One of the desirable features of WordPress is the ability to add additional functionality to your sites through the use of plugins. Using plugins, although helpful, requires the website owner to maintain their site by ensuring that ALL of the plugins are up-to-date.
In this article, we are going to go over the best practices of updating plugins in a way that ensures your site will remain up during the process.
- Make a backup – Before making any changes to your website, you should always make a backup. When the backup completes, you will have a point in time that you can always restore back to in case of a mistake or for disaster recovery.
- Utilize a Staging Environment – A staging environment is an exact replica of your site that is under a different URL. This will allow you to test your site without the fear of breaking your live site. Creating a staging environment is very easy to do on our platform.
- Update and Test Plugins One at a Time – When updating plugins, you want to update and test each update separately. I know…it sounds like a lot of work, but this is very useful when things go bad. Consider if you updated 10 plugins and your staging site goes down. Which plugin is the culprit? You would need to start fresh with the entire update process again. Updating and testing the plugins one at a time gives you the ability to see which plugin update is problematic.
- Perform update on a Live Environment – Once you have successfully updated and tested all plugins on your staging environment, it’s time to replicate those updates on the live environment. I would recommend going through the same steps of updating the plugins as you did in your staging environment. This will ensure any plugin updates that altered the database have been executed.
You have now successfully, and most importantly securely, updated your plugins. If you have any trouble updating your plugins, please feel free to reach out our knowledgeable support team.