WordPress updates are changes made to code. This may be the code of the core WordPress software, your theme, or your plugins.

WordPress updates show up in your admin dashboard as a bright red notification. They signal that software you have installed, whether activated or deactivated, is in need of a refresh.

With just a few clicks, you can push an update from a developer to your WordPress website. But we highly recommend taking safety precautions like doing a full backup of your site before doing updates, performing updates on a staging site first, or simply having your webmaster manage all your updates.

Every piece of software installed on your server must be kept up-to-date if you want your site to run in tip-top shape. This is why you use tools built by trustworthy developers and designers who are accountable to their software and keep it updated on a regular basis.

There are a number of reasons why a WordPress developer might see fit to update the code of their software and send it over to your website:

• Security patches: code is highly susceptible to infiltration and infection, which is why you’ll often see security updates issued for the purposes of patching bugs.
• Performance upgrades: even if you’ve installed well-trusted and well-reviewed plugins and themes, performance can degrade over time as software or code becomes obsolete. Performance patches are issued to ensure that your WordPress software doesn’t have a negative effect on speed.
• New features: the web is always changing, which is why any good developer (including those behind WordPress itself) will pay attention to changing trends. As they change, it’s crucial to keep software in line so that websites may continue to align with the modern user experience.

Your WordPress updates are performed on a weekly basis. What’s more, they are safely handled by WP Buffs during low-traffic hours, ensuring that updates have not adversely affected the security, performance, or user experience of your site. We’re also happy to perform the updates on your staging server before pushing them live for another layer of security.

WordPress automates some of its core updates, especially the more critical ones. The rest, however, it leaves to its users to handle.

You can do this by logging into WordPress and pushing each plugin, theme, or core update through manually. You can automate the process with a plugin. Or you can use a WordPress management tool to handle updates for numerous websites simultaneously.

That said, updates don’t always go smoothly. Code in one piece of software can conflict with others, causing part of your website to break or the whole thing to go down entirely. Updates also have the potential to cause unwanted or unexpected changes on the front end of your site. Without some handholding and close monitoring of each update, your visitors may be left befuddled when they unexpectedly encounter a misaligned page or broken plugin functionality.

Granted, you have backups to rescue you if such a thing should occur. But your best bet is to outsource this to WP Buffs update service for WordPress included in our care plans.