How To Upgrade To The Latest Version of WordPress
As more and more people are using WordPress many people have asked me how do I upgrade WordPress? While there are many different ways to go about updating your WordPress blog, in this article I am going to show you what I do to implement a WordPress upgrade. Please keep in mind, that what I do is strictly up to you. I am more or less just showing you how I do it.
Keep in mind that I run a ton of blogs and the method in which I use to upgrade WordPress takes me literally less than five minutes per blog. Many host providers are different than others, but all have one thing in common and it just so happens that my method for upgrading WordPress should work on practically any web host. Here is how I do it.
Backup Your Blog
While this is optional, I strongly recommend it. Your content is valuable, I consider my content to be priceless. I take many extra measures towards preserving my content. Back up your data, I am not going to do into details here on this article about how to back up data, I may cover an article about that in the near future. When I do, I will provide a direct link to it in this paragraph. The remainder of this article is written that will guide you towards upgrading WordPress assuming that you have made a backup.
Download and Extract WordPress To Your Computer
First step is easy. Simply visit www.wordpress.org and download the most current version. I always choose the zip file option. After you download the zip file to your computer, simply located it and unzip it. doing so will give you one folder called: wordpress. if you open that folder you will see the following three folders and a bunch of files: wp-admin, wp-content and wp-includes.
Open Up An FTP Client
The next step is to use an FTP client to upload the latest edition. If you don’t have an FTP client program I would suggest using FileZilla. If you don’t know how to use an FTP client, you really should learn the basics first. In due time I will try to invest some time into covering this topic. In the mean time, I would suggest reading this page on what an FTP client is.
Assuming that you’re ready to go here and have an FTP client and also know how to it, simply open up your FTP client and log into your web host account. Navigate your FTP client int your public_html directory. Then from your computer side navigate that pane to the location of your updated copy of WordPress. Here is a screen shot:
Right click anywhere on the left side of the window (your computer side) and select all. Next step would be to hold the CTRL button down and click on wp-content to deactivate it while leaving everything else activated in blue highlighted text. Here is a screen shot:
From there simply drag and drop the TWO FOLDERS plus all of the FILES below the two folders. You don’t need to transfer the wp-content folder because this folder does not contain any of the WordPress data files. One thing to consider though is that you might want to check with the designer of your WordPress theme to see if it’s up to speed with the latest WordPress version.
After you Drag and Drop the two folders and all the files below the two folders, simply overwrite the existing two folders and files on your server. See screen shot below:
After you successfully overwrite the two folders and all the files, visit your WordPress admin dashboard by visiting: YourName.com/wp-admin/ when you do that you’ll be presented with a page informing you of a database upgrade required. Go ahead and click Upgrade WordPress Here is a screen shot:
After you click Upgrade WordPress the next page will load after a few moments and then you will see that the upgrade was successful. After than you’re WordPress blog has been updated to the latest version. Here is a screen shot:
You’re all set. This is all that is required to upgrade WordPress. If you should, however, run into problems, I would suggest visiting the following page for support:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress
Why Does WordPress Offer Updates?
The main reason WordPress offers newer versions is because they actively work towards making WordPress more safe and secure. Another reason why WordPress provide updates is to add new features to their software. A lot of the times when new features are added to WordPress theme designers have to go back and revise their WordPress themes to take advantage of these newer coding features.
Is My Current WordPress Theme Compatible?
Some times, if your current WordPress theme is really old, you may experience errors. Before you upgrade you may want to check with your current WordPress theme designer to see if their theme is compatible with the latest version of WordPress. If it is NOT, then you should inquire when the designer will be updating. If they have no plans to update, then you need to look for another theme as it is more important to run the latest version of WordPress rather than sacrifice your security for the sake of a WordPress theme designer failing to do their job in updating their product.
Wait Don’t Leave! I Have Questions…
Not to worry, I will provide support as best as I can here on this article. If you have questions regarding upgrading your WordPress blog, use the comment form below and I will try my best to answer. Also you may find that other readers may pitch in and provide some feedback for you as well.
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12 comments
I think I’ve read before somewhere on your blog (a recent post if I remember correctly) that you use your SEOAdMax theme for a lot of your blogs.
Have you ever thought about using the multiple user version of WordPress? That way you can just update the core files and all of your sites would be automatically updated?
Or did I read incorrectly about the uses of WordPress MU? Or does it not really apply to you the way you have your blogs setup?
I tried WordPress MU and didn’t have much luck with it. Do you use it? I would love to learn more about it and become a better operator of the software. It isn’t as widely supported or accepted as the regular distribution of WordPress. I’ll admit from what I did experiment with, I did have fun with it and could totally see its potential. Do you think that this is something I should invest more time in looking into? I am all about being more efficient with updating my blogs as it is indeed very time consuming.
Nah, I don’t use it personally…only have one blog so far….but I was just reading about it a few days ago.
After reading this post it just sounded like the perfect solution to your situation. If I was you and running over 100 sites, and if there was someway to instantly update the core files for all of those sites, I would definitely be learning/using the software. Even though you say it only takes about 5 minutes to do each site currently, this would shave off a lot of time obviously.
What exactly did you mean by you not having much luck with it? Is there something that it wasn’t providing? I was reading a bit about it tonight and it sounds like if you know anything about using WordPress, you shouldn’t have too much trouble figuring out how to use the MU version.
I think rather then extracting the zip file on our local disk, it would be better if we extracting it on our web host directly.
well, at least i have been doing that so far. and it works well for me. all i need is just remove the wp-content folder first form the zip file, and then upload it to my server, and extract it there.
that way, people who have slow connection like me can upload it easier and faster. uploading so many files at once via ftp client softwares is so hard and often failed. yea our internet connection is not really good here in south east asia.
I was having trouble with getting domain names assigned to each account. I didn’t have any trouble doing subdomain.mydomain.com, but I wasn’t able to get it configured to do independent mydomain1.com, mydomain2.com, etc…
You’re right though, WordPress MU would be a hell of a lot easier if it could do what we’re talking about. You very well may be my life saver… or at least time saver. Thanks so much for bringing this to my attention.
Also, it was about a year ago since I last looked at WordPress MU and my skills have increased a ton since then.
Good idea Jacky! That is definitely a great option for people to consider. I am sure the folks that have a low speed connection will consider doing that now that you have added that part in. I appreciate it. Excellent idea.
Ah, well let us know if it works out for ya!
Will do. I could be a few weeks before I have time to investigate it though. But sounds like it could be a great option.
Hi Garry! I came from Bobby’s. You are such an expert & a wonderful friend indeed!
How do i back-up my blog? I am using blogger.
Jean Chia
Hi Garry, thanks for this post, it explains it all in full detail unlike most of the other explanations I’ve seen. I explained to jean how to back up her blogspot blog in the comment above this one…haha (hey, I know how to do that!). I’m stumbling this:)
Hi Garry. Anybody here using WP 2.5 yet? I haven’t bothered after hearing about the bug reports.
I know this is a shameless plug so please forgive me but I’ve written posts about backing a Blogger blog if Jean Chia is interested.
Cheers!
[...] I have – chances are, so are each and everyone of you on a deeper level. Now for this weeks links: How To Upgrade To The Latest Version of WordPress – from Garry Conn. There are lots of sites that can show you how to upgrade your self-hosted [...]
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