It is critical to update your WordPress website regularly in order to keep it safe, as well as ensuring proper operation of the theme and plug-ins.
Updating any software does have some inherent risks, but you can mitigate the risk and reduce the chances of website crashing out by taking some simple steps.
Backup
First and foremost, backing up your website on regular basis is good practice, but it is even more important when you are doing updates.
Make sure you have the latest backup version of your website available, before doing any updates. This allows you to revert back should anything go wrong.
If your hosting company does not offer timeline back up, then you need to do a manual back up and download a copy to your PC or an offline folder.
Auto-Update
Firstly, we have already discussed why you should not use auto-update on your website (read more here).
Whilst you should not allow WordPress engine and theme to auto-update, there are some plug-ins that can safely be left to auto-update.
Generally these are plug-ins that have little or no impact on the operation of the website. Cookie compliance, or image compression are a good example of these plug-ins. However, it is best not to set critical plug-ins such as WooCommerce, or Contact 7, to auto-update, as this type of plug-in is critical to the operation of your website.
Each website is made up of various plug-ins, so you need to use some common sense, and decide which plug-ins are safe to auto-update, and which should be done manually.
Order of Update
You usually find when a new version of WordPress is released, it is accompanied with updates for various plug-ins, and some times your themes too.
It is always advisable to update in the following order:
- Plug-ins – Check that everything is working before you update anything else. If you see a problem, roll back the site using your backup file.
- Theme – Update the live theme, and then non-active themes. It is important to update the non-active themes, as they may have security issues that the latest version fixes. Once again, if things go wrong, roll back the site using your back file. It is advisable to remove inactive themes, but if you want to keep them, then you need to maintain them.
- WordPress core – Now it is time to update your WordPress. Once again, if you see problems on your site, roll back the site to its pre update state using your back up copy.
Why this order?
We recommend this order as it reduces the risks of failure. Plug-ins are generally backward compatible, so the chances of them failing to work on previous WordPress version is pretty low. The same applies to Themes, but there is a greater chance for a theme to have a problem if the plug-ins are not the right version.
Finally, WordPress core is most likely to cause a problem, but having the latest version of plug-ins and theme will reduce the chances significantly.
Summary
It is important to ensure your WordPress website does not fall too far behind, as it has security implication as well as operational issues.
Having a backup version enables you to roll back the site if things go wrong, but doing the updates in the above order reduces the risk of update failure.
Alternatively, contact us to find out how our Fully Managed WordPress hosting package can make WordPress ownership a worry free experience.