Safely Upgrading The WordPress Core

Apart from enjoying saying “Upgrade The Core” because it taps into my geeky side (which if I’m honest is most of me!) and makes me feel like I’m a Sci-Fi movie, it’s a vital aspect of Managing your site.

With the popularity of WordPress as a Platform it has become a target for Hackers and Spammers. There are some basic security measures that can be taken to ensure that your site is safe and secure and one of those is to make sure that the the Core of WordPress is running the Current version.

One Click Update

WordPress has a One Click Update button which is elegant and awesome. However, before you click that button there are a few things that need to be done:

• BACKUP YOUR SITE
• Disable All Your Plugins (but make a note of the ones that are activated first!)
• Now Click the Upgrade Button
• Reactivate your Plugins

All in all it should only take a few minutes of your time.

Back Up Your Site

This is very important and you can do it a couple of ways:

• Backup Plugin
• cPanel

If you’re happy to let me set up the Backup Plugin to make regular Backups for you then you can relax and only need to follow points 2, 3 and 4.

However, you can also use the cPanel Backup feature. It’s a bit more complex and involved but it’s very, very thorough.

Why Backup First?

When you tweak the Core files you could see something go wrong… It’s very rare but if you do and you have a Backup then you can effectively reset your site to a point before the site went squiffy. A full Backup will save everything including all your content and your Database.

Why Disable Your Plugins?

Your Plugins hook into the Core of WordPress to work, if you try to Upgrade the Core with things that are still using it in the background you can run into problems. Simply disabling them is a small step to take and it helps immeasurably.

Make a list of the Plugins your site is currently using (don’t worry about their Settings, they don’t reset to their defaults because they’ve been deactivated). Take a look at the following picture:

Plugin’s Page

1 – Filter Your Plugins

You can use the filter at the top of the Plugins Page to select only the Active Plugins on your site. Very handy!

2 – Select The Plugins

You can select them individually by using the checkbox next to the Plugin Name. Or… you can Filter to the Active Plugins and then select the checkbox at the top of the list called Plugin which selects all available listed Plugins. (it should really be labelled Select All but for some reason it’s called Plugin…)

Once you selected all of the Active Plugins you can use the dropdown menu (Bulk Actions) to select Deactivate, click apply and they’re all switched off.

3 – Update The Core!!

Now you can go to the WordPress Updates section (on your Dashboard Menu, at the top, is the Dashboard Link, hover over that and it should reveal an Updates Link). Click the Upgrade Now button and let WordPress do it’s thing.

4 – Turn Your Plugins Back On

Now, this is the bit where you’ll need that list of the Plugins that your site uses… Got it? OK, here we go.

Turn them on ONE AT A TIME.

Now that WordPress is Updated to the newest version (mostly it’ll be security tweaks more than a whole revision) you need to reactivate your Plugins and see if any of them have a conflict issue with the new Core stuff. Most shouldn’t if the Update wasn’t a complete Core overhaul to a new version but you never know…

If You Encounter A Problem With A Plugin

First of all, don’t panic! If your site goes to what’s known as the White Screen Of Death, it’s not as serious a problem as the Blue Screen of Death with which Windows users are almost certainly familiar.

If this happens then there’s a conflict between the Plugin you’ve just reactivated and the Core + other active Plugins.

The way around this is to go into the Server either via ftp or cPanel and change the name of the Plugin Folder (even by one character) and then refresh/reload your site and you should have access to it again as normal. This sounds like a lot of drastic stuff to do, especially if you’re panicking but if you take a deep breath and maybe put the kettle on you’ll be fine. I promise.

When you get your Hosting you’ll have a cPanel Username and Password (sent to you in an email) so using these you just:

• Log in to cPanel
• Open the folder “wp-content”
• Open the folder “plugins”
• Click on the name of the Plugin that’s gone squiffy and change it’s name or add a letter/number to it
• Hit Return to make the change stick
• Go back to your Browser and refresh the page
  • If the site doesn’t come back to normal you may need to clear your Browser’s Cache. Check the Browser’s docs for more info on how to do that…

If there’s a Plugin that doesn’t play nice with the new tweaks to the Core it won’t be long before the Plugin’s Developers have a new version out that does! They generally get the Beta versions of the revisions ahead of release and make sure they’re ready to go with a new version of their own work.

Summary

So there you have it 🙂 It’s not that difficult to do and once you’ve done it once it becomes less of a scary thing. As always, if you need me to do it I am available and will do Core Updates for £10. Email me at sos@ikarra.com and we’ll take it from there.