Most website owners update their plugins religiously and completely forget their theme. That is a mistake. Your active WordPress theme is code that runs on every single page of your site, and an outdated theme can carry exactly the same kind of vulnerabilities as an outdated plugin — sometimes worse, because it is loaded everywhere.

Theme vulnerabilities usually appear in three places. First, bundled components: many premium themes ship with their own sliders, page builders, or contact forms, and those bundled tools can contain flaws even when the theme itself looks fine. Second, abandoned themes: if the developer stopped releasing updates, known flaws pile up with no fix coming. Third, old code: themes written years ago may lack modern protections against cross-site scripting, leaving visitor data exposed.

The fix is simple, but it needs a routine.…