WordPress has quite a regular major update schedule (around four times a year with minor releases in between). If your website is running fine and is doing what it needs to, you might think updating WordPress is not necessary.

3 Reasons for updating WordPress

1. Get the latest features

Every major release comes with a few cool features. These features improve your experience with WordPress and also improves the experience your visitors have. They can range from dashboard features that allow you to work on your website in a more intuitive way or they can include features which give you greater freedom in making your website look better.

Sometimes these features won’t make any difference to you, but, generally, there is something for everyone that makes using WordPress so much better.

2. Get performance enhancements

The codebase on WordPress is continuously getting improved and refactored to make it as efficient as possible. These improvements give you and your visitors a better experience by loading pages quicker.

This is especially important when sites have complex databases queries (because of plugins or themes). Having these enhancements on your website as quickly as possible makes sure that you and your visitors are getting a fast website that isn’t getting bogged down with slow queries.

I’d just like to mention that these performance improvements don’t mean that your website will instantly be fast. There are a number factors that affect a website’s speed, one of which is the quality of the platform – this is all that WordPress can take responsibility for.

3. Get security patches

This may be the most important reason for updating WordPress (and all the plugins). Unfortunately, there are people out there that want to get into your website (for SPAM or malicious purposes). They (the hackers) are continuously looking for ways to hack into websites using various methods – they rely on flaws in software that allow them to get in.

Every update of WordPress (major or minor) has a security patch with it. Some are more important than others, but every update is important when it comes to security.

You can ignore every other reason except the last. If anything, update WordPress just because you want to keep your website more secure.

PS Before updating WordPress, here are some important things to remember before updating WordPress.