Last week we talked about WordPress Automatic Updates that came with version 5.5. It sounds like a no brainier to turn automatic updates on and use it. However, there are some potential problems that you could run into.
Cons of WordPress automatic updates
- Could break your site
- You could lose content
- Could cause you to lose traffic if your site goes down
- Concurrent auto-updates can fail.
Could break your site
Just because you get an update, doesn’t mean that you should update it as soon as you can. Like I mentioned last week, developers are human and they could code something that is not compatible with another plugin or the theme and if you update it too soon could break your site and cause it to go down. You should wait a couple of days after an update comes out and see if they push out another update a day later to fix any issues. If you have automatic updates turned on, these updates will be installed and could break your site.
Your site triggers these updates using a function called cron jobs. What you need to know is that this is triggered by someone visiting your site. So if you have a large number of updates available, then all of them could be triggered at one time. This could cause the resources on your server to be maxed out and could cause some of the updates to fail and not completely install. This could cause the plugin to fail and could cause the site to crash.
You could lose content
If you have a plugin or theme that fails and causes the site to crash, you may have to resort to a backup to recover. If you don’t have an up to date backup, then any content update or changes since your backup are gone and you would need to recreate them to get your site back to where it was originally. You always want to make sure you have an updated backup that you can restore to.
Could cause you to lose traffic if your site goes down
If an update goes bad and causes your site to go down, then people who want to visit your site won’t be able to. If you don’t catch the site being down for a while, you can potentially lose lots of visitors. Google could potentially lower your site rankings if they see a decrease in traffic.
So while automatic updates have their advantages, there are cons of WordPress Automatic Updates. If you are not comfortable with running these updates, then feel free to reach out to us, and we can work with you to make sure your site is backed up regularly and up to date on all of your code with one of our monthly care plans.
