Why You Should Have a Professional Update WordPress

Many studies show that most hacked WordPress sites were compromised from out of date core or plugin files. This is almost entirely avoidable by keeping things up-to-date. This includes plugins, themes, WordPress core, and server infrastructure, and PHP version.

The problem is that this can sometimes be tricky because updates can break a website. They should be made on a staging environment and tested thoroughly before being done on your live site. We make this dead simple by doing it for you by an experienced WordPress professional every month.

There are many layers to your WordPress website and each one should be properly maintained, monitored and kept up to date.

1 Hour of developer support

Sometimes updates can be risky or extremely time consuming if you’re not an experienced developer. We’ve got you covered.

Unsure of how to do something? Don’t risk it, ask us first! Our experienced team of WordPress experts will walk you through it. This avoids the risk of breaking something you may not be familiar with.

Updating Plugins and Themes

The first layer is the most dynamic and sensitive. WordPress is popular in large part because of its 3rd party ecosystem of free and premium plugins and themes. This allows you to easily add features and functionality quickly and on a bugdet. The drawback is that these can be very insecure and are the first place malicious visitors look to as an entrypoint to hack your WordPress site.

They also receive updates very frequently and so they can quickly become out-of-date and therefore insecure. We update them every single month and thoroughly test them. The more plugins you have the more chance of conflicts between them, but we know what to look for and make sure everything is running smoothly after every monthly update.

Updating WordPress Core

The next layer that’s often attacked is the core of WordPress. This is usually much more secure but should be maintained up to date so that it can keep up with the other changing parts, like PHP versions and other plugins and themes. We oftentimes come across older WordPress websites that haven’t been updated in years and so they need an entire overhaul. You can avoid this expensive process my incrementally keeping up to date since.

Updating Server Infrastructure

WordPress must run on a web server and so this is considered part of its application although it’s oftentimes ignored by webmasters. We keep your database optimized and updated alongside nginx.

Updating PHP Versions

WordPress is a PHP web application and so its crucial to keep its PHP versions up to date. Keeping PHP up to date will make your website more secure, faster and able to handle more happy visitors. Unfortunately, WordPress oftentimes lags behind the newest versions of PHP and so careful testing and knowledge of WordPress’s changelog is needed to know when the soonest moment comes to carefully update PHP for your WordPress site.

Quality Assurance on Staging

We’ll admit, it’s pretty easy to update your WordPress core and plugins. However, the hard part is what happens after the update finishes. Sometimes updates break things, things you may not even be aware of. We’re experts in quality control, so we execute all updates on a dedicated and perfectly replicated staging environment in order to ensure we catch any issues in a non-critical environment before pushing your monthly updates out to the world wide web.

Detailed Reports of What’s Been Updated

You don’t need to concern yourself about every little detail of your WordPress site, that’s what were here for. But having a summary of what’s been happening every month can be very illuminating. We send you a report of all the critical metrics of your site alongside any work that we’ve done. We also encourage you to give us a call and ask any questions you may have or about the health of your site and how it can be improved.