Best Practices for Safe WordPress Updates on Big Revenue-Critical Websites

In my WordPress developer career, I’ve been asked many times about the best practices for safely updating WordPress core, plugins, and themes, especially when it comes to a site that can’t afford to have any downtime.

There are several update strategies to consider.  I’ll go over them here.  It’s really all up to the client’s risk tolerance vs. their willingness to pay for extra maintenance work.

But, with my WordPress update strategies, you should be able to perform updates the safe way without too much extra effort.

Could updating WordPress break my site?

Yes, it could.  But, it should be unlikely to break your site if you don’t have too many plugins or custom code.

Updating plugins could introduce a bug that a plugin developer pushed without properly testing first.  You are completely subject to the quality of the plugin developer, here.

If a bug happens, you can revert (which I’ll talk about below), but you do risk having downtime on the production site which might be costly if you are running a critical revenue-generating website.

So, you need a process to perform WordPress updates safely!  I’ll show you how.

Do I need to update WordPress?

Yes, for the love of God, yes!  You need to keep your WordPress up to date.

Many “production-critical” websites choose to delay updates for as long as possible out of fear that an update will break the website, resulting in loss of revenue.

What’s the long-term risk of not doing regular WordPress updates?  Not patching a known security vulnerability quickly enough could result in a hacker taking advantage of the exploit to compromise (hack) your website and web server.

Since WordPress is so popular, any published security updates are going to have vulnerabilities that are attempted against websites that are out of date.

If you can’t afford downtime from a bad plugin update, then you certainly can’t afford to get hacked!

What’s a good frequency for doing WordPress updates?

The more frequent, the better, but let’s be honest, doing daily updates is not feasible for most people.

When I was working for an agency, we did regular monthly updates for our mission-critical clients.

What’s the best WordPress update strategy?

I’ll give you two.  You either can do them on the production server with a testing process and rollback strategy in place, or you can do it off-site, test it, and then push it live.

Getting the production site versioned on a git repository is a huge help with both of these processes.  If you don’t already, you should consider getting your production site on git.

1) Live Updates with Testing and Rollback Strategy

This strategy is ok if you have a smaller website that gets less traffic, or has less plugins, or you just like living life on the edge!  Or, this strategy lends itself to being a lot more efficient for agencies that might have a lot of websites and want to use a central WordPress management system like ManageWP to take care of all WordPress updates from one place.

With this strategy, before you do any updates, use a backup plugin like Updraft Backups to do a database backup.  After the database backup is complete do a git commit using the Revisr plugin or the following command lines on the server…

git add .
git commit -m "Live changes before plugin updates"
git push

Then you have a commit in git storing a snapshot of all the files at that point along with a backup of the database in case that gets messed up for some reason.

Then do the updates on live.

After doing updates, test the site.  If there are issues that can’t be quickly resolved, you can rollback the files by running in the command lines…

git reset --hard HEAD

… or if that command gives any trouble for some reason, you can do the same thing with…

git checkout .

What about the database?

Usually rolling back files is all you need.  In only very rare cases, a plugin might affect the database after being updated, but normally, they require you to click a button to upgrade the database after a plugin update.

Typically, you won’t need to restore the database from the backup.  Rolling back the files should be enough to get the site back to how it was before the update.

2) Off-site Updates with Testing and Push

This method requires that you have another server (or perhaps a developer’s local environment) which has the site cloned from git with a semi-fresh database restored from the live backup.

git add .
git commit -m "Plugin updates tested off-site"
git push

git pull

How do I stop WordPress from auto-updating?

If you plan to adopt an update strategy like this, you might want to consider disabling automatic WordPress updates.

To disable automatic WordPress core updates, put this in your wp-config.php  file:

define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', false );

To disable automatic WordPress plugin updates, put this in your theme’s functions.php  file:

add_filter( 'auto_update_plugin', '__return_false' );

To disable automatic WordPress theme updates, put this in your theme’s functions.php  file:

add_filter( 'auto_update_theme', '__return_false' );

Using the WP Rollback plugin

If you didn’t have one of these WordPress update strategies in place, you might be reading this because you already updated something that broke your site.

There is another option for you.  Use the WP Rollback plugin. It lets you select any plugin to rollback and lets you pick which version you want to roll it back to.

Comments or Questions?

Thanks for reading this.  I hope it was very helpful for you.

You might have a lot of questions because I probably breezed right by some things which really should be their own blog posts.  Let me know what questions you have, and I would be happy to answer them or write new posts to answer them.

Thanks!

Nathan Kinkead

Blogger, expert WordPress developer, and developer of the awesome bbPress Voting plugin which is a must-have plugin for any bbPress forum.

Download bbPress Voting for free on the WordPress Plugin Directory.