Many people ask me how to update WordPress. Updates on WordPress can be scary if you’ve never done them before. However, there are plenty of reasons to update:
- Security updates are huge!
- Any bug fixes that will make your site run better
- Staying up with web standards
- Taking out the trash!
In this video, I guide you through updating your WordPress site. Make sure you’ve backed up before you do anything and you’ll probably be just fine! This video takes you through the major steps of updating, in the order I prefer:
–Plugins
–Framework
–WordPress
–Network
Any questions, let me know!
Nate
Transcription
Hey folks!
Ok, so I wanted to take this opportunity really quick. There’s a website that I’m managing here and I get a lot of questions about updating people’s WordPress site and how to do that, so I wanted to show you really quickly, uh, how to do that fairly quickly and with not a lot of issues.
So, anyway, if you’re running a backup plugin, this particular website has BackWPup because it’s a multisite, and you can run that really quickly and it will back up your site, so just in case weird things happen when you update, um, that, you know, that is something you can roll back to, so anyway, um, yeah, so once you get a back up done, then you can start updating things. You’ll see here that WordPress, uh, is now available.
This 4.2.4 is available, uh, update now, and then also this, uh, website is built on the Genesis framework, and Genesis actually has an update out, so please update now. So, anyway, uh, you’ll also see here that there are eight other updates available. So, basically the order of operations on this is to first update plugins and then update themes.
So, uh, the reason that I do that is if, uh, plugins get updated and, uh, they break something, they’re a little bit more modular and you can, uh, fix that a little bit easier than just updating theme, but you know this is just kind of, again, I think, my preference, and, you know, maybe there’s a better way to do that, but uh, this is how I do it.
So, anyway, uh, basically I’m just gonna go ahead and open this in a new tab and just so I can leave those open. And it will…okay, so once this, uh, loads up you can scroll down and one of the awesome things that is now available in WordPress is is this “compatibility with,” right?
So, um, shows your current, you know, setup and then also the uh, the upgrade, so we know that we’re going to be upgrading to 4.2.4 and so you have the current option that you’re running and also the new version, right? So, uh, the new version is fairly new, and so these will come up as unknown.
Uh, nowadays it’s a lot safer, you can typically go ahead and update and if something, uh, cracks, then it’s pretty easy to fix, so, anyway, um but, what I also look for is an indication of the updates for the current version that I’m running on my website, right? So, I know that this all, all of these are one hundred percent compatible, right, so I’ll just go ahead and select all and then update plugins. And this could take a little while and it’ll go to a new screen but once it’s done it’ll come up and say everything’s been update.
Okay, so we can see that everything has been updated here and looks good and we can also you know typically at this point I like to go to the front of the site and check it out. I’ll let you go ahead and do that but, you know, basically just visit the site and check it out. The main reason that you want to visit the site and check it out is just to make sure that everything is fine and running well and not wonky or anything.
So, okay so let’s just say I’ve gone ahead and done that. You’ll see there’s still two updates, uh, remaining and you can click back on that and you’ll see that the theme updates, so Genesis, even though it’s a framework it’s still classified as a theme, so yeah I’ll go ahead and update that. And it basically goes through the same thing that the plugins does, and so everything has been updated successfully.
Again, at this point you can go back and check out your site and make sure that everything looks good. And uh, but I’ll go ahead and click on this last, final update. Okay, so the last thing to update is the, version of WordPress here, right? So, you can download it and manually update it, but you don’t need to really worry about that if you’re in the back-end here. Uh, so basically you just click “Update Now” and it will begin the update.
Okay, so um, yeah, uh if you’ve gotten through everything and everything has updated successfully, you should get a welcome to the new version of WordPress that you’re running. There’s just a bunch of information you can view about the new version so, uh, again this one is, this particular site is running multi-site so I’ll probably be needing to do some upgrades to the network here, and I’ll check that out, uh, here in the next page, but if you aren’t running a multi-site, you’re pretty much done here and, um, I would actually go ahead and suggest making another backup at this point so that you have a fresh backup of your new installs, so if anything were to happen from this point forward, you don’t need to worry about, um, yeah repudiating everything, so I hope that’s helpful, again if you’re running a multi-site network, stick around.
If you’re not, feel free to leave. So, anyway, I’ll go ahead and click on this “Upgrade Network” and yeah, basically all I need to do is upgrade the database here, so I’ll click on “Upgrade Network” and it shows that the network has been completely upgraded and basically this is just kind of a one-click you can just upgrade the whole network, so I’ve just got two sites on this multi-site network and everything, so yeah, everything’s all done. And again at this point you would want to check and make sure that your site’s running well and also if you’ve done this, maybe do another back-up as well so you have a fresh back-up. So, that’s all.
I hope that’s helpful. Talk to you later.