WordPress Updates: Why You Should Leave it to the Professionals
One of the reasons why WordPress and its CMS is popular with businesses is the ease of use. You can quickly become confident in using the platform, whatever your technical expertise. It’s easy to think that it can handle everything for you but that’s not always the case.
WordPress updates are one area where site owners often get into difficulty. What seems simple at first sight can quickly become a major problem for your business and take up hours of your time to put right.
Here we take a closer look at how using a professional service can help ensure your WordPress updates are managed effectively.
What Can Go Wrong With WordPress Updates?
There are a variety of different updates for any WordPress website and these can become available at any time. You may see updates to the WordPress operating system, your plug-ins and the theme or design that you use for your display. Some of these updates happen automatically. Major changes on the WordPress site and themes and plug-ins do not, however.
The danger of not managing updates properly, of course, is that you are putting your business website at risk. These often contain patches to prevent cyberattacks and the like which protect your data and ensure that you have the latest software in place. Different pieces of software can also conflict and cause problems, especially when there is a major update to the core operating system.
What is WordPress Maintenance Mode?
When WordPress does a major or core update of their software, you’ll actually see a notice that the system is updating. During this time, you can’t update the site. Normally, this doesn’t take very long and most people won’t even notice that it has happened.
In some circumstances, however, it can get stuck in maintenance mode which can be confusing if you don’t have the technical knowledge to put it right.
When Your WordPress Site Breaks
On other occasions, you may find that your site is down and it has nothing to do with the maintenance mode. This can be caused, for example, by incompatibility between WordPress updates. In some cases, a plugin may not have been updated in a long while because the developer is no longer involved with it. This can cause problems once you update the core software for your WordPress site.
Why You Should Always Backup
While it’s generally rare things go wrong with smaller sites, it can be a more complicated situation with larger websites. Keeping track of updates to the core WordPress site, your plugins and themes can be challenging.
The first thing you should ensure, of course, is that you are regularly backing up your systems and data. When a problem does occur, you may need to revert back to this while you sort the problem out.
How a Professional Can Help With WordPress Updates
Updating WordPress is a lot more complicated than many people think. Users can get into bad habits such as not updating regularly enough and, when issues do occur, they can be less straightforward to put right.
A professional third party WordPress maintenance and support service essentially means you don’t have to worry about any of this. They will handle all aspects for you and ensure that your site remains optimised and fully secure at all times.
At Simplicity Digital, we offer a range of WordPress maintenance packages which include ensuring updates are managed effectively. Contact us today to find out more.