Keeping your website’s software & code updated is one of the most important things we do. Ensuring that all the moving parts of your site continue to be up-to-date and working in harmony together takes a lot of work – but that’s why you hired us!

When we make updates to the code or software on your site, we ensure that they happen in a timely manner and also don’t conflict with each other. In some rare cases, an upgrade of the core software, theme or plugin will ‘break’ your site – which is why we take care of this for you. Having an ‘OH NO!’ moment when you click the “Update” button isn’t an enjoyable feeling. We have daily backups so we can roll back any changes at any time.

In this section of the report, you’ll see if there were any core (WordPress) updates, theme updates or plugin updates and on which days those happened. Below, you can see more of the benefits of why we keep your website machine oiled up & running smooth.

Questions about anything you see in this report?  Contact us.

Updates

Security

The #1 reason we update the software on your website is security. Because WordPress is an open source platform (meaning that it’s free and available to anyone), that means it’s available for anyone to open the code to learn & improve upon it. Including hackers aka the worst people on the planet.

Thankfully, all hackers aren’t bad. The good kind are constantly looking into the WordPress core, themes & plugins to try and find vulnerabilities. These hackers report the issues to the developers, who fix the issue and upgrade their code.

Just like updates to the software on your smartphone, your internet browser or your computer – they’re just trying to stay one step ahead of the hackers from causing issues on your website.

New Features

The most exciting part about upgrading the software on your site are the new features. You can read the changelog (listing of things that have been updated) to see all of the new features for any of the themes, plugins or core software updates on your site. There aren’t exciting press conferences like Apple has for the new version of iOS, but every new update brings a bunch of new cool features to incorporate into your site.

Speed

Faster is better when it comes to your website’s load times. Making sure the theme and all the associated plugins are running at their most optimal level to ensure a quick-loading website is very important. With each update, there often come speed optimizations.

Bug Fixes

No software release is without bugs. Software developers have their work cut out for them and even after many hours of testing, there is always something to improve on. The most egregious of bugs are usually taken care of before launch, but minor glitches here and there are fairly common.

Compatibility

The WordPress community is a great network of developers who are working every day to make WordPress a better platform to build websites on. While most of these themes and plugins work together harmoniously to make your website look and act perfectly, from time to time there are conflicts. One line of one code in a plugin (like a missing semicolon) can cause the site to ‘break’ or certain features to be rendered useless. We are constantly watching for compatibility issues and ways around the issues until the developers can provide a permanent fix.