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Keeping a website up-to-date is one of the most important aspects of WordPress website maintenance.
Here’s why:
- Better speed: Updated WordPress versions often contain features and enhancements that can improve website loading speed
- Enhanced functionality: An update usually adds new features and options that you can use to upgrade your website and its user experience
- Improved security: Most importantly, an updated website ensures that bugs and security vulnerabilities from older versions are fixed. Ignoring updates can lead to serious security issues, as hackers can easily exploit known vulnerabilities in outdated versions.
Website owners and WordPress developers often hesitate to update, especially WooCommerce, for fear of breaking the site and losing critical data. However, updating a WordPress website can be relatively safe and easy with the right tools and proper procedure. This article discusses how you can update your WordPress installation without any hassles or risks.
First things first—what is a WordPress update? It usually consists of updating the WordPress core, themes, and plugins installed on the site. You can carry out these updates manually or automate the process.
- Manual updates: In this case, the WordPress admin updates the core, theme, or plugin from the WordPress dashboard.
- Automated updates involve a computerized process enabling plugins, themes, and the core to update themselves. Anyone with administrator access to the WordPress website can update the core, themes, and plugins. But before making any updates, we suggest creating a staging website.
What’s a staging site? Why do you need one?
A staging website is a replica of your WordPress website. A WordPress website design company often uses a staging site. You can test your updates on the staging site to see if they might break your website or cause any other issues. After this, you can update your original website’s core, themes, and plugins.
There are many staging services to choose from—from staging plugins to Web host services that offer staging facilities. However, most staging services can negatively impact your original website. Most plugins create a staging site on the same server as your original website. This staging site consumes bandwidth meant for the original website, causing the site to slow down.
We would recommend using a WordPress staging plugin to create a staging environment. Plugins like BlogVault offer staging on their servers, and the staging function is built at no extra cost. You must sign up on BlogVault, add your site to the dashboard, and click “Add Staging site” to create your staging environment.
How to manually update a WordPress site
After the staging site is ready, here are the steps to manually update a WordPress website. The steps remain the same – for your live or staging sites. To reiterate, updates consist of WordPress core, plugins, and themes. We’ll tackle them one by one in these tutorials.
Manually update the WordPress core:
Step 1: On your website’s WordPress dashboard (wp-admin), navigate to the top of the page. You will see a prompt from WordPress to update to the latest version.
Click on “Please update now”.
This will take you to the WordPress Updates page.
Step 2: You’ll know if an update is available on the WordPress Updates page. If you see that ‘An updated version of WordPress is available,’ click “Update Now.”
This will update your top-level WordPress core. You now have the latest core version number powering your website!
An alternate way to update the WordPress core files:
An alternate way to update the core is to use the website’s dashboard. In the dashboard, navigate to the “Updates” option from the sidebar. This takes you to the same WordPress Updates page.
Manually update WordPress plugins:
Step 1: On the website’s WordPress dashboard, navigate to Plugins and click “Installed plugins.”
It takes you to the Plugins page, where you can see all the plugins installed on your website.
Step 2: On the Plugins page, WordPress tells you if any plugin needs to be updated. For example, the new version of the Bluehost plugin is shown below.
Step 3: Click “Update now” to update a plugin.
An alternate way to update WordPress plugins:
There’s another way to update plugins.
On the WordPress dashboard, click the “Updates” option in the menu. This will take you to the WordPress Updates page.
On the WordPress Update page, you will see a list of plugins that need to be updated. Choose “Select All” and then click “Update Plugins.”
Similarly, there is also a list of themes that have updates available. Click “Select All” and then “Update Themes.” That will update all the themes on the page!
Manually update WordPress themes:
Step 1: On the staging website’s dashboard, navigate to “Appearance” and click “Themes.” This will show you a list of all the themes installed on your website.
Step 2: WordPress tells you if a theme requires updating. Click on “Update now” to update the theme.
And that’s how you can manually update your WordPress Site.
How to automate updates of a WordPress site
Automating updates ensures that your site is always up-to-date. But there’s a catch. Updates can cause issues. For instance, if you enable automated updates and there’s a compatibility issue, the update can break your website.
Hence, if you enable automated updates, there is a real chance that something can go wrong. With that word of caution, let’s go ahead and see how you can automate all updates on your WordPress website. You can do this manually or by using a plugin.
Updates:
- Automating updates manually means using code snippets to instruct WordPress to update the core, plugins, and themes.
- Automating updates using a plugin means instructing WordPress to update the core, plugins, and themes using a plugin.
We’ll explore both these options one by one. Let’s start with a plugin because that’s much easier than the manual process.
Automating updates using a plugin:
For this article, we’ll use the Easy Updates Manager plugin. There are a few reasons why we chose this plugin. It comes from the makers of UpdraftPlus, a popular backup plugin. It has over 20,000 active installs, is frequently updated, and has a 5-star rating from over 300 users.
Let’s get started:
Step 1: Log in to your WordPress dashboard. On the sidebar, navigate to Plugins and click “Add New.”
This will take you to the “Add Plugins” page.
Step 2: Type “Easy Updates Manager” in the search bar. When the plugin appears, click “Install Now” and “Activate.”
Once activated, it’s time to configure the plugin.
Step 3: Click “Update Options” from the WordPress dashboard. The option wasn’t present before. It only appeared after installing Easy Updates Manager.
This takes you to the Easy Updates Manager page.
Step 4: On this page, select to enable the following options:
- Core Updates
- Plugin Updates
- Theme Updates
Generally, the options are enabled by default when you install the plugin.
And that’s it. Every time a new version of a plugin, theme, or even the core is released, they will all be automatically updated.
Automating updates manually using code snippets:
Here’s something to consider before you use this manual method. This method involves making modifications to the website’s backend. The backend is made up of WordPress files, and it’s not something users generally access because minor missteps can lead to big issues.
We recommend backing up before handling the WordPress files. You can use a backup tool like BlogVault or UpdraftPlus to do this. This way, you can always undo the damage done by any modifications you have made to the WordPress files.
Once you have taken a recent backup, you can enable automatic updates for all three WordPress components: the core, plugins, and themes.
Manually enabling automatic core updates:
To manually enable automatic updates for the core, you must add a code to your wp-config.php file. Here’s how:
Step 1: First, access the wp-config.php file. Log in to your Web Host account and click on File Manager.
Step 2: In the File Manager, navigate to the “public_html” folder. The wp-config.php file is present in this folder.
Step 3: Right-click on the wp-config file and click Edit.
Step 4: When the wp-config file opens, place the following code snippet on the top of the page:
define( ‘WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE’, true );
Then click on “Save Changes”.
Now, the WordPress core will be updated automatically.
Manually enabling automatic plugin and theme updates:
To manually enable automatic updates for all plugins and themes, you must add a code to the functions.php file of the active theme.
For instance – On our website, Westworld Fansite, we use a theme called Personalblogily. We’ll add a code snippet to the functions.php file to manually enable automatic updates. This file is part of the Personalblogily theme. Here’s how to go about it:
Step 1: Identify the active theme on your website.
Step 2: Log in to your Web Host account and click on File Manager under the Advanced section.
Step 3: In the File Manager, navigate to the “public_html”. From here, navigate to wp-content>themes>personalblogily (the active theme).
Step 4: In the “personalblogily” folder, you’ll find the function.php file as shown below.
Step 5: Right-click on the “functions.php” file and click Edit.
Step 6: Add the code snippets in the image below to automatically install all plugin and theme updates.
For plugins:
add_filter( ‘auto_update_plugin’, ‘__return_true’ );
For themes:
add_filter( ‘auto_update_theme’, ‘__return_true’ );
Then click on “Save Changes”.
And that’s how you enable the automatic updates of plugins and themes, folks!
Over to you
Keeping your WordPress installation up-to-date is one of the most critical components of your website maintenance journey. An updated WordPress website is the easiest way to ensure the best user interface experience for your visitors and increased security for your site.
We hope this article helps you pick the best way to update your WordPress website. Whether through manual or automated methods, we strongly recommend making WordPress updates a regular part of your website management strategy. While manual processes can be time-consuming and daunting, computerized methods simplify the job. WordPress security plugins are your best bet if you’re looking for a quick and straightforward way. They are designed to be used like any other plugin and save time, energy, and effort.