The Importance of Updating WordPress on Your Website

It's easy to let your website run by itself and forget about it. You may even be doing regular content updates and think everything is hunky-dory. However, if you don't perform regular updates on WordPress and the various plugins it can produce problems down the line.

One example where I recently had to fix a client's website is as follows:

They regularly post content to their website and their content is time sensitive - once it's out of date it needs to be removed.

They contacted me a few months ago saying they couldn't get access to the WordPress admin - it was a blank screen with an error message. Sure enough, when I checked I also couldn't login.

After some searching of the error message I discovered the problem was likely due to a server update which was causing some incompatibility. The "fix" was to rollback the update to before the change, which I was able to do from their control panel. The WordPress admin worked and everything seemed back to normal. At the time I said it would be a good idea to update WordPress and the plugins and gave a quote for how much that would cost.

I heard nothing back until a week ago when - panic - they couldn't get into the admin again and couldn't remove the out of date content.

I logged into their control panel to repeat the rollback but this time it wouldn't work. I contacted Tech Support of their hosting company and was told it's no longer possible rollback. I also noticed in their account there had been a notification that after the end of August 2018 it wouldn't be possible to do this rollback.

Meanwhile Tech Support had made some changes to the database to try and resolve it which meant their website was showing default theme and no longer showed their content which was built into the theme their website was originally using.

Solution? After backing up the database I manually uploaded the latest version of WordPress, did a database update and hey presto! It worked! Phew.....

So the moral of the story? Get your website manager to do regular updates of WordPress and the plugins - or do it yourself if you're comfortable with this.