From: Bob Spies <bob@flyingsealsystems.com>
Date: Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 9:25 AM
Subject: WordPress 5.5 Automatic Updates
To: FSS Website Maintenance Clients

WordPress 5.5, which is scheduled for release on August 11, contains a new feature to enable automatic updating of your website’s theme and plugins. Today the Wordfence organization published an excellent article describing this feature, including the benefits and risks of using it. In a nutshell, the benefit is that your site stays up-to-date, reducing the stability and security issues with out-of-date software. The risk is that, due to the update something goes wrong (because of the update process itself or problems with the new software version), impairing your site or causing it to fail. Please read the linked article for more detail.

If you’re enrolled in my website routine technical maintenance service, I recommend you not enable the new feature. Every week (and more frequently when necessary) I update your theme, plugins, and WordPress itself in a controlled way. If something goes wrong, I’m there to discover and deal with it. Therefore, enabling the new feature exposes you to additional risk without much benefit.

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The document below is intended as a resource for clients. It has several purposes:

• To explain what routine website technical maintenance is and why it’s critical that you do it.
• To describe the technical maintenance service I provide to clients.
• To explain why you may be better off using my maintenance service rather than attempt to do the work yourself.
• To give some pointers to clients who choose to do their own website maintenance.

Click this link to read or download the document: Routine Website Technical Maintenance.

If you are interested in learning more about my website maintenance service, please contact me.

– Bob