Many entrpreneur thinks that developing a website for their services is a one-time process and no future tasks are necessary to be able to use the website. We collected some ideas why it is advised to regurarly update your website, webshop.
Security concerns
More than 30.000 websites are hacked daily globally. For content management system platforms like WordPress, which host over 35% of all websites on the internet, 98% of its vulnerabilities come from plugins. That’s why there are also tons of security plugins to protect the vulnerable ones.
Content management systems can be vulnerable to attacks by:
- outdated client side libraries (mainly Javascript, such as: jQuery, React, Angular)
- outdated server side frameworks, libraries and plugins (eg.: Lararavel, WordPress and various plugins)
- misconfigured webservers
- outdated server side applications (PHP, Apache, Nginx, various databases)
- week user passwords in the CMS
System upgrades
System upgrades may involve operating system upgrade, framework and application upgrades (such as Java, PHP, Ruby). Since webhosting service providers regurarly updgrade their webservers and services it may happen from time to time that the code used by the CMS will no longer be compatible with the underlying operating system or system services. In such a situation usually the website becomes unusable and unreachable.
Compatibility
If the website is connected to 3rd party providers it is possible that the website loses its connection to 3rd party services by losing the compatibility to the always evolving APIs and services. Just think about AWS S3, Calendly or any other cloud based services and how often they change their API or the input/output parameters and format of their services
How often is it necessary to update a website?
This may vary based on your fault tolerance, resources, visitor count and various other factors. But as a rule of thumb, one should update the CMS once a year at least. You are better off updating it more regurarly, querterly or even monthly.
The website update process
- create a full backup of the production website before starting any kind of upgrade process
- create a test site (full working copy of the production site)
- upgrade the test site (CMS, plugins, framework, etc.)
- test and verify the test site
- if everything works as expected then upgrade the production site and verify that it is also working as expected
Resources:
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-many-cyber-attacks-happen-daily-2024-cywreck-zf5yf/