Should I keep my WordPress plugins up‑to‑date?
If you have a WordPress site, you probably have one or more plugins installed (hopefully Jetpack is one of them!).
Keeping plugins updated to the latest version is a best practice — developers update their plugins to fix bugs and close any security loopholes they may have discovered since the last release.
Outdated plugins can affect your site in a variety of ways:
- Hackers can take advantage of known loopholes in outdated plugins.
- You miss out on new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes.
- Outdated plugins bring a higher risk of conflict with other plugins you may be using.
With Jetpack installed, it’s easy to choose which plugins (including Jetpack itself) you want to keep automatically updated without having to constantly monitor releases and manually update things each time a new version is released.
With Jetpack’s plugin management tool, you can update plugins manually, set some or all plugins to update automatically, and activate or deactivate plugins on a per-site basis or in bulk.
When working inside the WordPress.com dashboard, the yellow update icon indicates that the site has updates available. You can see all sites that need updates in the My Sites list.