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Tutorial: How to Upgrade Wordpress
By admin | November 25, 2009
Upgrading your Wordpress blog may seem like a daunting task. However, if you follow these simple steps, you should have no problems at all.
IMPORTANT! Always back up files before messing with technical stuff! NO exceptions. I cannot be held responsible for errors. YOU must back up files.
There are two ways to upgrade your Wordpress blog. One is through the admin section and one through ftp. It really all depends on what version is being used and what method you are most comfortable using.
Before you begin, make sure you back up everything. THEN read ALL directions carefully.
Upgrading Wordpress Through Admin
IMPORTANT! Always back up files before messing with technical stuff! NO exceptions. I cannot be held responsible for errors. YOU must back up files.
If an upgrade is needed, you should see a little notice at the top of your admin dashboard saying something like; WordPress 2.8.1 is available! Please update now. If you do, then do the following:
Step One: click on the link, “Please update now.”
Step Two: click on “upgrade automatically” button (if not there, you are using older Wordpress version and cannot use this method to upgrade, move onto ftp method).
Step Three: Enter information in the provided spaces.
- Host Name: this is your url. Example: www.designedbylara.com would be mine.
- Username: this is the username for your website’s cPanel, ftp or website back office. NOT your Wordpress log in.
- Password: this is the password for your website’s cPanel, ftp or website back office. NOT your Wordpress log in.
- Make sure ftp is checked
- Click “proceed”
Step Four: wait for upgrade to take place. It may take a few minute. Once complete, it will tel you it was successful…or…
Step Five: If you encountered a problem, do the ftp method instead.
Upgrading Wordpress through FTP
IMPORTANT! Always back up files before messing with technical stuff! NO exceptions. I cannot be held responsible for errors. YOU must back up files.
Step One: download latest version of wordpress through your admin or from main site wordpress.org to your computer.
Step Two: Unzip
Step Three: log into website through favorite ftp software (I use filezilla)
Step Four: on your website side of the ftp, go to where Wordpress files are located (example: yoururl.com/blog), delete the admin and includes folders ON THE BLOG SIDE OF FTP. Do NOT delete the content files.
Step Five: Now, on COMPUTER side of ftp NOT blog side, delete content folder. You are deleting the content folder from the NEW version of Wordpress. NOT what is already on your site. DO NOT touch that at all when doing upgrade. Period.
Step Six: transfer admin and includes folders AND all other files FROM computer side of ftp TO blog side. DO NOT transfer content folder. That should have already been deleted in step 5.
Step Seven: when transfer is complete, log into your wordpress admin.
Step Eight: if it tells you to upgrade database, click “upgrade now.” If it does not, you are good to go.
If you still do not feel comfortable upgrading Wordpress on your own, contact me, and I can do it for a nominal fee.
Topics: Tutorials | 5 Comments »
July 16th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Thanks for great tutorial. I’ll bookmark it!
July 17th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
Thanks for spelling this out so clearly. For me, I found I had to move ALL the files & docs, not just admin and includes. (I took a tip from someone in the WP forums and removed the content folder on the computer end so there wouldn’t be any chance of that moving over!)
Also I messed up because I was using the same upgrade download I had used for another blog, and the wp-config file, which I had rewritten, moved over, and redirected for a while. All okay now!
July 29th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Thank you for posting this tutorial. The directions were awesome and worked perfectly! Very easy to follow.
September 6th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
You are an angel! I would not have been able to upgrade without this gem of a post. Thank you so much!
September 20th, 2009 at 4:54 am
I manage 6 WordPress blogs, some on subdirectories. I’ve been undating WordPress manually since 2.5 or so. Your instructions are by far the easiest to follow. I used them today to go from WP2.7 to WP 2.8.4
Only ran into 1 glitch and that was with one blog that lives in a subdirectory but access is with domain URL. The maintenance page I had activated was okay, but I couldn’t login. Kept getting site does not exist. But I was able to bypass that by manually typing in the complete URL to the wp-login.php Everything was fine from then on. Thanks!