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It is Very Important to Keep Your WordPress Plug-ins Up to Date

  • May 21, 2021
  • Bradley Taylor

Wordpress Update and Plug-ins

The systems used by website developers to allow the customer to log into the back end of their site and manage the content is referred as a CMS. Those letters stand for Content Management System. Examples of CMS are Joomla, Magento and WordPress.

The most popular CMS in the world is WordPress. This system allows developers to customize a website which can be updated or altered easily in the future. WordPress also allows the developer to install a myriad of plug-ins which all aim to serve a specific function within the website. For example, these plug-ins can be something as simple as a local weather widget. They can also help speed up loading time of your site, which is very important for SEO.

The plug-ins are all developed by independent companies. All of these companies update their plug-in whenever they see fit (and sometimes abandon them altogether). These updates can improve the plug-in or even patch a vulnerability. This is where we reach the purpose of this article. Keeping these plug-ins updated is essential to keeping your site from being hacked.

There are many thousands of bots scouring the web looking for vulnerabilities in websites. Once in, they can infect the website with any number of viruses or hidden programs of their own. One very menacing hack causes the server on which your site is hosted to mine cryptocurrency for the hacker. This slows down your site and eventually could get you booted from the hosting provider.

The Advice

A good web developer will stay on top of your site and make sure all plug-ins and themes are up to date. If you don’t have a web developer, you may want to set an alarm every month reminding you to update your plug-ins. There are plug-ins available which automatically update the other plug-ins. But these are often glitchy and leave some plug-ins not updated.

WordPress makes up 45% of all websites on the internet. Consequently, it is also the #1 hacked CMS.

If you don’t regularly update your plug-ins, or pay someone to regularly update them, the question isn’t if you will be hacked but when you will be hacked.

 

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