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Why you should wait to update your plugins
The typical recommendation for webmasters is to update your plugin as soon as new updates come out.
The rationale is that the updates are patches and improvements. So, for best performance as well as for security reasons, you should update as soon as they come out.
But in practice, that's not true.
Many plugin developers are small companies that don't have the resources, the systems or, sometimes, the knowledge and willingness to test thoroughly.
So their first releases into "production" can cause issues of compatibility and performance. And the real testers are the users who update as soon as the updates are available.
It's not uncommon to see users complaining of updates that caused issues or that crashed whole websites.
And it's not uncommon to see plugin developers to release a few updates one after the other. That's because they are "learning as they go", on the experience of the early updaters, who end up bearing the costs of the developer's mistakes (or, sometimes, poor work ethics and sloppiness).
This happens also with much bigger developers, like Yoast.
They have been struggling with the 13 version for weeks now.
Then they released the version 14 saying all was good. And still, they are causing some major issues to webmasters:
The "people running into issues", sometimes, were people who saw their website crash.
For those who run website with paid access, or courses, that's not acceptable, of course.
Yoast also once released an update that destroyed their customer's rankings on Google. I was searching for that update which happened around a year or so ago to link it,, and found out that they have done it again, much more recently.
A year ago, Yoast promised to do much better with their testing. But it looks like they haven't.
So, for now, I'm not going to use their latest "cutting edge" tech. I'm going to wait it out until they can get it stable enough, even if that means waiting weeks.
If one day you'll have a website, don't necessarily believe the maxim "update as soon as updates are available". "Install as soon as updates are ready" only pushes the costs of development onto you.
