The short answer: most likely. Unless you are yourself a developer, a web professional, or a highly technical person – you should at very least seek out a little assistance with updating your business website.
Why? Because we hear this phrase everyday: “I tried to update my WordPress site and now it is broken.”
The first rule of WordPress is to always run the latest version of WordPress. No matter what platform your website is built on, you need to do updates to make sure your site is functioning correctly. Think of it this way: over time, you need to preform periodic upgrades on your car to keep things functioning like they should, your website is no different in this regard.
When you have a WordPress Content Management System, it is especially important to make sure your site is updated when the system prompts you to perform updates. One of the things that make WordPress such a popular blogging platform and website platform is the ability to add in plugins to make the system as robust as possible. When you are adding those many plugins to your WordPress site, all of those plugins need to communicate together and when they do not, your site does not function correctly.
So what do you do when you need to update your WordPress site?
WordPress has two methods for updating, the easiest being the one-click update, which in theory should work for most sites. The WordPress directions for a one-click update are listed here and seem simple enough: http://codex.wordpress.org/Updating_WordPress
What they do not explain is that this is dependent on the update being compatible with your current WordPress theme and all of your plugins to that theme and this is where you will typically encounter problems. In our experience, we see over 90% of the time there are compatibility issues when you attempt to update WordPress.
Your WordPress version needs to be compatible with your current WordPress theme otherwise it could break your whole theme and your blog/site could go down. You will also encounter compatibility and functionality issues within your WordPress plugins. This is best done in a development environment what areas of the site are not functioning correctly from the upgrade. This is where we recommend calling an experienced WordPress Developer to do this for you. The second method WordPress has for updating is manual. As you get into the manual functions of updating your site and plugins, it can get extremely complicated and tricky to do this correctly. The hours you spend attempting to do this yourself only to realize your site is not functioning correctly is not worth the money you will save by hiring an experienced developer to do this for you.
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