Why you should Upgrade WordPress
Categories: Blog
If you are reading this, there is a very high possibility that you are using WordPress in a way that it either supports your business or IS your business. If your WordPress website were to become the victim of a hacker attack, your business could suffer irreparable damage, resulting in the loss of customers and revenue.
WordPress is a living system, constantly being updated and improved upon by the WordPress.org developers and the extended community. An extended ecosystem consisting of millions of themes and plugins by Third-party developers make it one of the most extensible and user friendly platforms available today.
All this comes at a price. Because it is open source, hackers and developers alike can scour the code to find weaknesses that they can exploit. Not all Plugin and theme developers are created equal, and the new plugin you installed last year that gave you those much needed teddy bear shaped social media sharing icons has now become your achilles heel – a jupiter sized hole in your website’s security.
Luckily for you WordPress has made it easy to upgrade anything, and the upgrading process is usually just a click of a button.
The Reasons to Upgrade WordPress
1. Improvements and new features
The WordPress developers are constantly improving the system, adding functionality, fixing bugs and streamlining usability. All these changes result in a better, faster and more user friendly CMS
2. Security
WordPress is an open-source software and can be vulnerable to attacks and malware infiltrations by unscrupulous hackers. Updating fills the security gaps and improves your site. This is critical and that’s why it’s so important to stay updated on everything, including your plugins and themes
Step-by-step: Upgrade WordPress
WordPress makes it very easy for you to update, with WordPress itself and the plugins working on a one click update. WordPress also warns you when to update by clearly indicating available updates when they are available in the Dashboard in the backend. Theme providers like WooThemes also allow us to set warning messages for when updates to their themes become available.
- Back up your Database
- Backup your and WordPress files
- Deactivate all your plugins
- Click the Automatic Update button
- Activate and update all plugins
- Check your site and make sure it works.
There is a detailed list of instructions to upgrade WordPress in the WordPress codex, giving a much more thorough overview of the upgrading process, specifically when upgrading manually instead of making use of the Automatic Update button.
Upgrading WordPress with the one click Automatic upgrade
If all goes well, you should be back up and running. If things did not go that well, you’ll need to dig up the issue.
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