People who are new to WordPress Content Management System or using it for the first time probably would have a question: Why are there updates? In this post, I will explain to you why you should always update your WordPress website whenever there is a new patch released.

WordPress is an Open Source project which means thousands of developers from different parts of the world contribute and work together to build an awesome platform for the users. They constantly and collectively work to move the project and WordPress forward. This means WordPress will change over time and be built stronger. Whenever the community of developers add something to WordPress, they release it to the WordPress users in the form of updates. To take advantage of the expanded and new capabilities of WordPress, you MUST keep all your code up-to-date.

There’s no reason that a well-planned and developed WordPress website cannot keep giving value for years after it goes live – whether you choose to make ongoing changes and improvements or not. It is still very important that WordPress and any plugins and themes are kept up-to-date.
WordPress Releases Updates For The Following Reasons
To improve features: New features make WordPress easier to use or more useful. Don’t wait and update two or three versions at a time. It can be detrimental to your site, and then you must learn about many new features at once.

For your safety: The WordPress security team works continually to identify and fix security risks and holes. These fixes are released as WordPress updates. If you don’t update your WordPress site, you’re leaving known security risks in place. This means that sooner or later your website will probably be hacked. This could have serious impact on your business – resulting in loss of confidential data like client details, site downtime or embarrassing content being placed on your site. Updates to WordPress core, plugins, and themes often increase security by patching vulnerabilities and strengthening against attacks. To reduce the risk of your site being hacked or compromised in some other way, update! Hackers and other malicious third party developers watch the release notes. As soon as they learn of a vulnerability, they start exploiting it. So, you need to update as soon as possible to reduce the time that your site is vulnerable. New security features prevent hackers from breaking into your website and inserting malicious code. These codes can harm your site and cause it to lose position in search engine results as well. Search engines may even remove your site from their listings or search results.

To fix bugs: Updates to WordPress core, plugins, and themes often fix bugs that were discovered in previous versions. To get the bugs fixed, add features and functionality, please update!

Performance: The WordPress core team and community put a lot of time and effort into making WordPress faster, efficient and more robust. Keeping your WordPress site updated means that your site is performing at its maximum capacity.

User experience: Most updates to WordPress make the content management system quicker, easier and nicer to use. This can encourage you to interact with your site more.

Future enhancements: When new WordPress versions are released, the plugin/extension developers stop supporting the older versions of WordPress. If later, you need to get your website enhanced by adding more custom features to it and using third party plugins or extensions, it might require the latest version of WordPress. By updating frequently, you keep your WordPress website updated with the small version releases and packages. If you don’t update for say a year or two, you are likely to suffer major disruption, because all of those small and minor issues that you didn’t update with – would become intertwined, making diagnosis and fixing harder, more time-consuming and expensive.

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