Question about WordPress website maintenance

  • Hello,

    I have developed a web platform using wordpress CMS for a school. It is based on dozens plugins and modified php source code which I have written. I was wondering how much maintenance such a web site is required in the future ? I can assume one person should regularly update wordpress and plug-ins but I am not sure if all of these tasks can be automated some how ?
    My second question is that what happen if we don’t maintain and update the website and just work with it in its stable condition ?

    Thanks

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  • Second question first: major security risk, especially in a school. It seems illogical that what is Secure today is not Secure tomorrow, but it is true because “security exploits” are published on the Internet by hackers.

    Hackers often use one insecure piece of software to gain access to other, more important things on a web server and even associated computers on the same network.

    In my experience, it does not make sense to automate updates of plugins or WordPress (other than the already automated minor level updates, x.x.1 to x.x.2) because things change between x.5 and x.6 of WordPress that may cause plugins or custom-written PHP to fail. The same is true, although to a lesser extent, for PHP and MySQL version changes.

    What can help is automated notifications when Updates to Plugins, Themes or WordPress are available. I use an out of date plugin for this, but there is likely something newer available now.

    With such automated notifications available, having someone check things out manually every 6 weeks is probably good enough, assuming they read their e-mail regularly and watch for the automated notifications.

    Without automated notifications, every week or 10 days is probably a good idea, given how fast major issues can come up.

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