Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in 2007, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In May 2007 WordPress released version 2.2. It was a significant leap anyway – widgets arrived for the first time, jQuery was bundled, and the development team stuck to a more structured release calendar. It was also the start of a very bad week for thousands of bloggers who run their own servers.
One widely read account from that era captured the chaos in real time: caching layers collapsing under load, Apache race conditions sending servers crashing, plugins that worked separately but exploded together. White screens. Unconnected SSH sessions. Hours of diagnosing problems with no authoritative answers on the internet. The writer summed it up clearly – he had upgraded many WordPress versions before and assumed it would be smooth. He was wrong.
This story is nearly two decades old. But the dynamics he describes continue today on a much larger scale.
In the context of version 2.2
WordPress 2.2 shipped on May 16, 2007 – just a few weeks short of the publicly announced deadline, which was a breakthrough in itself. After a long hiatus between versions 2.0 and 2.1, the project has introduced a more official release schedule. The intent was good: shorter cycles, more predictable shipping, less feature bloat. Version 2.1 was the first to ship with a specific release date for the next version, and the community has come to regard these dates as a sort of promise.
The problem was that the platform grew faster than the supporting infrastructure. Plugin authors were not given enough time. Server environments have changed a lot—shared hosts, VPS setups, dedicated machines—and the same upgrade behaves differently in all of them. The documentation lagged behind the code. Running a long list of plugins, users have stepped into something no one has fully tested: a combinatorial chaos of twenty or thirty extensions all bumping into each other in a rewritten core.
A study conducted in May 2007 found that 98% of WordPress blogs running at the time were exploitable because they were running outdated and unsupported versions of the software. That number wasn’t just a safety statistic—it was a signal that most people weren’t upgrading, perhaps because upgrading was too painful.
The lesson that slowly and only partially emerged was this: the platform’s success outpaced its development experience.
What has changed – what has not changed
WordPress has finally fixed the mechanical issue. In version 2.7, released in December 2008, WordPress made software updates a very easy, one-click automated process. This single change probably had more impact on the security posture of the platform than any other release in its history.
What it didn’t address was a deeper structural tension that 2007 was under: WordPress is an open platform, meaning its real-world behavior depends not just on the underlying software, but on the entire ecosystem of themes and plugins that run on it. And this ecosystem is huge and largely unmanaged.
By 2025, WordPress will power 43.4% of all websites on the internet and have a 61.4% market share among content management systems – more than all other platforms combined. The official plugin repository now has over 70,000 plugins and counting. This scale creates a combinatorial testing problem that no centralized team can fully solve.
There is evidence in the last release date. When WordPress 6.9 is launched In December 2025, three of the most popular plugins on the platform went down within hours. WooCommerce checks stopped working. Yoast SEO’s content analysis is lost for non-English sites. Elementor’s editor refused to fully load. Emergency patches followed for days. Anyone who auto-updates a live site woke up to a crisis very similar to 2007.
The plugin problem has not gone away
If anything, the security dimension of the plugin ecosystem has gotten sharper. Plugins account for 96% of WordPress vulnerabilities by 2024. In 2024, more than 1,600 plugins and themes were removed from the WordPress repository due to unpatched security issues – roughly four plugins were removed every day.
The WordPress Plugins Team is working on it. The team in 2025 Reviewed 12,713 plugins — a 40.6% increase over 2024 — and plugin approvals increased by 66.2%, with 69.5% of reviewed plugins ultimately approved. Automated tools have improved the speed and quality of reviews. As of September 2024, Plugin Check Plugin is integrated for automatic review on WordPress.org and reduces plugin validation issues by 41%.
But the scale is relentless. Plugin submissions doubled in 2025, with the team receiving around 330 submissions per week by the end of the year. The view queue is growing faster than the team can process it. The rise of AI-powered plugin development—along with its true democratization—means that for the first time, developers are pushing code into the production ecosystem that millions of sites depend on.
The challenge of 2007 was a platform that surpassed the upgrade experience. The 2025 challenge is a platform that surpasses quality assurance capabilities.
What should bloggers and site owners actually take away from this?
There’s a tendency in the WordPress community to treat update anxiety as a beginner’s anxiety – something you get over once you’ve learned enough. This is wrong. The 2007 account that launched this piece was written by someone with a VPS, SSH access, and many previous upgrades under their belt. It was still burning.
In nearly two decades of WordPress update history, a few things remain true:
Never auto-update the base version on a live site. Minor security patches are generally safe. Major version jumps—especially those that touch the editor, plugin API, or database schema—require testing first. The stage environment is optional; this is the cost of running a serious site.
Test your plugins relentlessly and regularly. In 2007, the writer had about 25 active plugins and discovered that it was almost impossible to predict how they would interact. This problem scales with the number of plugins. Experts now recommend checking your site for any plugin that hasn’t been updated in the last six months, and removing it if there isn’t an update.
Think of your update cadence as a strategy, not a chore. Sites that were damaged in 2007 were often sites that ignored updates for too long and then tried to switch to multiple versions. Those who get hurt today are often the ones who update everything the moment a big release hits. The middle ground—staying relevant in small releases, testing the basics—requires discipline, but isn’t complicated.
In 2026, WordPress is an extraordinary platform. From personal blogs to enterprise publishers, there are more than 63 million websites operating worldwide. Its longevity is a real achievement. But the hard lessons learned from the chaotic upgrade in 2007 still hold: a platform’s openness is its greatest strength and most enduring liability. Understanding both is what separates sites that survive major releases from those that don’t.
