If you are using WordPress for your website, or even just your blog, you must take all those plugin and themes update notifications seriously.

Here’s why.

You spent time customizing WordPress

It’s unlikely that WordPress, straight out of the box, met your needs, so you chose from thousands of plugins and themes to create a website that met your needs from a functionality standpoint and that fit your brand image. Those choices made your website look and feel different than other websites.

However, you can’t just set it and forget it. Developers regularly release updates for plugins or themes that fix bugs or provide new features. If you don’t run the updates, you could lose features you and customers want and need.

It’s not hard  

If you are using many plugins, you may need to update monthly or even weekly. The good news is that the latest versions of WordPress notify you on your administration panel which updates are required, either by letting you do it under “Updates” or by directing you to the “Installed Plugins” section in the Dashboard. You can update with a few clicks of a button, and the updates rarely take more than a few minutes. Some take just seconds.

Note: Custom plugins are a little more difficult to update and will require your designer to check files and lines of code to ensure the plugin is still working properly. Still, the effort involved is worth it to prevent issues.

Not updating creates performance and security problems

Just like with software and applications, updates for WordPress are released to improve overall performance. If you don’t update to new versions, you could break functionality of the website, create security risks or cause other problems that damage the customer experience.

If you are disregarding them to save costs, you could create a whole host of problems that end up costing you much more down the road.

Bottom line: You can’t keep ignoring them. Your best bet is to create a regular maintenance routine where someone is accountable for ensuring that all the updates are being done consistently.