Why is Website Maintenance so important?
Only a year ago we used to do plugin updates and maintenance on websites for clients on our maintenance plans once a month, during this we update all of the plugins, make sure the forms are still sending mails and check and clear the error logs of the website, and obviously attend to any issues we might have found there.
What has Changed?
It was enough and safe to do it once a month, but things have changed. Everything has changed….
A year ago you needed to be a season and full time hacker to be able to break into a plugin or website, now it takes a couple of well-crafted lines in an AI prompt and soon you will be exposing or creating vulnerabilities that leave websites open to attackers.
Even more scary of those awesome “Vibe Coders” who actually know little to nothing about code, which are writing software and plugins that are being used on websites and literally have a “key in the door” to get into the website without much effort at all because they have left so much exposed.
We Monitor Vulnerabilities
Today, 12 months later we have an open feed in our emails. We receive a report every minute of vulnerabilities detected and exposed by responsible hackers and we are running updates daily on all websites on our maintenance plans, sometimes twice a day to mitigate these risks.
What about Auto Updates?
I have heard many people say, “We can just use auto-update” to update our plugins and core files”. Yes, you can, but updates run when the server Cron-job allows it, not when the vulnerability is exposed, and then there is my favorite, when a plugin has a bug and its auto-updated and the website throws a critical error to visitors, this happened this week, with hundreds of unmonitored sites on our servers.
Maintenance is no longer an option!