Do These before Upgrading WordPress

Posted on 04. Aug, 2009 by Isaac Yassar in WordPress

wordpress-upgradeWordPress is a super popular own-domain blogging platform and earlier today, the newest version WordPress 2.8.3 went public. It has an important security fix and some bug fixes. If you use WP for your blog, you better upgrade it soon.

WordPress offer you an automatic tool to upgrade your installation. You can access it from your WP dashboard. You can also upgrade it the manual way, if you are techie enough or having lots of spare time to kill. WP has provide a nice long documentation for its manual upgrade.

However, upgrade process does not always run smoothly. Therefore, you need to do some precautions, just in case something goes wrong. Here are some wise things to do before upgrading your WP installation:

1. Backing up

First, backup your SQL database, the core of your WP system. You can do this from your Backup / Restore Wizard in your hosting control panel. Database has more chance to go wrong in the process, making this backup the top priority. If bad things happen, you can easily restore your database from your hosting control panel using the same wizard.

Then backup your Home Directory / files, which contain all files in your website. The same wizard on your hosting C-Panel will help you for this.

Full backup, which contain all the files and database settings, is also a smart move. Though created from the same C-Panel wizard, it cannot be restored easily like those two above, except in emergencies. You can also use it to move your site to another hosting service, if necessary.

The launching of new version of WP is always a good time to backup things.

2. Deactivating all plugins

Deactivating all plugins gives your domain / website more temporary storage (like RAM / cache), which the upgrade process needs. If you don’t deactivate all your plugins and your temporary storage is not enough to run the upgrade process, fatal error message will say hi. Trust me, I’ve met them.

After the upgrade is finished successfully, you can reactivate your plugins back. And then go back to your daily blogging.

You can deactivate / activate plugins easily from your WP dashboard >> Plugins. Mark all your active plugins and bulk-deactivate / bulk-activate them in one click.

Happy go upgrading :-)

Tags: upgrade, WordPress

8 Responses to “Do These before Upgrading WordPress”

  1. djupi

    04. Aug, 2009

    You’re right Isaac, upgrading automatically from Wordpress tool is very risky. Only one or two that work successfully in my experience. I suggest use Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin if you still want to upgrade automatically. It supports database back up, and automatic plugin deactivation functions too, so you don’t need to login to your cpanel.

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  2. Jim Hardin

    04. Aug, 2009

    Isaac
    Thanks for the tips! I have been trying to upgrade, but couldn’t because it was giving me some kind of memory error. So I did what you said. I deactivated all plugins and it worked.

    Thanks

    Reply to this comment

  3. Team Nirvana

    06. Aug, 2009

    When I did the upgrade, I backed up the database, but forgot to turn off the plugins and man, the upgrade troubled me for a while.

    Only for a short while, of-course. After 5-6 minutes I got the blog back and now it continues without any glitch.

    Reply to this comment

    • Isaac Yassar

      07. Aug, 2009

      Some hosting provide bigger temporary storage / cache, they won’t likely to experience issues regarding active plugins when upgrading, I believe.

      Reply to this comment

  4. Tony

    19. Dec, 2009

    This is the first time backing up my database and files. I hope nothing goes wrong.

    Reply to this comment

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