How We Help with WordPress Updates
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The best way to keep your site stable and secure is to have expert, meticulous humans managing the updates process.
WordPress updates — Core, plugins, and themes — are one of the most important and potentially most disruptive maintenance tasks for your site. Done right, they keep your site secure and stable. Done carelessly (or not at all!), layouts fall apart, plugins clash, and things break, often at the worst possible moment.
Because our Updates Team is hands-on with every site we manage, if something does go sideways, we’re already on it.
What we handle for you
Human-managed updates
Updates are performed by our dedicated Updates Team — not an automated tool running on its own. Leveraging years of experience, we read changelogs, security alerts, and feature announcements and then apply good judgement on when to update and what to check afterwards.
Eyes on your site
Before and after every update, a real human looks at your site, not just at logs. Because our team knows what your site is supposed to look like, if we find anything amiss, we’ll address it right away — usually before you even realize something happened!
Herd immunity
Because we update hundreds of sites per week, we see things others might miss. When we find a risky update, we pause it across all our clients’ sites until we’ve found a safe path forward so your site benefits from what we learn on everyone else’s.
Plugin updates
We keep WordPress plugins current for stability, compatibility, and security. We usually wait at least 48 hours for most updates (so new bugs can be caught and fixed), but will patch vulnerabilities immediately.
WordPress Core
We keep a close eye on all new versions of WordPress, monitoring changes and bug reports. We carefully test on our own sites first, and then decide when it’s safe to update yours.
Parent theme updates
We update your parent theme, keeping child theme customizations exactly where you left them.
Critical security patches
We monitor security vulnerability announcements and scour changelog notes, and then triage security issues by severity. Critical patches go out ASAP and don’t wait for the next update cycle.
Rollbacks as a last resort
Others will just rollback a problematic update (or just deactivate a plugin!) as a way to sweep it under the rug. We choose to troubleshoot instead. When possible, we simply fix it ourselves. Or, we’ll report the issue to the developer and collaborate with them to solve the problem. (Collaboration is one of our favorite things!)
How regular updates help your business
Your site is probably doing real work for your business — bringing in leads, sales, donations, or ad revenue — so it deserves more than occasional catch‑up clicks in wp‑admin.
When updates get ignored or squeezed in “whenever there’s time,” they tend to cause trouble at the worst possible moments. A rushed batch of changes can break layouts, trigger plugin conflicts, or take key features offline right when you’re running a campaign, launching a product, or closing a sponsor deal. Handing them off means you’re not spending evenings watching a progress bar or scrambling to fix whatever might have broken.
Here’s how one client, Rob Baer of Spikey Bits, put it:
Rob BaerBefore NerdPress, keeping our WordPress site updated and running smoothly felt like wrestling with a giant, never-ending jigsaw puzzle. There was always a missing piece. Between plugin updates, CMS maintenance, SEO headaches, and hosting issues, keeping the site stable was a full-time job. Then came Andrew and the team at NerdPress. Now, our site runs 24/7 without a hitch. Updates are seamless, everything plays nice with Google, and we’ve already started to see real improvement in search visibility. They gave us peace of mind. Absolute lifesavers.
When updates are handled consistently, your site stays safer, more stable, and a lot less stressful to run.
If you want help choosing the right support level for your site, compare plans or we can talk it through together.
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Things you might be wondering (aka: FAQs)
It’s usually not necessary, but when risk is higher, absolutely. Bigger releases and known-problem plugins get extra caution, including staging checks when needed, so your live site is less likely to get a surprise.
We troubleshoot and fix it as part of your plan. When possible, we simply fix it ourselves. Or, we may report the issue to the developer and collaborate with them to solve the problem. If a rollback is the fastest path to stability, then we’ll use backups to resolve the issue quickly. In that case, we’ll then plan the safest long-term fix with you for future updates.
We do when a child theme is in place. If a site is running a parent theme directly, we often pause parent theme updates to avoid wiping customizations. In that case, we’ll explain the risk and the next best step.
With the rise of AI analysis, more vulnerabilities are being discovered and reported than ever before. We monitor security vulnerability announcements and scour changelog notes, and then triage security issues by severity. Critical patches go out ASAP and don’t wait for the next update cycle. If updates aren’t available, we’ll apply firewall rules to keep things secure.
Backups are another way we help, and they’re part of the overall way we keep your site safe and secure. We run backups before doing any WordPress plugin or theme updates in order to be able to do quick restorations in the worst-case scenario that something goes wrong. Learn more about our Backups and Recovery process for how they work alongside updates.