The Importance Of Updating Your CMS

As the popularity of Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Magento and Joomla have grown and grown over recent years, they have helped open the web up to a variety of businesses and hobbyists. This is due to their easy builds, the variety of add-ons you can get, and simple ways of updating and managing a website.

Be that as it may a website is never a finished article, and as the popularity and use of CMS have grown they have become a target for exploitation by hackers. While previously hackers would have to solely focus on one site and probe for vulnerabilities – whether through a DDOS attack or Remote Code Execution – CMS have provided hackers with a large target area and just one focus due to the range of sites using a particular system or plug-in. So how do you stay ahead of any security issues that may arise and ensure your website is bullet-proof? Here are a few reasons of the importance of updating your CMS:

Stay Up To Date

You can be forgiven for not updating your CMS when you see a new update is available – clicking it can bring with it a variety of unforeseen issues with your site layout, incompatibility with your installed plug-ins, and a bunch of other headaches that might leave you wishing you could roll back the clock. Unfortunately these updates are never for minor cosmetic changes, they’re always fixing a security issue, problems with functionality, or even the CMS itself. As such they are very important.

Don’t Touch That Button!

Most hackers will use exploits in plug-ins as a way to get backdoor access to your website. WordPress is handy for telling you when a plug-in is out of date, but similar to updating the CMS there can be a variety of knock-on issues such as incompatibility with the update and issues with functionality.

Plug-in updates occur often and can be for anything – from minor bug fixes to security updates – and it is imperative that the plug-in will be supported by the version of the CMS you have prior to updating.

Routine Back-up

Backing up your work should be second nature for you. If you don’t regularly back-up your site, even if it’s just prior to installing updates, it can set your business or site back in a big way and mean you not only lose out on visitors but potential revenue too.

Having a clean back-up of your site ensures that any inconvenience of a hack is quickly dealt with and can make it much easier to get back to normal if your site is compromised.

It’s estimated that 30,000 website are hacked every day. With this startling statistic in mind, it’s important that you don’t become a statistic.

If you want help or advice about maintaining your website, get in touch with our Web Development team today.