Regular updates keep WordPress secure and expand the feature set, ensuring the platform meets both the developer’s and their client’s needs.

The flipside of regular updates is the maintenance of WordPress installs. Once you start maintaining more than a few installs for your clients, keeping both plugins and WordPress up to date can become a bit repetitive.

A common question for new WordPress designers/developers is how to handle plugin upgrades and upgrades of WordPress itself. To illustrate the meaning behind this question, consider the following real-life example. I recently logged into a client site for maintenance to find that someone had “attempted” an upgrade of WordPress, but that it had failed: