OSTips – How To Keep Your WordPress Site Up To Date
One of the fastest ways your WordPress site will get hacked is if you don’t pay attention. Well ,how do you know when stuff needs attention?
In this video, I want to talk to you about a really simple plugin called Update Notifier that helps to keep your WordPress site up to date. This Is going to let you know when parts of your wordpress website need to be updated. Now WordPress updates itself in minor releases but not major releases, and your plugins and themes don’t automatically update, so you need to maintain those well.
If you don’t regularly log into your WordPress site, how do you know?
Let’s find out!
“Welcome to OSTips from OSTraining. My name is Rod Martin.
So here I am on a WordPress site that I actually haven’t logged into in months. Now that’s okay, because it’s on my local machine. Notice that the latest version of WordPress has automatically been installed for me and that’s really terrific; however, I do have a plug-in and two themes that are now out of date.
So how do I find out when I have updates available?
- head over to Plugins
- add New
- search for Updates Notifier
- click install
- activate just like any other plugin in WordPress
- click on settings (to make sure our plug-in is set up correctly)
It’s going to:
- check every hour
- notify about plug-in updates – yes
- notify about theme updates – yes
Now you’ll note there’s only active plugins and only active themes. It’s probably not a good idea to have inactive plugins and themes on your site anyway, so leave that at yes and consider deleting plugins and themes that you’re not using.
- notify automatic core updates to this address – yes (let’s leave all of those at the default)
- send email notifications (Here’s my email, and it even allows for slack notifications)
I’m going to go ahead and click save settings, and here’s the email I just received when I turned that plug-in on.
There are updates available! The plug-in, Akismet anti-spam, and two of my themes are out-of-date. It let me know right away that I’ve got updates to do, and now I can quickly log in and take care of any updates that I need to.
So that is Updates Notifier, a simple, but really helpful plug-in, that makes sure your WordPress site is always up to date, and lets you can sleep in peace at night.
Thanks for watching. This has been OStips from OS Training, and I’m Rod Martin.”