WordPress Best Practice: Essential Tips for Safe Updates

WordPress best practice involves keeping your website updated to ensure security, bug fixes, and improved performance. With every new WordPress (WP) release, updates provide enhanced features and better protection against vulnerabilities.

Despite this, many users hesitate to update their WordPress sites due to concerns about data loss. However, updates are designed to create a more stable and secure experience.

Before making any updates, the most crucial step is to back up your WordPress website. Always ensure you have a full backup to avoid losing data or dealing with unexpected errors.

Below are some WordPress best practices to help you update your site smoothly and prevent common errors.

WordPress Best Practices in Backing up your WP Website

One of the most important WordPress best practices is creating a backup before updating your site. You can back up your WP installation by accessing your server with an FTP-client and download the entire folder to your desktop. You could also trust your backups to premium backup plugins like BackupBuddyor WP-DBManager. Spending some money on a good backup is definitely worth more than going through the trouble of restoring your page in case of failed attempts.

There are also some web hosts who offer backup solutions for users. To make your life easier, you could checkfor backup solutions with your web hosts.

Avoid making an Upgrade on Live Install

It can be extremely taxing to recover a website after a failed update attempt. Especially when you start receiving complaints that your customers can’t access the site.

To avoid failed updates, always attempt new versions/updates on a remote copy of the site first. Create a ‘play space’ where updates can afford to fail without any immediate effect on your web traffic.

Use Child Themes and Plugins

Avoid making changes directly to themes or core files as they can be overwritten when updated. Be sure to use child themes and plugins.

Check compatibility for your Plugins

Certain plugins play an important part in the functionality or design of a web page. You have to ensure that your plugins are compatible with the new versions before updating your WordPress. You can do so by checking compatibility here.

Now that you know the best practices for updating your WP website, remember to be mindful and do all your backup before hand! These 4 guides arerelatively easy to follow, you will be surprised by how much it can boost your experience with WP. Here at Network Dynamics, backups solutions are available for clients, click here, to find out more.