Q&A Information About Website Updates
WordPress and WordPress themes are updated frequently to improve:
- Security
- Functionality
- Site performance including SEO
How can I tell if my website needs updating?
A site health report will identify what needs updating.
Where can I find a WordPress Site Health Report?
Dashboard > Tools > Site Health
Red circles with a white number inside also indicate an update needs to be done.
What needs updating?
Any of the following types of WordPress updates can crash a site:
- WordPress Plugins
- WordPress
- WordPress themes
- PHP update need access to your web hosting control panel of which cPanel is a popular brand control panel manager.
What is the risk of site updating?
There is a chance, albeit a small chance of crashing your website when doing a WordPress site update, however, that would be a disaster.
What is the first thing to try after crashing a website?
If your web hosting service provider has cPanel Acronis take automatic backup every few hours. If you have cPanel logins click Acronis > select a time and date > click restore. If that does not work go back further in time. If that does not work use a site backup that you or your web designer or IT support has downloaded to their hard drive of cloud storage. It’s the essential reason why clarity on who has cPanel logins and who of the people with cPanel login will be doing regular, at least monthly site backups.
How to prepare for disaster recovery?
Before doing a site backup you should have an up-to-date site backup of at least your database. If you don’t have a site backup, someone reliable that you can contact quickly should have an up-to-date site backup. Some website owners don’t like to give confidential access to web hosting (eg cPanel). Still, when a site crashes it means the person (eg SEO) who crashed the site has to contact the site owner to say the site crashed and needs disaster recovery. The site owner then thinks poorly of the contractor for crashing the site and gets annoyed because they might have to ask their web designer or IT support to do disaster recovery.) If the web designer or IT support person has not been doing monthly backups then only an old version of the site might be recovered, meaning much web development and or SEO work will be lost.
Who does monthly WordPress site backups?
I can do all of the WordPress updates described above but that takes time, not only doing the updates but importantly doing an up-to-date site backup before updating. If I believe someone (web designer or IT support) has a backup, I’ll update plugins, except plugins that I don’t have a license for, but I will not risk doing a PHP or WordPress update without access to cPanel. Complex websites with a lot of plugins
- slow page load speed
- run a greater risk of an update crashing the site
- have a greater security risk
- take longer to update.
After my recommendation of Sam, most of my SEO clients take on Sam’s web support service. Monthly site updating in Perth is one of the many worthwhile web tech support services that Sam does. If you’re not going to take on Sam’s outsource web support services then you must either give me your confidential cPanel (or Plesk) login information or confirm the name, phone number and email address of the person who is RELIABLY doing WordPress website backups. If not I don’t want to do your SEO. I don’t want a bad Google Review for crashing your site while updating your site.