WordPress is a great tool for website design and management. It offers versatility because of a quick installation of a little code called a plugin. Plugins are created to perform certain functions, such as running a fillable form, take a PayPal payment or tie into a Facebook feed.
When you need a specific function on your website, most likely there’s a plugin to do it.
However, plugins aren’t infallible – they are coded by people, who sometimes make mistakes. A plugin may be incompatible with the theme you select, with another plugin or recent update. When you have thousands of plugins available, both free and paid, with lightning speed installation you can overstress your website with too much functionally.
What is the worst thing that can happen? A bad plugin can take down your entire website, break something, or break something not realized.
Some web hosting providers automatically update WordPress plugins for you. When something breaks, they try to revert to the previous version, if that doesn’t work, they may leave your website running in its broken state or take it down completely.
Hosting with a service that doesn’t update your plugins – you have an option to turn on automatic updates. However, it’s much more prudent to review the plugin “changelog” to see all the changes included in the update. If the update is security-critical, install it, if not, wait awhile perhaps a week or so, to see if the update is clean and didn’t cause additional issues for other folks using it.
It’s always a good idea to make a backup of your entire website before updating, just in case it breaks your website. No back up available – ask your hosting provider for a staging site, update the plugin(s) in the staging environment for testing.
Small business owners may not have time to update their website or read changelogs. So to avoid the hassle of testing and installing a new plugin update, they host with a managed WordPress provider, like Digital Web Leprechauns.
Managed WordPress hosting allows the site owner to focus on the daily business instead of website business. Managed WordPress hosting saves time, money and energy, leaving you with a faster, secure website with an optimal experience for your website visitors.
