Safely Update WordPress Plugins

Hi, this is Alisha from https://alishamcfarland.com.

In this video, I'm going to show you how you can safely update your plugins. When you're logged in to your WordPress website. You will sometimes see this little circle next to the word Plugins that has a number in it. That means that there are updates that need to be done within your plugins. There's a two-step process that I recommend. The first being backing up the website and the second updating the plugins. It seems pretty simple, it is. It just takes a few minutes.

The first step is to go to All In One WP Migration. If you don't have it installed, I highly recommend it. It will save your ass many times. Click on “Export, Export to File” or if you want to link some of your cloud storage like Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, or Onedrive. I highly recommend doing that. If you want to just choose File, it's going to prompt you. You can save it to one of those anyway. If you've got it set up on your computer that way. You're going to click on “Export” wherever you choose to store it. It's going to give you an update as it goes through the process of finding and archiving, all of the files necessary to recreate this website if necessary. It's a complete backup that it's making for you. Pending on the complexity and size of your website. The file may take shorter or longer to create. This one is completed. You can tell by the pulsing green box telling you to download. You're going to click on that “Download”. Save it to wherever you'd like. Again make sure that it's somewhere on the cloud, so you don't have any troubles if your hard drive crashes. Click “Close”. Now the first step is done and you have a back-up plan if you need to revert back to the website as it is now. Once you start updating the plugins.

The second step is, going to your list of plugins and looking at which ones need to be updated. In this case, Wordfence, Pay Like for Stripe, and Yoast SEO. Wordfence and Yoast SEO are probably pretty big. Pay Like for Stripe is going to be important because obviously, you want to keep the money flowing. What I recommend doing is just going from the top to the bottom and clicking on this “Update Now” link. Waiting for it to do its thing. Again, some of these updates are going to take longer than others, just be patient. Wait for it to say, yay it's updated. Then I always go out to the website just to make sure that it all looks good. Wordfence is a security plugin. There's not too much you could specifically check. If something goes wonky, it should be fairly obvious from the get-go. This looks fine. Let's go back to the plugins and update those other two. When you go here, you should just see two. I'm going to click “Update Now”, wait for it to do its thing. Very quick and simple, “Update Now”, Yoast usually takes a little bit longer. But, that was really fast. Let's go back to the site. Just make sure that everything is fine. and if you have updated certain plugins. Like a forum plug-in or something. Look specifically at those features within the website to make sure that they still look okay. This all seems to be fine and now you are done. In the process of safely updating your plugins, you've also created a backup that you can use at any time. I highly recommend back up. Back it up anytime you make major changes or periodically depending on how often you change your website.

I hope that was helpful. if you'd like to come on over to https://alishamcfarland.com. I'd love to see you there and sign up for my weekly emails. Thanks so much!