Offering one of the most powerful content generation platforms in a simple and easily digestible management system, Wordpress is the internet’s current content creation king. But do you really have to deal with all of those little, insignificant and obnoxious security updates? Can’t you just ignore them? In a word: No, and here’s why.
Security Updates Address Past Weaknesses
You work hard to produce the content on your Wordpress account, spending hours, days or even weeks creating every single piece. And the internet appreciates all of your hard work. Unfortunately, so do savvy hackers. The defenses of your hard work rely heavily on security updates, as these updates are created to address known security issues that have occurred in the past.
Think of security updates as a vaccine, and hack attempts as a virus. Once that virus has been found, the folks on security create a vaccine in the form of updates. These ensure that those particular types of hack attempts are now guarded against of future attempts to hack your site.
Security updates also work to:
- Proactively Avoid Security Risks. Wordpress works hard to shore up all of your defenses, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities and contamination of your site. This includes efforts to reduce the possibility of problems in the future, enabling you to continue working with less piracy fear!
- Address Bug Fixes. These updates also often carry fixes for user and creator bugs, and making sure your site stays up to snuff ensures a bug-free workspace. Failing to keep up may lead to user issues.
And so, to reiterate, you should absolutely and without a doubt utilize the security updates offered by Wordpress. We’re not trying to nag, or be hard cases. It’s just that refusing to keep up and spend a few minutes installing an update is a silly reason to lose all of your hard work!
That being said, there’s one important part that should be mentioned. Have a full and tested backup of your site in place before you do any updates. The developers of these updates do their best to be sure they are compatible with the tens of thousands of other plugins out there. But, we’ve seen it happen where someone does an update and their site goes down. You might even want to have a small history of backups to restore from should you happen to not notice a problem that even existed with your last backup.