Always patient, she helped us get focused and move forward, and completed the project ahead of schedule and beyond our expectations ... We have truly enjoyed our experience working with Laura Bowly and we highly recommend her web design services!
-Willow Thorpe, Operations Director, Center For a Non Violent CommunityNOTE: The WordPress 5+ update changes the way you’ve edited your Page & Post content if you are running an older version of WordPress, so familiarize yourself with Gutenberg asap!
I know it seems like WordPress releases a lot of updates and it’s true, they do! Updates provide new features and/or fix bugs that might affect the security of your site. Because WordPress is the most popular content management platform in use today, it’s also targeted by a lot of not-so-nice people (hackers). Keeping your site updated is a good way to help prevent malware attacks (click here to read about other things you should be doing as well).
WordPress releases major updates about three times a year. There are many minor updates released between those major versions, and for most sites, those minor updates happen automatically.
That’s easy. Login to your WordPress Dashboard. You can always see what version of WordPress you are running in the At-a-Glance details. Generally, if there is a newer version, you’ll see an alert at the top of the Dashboard.
If you are logging in with an Admin level login, you will see a tab under Dashboard called “Updates” which gives you a complete list of the updates needed for the platform (WordPress), Plugins, & Themes.
Before you run any updates, it is critical that you have a current backup of your site & database. From time-to-time, there will be compatibility issues between new versions of WordPress & different plugins. These compatibility issues can take your site down and you’ll need to be able to fix the problem at a code level or restore the site or plugin from a backed up copy.
Ideally, your hosting package is running daily backups that you can easily restore from if something goes wrong during updates.
Once you have confirmed you have a current backup, login to your site with Admin level access. You can run the updates using the one-click process at Dashboard » Updates. Run one update at a time and check the front end of the site after each update to make sure everything is working properly. The reason I recommend this is because if something goes wrong, you’ll know exactly which plugin caused the problem so it will be much easier to get your site back online.
Again, updating is about site security — closing all possible “windows” into your server, so I definitely recommend you update your site at least a couple of times a year. If that just isn’t happening, make sure your host has some sort of Malware Scanning in place and it running a daily backup that can easily be restored if there is any issue.
Remember, Laura Bowly Design can run updates for you if you don’t want to tackle them yourself. Contact us to schedule updates!
Always patient, she helped us get focused and move forward, and completed the project ahead of schedule and beyond our expectations ... We have truly enjoyed our experience working with Laura Bowly and we highly recommend her web design services!
-Willow Thorpe, Operations Director