How often to update plugins?

  • vidhya1113

    (@vidhya1113)


    3 years, 11 months ago

    Hello,

    I am relatively new to WordPress and I would like to understand best practices in updating plugins.

    I frequently get in my WordPress dashboard updates available on some of the other plugins. I always do manual updates in staging site, do some testing and if all’s fine I’ll do it on the main site. But frequently doing this takes time and I am wondering if you can suggest on how to intelligently handle this. Most plugin updates are minor version changes only.

    Also, at present I see in my WordPress dashboard, WordPress 6.0 is available for update. Is this a major version change? What cautions do I need to take before doing this update?

    Thank you for your time.
    Vidhya

    • This topic was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by Jan Dembowski.
Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Moderator t-p

    (@t-p)

    3 years, 11 months ago

    I would like to understand best practices in updating plugins.

    Plugin/theme/WP should be kept up to date.

    WordPress 6.0 is available for update. Is this a major version change? What cautions do I need to take before doing this update?

    Yes WP 6.0 is a major update.

    BACKUP: Always backup everything (including your database) before doing any actions, just in case something really goes wrong. You can never have enough backups! See https://wordpress.org/support/article/wordpress-backups/

    Thread Starter vidhya1113

    (@vidhya1113)

    3 years, 11 months ago

    Hello,

    Thank you for your response. I am using WordPress for LMS website and I am using tutor LMS pro. Since my site is live, while I take backup and run the WordPress 6.0 updates and testing on my staging site, users could be already using the live site and transactional updates could be there in the database (when user registers, enroll course etc.). Hence I wont be able to simply revert to my back-up version.
    Now, can you share any guidance to sync this, I am only doing manual comparison of the DB which is a huge task and highly risky.

    Thanks,
    Vidhya

    barnez

    (@pidengmor)

    3 years, 11 months ago

    My thoughts on updates:

    1. For plugins and themes, check the changelog to see if there are any security elements in the update. If so, this suggests a more urgent approach. If not, then wait a few days, or even weeks, and monitor the WordPress.org support forum for that plugin or theme. If there are conflicts, then you will usually see these, and can determine a) how widespread they are, and b) whether the issues are relevant to your setup.

    2. For WordPress core, set to automatically update for minor and security updates (e.g. 5.9 -> 5.9.1). For major updates (e.g. 5.9.x -> 6.0), I usually wait a week or two and keep an eye on the support requests on this support forum before deciding to update.

    Other than that, using a staging site (as you do) is excellent practice, as well as ensuring that only essential plugins/themes are installed, and that the developers have a history of pushing well-tested/coded updates.

    Thread Starter vidhya1113

    (@vidhya1113)

    3 years, 11 months ago

    Thank you so much for such a nice explanation. This really helps.

    Thanks,
    Vidhya

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