Why people don’t update WordPress

Why people don’t update WordPress

Not me guvna, I always update my WordPress website.

After quickly reading the article at WP White Security and the crazy figure of 73.2% of WordPress sites not running the latest version it got me thinking about why people don’t update WordPress. Initially I thought the figure was probably because of all those abandoned blogs but looking a bit more carefully I read that the figures were calculated from the top million sites on Alexa! So 42,106 of the Alexa top million are WordPress websites and over 70% of these are not using the latest WP version.

OK so some of these must be abandoned blogs, business websites that were made and forgotten etc but some of these must be some pretty big, pretty popular websites. So again it begs the question as to why these site owners are not keeping on top of the updates?

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Here are some hypotheses:

  1. The websites are badly customised or so heavily customised that updating to the latest version breaks functionality.
  2. The website is hosted by the developer who either hasn’t told the client their website is made in WordPress or offers no maintenance packages.
  3. The website owner does not know the risks involved by not updating WordPress.
  4. The website owner is scared to update because everything works fine and they don’t want to break anything.

But there are some scary figures there, like the 11 websites that have an invalid versions of WordPress, I mean WTF. Surely this would only be done by the developer in the attempt to stop the client updating themselves or stopping the WordPress update nag? Not even sure if that works to be honest but why bother when you can just update.

Do you have any hypotheses on why people don’t update WordPress? Let me know below. Also if you own one of the 30,823 then get in touch. We can help you out! 🙂

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