Updates for website software are important. A website is like a car, its your vehicle for online presence and marketing…you would not drive your car month after month without any maintenance and expect it to perform its best would you? The same is true for your website.
Updating website software is essential for website health, protection from hackers and keeping your site running at its optimum performance.
The three main reasons to keep your website CMS up to date are……
Website Security vulnerabilities
Security is the number one reason to keep your website software up to date.
Website Content Management Systems (CMS’s) such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are free open source programs that anyone can download. They can then study the code and learn it and improve it…….that also means that hackers can study it too and find ways to break into your website.
This means that if you are not using the latest available version of your CMS you are using software with known security vulnerabilities.
Hackers can scan the web looking for websites running the older CMS versions and you could become the victim of attack.
Updates keep you safe from known security holes
Once hackers have accessed your website via a security vulnerability it could result in:
- spam emails being sent from your server – result; your company email addresses being blacklisted, this means your emails are prevented from reaching their intended destination
- your website and database being taken offline or deleted
- data (sensitive or not) being stolen
- your site or homepage being replaced with a different one
- all your website visitors redirected to a different site
- bad SEO data – affecting your search engine rankings
- uploading of viruses / malware / adware
- spam pages being added alongside your content
- hackers using your hosting to host illegal content
It is not a good look if your site visitors get infected with viruses downloaded from your website.
And if Google detects infections on your site they will delist you until the issue is fixed.
To find out if there are updates available for your website – check your CMS dashboard.
The below example is an example of the WordPress CMS Dashboard, it is showing that there are 9 updates that need to be applied. You will see similar alerts in whatever CMS you are using.
It not just the core software that can be vulnerable, out of date plugins and themes can also be exploited by hackers.
Time spent completing regular updates is far less time consuming and costly than waiting until an attack occurs and then trying to clean up and rebuild your reputation with Google and your customers.
All you have to do is keep up with your updates. While it’s not a guarantee that your site will be safe from hackers, it will dramatically reduce your risk of infection.
Stay Compatible
It is not just the major updates that need attention. Whilst core CMS updates are critically essential, the updates to your site plugins and themes are equally important.
When your site was created the installed plugins and themes were specifically developed to work with the original core CMS.
For example, if you have a WordPress site built; your plugins were compatible with that version of WordPress but may not work correctly with future versions.
All updates are important.
Because the web is always changing, web hosting servers and web browsers are also always being updated – if you don’t keep your website up to date as too, it could become incompatible with the servers and browsers and problems like bugs or not displaying correctly could begin.
Better Functionality
Compatibility and security are not the only considerations.
Sometimes software updates are new features that users like yourself have been asking for. For example, this could be an easier way to insert links into your webpages or a better way to moderate blog comments.
If you do not update regularly, you may never know these new features are available to make your life easier.
New features often bring better functionality too, making it a better experience for your website visitors and easier for you to manage.
!!BE AWARE!!
Updating your website software can affect the appearance of your site
It is extremely important that you complete a full backup of your site files and database before applying any updates.
I will be showing you how to properly update your site without using questionable plugins soon in an article coming soon
Don’t feel confident that you can back up your website correctly? No time to handle updates yourself? No problem. Contact Rachel Martin to discuss a maintenance schedule that supports you to keep your website running smoothly.
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