Updating WordPress, Themes & Plugins

Today I'm going to be talking about upgrading inside of WordPress - not just upgrading WordPress, but your themes and plugins too. It's important to keep everything up to date for a couple reasons. Security is the biggest reason, hackers are always out there coming up with new ways to ruin everyone's hard work, but luckily, the WordPress developer team is always coming up with ways to thwart these attempts. If you don't update your WordPress installation, you're putting your website at risk.

It's the same idea for themes and plugins - they're updated for a reason, and shouldn't be ignored. So now that we know how important it is to upgrade, how do we do it?

Quick links

Upgrading WordPress
Upgrading WordPress Plugins
Upgrading WordPress Themes - the easy way

Upgrading WordPress

The WordPress guys give everyone a little notice at the top of their Dashboard when there's a new version of WordPress available for download. This is what you'll see:

Once you click that link, you'll be taken to this page:

This is WordPress' Upgrading section - not only can you upgrade WordPress, but you can update your plugins also. To find this page without the special notice box - you need to look for the "Upgrade" link in the sidebar.

In versions of WordPress prior to 3.0 - it's located under Tools, and is labeled "Upgrade". In WordPress 3.0, it's located under the "Dashboard" button, labeled as "Updates". The "Dashboard" button is the very first button on your left.

Okay, now to upgrade WordPress - see that button that says "Upgrade Automatically"? Click it and let WordPress do it's thing - do not close your browser or navigate away from the page after you click the button - remember WordPress has to update hundreds of files, so it could take a minute or two. Once it's completed, this is what you'll see:

Pretty easy, right? Your WordPress installation is now up to date.

Upgrading WordPress Plugins

Plugins are updated much more often than WordPress itself, but they're just as easy to upgrade. WordPress will let you know a plugin needs upgrading by displaying a little number (depending on how many plugins needing upgrading) next to the "Plugins" button - here's a look at a website with one plugin that needs upgrading.

Here we can see the "Updates" link in WordPress 3 telling us there's something that needs upgrading, and we can see the "1" next to "Plugins" letting us know it's a plugin. You can choose to upgrade through either page. If you click the "Updates" link, you'll be taken to the page pictured above when you upgraded WordPress.

I'm going to upgrade through the "Plugins" page, as we haven't looked at it yet. Once I click "Plugins", this is what is shown:

This plugin author has displayed a notice under their plugin, asking you to upgrade to the newest version. Click "upgrade automatically", and let WordPress do it's thing.

When WordPress is done, it will give you some options - if the plugin is not already activated, it will give you the option to activate it, pictured below:

If the plugin was already activated, it will simply let you know it has successfully upgraded and re-activated.

Upgrading themes the easy way

Time for themes - theme updates are the least common, at least from my experience - but they do happen. Users of Freelancer Theme can expect upgrades, as I want it to continuously evolve. There is an easy way to do this - but it requires you install a plugin - and not the easy way! Don't worry, I'll walk you through it.

iThemes has developed a plugin that allows you to easily upgrade your WordPress themes, the only catch is - the plugin isn't in the WordPress plugin database yet. What's the big deal? Plugins that are in WordPress' plugin repository can be installed with one click, no kidding. Plugins that aren't included in the repository, need to be uploaded through WordPress.

I've written up detailed information on how to do this on this page.

Now that we have that plugin installed and activated, we can easily upgrade our theme! I'm going to upgrade my website to the latest version of Freelancer Theme. For those of you who use my Freelancer Theme, you'll receive an email letting you know when I release updates. When you receive this email, head over to FreelancerTheme.com, login and download your new copy.

Once you've extracted your updated theme files to your computer, head over to "Appearance >> Themes >> Install Themes >> Upload". It looks like this:

I've clicked "Browse" and selected my file that needs updating. For Freelancer Theme, you want to select the freelancer_framework.zip file. Once you select it, make sure you change the select box to say "Yes". This section of text and the select box are present because you installed the Easy Theme and Plugin Upgrades plugin above. Once your select box says "Yes", click Install Now.

This process will work for all themes - but of course is focused primarily on my Freelancer Theme.

Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you've learned something. Drop a comment below if you have any questions!