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Why Updating Your WordPress Website Is !Important

wordpress-updatesOne of the many great things about WordPress is it’s ability to continue to be updated regularly to use the latest coding techniques and strategies to make WordPress more secure and user friendly.

The most important thing that you can do as a WordPress website owner is to make sure your website is upto date with the latest versions of WordPress themes, plugins and the core itself.

The common question I get asked is, “If I update, will it break my website”. The short answer is maybe. There is always a possibility that after an update, certain parts of your website or perhaps the whole website may not work properly. That is why I always recommend people to make a backup of their website just prior to performing the updates as you can always revert back to the version before the updates.

I cannot stress enough how important backups are. If your website is important to you – as it should be, then you must have a backup procedure in place. You should never rely on your website developer or hosting provider to make backups or updates on your behalf.

There are many plugins you can use to perform backups on your website. Listed below are two of the ones we use:

  • BackUpBuddy
  • X Cloner

How To Perform Updates To Your WordPress Website.

As you can see in the picture in this article, you will notice a number next to the Updates menu item in your Dashboard. You will also notice a small circle with arrows pointing around to each other with a number representing how many updates are available in the top menu area of the dashboard.

Following are the basic steps to take to update your website.

  1. Make a backup of your website.
  2. Click on either the Updates menu item or on the circle and you will be presented with the updates page.
  3. You will now see whether WordPress core needs updating, a list of plugins and then a list of themes that require updates.
  4. Click on the small checkbox at the very top of the plugins or theme list (if there is more than one update), this selects all of the plugins or themes.
  5. Click on the Update Plugins / Theme / WordPress button
  6. Check your website to make sure all is still working.

You will then see the plugins / themes being updated accordingly, once they are all done, go back to the updates page again to update anything else that appears needing updating.

If you prefer someone else to do the updates for you and keep your website safe, we offer monthly maintenance packages to help you to keep your website updated and secure.

 

 

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