One of the remarkable things about having a WordPress website is the fact that WordPress is continuously being updated. And along with that, themes and plugins are also frequently being updated. Some of these updates are bug fixes. Some are cosmetic. Some are security fixes.
You should keep a constant eye on your dashboard for announced update opportunities so that your website can look its best, operate more efficiently, and be protected from the predators of the web world. And when these notices occur, you should perform the update.
But, not so fast. Somethings updates are made that will cause problems for your website. You must be careful and not blindly install and update without taking precautions.
Protect your website
One of those precautions is a backup. After you have made a complete backup of your website and make the existing updates, if something goes wrong, you will have a fallback. You can reinstall the website from the backup and return to your last known good installation.
There are many ways to make a backup of your WordPress website. We use a free plugin called WPClone which you can download from WordPress. Go to your dashboard, choose plugins, add new, and in the search box enter “wpclone”, choose “WP Clone by WP Academy” and install it.
WPClone allows you to make a backup of your complete website. It creates a file that can be imported into any website that has WordPress installed and replace the contents of the new site with the contents of the old site. It’s as simple as that.
So, if you install an update that messes up your existing website, you can access the wpclone created backup file and be back to where you were the instant before you chose to perform an update.
Update Precautions
After making the backup, install only one update at a time, and then check your website as thoroughly as possible to see that it works as expected. If not, try to find and fix the problem before proceeding with the next update.
