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Why Updates Matter

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A WordPress site is software, and just like the software for your phone, computer, etc. it has to be updated, usually for security reasons and less often for new features or bug fixes. And just like your car needs regular maintenance to run right, so does your website.

WordPress and its plugins and themes do get updated a lot – that’s for sure. Especially if your site is large or complex, there’s a lot to keep up with when it comes to updates.

What can happen if I don’t update my site?

The longer you go between updates, the more risk you’re taking. Here are some of the things that might happen if you don’t update regularly.

  • The risk of acquiring malware/being hacked increases. Did you know that when WordPress, plugin and theme developers release new versions, they generally publish a changelog which is basically a roadmap of the vulnerabilities they fixed with the new release? Hackers use these to target sites still using the old versions to exploit those vulnerabilities. The more old plugins/themes you have, or the longer you wait to update WordPress core software, the more vulnerable your site gets.
  • The risk of something breaking increases. I’ve had clients come to me with dozens (sometimes as many as 50) outdated plugins and themes. When you wait that long, something is bound to break when you finally do get around to updating. Unless you do it carefully and methodically (and on a safe copy of your site), you may not be able to figure out which update caused the breakage. This can lead to a rabbit hole of attempts to fix the problem and become quite time-consuming.
  • Missing out on new features. New features often accompany security improvements especially in major WordPress core software updates.
  • Functionality can begin to fail. If you update sporadically and have a mix of old and new versions of WordPress core software, plugins and themes, you may find that functionality on your site is not working the way it should due to conflicts between those various elements.

Software vulnerabilities in plugins, themes, and WordPress core are one of the top causes of site hacks1. Attacks are done through automated scripts that search for known vulnerabilities all over the web. It’s not personal, but if your site is chronically out of date it is an attractive target for these kinds of hackers.

Why don’t site owners update their WordPress sites?

I’ve heard a few reasons for this, the most common ones being:

  • They just don’t think about it, or forget to do it. This is mostly from brochure-style site owners who don’t update a lot and rarely login to their sites.
  • They didn’t know they needed to do it. This is usually from first-time WordPress site owners.
  • And the #1 reason: they’re afraid they’ll break something. The larger a site becomes and the more plugins in play, the likelihood of breaking something with an update increases. This is especially true of WooCommerce sites.

Those are the reasons we started WP Minder back in 2014 – so our clients don’t have to think about everyday, required site maintenance and are never at risk for breaking something just by trying to take care of their site. We do the care and if something does break, we fix it. It’s that simple.

If you’re a WordPress site owner ready to leave the maintenance behind so you can spend more time on your business, give us a try. Contact us for more information or take our quick survey to see which Care Plan is right for your site.

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1 Sucuri 2019 Website Threat Research Report.

Weekly Links Roundup – Online Sermons, Help Desk Plugins, Before You Hit Publish, Download Managers

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

Are you the manager of a WordPress site for your church? If so, have you considered putting sermons online? Here’s a guide to doing that, including audio and video recording, getting sermon content into your site, turning your sermons into a podcast and more.

Here is a review of 13 of the best WordPress help desk plugins. Offer product support right within WordPress!  Help desks can make it much easier to manage client support – assign ticket numbers, organize all support requests and followups in a single dashboard (much simpler than using email!) and be less frustrating for both you and your customers.

Here’s a treat from ProBlogger – this video teaches you 23 questions to ask yourself before you publish your next blog posts.

Download manager plugins extend WordPress’ native ability to handle downloads by adding in download tracking, organization of downloadable materials, and user restrictions on downloading content. Here’s a roundup of 15 of the top WordPress download managers.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – WooCommerce Payments, Uptime Monitors, Popup Plugins

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

For WooCommerce users, a new payments option was announced this past week: WooCommerce Payments. This new service uses Stripe’s payment processing but with a different user experience. However, there’s one big drawback – it requires Jetpack to function. If you’re already using Jetpack to calculate taxes in WooCommerce, then it may be worth a look. If not, I’d probably stick with Stripe. Learn more about WooCommerce Payments. And, why you may want to avoid Jetpack if you can.

Looking for a service to let you know if your website goes down? Here are 12 of the best uptime monitoring services reviewed. Note: if you’re a WP Minder client, we do this for you and always have an eye on your site. Learn about all the benefits of working with us.

Popups are everywhere – they can be useful and engaging, or just terribly invasive. This post about the 5 best WordPress popup plugins also has info on how to make sure your popups are not irritating.

And a few posts from our sister site Red Kite Creative that you might find helpful:

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Easy WP Guide, Podcasting, Post Excerpts, Yoast SEO

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

The latest edition of Easy WP Guide, an evolving manual on all things WordPress, is available now. You can read it online (recommended) or download a PDF in English or Spanish. Keep in mind it’s  PDF that gets updated frequently….

Looking to start your own podcast? Here’s a roundup of 7 of the best WordPress podcasting plugins right now. One of my colleagues recommended Blubrry PowerPress for a new project this week.

If you ever wanted to change the length of the blog post excerpt, which is by default 55 words, this post is for you. The excerpt is the first bit of each blog post that’s displayed on the blog archive page. Learn how to change the excerpt length with or without a plugin.

If you’ve installed Yoast SEO and used it a little bit to try to get your pages or posts ranking higher, it may still not be clear exactly how Yoast works. Learn what Yoast SEO actually does for you. You don’t have to be a tech wizard to get the benefits Yoast provides.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Clean Up Your Media Library, Remote Working Toolkit, WooCommerce Catalogs, Spamdexing

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

Do you have dozens (or hundreds? Or thousands?) of images in your Media Library that you know or suspect are no longer being used? All those extra images can slow down your site, first by taking up lots of extra space on your web server, and second by making backup files huge. Fortunately, there are some fairly easy ways to identify and remove them without having to go through every image one by one. Learn about how to clean up your Media Library without too many headaches.

A timely article called Make It Remote shares work-at-home knowledge gained over a decade of managing remote teams. This is a pay-what-you-want toolkit.

If you want to use WooCommerce as a product catalog instead of a sales machine, there’s an extension for that. I used this in a client’s site last week and it’s super-easy to hide the add-to-cart functionality and replace it with custom messages or links of your own.

Finally – all about spamdexing, where websites get hacked with injected nasty keywords and links to manipulate search engine rankings for another web property designed to rip people off. You can avoid being the target of one of these hacks by keeping your site up to date, using strong passwords, and using a good security plugin properly set up to scan your site regularly.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Grammar, Anti-spam Plugins, CCPA

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

Not the best speller? Think doesn’t matter? Think again…Nothing hurts the credibility of your business like content full of spelling and grammar errors. It forces the reader to work harder to understand you. And put simply, it makes your business look slack. If your content is flawed, what does that say about the rest of your operations? Learn how to improve your content to build credibility. And if you’re not the best at spelling and grammar there are tools for that, like browser-based Grammarly which works in both Gutenberg and classic editors.

Here’s a roundup of some of the best anti-spam plugins for WordPress. I’m been a fan of Antispam Bee for awhile but lately am using the commercial plugin CleanTalk for our WP Minder Care Plan clients and it is fantastic. CleanTalk provides behind-the-scenes protection (no captcha!) and a dashboard that shows how it’s working – one of my client sites that was previously reporting a bad spam problem had almost 1,800 spam attacks blocked just this week.

By now you have likely heard about the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) which dropped on January 1. Like the GDPR, the CCPA is designed to protect private data of users including knowing what person info is collected; what info is being sold; opting out of data collection and data selling. Here’s post about how CCPA may affect your WordPress business.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.