Keeping your WordPress plugins up to date is essential for security, performance, and compatibility. However, updating plugins without a proper strategy can lead to broken features, site downtime, or data loss. In this guide, we’ll walk you through a safe and reliable process to update WordPress plugins.
About automatic updates
WordPress supports automatic updates. This can save a lot of time and help you get security fixes quickly. However, auto-updates come with a risk: a buggy update can take down your site. If you do enable automatic updates, make sure that you have a solid backup strategy so you can recover from update failures. You should also be comfortable diagnosing WordPress issues, e.g., you should know how to connect to the file system, enable debug logging, etc.
Instructions
- Backup your site
Before making any changes, create a full backup of your site, including files and the database. See How to build a good backup strategy for your WordPress website.
- Check plugin compatibility
Review the notes for each plugin update. Look for known issues or conflicts with your theme or other plugins. Do not update if WordPress indicates it has not been tested on your version of WordPress.
- Update staging first
If you have a staging site, clone your site to staging and perform the updates there first. This helps you catch issues before they affect your live site. Check if your hosting company has a staging option as you may be able to create your staging server with a few clicks.
- Wait a week before applying non-critical plugin updates
This is especially true for major updates, e.g., rewrites. It is not uncommon for the first update to cause issues, which get reported and quickly fixed by the developer. Waiting a week avoids the headache.
However, an exception may be granted to security updates, especially those fixing newly reported vulnerabilities. When a vulnerability is discovered, hackers try to catch as many sites as possible before they get patched. If your site is impacted by the vulnerability, conduct your testing but update as soon as possible. - Update one plugin at a time
Avoid bulk updates. If something breaks, you will have to roll back your changes and then narrow down the problematic plugin.
- Clear your caches
Once updated, clear your site cache to ensure the changes are properly reflected.
- Test your site after each update
For each update, test the functionality affected by the plugin. Also run some quick tests to validate nothing major is breaking. For example, log into the site, fill out a form, confirm the form saves data, etc.
- Monitor for issues
Despite your testing, an issue might not surface right away. Use a plugin such Query Monitor to keep an eye on the site especially in the first days after any major update.
- Watch out for over-confidence
After months of never having an issue, it is easy to start taking shortcuts, e.g., skip testing, or update in bulk. It will seem overkill to test each update. This will hurt you eventually, so at least minimize the pain by always, always, always making a backup right before you apply updates. At least then you can rollback when things break, without losing other work. Everybody goes through this, you will too.
Reference
- Plugin and themes auto-updates – Documentation – WordPress.org – official documentation on how to enable and manage auto-updates of plugins and themes. Be sure to have a backup strategy before enabling automatic updates.
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