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Years ago, when WordPress started gaining popularity, upgrades were a scary thing. You could never be sure if your whole site would get messed up with what was meant to be a simple upgrade. Even I dreaded clicking that “Upgrade” button.
Thankfully, things have changed a lot. Upgrades are simple and fast, as they should be. I rarely have any problems at all anymore, and our clients can easily do upgrades for themselves without fear of crashing their sites.
But…the key is to do the upgrades when new ones are released.
Why Are Upgrades Important?
Upgrades keep your site healthy and safe. Technology changes with lightning speed on the web. Yesterday’s code may not play nice with tomorrow’s new device or browser. Hackers are always finding chinks in outdated armor. Themes with old coding have to cooperate with the new code in WordPress. Old or unused plugins can slow down your site and put unnecessary stress on your server.
In short, ignoring updates of any kind are a fast track to causing you more problems than you bargained for.
What Happens When You Don’t Upgrade?
Conflict is great in storytelling, but not so much when it happens on your site. By ignoring WordPress or plugin upgrades, you’re leaving yourself wide open for conflicted coding. Each upgrade builds on the previous one, skip too many of them and you run into problems, sometimes big ones that could have been easily avoided.
If you have 20 plugins you haven’t updated for months, then try to do them all at once, I can guarantee you there will be at least one that causes an issue. Then you have to go through the tedious process of shutting them all down and going through them one by one until you find the culprit.
With a WordPress upgrade that hasn’t been done in a while, you also run the risk of crashing your theme or database. Then you’re stuck without a site while you search for a new theme or having your database restored.
The Dreaded Warning
A couple of months ago we had a scenario like this with one of our clients. The plugins and overall installation hadn’t been touched for months. When we went in to do some non-upgrade related changes, we saw what needed to be done, alerted the client and did the upgrades. I fully expected issues and wasn’t disappointed.
After the upgrades were complete, the site had this error all over it: “Warning: preg_match() [function.preg-match]: Compilation failed: nothing to repeat at offset 1″
Fortunately, the fix was a simple matter of resetting the Permalinks (changing them back to default, saving, checking the site, then changing them back to the custom Permalink and saving again).
Other fixes may not be so easy and might mean tearing down the old site and having a new one made.
What Can You Do?
What can you do to avoid this kind of stress and downtime? Here are a few tips for you:
- Check your site on a regular basis. The moment you see the notification of an upgrade, do it, especially with plugins. This way, if the site throws up a warning, you know what you changed and can undo it immediately.
- Use Themes and Plugins that the developers support. Using a theme system like Genesis keeps your site running smoothly. The developers are vigilant about keeping their code current with WordPress standards. The basic framework is what gets upgraded and the customization (look of your theme) never gets touched. When installing new plugins, read through the notes and ratings. Look for ones where the developer monitors changes and bugs, and offers upgrades.
- Remove dead plugins. Do you have a long list of plugins for your site? How many of them do you actually use anymore? If you’re not using it, get rid of it.
- Backups. Make backups of your site before you upgrade. You should be making regular backups anyway. If a site or database becomes unfixable after an upgrade, at least you have the previous files to restore and start again.
Keep your site healthy and happy, maintain it. And if you don’t want to do it yourself? Contact us. We’re happy to help.