TCB Website Maintenance Service Outline
A website starts falling apart when the foundation of the website is falling behind. A foundation of a website is its plugins, its theme, its server language, and its development framework.
The best way to think of this is your smartphone. At some point, as the apps get updated, they will not run as smooth as before if you do not upgrade your iOS or Android version. Sometimes, you also need to upgrade the hardware, which is the phone itself.
The concept is similar to a WordPress website. The plugins are the apps, the Theme is the operating system, and the PHP framework & WordPress framework is the hardware.
Plugins Update
As the PHP / WordPress upgrades continue, the older plugins will stop functioning. We cannot delay the upgrade of the PHP / WordPress version because the upgrade is required by the hosting companies.
The difficult part of this task is as you upgrade the plugins. The site will begin acting weird. We need to find out the conflicting plugins and find workaround solutions to restore the functionality of the site and making sure the plugins are compatible with the new website environment.
Theme Upgrade
In WordPress, a theme is a collection of templates and stylesheets used to define the appearance and display of a WordPress powered website.
The theme is what gives you the interface to edit the content. As the theme keeps updating to stay compatible with plugins and the PHP / WordPress version, it also needs to be upgraded whenever an update is available.
PHP Update
PHP is a server-side scripting language. that is used to develop Static websites or Dynamic websites or Web applications. PHP stands for Hypertext Pre-processor, which earlier stood for Personal Home Pages.
Every month, PHP launches a new version that will make certain functions deprecated in favor of new, modern features. These additional capabilities include anonymous classes, throwable errors, and type declarations. Updates such as these are a much-needed refresher, keeping PHP competitive as a programming language.
For example, on 24th October 2019, PHP launched v7.3.11. On 26th September 2019, PHP launched v7.3.10. On 29th August 2019, PHP launched v7.3.9.
Overall, newer PHP is faster, more secure, and significantly more resource-efficient than older versions. To give you an example, a site running PHP 7 can handle twice as many visitors as PHP 5 can, using the same amount of memory.
If the plugins or theme are not updated and if the plugins and theme are using functions that are no longer supported by a specific version of PHP. The site will act weird or potentially crash.
WordPress Version Update
Leading WordPress security research shows that the majority of WordPress websites that get hacked are either due to an outdated WordPress core, plugins, or theme.
WordPress is actively maintained by developers from all over the world. These developers find and fix bugs, add new features, and hunt down security vulnerabilities on a regular basis. These changes are then released in a new WordPress version.
The upgrade process will affect all files and folders included in the main WordPress installation. This includes all the core files used to run WordPress. Without carefully
The concept is similar to the PHP updates, if the plugins or theme are not updated and if they are using functions that are no longer supported by a specific version of WordPress. The site will act weird or potentially crash.