Let's get a tech question answered.

Common questions ...

• Do I need to do updates on my website?
• What are all these notifications about my theme or WordPress or plugins being out of date?
• And what do I need to do about that?

Well, much like your car needs gas to keep going and needs a regular service to keep going in the long term, your website is exactly the same. So yes, absolutely, you need to keep your website up to date.

There are three things in your website that needs updating WordPress itself, the theme that you're using, and all the plugins that you're using.

There's a specific order you need to do these updates. And I would always recommend that you update the plugins first. Once all the plugins are up to date, you need to update your theme. Once your theme and your plugins are up to date, so you can then go ahead and update WordPress.

Is it always seamless?

No, sometimes they may be some tech problems. Sometimes one of the plugins you're using may have an issue when you run an update. And Heaven forbid worst case scenario, you get a WordPress white screen of death, as we not so affectionately call it.

So it's not a seamless process. It's not always perfect, but 99% of the time, you can safely update your website if you're doing the web site updates in the order I mentioned before.

So do you have to do this yourself?

If you haven't tasked anyone else with doing it, then yes, it's your responsibility. If you don't want the responsibility, there is always the option of outsourcing this task. One of the things that I offer within my business is a website care plan. So if this is something that really drives you nuts, and you really don't want to know about updates, you don't want to be doing them. And you certainly don't want to be fixing any problems when you run the updates and something happens, just hop onto my website and go into my website care plan. You can sign up it's a monthly fee and I'll take care of your website for you.

You will find that there are much better ways to spend your time then updating your website for most people. But if you are new with your website or you're a DIYer and you're trying to maintain or handle keep a handle on your costs, then by all means go ahead and DIY this.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I'm going to recap you need to update plugins first, followed by your themes and then by WordPress. Do this at least once a week and if you have any problems don't hesitate to get hold of me.