One of the services we provide our many WordPress clients is a regularly scheduled upgrade of their site’s plugins. We do this to ensure they’ve got the latest developer releases that could be patching compatibility issues or vulnerabilities.

Another important benefit, however, is recognizing when a plugin has stopped receiving updates by its developer or has been dropped from WordPress entirely. Quite often, our Wordfence or Defender Pro scans will alert us of such issues, at which point we determine whether to seek out a replacement or to simply remove it if the plugin’s functionality is no longer necessary.

A recent example involved a plugin used to write analytics code into the site’s head area. Although no vulnerabilities were being detected, the plugin hadn’t received an update in years. So, rather than wait for an issue to arise, we removed the plugin and replaced it with “Head, Footer and Post Injections.” This sleek, problem-free plugin was last updated 8 months ago and is tested up to WordPress v6.0.3. Equally important, it currently has over 400,000 active installations. When determining which plugins to use, it’s generally better to select the ones with more happy users!

If you’re seeing the “plugin appears to be abandoned” warning in your security scans, let us know. We’ll be happy to help you find and implement a trustworthy replacement plugin.