WordPress is an excellent platform for website design AND great for ranking purposes – SEO, when you really know what you’re doing. Search engines crawl content regardless of Content Management Systems (CMS) and WordPress provides a more than adequate framework and tools required to satisfy the necessary factors for ranking purposes. That said, there is some maintenance required.
PLUG-IN UPDATES
The first and most common maintenance requirement is, Plug-In updates. Think of it like a computer operating system update; or phone apps updates. They are frequent; you may ignore some for a while, but they always get to a point where you have to, or things start to fail. For WordPress Websites, that means, scripts appearing on pages; page load errors; or the worse one, a blank website loading; also known as the “wordpress screen of death”!
Setting auto-updates, is something that some designers do not opt for. Why? …because it is not a given that all latest plug-in updates will be compatible with your current version of wordpress… and when incompatibilities occur, you usually find out through a customer calling your, asking you why their website looks compromised; or, telling you that their clients are notifying our them that their website is not loading!…
WORDPRESS UPDATES
WordPress has transitioned from a multi-release requirement annually, to an average of one major update, annually! That said, minor security patches and minor maintenance updates will occur throughout the year.
HOSTING PHP UPDATES:
Centred around security and performance, hosting PHP updates are absolutely necessary. Unlike the two above updates, the hosting update is not done within the website; it is done at the hosting level (server).
Highly likely to have an impact on the Plug-Ins within your website, often, a PHP update will require the latest plug-ins to be updated and, vice-versa… some plug-ins will not update, until the latest PHP hosting version, has been facilitated.
Without getting too deep into the technicalities, WordPress has several updates (minor and one major) annually; and, Plug-Ins require several updates annually… and, add to this mix, a hosting PHP update / upgrade, can complicate things a little bit… so, compatibilities amongst all three is a must for the website to run smoothly!
So, when you think of “just hosting”, these days, this implies a whole lot more than just paying for ‘hiring’ space on a server annually.