Why You Must Keep Your WordPress Theme and Plugins Up To Date

As of now, WordPress has been an influential CMS (Content Management System) that enables users to manage their website content in a hassle-free manner. The majority of enterprises and bloggers around the globe prefer WordPress over other alternatives.

Year after year, WordPress is proving its worth with its surprising and ease-of-use features. People are going for the WordPress platform for blogging purposes.

And one thing is certain: when we are relying so much on the WordPress platform, we wouldn’t wish our blogs to get compromised by some kind of hacking attempt. Agree? It seems like a nightmare to us.

Why is security a major concern in WordPress?

What if all of your recently published blogs are hacked overnight and your users are redirected to some other website? Irrelevant sites? It is unimaginable. It might happen because you are missing something or probably doing something wrong so that hackers can peep into your website and use your blogs for some other malicious activities.

In recent times, we have encountered major data attacks, including ransomware, on the WordPress platform, which is no different. Even WordPress has gone through major security hacks a few times. Not aware of it?

Let’s take a glance at the recent WordPress data attacks.

• Unlike its innocent name, TimThumb is a strong security breach script that has managed to compromise data on millions of WordPress sites. It comes in the form of an ordinary photo-resizing tool, usually used by the majority of plugin developers. So, the hacker enters the malicious code on the user’s website and carries out DDoS attacks and even spear-phishing data campaigns that eventually make the user’s website unresponsive. And in the past two years, this attack has brought a major loss to many businesses.

• WordPress.org Hack: Some unauthorized parties changed the major WordPress plugins, including WPtouch and W3 Total Cache. So, on whichever blog these plugins were installed, hackers could use them for malicious activities.

Here’s the solution: Keep your WordPress plugins and themes up-to-date

If you make a careless mistake, you are inviting hackers to steal your confidential information. And in a moment, your years of hard work could be ruined.

However, you can limit and monitor the risks that have the potential to affect your website. Wondering what the real problem is that you must be aware of? Well, usually people aren’t habitually updating their plugins and themes regularly.

Still not convinced and want more evidence of why you must update the plugins and themes of your WordPress website regularly? Below is a dropdown that has enough reasons to convince you:

Security factors

Being an open-source platform, WordPress enables developers to create plugins and themes that can be easily integrated with the software. And when the source code is made accessible to the public, it gives an open invitation to hackers to carry out data attacks.

To overcome this, WordPress comes with regular security and bug updates. These updates not only include security updates but also numerous rich functionalities that can help you be a better user experience. Here are a few new features that recently came with WordPress 4.9:

• Theme installation has been improved.

• a new gallery widget

• Draft and revise posts along with scheduling.

• It supports text widgets.

Rapid Speed

New updates often accompany better speed results for your website. With speed being a crucial factor in SEO and page loading time, the high speed of your website can help you reduce bounce rates and target potential customers easily. So, this will even help with better rankings in the search engines and offer better conversion rates for your website.

Staying on the safe side

Remember, whenever you perform any type of update, make sure you take proper and complete data backups ahead of time. The reason for this is that, if the upgrade does not go smoothly, you have website backups and can determine which theme or plugin is incompatible with your website. So, I would recommend that you check the plugins and theme compatibility beforehand so that you don’t have to suffer in the future.

Furthermore, when choosing a plugin or theme, make sure you are using a reliable source with a good reputation. A reputable history and a track record of success will help you avoid compatibility issues in the future.

Wrap Up

Updating your WordPress site might be a challenging task for beginners, as leaving the site. Updating for an extended period exposes data to threats and may result in incompatibility issues. But once you have successfully updated your WordPress site, you can rely on it. It will be secure from hackers and malicious activities, have data security, you’ll experience no downtime, get accurate results, and, of course, you’ll get an update that has a wide range of exciting functionalities.