Can you keep your Joomla website up-to-date?

A white ago I wrote a blog post about the importance of keeping your website up-to-date so it's safe and secure. One of the great things that Joomla does is make it nice and easy for your to apply any updates in just a couple of click - anyone can do that.

But what if you can't update your website because it would break? Well in my view that's just bad development. 8 or so years ago there might have been scenarios where you needed to "hack" core files to do what you need, but these days that is both unacceptable and unnecessary.

I was recently contacted by a company who was looking for a Joomla specialist to update an API for some integration they have on their site, and while doing that work I noticed that the core of Joomla and all the components the site uses were way out of date. The core was running Joomla 3.8.5 which was released back in February 2018, so almost 2 years ago (at writing this Joomla is at version 3.9.12), and since then there have been 19 updates released which would include many security patches that will help keep your site secure - not to mention the new features you're missing out on, and the countless updates to the various components, modules and plugins that are also out of date.

I am now looking to work with that client to get their site to a state where they can, with confidence, apply any future Joomla or component updates that are released, and by doing so their site will be more protected from hackers and prolong the life of their site.