WordPress & plugin updates – the why behind it

As we have been reaching out to our clients, we have noticed quite a lot of the same questions coming through. A lot of the WHY questions… So we thought we would put a quick mail together for you to help it all make sense.

These updates are necessary, as they are related to WordPress versions and 3rd party plugins. There are risks involved with not doing these updates, to both you and to us as your hosting provider:

Security: WordPress and plugin updates often include security patches and bug fixes that address known vulnerabilities or exploits. The keyword here is known, as this means that there have been breaches through this which have been reported to the 3rd party plugin developers. If they know already, it means the people who exploit these also know. Keeping your site up to date helps protect it from potential security threats and reduces the risk of your site being hacked or compromised.

Performance: Updates can also improve the performance of your site by fixing bugs that may be causing slow loading times or other issues. This can lead to a better user experience for your visitors and help improve your search engine rankings.

Compatibility: As newer versions of WordPress and plugins are released, they may not be compatible with older versions. This can cause your site to break or display incorrectly. By keeping your site up to date, you can ensure that everything is running smoothly and avoid these compatibility issues.

One of the biggest risks of not updating your WordPress website and plugins is that it can make your site vulnerable to hacking and compromise. Hackers can exploit vulnerabilities in outdated software to gain access to your site, steal sensitive data, or use your site for malicious purposes such as spamming or distributing malware.

In addition to compromising your own website, a compromised website can also affect other sites on the same server, especially if you are using a shared hosting plan. What this means is that if your site is hosted on a shared server, you are sharing resources with other websites on the same server. If one of those websites is compromised, it can potentially affect other sites on the server as well. This is because hackers can use the compromised site to gain access to the server and other sites hosted on it.

As many of you already know, we are in the process of reaching out to our clients to get these updates done. If one of our team members have not yet and would like to get ahead of this, please do make contact with us or click below and we will be in touch shortly!