This project was a bit unique. The site hadn’t been updated in several years. This was causing a number of errors on the back-end. What wasn’t obvious is that this can also increase security and stability risks. Plug-ins, themes and PHP (the main coding language for WordPress) were all significantly out of date. The site was also a multi-site which means that it had multiple sites in one WordPress installation. This isn’t used very often but can be a unique way to offer and maintain multiple sites that are similar.d

We updated the sites’ plug-ins, themes and PHP, which is done on the server. This took a bit longer than normal updates. Since things were so far out of date, periodically, one update or another would break the site, and so we would have to back up, fix that and move on. Overall, it worked pretty well and things updated fairly well.

While you don’t always have to be completely updated on everything on a WordPress site, it is worth being close to up to date. Once you fall too far behind, this could create several issues for you. Your site might randomly break. It also can open up security problems with your site. Some hosts, will periodically force PHP to certain versions when you are too far out of date to ensure the security of their server. They also may not provide support because you haven’t updated things. Periodic, smaller updates are much better than large updates after a long time.