Why Should You Update the WordPress Theme & Plugins? Four Reasons You Must Know
WordPress is unarguably the most popular and powerful CMS available to manage websites. You would be amazed to know that more than 34% of websites on the internet runs on WordPress. Apart from this, WordPress holds a 60.8% market share in the CMS industry and powers 14.7% of the world’s top websites, as reported by Kinsta. One of the crucial reasons individual developers and web app development companies prefer WordPress is because of its vast repository of availability in plugins and themes.
However, WordPress is based on multiple tech-stacks, tools and libraries. They are not future-proof and they may be prone to becoming outdated too. These outdated themes and plugins can make your website vulnerable to security threats, disturbed user experience and more.
Here in this blog, we are going to explain a few reasons that indicate why you should update your WordPress theme and plugins.
Why Should You Update WordPress Themes and Plugins?
Patch Security Holes & Fix Bugs
25% of the WordPress plugins among Alexa’s popular sites are flagged with critical vulnerabilities. McAfee also reported that hackers created more than 65 million new malware in the first quarter of 2019. And, according to Patchstack, over 90% of WordPress vulnerabilities are associated with plugins or themes. These statistics and data prove that security is unarguably the most crucial reason to update your WordPress theme and plugins. All significant updates to your WordPress theme and plugins ensure that your website is not vulnerable to virus or hacking, Securing your WordPress site will save your website data, help you avoid lawsuits, and stop you from losing website traffic.
Since WordPress is open-source with a large community, anything found in the open due to security loopholes might result in unintended data exposure too. Keeping the WordPress updated avoids such circumstances from rising.
As aforementioned, it’s open-source; hackers can also read and modify the source code and insert malicious code into the software to exploit the vulnerability and infect your website. So, it is advised to install the updates regularly and as soon as it is released. Waiting for a few days can pose a considerable security risk to your website. However, the developers’ team at WordPress takes care of this and keeps you informed about bug fixes and security patches on a periodic basis and timely manner.
You can also opt for some web app development services that can take care of these theme and plugin updates. They are mandatory to keep your website safe and such services also help monitor and keep track of vulnerabilities.
Improved Compatibility
Theme and plugin updates play a vital role in ensuring compatibility of features added, libraries integrated and more with the latest WordPress versions. There are chances that despite constant updates being done by the WordPress developer team, your version of the website may have failed to be automatically updated or maybe you missed doing it manually. In such cases, external third-party plugins installed also pose a threat and loose compatibility with your existing WordPress version resulting in misalignment of content and features. Every good developer constantly must test their theme and plugins against the newest version of WordPress to check the compatibility and make changes accordingly if required.
Updates to plugins and themes thus can help you in resolving the compatibility issues by ensuring that your web application is running on the latest WordPress version. Moreover, these updates can also help you benefit from the new features and functionalities introduced in the latest WordPress releases.
New Features & Enhanced Functionality
Another important reason to keep your WordPress theme and plugins updated is none other than bringing the possibility to add new features. Themes and plugins developers regularly are updated with changes in the code to add new features or enhance the existing functionality. After all, if a new feature can improve your web application’s functionality, then why wouldn’t you go for the update.
For example, the recent Yoast SEO 16.9 release comes with two new image assessments for the process of SEO analysis named Image presence assessment and Image alt attribute assessment. They also come along with some technical improvements and bug fixes. So, if you’re using an old version, you might not be able to leverage the full power of WordPress to improve the user experience. So, keep your WordPress Core, theme, and plugins up to date.
Improved Performance
Every update of plugins and themes comes up with some enhancements and bug fixes in order to improve the performance. Keeping them updated when introduced to obtain performance benefits along with improvements in page loading time. It results in the reduced bounce rate and makes more services look better and efficient. Hence, it also helps in gaining high traffic to your web application.
For example, JetPack 10.0 introduced some changes to Carousel feature to enhance the performance on all pages where Carousel is loaded. So, it’s clear that good performance help boost traffic and elevate business value. So, you should make sure that you have installed the latest update of WordPress versions and if you find it challenging you can always hire companies that offer web app development services.
Summing Up
Now you know the reasons why you should update your WordPress theme and plugins. Regularly updating to the latest version will make your website more secure and compatible with the newest version of WordPress. It also allows you to add some new features to enhance your website’s overall functionality and improve performance in the process. However, there are some good practices you must follow while installing the updates such as,
- Don’t forget to backup your website before installing an update.
- Always download themes and plugins from a trustworthy source.
- Test the updated version on your staging site first before making it live.
- Create a child theme and add changes to this theme first to avoid changes being lost when you update the live website to the parent theme.
- If any existing feature, theme or plugin is outdated without any support, always consider immediately uninstalling or removing it entirely to avoid security threats.
