What updates are included with Cornershop maintenance?

Do you update plugins? When?

Yes. We update your WordPress plugins once a week, usually on Wednesdays except during holiday weeks and Giving Tuesday, we will often delay all non-urgent updates to Thursday or for the following week. 

What if something goes wrong?

While rare, updates pose the risk of breaking default and custom functionality on your site, so we take full site backups before performing updates.

What if there's an urgent security release?

We give priority to security updates for all plugins. We subscribe to many monitoring services that alert us if there is an urgent security vulnerability in any plugin used on our sites. If we are alerted to an urgent security release, we will run an off cycle update of that plugin as soon as possible to ensure your site is safe and protected. 

Do you update all plugins?

There may be some exceptions to plugin updates. For example, if we know that your site will break if we update a particular plugin – either because of a breaking change in the plugin like a feature being removed or significantly changed, or because the plugin has been customized for your site – we'll skip that specific plugin update.

Do you check my site after performing updates?

We run a visual comparison monitor on 1-5 URLs of every site – always the home page, additional pages depending on your support plan level – before and after all updates. This monitoring alerts us to outages or other visual issues. If we notice an issue, we rollback the changes using a backup and create a plan forward.


Do you apply WordPress updates?

Yes. WordPress itself is regularly updated. Just like plugin updates, we prioritize security updates for WordPress releases, so security patches are applied ASAP. 

However, a new version of WordPress can sometimes cause unforeseen problems with plugins & themes, so when a WordPress update is released that isn’t critical for security reasons, we often wait a week or so before applying it on your site to ensure this new version of WordPress is stable and won’t change any issues on your site.

Do you do theme updates?

We will only apply theme updates by request. Because theme updates can dramatically impact the appearance and layout of your site, we prefer to first investigate your individual theme and website before providing an estimate for the work needed. 

In some cases, the theme update can be pretty minor and applied without extensive development work, but most instances require us to be more careful when performing the updates to make sure theme updates don't break your website. In most cases, theme updates will require approval of additional development time.

As a rule of thumb, we recommend updating your theme once a year so that if you are forced to update your theme due to critical issues such as a security vulnerability, the version upgrade is not as large (ex. going from version 5 to 6, as opposed to version 2 to 6) and therefore there is less developer intervention that is required.  

Our team will flag a recommended theme update for you in one of 2 ways depending on your maintenance plan:

  • Hosting and Maintenance Only customers: 90 days before your maintenance plan renewal date

  • Maintenance + Support clients: During your annual site audit


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