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Keeping your WordPress site updated is the first and well-known thing that you must do to prevent your website from being hacked and to ensure the best user experience for your visitors.
Even though most WordPress users claim to know the importance of daily and weekly updates, it is a widespread mistake for them to skip this critical step and leave their website vulnerable to many different exploits.
For such occasions, some WordPress plugins could ensure that WordPress is up-to-date, along with its plugins.
Still, now with the new incoming update of WordPress 5.5 – the WordPress Dev team is introducing another amazing feature that is called “Auto-update for themes and plugins.”
Currently, this feature is only available for WordPress core, but soon when a more stable version is released, it will be available for everyone.
Also Read How to Create a Blog on WordPress (Guide for New Bloggers)
WordPress 5.5: Why is auto-updating important?
The main reason to use auto-update functionality is to prevent hacking and exploits. Many vulnerabilities occur not only in the WordPress core but also in plugins. There are plugins that are friendly and useful at first sight – but inside they include some malicious code that wants to steal information or inject something in your website that you don’t really want.
For the last several years, many WordPress website owners found solutions to achieve auto-updates. However, the WordPress developers team did not implement these solutions, for one reason or another. Now they decided to do it.
The new WordPress 5.5 version will come with a beautiful interface and will ensure a great and easy user experience and thus enable WordPress users to have a smooth UI that they can use for accomplishing their goals.
Many cybersecurity companies field tend to point out that a vast majority of WordPress website hacks happen due to vulnerabilities in some out-of-date theme or plugin.
With this incoming feature of WordPress 5.5, it is expected that the number of compromised websites will be significantly reduced.
The idea of auto-updates has been discussed since 2013, but WordPress decided to take action and started developing it in 2019. Now in 2020, the expected release of WordPress 5.5 is March 2020. You can already try it but have in mind that it is not officially released, and you might experience some bugs or problems.
Also Read Fix WORDPRESS After Theme Change
The idea behind the new update in WordPress
One of the main goals of this project is to create an admin user interface that will enable WordPress admins to manage the way automatically updates work. WordPress admins will be able to enable or disable the auto-updates on either the core of WordPress or of each plugin. This is a feature that will be loved by the WordPress community, that is for sure.
It will save time
Let’s take a look at two different scenarios and discuss why this feature is great and will save time.
1. If you have one website, such as a personal blog, and you post there once in a while, this new feature will not be that helpful for you. You can take your time and check the website once in a week or maybe once in a month and see if there are some updates and do them manually.
However, if you are a WordPress developer and you create and support websites for many clients, now, with the new incoming update, you will not have to think about any updates anymore.
Once you update to the new WordPress version, you can adjust the update options to all of your websites and WordPress will do that for you.
Final thoughts
WordPress is a fantastic content management system that supports millions of websites around the world. It is the most-used CMS, and this grants hackers the desire and the opportunity to look for vulnerabilities.
Keeping your website updated is crucial for its security and is mandatory for everyone running a WordPress site. With the new WordPress 5.5 version, the automatization of the whole process becomes an easy job, so do not hesitate to do it.