If you have a WordPress website, you know what this cycle icon means in your top menu bar. It means that it’s either time to update a plugin, theme or even WordPress core itself.
For the most part, these updates come and go and nobody notices. But occasionally an update comes along and it wreaks havoc on your website, knocking it down and offline and sending you scrambling to get it back up so that it can help your business. There’s that sudden panic and suddenly seems like everything’s coming to an end.
So today I’d thought I’d share my process for updating my WordPress websites so that hopefully you can create your own process that allows you to safely update your website.
Okay so the first thing that I like to do when I have to do updates is to just look around at the website that I have, and see what and make sure that things are running and taking notes. So I can check after I run the updates and see if anything broken before the update or the update actually broke something.
So the homepage looks fine here. Forums look fine. Videos look fine. So everything is fine.
So once I’ve figured out that everything is fine, I come into WP Engine because I’m going to take a backup. And I like WP Engine because it makes it easy to take quick backups of my website that I can restore after I’m done.
Okay so our backup is completed. We see it right here. And if something were to go wrong, at least here in WP Engine, we would be able to select this and hit restore and it would restore the backup. And then we could figure out okay what, do we need to change or do we just need to wait on that plugin update until it comes out with something better?
Okay so now that we have our backup and we’ve looked at our website to make sure that things look good beforehand, let’s go ahead and run the update. So we’ll just go into the WordPress update. I’m just going to update them all. And we’ll figure it out if something breaks.
Okay so they’re all updated now. Let’s refresh our page here. And that looks fine. We’ll go back to the homepage. That looks perfectly fine. Back to the forums. And we’re good to go. That’s a perfect update. And if something were to happen again we can go back here and restore it, figure out the issue and what not. But that really is the proper way to update your website. So you can make sure that nothing breaks and have a way to get back to a previous point if something does.
Now, you can get this all taken care of for you. One of the things that I offer is a set WordPress Website Care plans. There are three different tiers to this plan. But with each plan, you get great hosting on WP Engine, security, managed updates and a whole lot more. It’s a great way to make sure that your website gets the care that it deserves, and you never have to worry about an update breaking your site again.
But what questions do you have about updating your WordPress website? What’s your process for updating your website? Leave them down in the comments section below. And if you want more WordPress tips and tricks, be sure to subscribe.
But until next time, happy WordPressing!
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