WordPress themes, plugin, and WordPress itself (“core”) all have occasional updates. It’s important to keep up with them for site security. You can see when there are updates by viewing the Updates tab in the menu:
The red circle and number indicate the amount of updates available.
To update, go to:
- Dashboard > Updates
- There are sections for core, plugins, and themes. Select everything that needs an update and click the “update” button. (You will need to update each type–plugins, themes, core–separately.)
- Refresh the page. If you successfully updated everything, the red circle + number will disappear. Before you update themes, there will be a warning message that customization will be lost. You can ignore that, as your site’s customization is safely stored elsewhere :)
If you work on your site regularly, keeping up with updates isn’t difficult. If you’re not on your site often, or would rather not deal with it,, let me know and we can decide if automatic updates works for you.
Backups:
Before you update, it’s recommended to backup your site. Read about the options I recommend for backups here.
If your site has backups with Vaultpress or Siteground your site is backed up once every day. You only need to back it up if you’ve made edits (or received forms or orders) within the last 24 hours. If so, you can log in to Vaultpress or Siteground, and backup now.
If your site is not backed up by your host or Vaultpress, it should be set to automatically backup once per week/month via a plugin called BackWPup. If you have recently updated the site’s information (pages, gallery, products, etc), then you should backup the site before updating. If not, it’s safe to update without backing up.
To backup your site,
- Go to BackWPup > Jobs
- There should be only one job listed. Hover over it, and click “Run now.”
To check how often your site is updated, check the “Next Run” and “Last Run” dates.
In this example, backups are daily.If you are using a different backup service, check how often it updates and follow the directions for backups with Vaultpress. If you don’t seem to have a backup service, please get in touch.