We’ve seen it happen more times than we’d like to count. A business owner logs into their WordPress site after six months (or a year, or longer) and finds either a wall of update notifications or worse—a hacked site, a white screen, or a homepage plastered with spam links. According to Sucuri’s 2023 Website Threat Research Report, 39.1% of hacked CMS installations were running outdated software at the time of infection, and WordPress comprised 95.5% of all detected infections.
If you’ve been putting off WordPress updates, you’re not alone. Between running your business and handling a hundred other priorities, logging into the backend to click “update” probably feels like the least urgent task on your list until something breaks.
This article walks through what actually happens when you don’t update WordPress for an extended period—the security risks, performance problems, and compounding technical issues that make each month of delay harder to fix. More importantly, we’ll show you what to do if you’re already in this situation and how to prevent it from happening again.
Why WordPress Updates Actually Matter
WordPress releases updates for three main reasons: security patches, bug fixes, and new features. The WordPress core team released three major versions in 2024 (6.5, 6.6, and 6.7), with minor security and maintenance releases happening every few weeks when vulnerabilities are discovered, but transitioned to annual major releases starting in 2025.
Your plugins and themes follow similar patterns. Popular plugins like WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, and Contact Form 7 release updates monthly or even weekly. Each update addresses specific issues—a discovered vulnerability, a compatibility problem with the latest PHP version, or a conflict with another plugin.
When you skip updates for a year, you’re not just missing one fix. You’re missing dozens or hundreds of patches that were designed to keep your site secure, fast, and functional. The longer you wait, the bigger the gap between your current version and the current version becomes.
What Happens to Security
This is the big one. Every outdated WordPress installation is a potential target for automated attacks. Wordfence blocked over 55 billion password attack attempts and 1.1 billion SQL injection attempts against WordPress sites in 2024, with the majority targeting known vulnerabilities in outdated plugins and themes.
Here’s how it typically unfolds. A security researcher discovers a vulnerability in a popular plugin—let’s say it allows an attacker to upload files to your server without authentication. The plugin developer releases a patch within days. Ethical security teams publish the details publicly (so other developers can learn from it) about two weeks later.
That public disclosure is when the automated attacks begin. Bots begin scanning millions of WordPress sites for installations still running the vulnerable version. If your site is one of them, you’ve got a target on your back.
The consequences of a successful hack vary:
- Malware distribution: Your site gets used to host and spread malicious software to your visitors
- SEO spam: Hidden links and pages get injected to boost sketchy websites, tanking your search rankings
- Phishing pages: Attackers create fake login pages on your domain to steal credentials
- Resource hijacking: Your server gets used for cryptocurrency mining or sending spam emails
- Complete lockout: Admin accounts get deleted, or passwords changed, leaving you unable to access your own site
Google’s Safe Browsing initiative flags thousands of websites daily for malware or phishing. Once flagged, your site shows scary warning messages to visitors, your search rankings plummet, and rebuilding trust takes months, even after you’ve cleaned up the infection.
Performance and Compatibility Issues
Security grabs the headlines, but performance degradation is often what business owners notice first. An outdated WordPress site gradually gets slower, clunkier, and more prone to random errors.
Part of this comes from technical debt. WordPress 6.5 (released in April 2024) includes significant performance improvements to the block editor and database queries. If you’re still running WordPress 5.8 from 2023, you’re missing those optimizations. Your pages load more slowly, your admin dashboard feels sluggish, and you’re paying more in server resources for the same functionality.
Compatibility issues pile up, too. Web hosting companies regularly update their server software—PHP versions, MySQL databases, security protocols. WordPress core keeps pace with these changes, but only in newer versions. If your host upgrades to PHP 8.2 and your site is running WordPress 5.6 (which wasn’t built for PHP 8.2), you’ll start seeing warning messages, broken features, or complete site failures.
Plugin conflicts become more common as well. Modern plugins assume you’re running a recent version of WordPress. When you try to install a new plugin on an old WordPress installation, you might get an error message saying it’s incompatible. Or worse, it might install anyway and break something else on your site.
We’ve seen sites where the contact form stopped working six months ago (because the plugin stopped supporting the old WordPress version), and the business owner didn’t realize until they wondered why inquiries had dropped off. That’s real money left on the table.
The Compounding Problem
The painful part about neglected updates? The longer you wait, the riskier and more complex the update process becomes.
Updating from WordPress 6.4 to 6.5 is usually straightforward—one click, a minute of processing, and you’re done. Updating from WordPress 5.8 to 6.5 (jumping 7+ major versions) requires more care. You need to verify plugin compatibility, test core functionality, potentially update PHP versions on your server first, and have a solid backup in case something breaks.
Many WordPress professionals won’t even attempt large version jumps on a live site without staging environments and extensive testing. The risk of breaking critical functionality is too high. This means your simple “I should probably update WordPress” task has become a multi-hour technical project requiring specialized knowledge.
The same applies to plugins. If you have 15 plugins that haven’t been updated in a year and try to update them all at once, there’s a good chance two or more will conflict with each other or with your outdated WordPress version. Now you’re troubleshooting which specific combination is causing the problem—a process that can take hours even for experienced developers.
This is why many business owners in this situation end up paying a developer $500-$2,000 to bring everything up to date. What could have been a monthly maintenance task has become an expensive rescue operation.
What To Do If You’re In This Situation
First, don’t panic. An outdated WordPress site is fixable, even if it feels overwhelming right now.
Your immediate priority is assessment. Log in to your WordPress admin (if you can) and check what version you’re running. Look at your plugin list and note which ones show available updates. If you can’t log in at all, or if your site is displaying errors or malware warnings, you’ve got a more urgent situation that needs professional help immediately.
Assuming your site is still functional, start with these steps:
Create a complete backup. Before touching anything, back up your entire site—database and files. Most hosting companies offer backup tools, or you can use a plugin like Updraft. If something goes wrong during updates, this backup is your safety net.
Update in stages, not all at once. Don’t click “update all” and hope for the best. Start with WordPress core, test your site thoroughly, then update plugins one category at a time (security plugins first, then SEO, then functionality). Test after each batch.
Consider getting professional help. If you’re looking at 12+ months of neglected updates, or if your site is business-critical, this might not be a DIY project. Finding a qualified WordPress professional specializing in maintenance can help you avoid costly mistakes and extended downtime.
Check for malware even if everything looks fine. Run a security scan using Wordfence or Sucuri’s free scanner. Sites can be compromised without obvious symptoms—hidden malware might be dormant, waiting to be triggered, or quietly redirecting your visitors to spam sites.
If you discover your site was hacked, you’ll need to clean the infection before updating. Updating an already-compromised site won’t remove the malware; it just gives you a hacked site running on newer software.
Preventing This Going Forward
Once your site is up to date, the question becomes: how do you avoid ending up in this situation again?
The honest answer is that WordPress requires ongoing maintenance. It’s not a “set it and forget it” platform. Regular updates, security monitoring, and backups need to happen monthly at a minimum. For many business owners, that’s either a time commitment they can’t realistically make or technical work they’d rather not handle themselves.
This is where WordPress maintenance plans make sense. A monthly service (typically $50-$300 depending on your site’s complexity) handles updates, security scans, backups, and uptime monitoring. You get peace of mind knowing someone’s watching your site, and you avoid the expensive emergency situations that come from neglect.
If you’re a do-it-yourself type, set calendar reminders for the first Monday of every month. Log in, review available updates, run them in a test environment if you have one, and verify everything still works. Budget 30-60 minutes for this routine maintenance.
The key is making it routine rather than reactive. Waiting until you notice a problem means you’re already dealing with consequences instead of preventing them.
Making Updates Part of Your Routine
We get it. WordPress updates feel like busywork when everything’s running fine. But that outdated installation, left untouched for a year, is accumulating risk every day—security vulnerabilities, performance degradation, compatibility issues, and technical debt that make subsequent updates exponentially harder.
If you’re currently staring at a year’s worth of neglected updates, take a breath. Get a solid backup, proceed carefully with updates (or hire someone who knows what they’re doing), and implement a maintenance routine so you never end up here again.
Your WordPress site is a business asset that requires maintenance, just like your physical office or company vehicles. The difference is that digital neglect tends to stay invisible until something breaks catastrophically.
Need help getting your WordPress site back on track? Find experienced WordPress professionals in your area who can handle the heavy lifting and set you up with a maintenance plan that actually fits your business needs.
