Updating & Managing your website
In this class you’ll learn how you can safely keep your website up to date.
If you have not updated your website for a long time, please take note of the following:
In December 2018, there was a big WordPress update, WordPress moved to page builder technology for its editor. As a result, Divi had to change along. If you update WordPress and Divi after December 2018, you will see a few things have changed in the way things work, and as a result we have also made changes to our e-course, and the way we set up our packs for our clients.
The e-course has been re-created to reflect the new way of working, and for your website to work and look the same as we present in this course, you need to make a few quick settings after updating WordPress and Divi. Go to the Welcome page of this classroom, and at the top you’ll find a toggle where we explain how to make these settings.
Updating your website
When you’re running a WordPress website, from time to time you see a little update notification like this: 
This tells you an update is ready to install on your site. But what do you do with these notifications? Well, it’s good practise to keep everything on your WordPress website up to date. But it’s even better to have an update strategy. And it’s easy to have an update strategy in place. Watch the video below and read on to learn more…
Why update at all?
‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, my grandfather used to say. But that was before all the wonderful new publishing technology we have today. WordPress is an open source project that’s being improved all the time. Lots of people work on it and that’s one of the reasons it’s so great. If you go back only a few years, WordPress looked and worked differently in many ways. By updating each time, you continue to have the best possible WordPress experience. Also, because so many people use WordPress, in all kinds of different ways, the software is really being tested to its limits all the time. And that means that every now and then, someone discovers something that doesn’t work as it should. Developers call that a bug, and these usually get fixed quite quickly and published in the next update. So by keeping your site up to date, those bugs won’t trouble you. Finally, occasionally someone discovers a security hole: a way for a potential attacker to gain access to a WordPress site. These issues always get fixed with priority and by keeping your website up to date, you know any security holes are always patched. So… updating is a great idea. But there is a small catch.
Can updates go wrong?
Very occasionally an update can break something and cause your site (or a small part of it) to look weird or start behaving strangely. This used to happen more often with older versions of WordPress. Today it’s rare, but still something to be aware of.
We’ve done many, many updates in WordPress and from those we’ve learned how to best handle them. Below is an update strategy we recommend you follow for keeping your website up-to-date.
Recommended update strategy
- Update once a month – pick a fixed day of the month, for example always the last day or first day, whatever works for you. By doing updates once a month, you strike a balance between keeping up to date and allowing any bugs to get discovered already.
- Optionally, before you update, you can make a manual backup of your entire site. See the section below on backing up.
- Then do the actual updates. See the section below on updating.
- Finally, and importantly, check you site. First in the backend: see if there are any settings that require your attention; sometimes there are new or adjusted features that you’ll be notified about. And then check the frontend of your site. Open your homepage, see if everything looks normal and then go through a few pages. Try any contact forms on your site to make sure they work.
- Normally everything is fine, but should anything not work as you expect, let us know so we can explore what the problem is and how we can help you.
Taking a backup of your site
If we’ve setup your site for you, you’ll find the backups under ‘plugins > updraftplus’ and then the ‘settings’ link.
When you’re there, on the ‘current status’ tab click the backup now button.
In the next screen make sure all boxes are ticked and press backup now.
Depending on the size of your site the backup can take from a few minutes to maybe twenty minutes. Best to go do something else and check after a little while. When the backup is complete you’ll see this message:
Note: the sites we setup have automatic backups enabled. Your database (with all your content) gets backed up every day and your files once a week (because those tend to change less often). It’s totally fine to rely on these automatic backups if you haven’t recently done lots of work on your site. But if you have just done lots of work and uploaded lots of images, we recommend an additional manual backup just to be sure.
Doing the actual updates
OK, so you’re ready to do your site’s updates. The next step is to click the update button at the top
In the next screen, if there is a WordPress update, do that first by clicking the ‘Update Now’ button
When that completes you’re automatically taken to the dashboard where you can read about any new features. Click the update button in the top-bar again and do your plugins next.
Select the plugins you’d like to update – you can tick ‘select all’ and then click the ‘update plugins’ button. Depending on the amount of plugins you have, updating will take one or two minutes.
Sometimes there are updates for themes on your website also. The process for these is the same. Select all the themes that require and update and press the ‘Update Themes’ button.
Note about customizations
There’s a note about customizations to theme files that get lost during updates and to use a child theme for those. You can ignore this message. It has nothing to do with any customizations you may have made to your website through the theme customizer; those are unaffected. Instead the message is about changes to the code in the files that make up your website’s theme. As a WordPress user you don’t normally directly edit those files – that’s something a web-designer would do for you. If we’ve setup your website for you, then your site already runs on a child-theme anyway, so you can safely ignore this message.
Non-English sites
If your website runs a language other than English, your site’s translation files may get updated automatically with any other updates you do. This happens automatically and you’ll get a notification if it happens. You don’t have to do anything else about this.
Maintenance mode
While you’re updating your site goes into maintenance mode. This means that anyone visiting your site at that time will see a message that your site is briefly unavailable for maintenance and to check back after a few minutes. This is usually fine, but if you’re expecting traffic to your site because you’ve just sent out a newsletter, it’s probably better to wait with your updates for a bit.
That’s it – you’ve updated your site!
If anything is unclear …
If at any point you have any questions, please get in touch – we’ll be happy to help.
What if something goes wrong?
First of all, don’t worry. A broken site is not like a cup you’ve dropped and is now in 100 pieces beyond repair. A website is a digital thing and it’s always possible to fix it – even without seeing any cracks afterwards ; )
Most likely it’s possible to do in reverse what happened to break things in the first place. Otherwise, there may be a known issue with a quick fix. In the worst case scenario, there’s always the option to restore a backup.
The best thing to do is to take a breath and write down what happened as well as you can remember, including any details that you feel are relevant. Then get in touch with us and we can explore what is needed to fix your site!
Updating Divi
Divi regularly introduce some very exciting new features when they update their theme. To make sure you can use the new options, you’ll need to update Divi to the latest version. To check what version of Divi you are running, go to Appearance > Themes in your Dashboard and click on Divi Theme. You can find your version in the top right. If you run an older version, you can click update (for updating plugins please first read the full Class on updating above, but it’s fine to just update your Divi theme without going through the updating class):
Once you have clicked “update now” Divi has been updated and the new features will become available through your Dawn Child Theme, that you see on the left, that is your active theme. So you should not activate the Divi theme after updating, just updating is enough. See active Child Theme and updated Divi theme below:
