Why does my website’s software need updating – and do I really need to do it?
If everything worked when your website was launched after all what event would stop it from working in the future. To understand why let’s look at what a WordPress website is.
WordPress
WordPress has been around since 2003, entering 2024 at version 6.4.2 and eleven updates throughout the year later welcomed 2025 in at version 6.7.1, following a troublesome 6.7 release it has to be said. WordPress is well established as the leading website platform yet is trying to be all things to all men with much of its recent efforts focussing on introducing a pagebuilder experience to the hobby end of its user base. Many developers don’t see this experience as capable of delivering professional website design and look to extend the power of WordPress through professional tools from third party developers instead.
Third Party Developers
The reason why WordPress dominates the website world is that it provides a free open source platform for everybody to use with a vast international eco-system of developers extending the performance of the platform way beyond its native capabilities. Some of these developers are small teams, others are multi-million pound businesses backed by investment fund managers.
Without third party developer plugins, WordPress websites wouldn’t be secure, or meet accessibility standards, or provide payment functionality or booking functionality. They wouldn’t reliably deliver emails or optimise your website for SEO. There are at least six essential plugins we install on every single website almost without exception. Some of these plugins are free-to-use and others are commercial. Commercial typically means once purchased they will receive updates for 12 months until the license is renewed. If the license isn’t renewed the plugin won’t suddenly stop working. However it might stop working in the future if WordPress or any other plugin or a third party service implements a change that causes a conflict.
What Can Go Wrong
Functionality
In the real world, most of our customers should want to keep their booking system updated. When new payment legislation took place in 2023 the booking system required an update in order for Stripe payments to continue working. In 2024 when Airbnb made a minor change to the way they sync bookings, the booking system again required an update to continue to receive these bookings. Your booking system received 6 updates in 2024, mostly bug fixes and improvements.
Security
We see the main threat however, and fortunately so far to us it is an unrealised threat, as security vulnerabilities. When this article was written there were almost 10,000 plugins with known vulnerabilities
Malware can take control over a website to the point where a non-infected backup of the website will be required to restore it. For this reason, in addition to recommending frequent backups, we recommend software is kept licensed and up-to-date.
Recommendations
Owners Websites has two Hosting Plans, our Self-Hosted Plan that does not include backup or licensed software updates, and our Managed Plan which does.
We recommend our Self-Hosted Plan to all new customers as they will receive updates from us for their first 12 months of their website as a matter of course. If customers wish to continue on our Self Hosted Plan beyond 12 months, of course they can, but they should be aware of the risks and should be updating their software plugins themselves.
Our Managed Hosting Plan is our recommended way forward for keeping all websites of 12 months and over functional and secure.
Simon Hibberd
Owners Websites
