Moderator
Jan Dembowski
(@jdembowski)
Forum Moderator and Brute Squad
Original WordPress Better/safer?
My simple question is, am I better off using an original WordPress theme and only original WordPress plugins to stop this happening
No.
*Drinks coffee for a better answer 😉 *
WordPress strives to be compatible with older code (themes and plugins) but there’s a lot of dodgy code out there and sometimes people have problems as in your case.
I think what you need to do is either take the time to create a separate dev site on your PC/Mac or on another host and sort out the problems there first. Once that’s done and you’ve confirmed you’re good then upgrade the production or real site.
You are a business owner but your WordPress site is your shingle inviting people in. It really behooves you to maintain the code so that you don’t risk security issues.
Maintaining your themes, plugins and core WordPress code keeps you and your visitors safe.
If that’s outside of your comfort zone (and that is fully OK and understandable) then you may want to look at managed WordPress providers. You pay them, they’re responsible for the code on your site. You do the content.
NOTE: I’m not saying you cannot do the debug yourself. This site and all of the code is for DIY’ers. Not everyone is that DIY (and again, that’s cool too). I’m also not making any recommendations as that can get this topic spammy very quickly.
I’m suggesting that you look at that option and see if it fits your case.
One quite viable option is to not take their routine updates. Truly significant security updates are either rare or very rare, in which case you will be notified.
By and large you will be safe against updates in WordPress core, a lot of effort is put into testing it and maintaining backward compatibility. So much so that in the last 5+ years I have only had two client sites glitch, in one the slider stopped working, in the other (to WP 4.5) a javascript update choked on bad code in the theme, reverting the site to 4.9x got it running and it stayed that way for a while.
I have some woocommerce sites which have not been updated, I have not taken the time to reconcile the theme customisations, so for the moment while these sites don’t need the new features, they happily stay where they were developed.
