In this video you'll learn about WordPress updates to the core files and why it's important to keep
your site updated to the latest version.
There are two levels of Wordpress core updates major feature releases and minor and security updates.
Both types of updates can be made to be completely automated or initiated by the administrator and they
can even be automated by the hosting company.
By the end of this lesson you'll have an understanding of how each type of update is referenced and
how in some cases it's best to have WordPress automatically update itself as is the current builtin
functionality.
Let's start by just taking a look at what the Wordpress Codex says about updating WordPress.
I'm at Wordpress dot org and I just did a search up here at the right for updating WordPress.
There's a page called updating Wordpress and it has a little bit of detail that you can read about even
how to manually update Wordpress which these days isn't usually necessary.
The main paragraph that we'll look at right here is the fact that automatic background updates are now
in wordpress built in.
Starting at versioned 3.7 you don't have to apply minor and security updates and they are set to actually
automatically apply in the background.
It's definitely a best practice to leave this set as is.
So that WordPress will automatically apply minor and especially security updates.
Now these are referred to with a third decimal place within the version numbers.
So we have 3.7 comes out at a certain time 3.7 point one will be a security update that can be automatically
activated just in the background as soon as Wordpress issues it.
This is important because when they issue a security update they may have found a security hole and
they want to patch that immediately so that the risk of your site being hacked or compromised is minimized.
The next kind of update is called a major feature release and that would be to a new feature version
inside of the version that's currently active.
So right now we're in version 4 of wordpress.
We just upgraded from version four point five point three to four point six.
And now 4.6 was a major feature release.
It was put out to add a lot of different features to WordPress and it's not necessarily a security update.
So these major feature releases do not automatically update but you can use one click instead of the
updating area inside of the Wordpress dashboard to update your version.
On the other hand some hosting companies provide automatic updates of the major feature release versions
of Wordpress both site ground and flywheel offer this service.
In fact flywheel has an upgrade schedule that's about two to three weeks beyond when the new version
of Wordpress is released.
They do this for a reason and that's just in case there are any errors or security issues that immediately
get released.
All the sites on flywheel are as secure as they possibly can be.
So now in one of my sites wild food girl dotcom in my flywheel account is out of date.
It's got the previous latest version four point 5.3 but the version 4.6 was the newest version released
a couple of weeks ago.
Now you can see down here in their message they're going to be automatically upgrading sites starting
Friday September 2nd and that's about a week from now.
But if I wanted to manually upgrade to 4.6 through my flywheel dashboard I could just click this button
right here inside the see panel site ground.
If you scroll down towards the bottom they have their special software and services section where they
have a special W.P. auto update feature right here.
I just clicked it and it's loading the sites that I have and enabled it this domain and I can choose
whether I want those to be automatically upgraded along with plug ins or if I don't want this activated
at all.
I could disable auto update right here if I want to now you probably have an old version of a WordPress
site that we built earlier in this course and hopefully you could log into your Wordpress dashboard
and see that older version and be able to make some updates.
I've got our fire weed photography site open inside of my local development environment.
So I do have map running like this.
And if I open that WordPress dashboard I can see this little nag at the top says WordPress.
4.6 is available please update now.
And there's a link there.
Also inside of the dashboard area the at a glance which it says what version I'm running of Wordpress
as well as what theme I'm running.
So right now pause the video and find an older version of one of the sites that we've created together
in this course and open up the Wordpress dashboard.
Whether it's in your local development environment using map or another service or whether it's on one
of your live hosting dashboards go ahead and log in to that WordPress dashboard and see what your status
is.
Once you have your Wordpress dashboard open there are a few places to check out to see information about
your Wordpress version and what updates are available including themes and plug ins.
First on the dashboard admin bar at the top there's a little recycle or circular icon at the top that
tells you how many updates are available.
And this links through to this Updates page right here within the Wordpress dashboard.
Also you can see under plug ins there's a little indicator that tells me I have 10 plug ins that are
ready for an update and we'll be doing that in a future video.
For now let's take a look at the updates page in the Wordpress dashboard and that'll give you a message
at the top about the word press corps files and what version is currently available.
Now I could just click Update now right now and update that WordPress version internally within my local
site.
But the first thing you want to do and this is important.
You want to back up your database and files.
It's always a recommended best practice before updating any WordPress versions plugins or themes that
you back up the data and backup the files inside of your Wordpress installation in case if something
were to go wrong you could revert back to your backup files.
It rarely happens these days I haven't had an error in backing up plug ins themes or the word press
corps in quite a long time a number of years but it's always a best practice to keep a current backup
on file.
What I've done inside my local host and I'll ask you to do is to create a full backup that's dated today
so that you can always restore that backup in the case that this update goes wrong.
The way I did that was I activated the all in one W.P. migration plugin and I clicked export and I saved
my export file on my desktop under my live site folder and I created a folder called backups.
And here you can see the file name of my double you press backup file has the date and that's today's
date and the name of the site right here.
So back on the site now that I have my whole site backed up including files and the entire database
and installation I can click update.
Now go ahead and follow along and do that on your own site.
OK great.
I'm greeted with a welcome screen that states the version of Wordpress I'm using.
There's always a welcome video and there's some notes about what's been added in these major feature
updates.
I hope that worked well for you if you are in your local environment.
As I was.
It took a few minutes probably about three or four minutes to update to this version.
I find that when I'm on a live server like at flywheel or at say ground the updates that I do from the
Wordpress dashboard are much quicker.
Of course my server is connected to the Internet probably in a faster way than I am at home.
One more thing to note.
You may get a notification that a database update is required if you get a white screen inside the Wordpress
dashboard and it gives you a blue button that says update database.
Now it's a good idea to do that as soon as possible and you should just hit that blue button and update
the database right away.
In this lesson you learned about the different types of updating that the word press corps files and
database require to keep up with security threats and future releases.
I hope you were able to find an older version of Wordpress from our previous lessons and log in to update
through the dashboard.
If not I'm sure you'll have a chance to update WordPress soon as they usually release three to four
major feature updates every year in the next video you'll learn about plug in and theme updates.
These are a little bit different in that themes and plug ins are for the most part provided by third
party developers and not from WordPress directly.
This means that updated versions should be tested to make sure they were correctly either before or
after the update.
Let's get to it.