Running Website Updates

Little Biz Website Updates

Running Website Updates

WordPress is a great platform for building a new website. It can be a great, reliable low cost platform for building your website on. However, with that low cost comes a responsibility to protect your website & hosting by ensuring that you are running your website updates regularly.

WordPress is classed as an ‘open source’ platform, which means pretty much anyone can create on WordPress. This allows a huge variety of different themes and plugins, templates and drag and drop builders. With all the cool options also comes a minefield of ensuring the plugins that are used are legit. Always make sure your plugins you choose have had recent updates and good reviews. Many users will review and comment if they cause conflicts with other plugins or issues.

So many of the websites I jump on and assist with have not been updated, or kept up to date. This can be due to;

  • They don’t know how to run their website updates
  • They don’t know how to fix their website if it breaks whilst running updates
  • They aren’t aware of the security issues around having out of date websites
  • They know out of date plugins may be an issue, but don’t think ‘hacking’ will happen to them
  • And then there are always some who don’t think it is important…

Just this week I jumped on a client’s website to discover they hadn’t run their updates in 18 months. As I was trying to run their updates, one of the plugins was causing a critical error on their website. Some plugins do auto updates when they have security vulnerabilities. This can then cause a conflict in the website with older plugins that haven’t been updated. Luckily the critical error only happened whilst I was trying to run a back-up before updating the website. I was able to fix the issue right there and then, meaning less time offline for my client.

The other issue that presents when WordPress websites haven’t been updated, is the website can be left wide open to security vulnerabilities. As mentioned, WordPress is open source, which means that bad can also be done through the websites by hackers with malware, viruses and redirection to unsavory sites!

I run website updates on a monthly basis for my clients (unless there are some major security updates released). This includes the following;

  • Website Backup
  • Theme Updates
  • Plugin Updates
  • Security Scan
  • Quick check of website to ensure it is working as required.

Any conflicts from the updates will either be rolled back to the backup, or we will fix the conflicts caused. We allow up to 15 minutes to do this in our monthly website update fee. If you prefer ad-hoc website work, we are happy to run updates at our hourly rate also.

If you are keen to hand over the maintenance of your website to someone who knows what they are doing, contact us today!


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