WordPress is a platform that Noventum™ Custom Software , and approximately 40% of all current websites, use. So, it’s super popular and powerful. It’s great for things like a blog, an eCommerce site, or a brochure site explaining your business. It’s not so great as a database or a web application with complex data relationships. As a result, Noventum chooses it for most of our basic marketing and eCommerce projects. We’ll occasionally combine it with an application development environment and use WordPress for marketing and eCommerce, and a powerful database for modeling data relationships.
WordPress maintenance is important. The reason it is important is because, without it, your site will get hacked, break, or break and then be hacked. Software is not a fine wine, set to age in your cellar. The underlying programming language (PHP) for WordPress is changing. The underlying database for WordPress (MySQL) is changing. WordPress itself is changing, and the plugins built on top of WordPress are changing.
All is in motion, all is in flux.
Λέγει που Ἡράκλειτος ὅτι πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει, καὶ ποταμοῦ ῥοῇ ἀπεικάζων τὰ ὄντα λέγει ὡς δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης.
S: See, Heraclitus says that everything is in motion and nothing stays fixed, and, comparing the universe to the flow of a river, he says that you cannot step into the same river twice.
From Simplicius, in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physica, probably a quote, but Ancient Greek lacked quotation marks, latin.stackexchange.com. Here’s the reference. I don’t speak Greek, but Greek and Latin make you sound profound.
What’s the practical application of this principle? The changes we direct and guide need to support the underlying changing infrastructure on which everything depends.
WordPress Core is receiving security updates weekly, so you need to click the “Update WordPress” button occasionally, or hackers will get into your site and use it for sending spam or selling pharmaceuticals.
The underlying architecture of WordPress means this is the case everywhere — a plugin can completely overwrite your entire site and destroy your database. A database query can erase all data. There is no separation of concern between a WordPress plugin and the core of WordPress — a plugin can literally modify everything. This is partially the reason WordPress became so powerful and is partially a reason that choosing it for a major, enterprise-level site is maybe not the best idea in the world.
So you need to update all of these things regularly. That means clicking “update plugins” in a safe and secure way (typically on a copy of your site) and testing, at least once a month, and more frequently if your site has to function to keep your business functioning. It means keeping regular backups so you can revert if there’s a problem. It means having someone able to support you when a plugin update in someone else’s code goes bad and your eCommerce starts having problems as a result.
So, take backups, click “update” in a safe, controlled environment, watch what happens, test things, and then do the same thing live when you’re confident nothing broke.
Noventum can, and does, help our customers with all of these things. We rely heavily on our hosting partner, WPEngine, and their Smart Plugin Manager tool, which automates about 95% of the work associated with these updates.
Is this something you need help with? If so, contact us!