Hi I am akshat
and today i will be talking about
something which which we as WordPress
users
would have done very very
so many times i’m going to be talking
about updating WordPress sites
i’m the founder of blog vault we are a
WordPress backup service
and i’ve been using WordPress for
over 10 years now
uh
you know we are all familiar with
seeing
this update counter whenever we log into
our WordPress admin
and it reminds me it reminds me of
this
you know this counter whenever we open
our phone it shows the unread messages
how much ever you try and address it
that number just keeps piling up
and yeah WordPress updates i bring a
very similar feeling
so why don’t we just click updates
click update and be like okay that’s
done it’s solved it’s not like going
through
hundreds of emails or messages this this
this is pretty simple right and
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i’ll tell you what if this is the only
thing you can do if you
have to do a if this is the only way you
can run the updates
i would suggest just go ahead and do it
something is better than nothing
but in case you want to really do this
well
and reduce the the chances of things
going wrong
then it’s good to have a plan
now you know there’s actually in this
plan
even before we get get started to do
anything
it’s there’s actually a step zero and
this step zero is where
it starts even before you actually see
an update notification it determines
whether you will get that update
notification
or not now
step zero depends on how you build your
site what plugins you use what themes
you use
and depending on depending on those
decisions
you will the number of updates you
see or whether your sites get any update
will be determined
so we all know that WordPress gets
updates you know the core WordPress
that gets updates regularly
it gets three major updates a year it
has been following that
cycle for such a that
cadence for a long time it gets
three major updates a bunch of minor
updates throughout the year
and we get notified around about those
updates
at regular intervals
but this is not true for the plugins and
themes that you
use now whether your plugin or theme
gets updates at all
the frequency of updates all of that is
dependent on how you go ahead
go about selecting that plugin or theme
do you download the plugin or so one of
the things that
determines this is whether where you
download the plugin or theme from if you
download it from a
good resource like if you download it
from the WordPress repository there’s a
higher chance of things
of you getting an update or if you
download it from a reputed
website there’s a good chance but if
you get it from
null you know people those websites
which
which distribute premium plugins for
free or low price
then there’s a high good chance that you
might end up with
plugin or update which never gets
updated
this is the second one is a slightly
controversial part
this is where
you know we record like we think you
should get a
popular plugin or add-on something
which is used by
tens of thousands or hundreds of
thousands and even millions of
users or WordPress sites now
the more popular
plugin or theme is the more likely
it is for it to receive an update and
there are
multiple factors behind it but it’s just
that people want
when you see something getting popular
the developers get encouraged
based on that feedback we have also
obviously seen popular plugins or themes
getting not getting updates
but if you look at look into it you
will see that
that happens
not that often you know so it’s a rare
rare thing
you want to download a plug a user
plugin or theme which is
frequently updated on WordPress
repository you can see the last state on
which
a plugin or theme was released if it is
a if it was updated recently
then you know that okay yes there
this plugin or theme is getting
getting work done and you will get an
update the next one
is getting it from a reputed developer
again
you know we have developers or we have
companies which are very very large and
popular
and if you just if everyone just opted
to buy a buy the plugin or theme from
them obviously
the smaller smaller fish or the
smaller companies would
would find it difficult to survive
but nonetheless we still think that
or the reputation of a developer plays a
role when it comes to
how often a plugin or theme gets updated
finally free or paid
you would you think that if a developer
is getting paid
to for the software then there’s a high
chance
that they would keep releasing updates
because it
becomes a continuous revenue stream
and that’s true but there are a couple
of things to keep in mind when it comes
to paid
plugins or themes one
a paid plugin is
is might not will often not be part of
the WordPress repository
in this case they might not have the
infrastructure to
do an auto update and manually updating
it by
going to that website and downloading it
is non-trivial
and it just becomes a friction point the
second thing with paid
plugins or themes is that many of them
have a
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as a yearly license so in case you don’t
purchase or renew the license then
you
won’t get the updates
okay so we have got this this
basic step out of the way and now we are
all set up hopefully with
plugins or themes which get regular
updates
okay now we are busy with our work
and it’s it often happens that we
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we forget to do the updates we are not
able to make time for
for doing updates we have lot more
important things to do
sometimes even just creating content and
working on our websites
uh
but given the importance of your website
it is
it is very useful to set up a regular
schedule it reminds you to
this schedule or a reminder on your
calendar
will ensure that you have a process in
place to get your website updated
now the frequency how frequently you
update
your website
can be we have seen companies do it or
websites do it on a weekly basis we have
also seen websites do it
with lower frequency maybe once in a
month
and you know there are disadvantages of
doing it once in a month
but i would be like
even if you can if you only have
resources to do it once in a month
go ahead and do it it is still better
than not doing it
the other thing when it comes to
scheduling
when to do an update is what time you
should do
the update the obvious thing to be is
like okay fine we’ll do it at
when there is no traffic or low traffic
and this is the case with
almost a you know any software
life cycle you will see that people do
updates when
there are when the traffic
is low or when nobody’s using that
software
but here again there’s one more thing
you should keep in mind and that is
support availability
so the your team members or the the
people who
can help you
solve this the problem when
if something goes wrong might not
coincide with
a low traffic
time slot so in this case you might want
to balance both the things out
and make sure that you have someone to
help you troubleshoot
in case things go wrong
okay so now we go on to the next step
which i think is a very very important
step and
almost a critical step and that is
to take a backup before doing the update
this is
this is your insurance policy this is
this is going to really
save you in the tricky difficult
situation
things will go wrong and in fact if
you
look at the data you will see that more
sites break because of an update
than any other for any other reason
and in this case if you have a backup
you can just roll back from the backup
and you’ll be good to go so having a
good backup
before an update can really help you in
a difficult or sticky situation
it is your fail-safe
before i go ahead i will take a slight
detour
okay you know what i’m talking about
it all might represent the ideal case
but this is not necessarily
what you want to use for
all websites or it might not be
applicable everywhere
okay there are i we have seen there are
simple sites you know there are brochure
sites which i don’t use any complex
we don’t which don’t use complex
plugins or things which barely use any
plugins which use stable plugins
or you have other websites such as you
know they’re not that important
even if they were to go down for a day
hardly anyone will notice
and for all these cases i often see
myself just
hitting the update all button
you’re like okay fine let’s just update
everything
the chances of it failing is very low
i don’t want to go through the entire
process which can be time consuming
and sometimes you know in for these
websites i don’t even go back and check
if the site’s our site is running fine
after the process so
so yeah the what what we are what we
are going to cover ahead
does not apply to every in every
situation
and it’s good to be good to have that
understanding
for these websites you can also these
might be the perfect candidates to set
up auto updates
you know with WordPress 5.5 there was
an auto update which got
which was released for plugins and
themes so now you can just set it up on
these websites and you know
you have much less to fear
okay now we get back to our our
updating
doing updates in case you want to
follow a better plan
okay and the first step
so once you have got your backups in
place the next step is to go through the
change log every update every plugin or
theme when it gets updated they release
a change log
and you know reading the changelog is a
daunting process let’s be clear
it’s not easy but in fact
it can be tedious and many of the
changelog does
barely contains any useful information
but it’s still good to look into it
because it helps with two situations the
first situation it really helps with
is security updates so you when
whenever there is a security patch
to fix a vulnerability
the change log covers this
well and they will have this
mentioned in that change log so when you
see this
it it it almost is like a
reminder to you to do that update at the
earliest
at other times the plugin or team might
have a major update something
it might have a new feature release or
it
might do some major
changes to the way it functions and in
this case the chances of it
breaking your website goes up
significantly
okay so
there can be updates which involve like
data migrations
and
these things are complex processes and
time consuming
too so it is good to be well prepared to
handle such situations
you know around this there’s also so if
there is a major update happening
then it’s good to you know
to delay the update like whenever on my
phone or
like android or ios phone whenever it
receives a major update
a new version is released i i will
delay the update by a few days
because it it helps the early bugs get
fixed
there are people who who who update
their phones more often and they will
identify these issues and they get fixed
before
it before my
before i do the update so then the
risk is reduced at my end the same logic
can apply to your WordPress site too
okay going ahead we have to the next
step
and this is this is actually
the most important step if you ask me
and that is to use a staging site
now a staging site is an exact replica
of your website it’s just in a different
location
when you make us make any changes to
your staging site
it does not affect your live site
so staging site plays a very important
role when it
comes to doing updates and for all our
critical
sites we make sure that we use staging
sites to do updates
it is the ideal environment to test
updates on
uh
here’s in on a staging site you can
run an update without the fear that it
will break
anything and worst case if it breaks
something
you can discard the staging site and try
the updates again at a later time
the other thing is
on the staging site you can also debug
what has really gone wrong
and you don’t need to do it with with a
gun on your head
because you don’t have a production or
live site which is down
so you don’t have to worry about the
the implications of a site being down
now so is is using a staging site all
unicorns and rainbows
actually not there are there are a few
challenges with stating side
the first one is that there are there is
no easy way to
make staging sites there are few
managed WordPress hosts who
come with stating with staging site
functionality
and this those
hosting companies of definitely make
it much much easier
to create a staging site
there are few staging site plugins which
have come out
which makes dating sites easy so you can
use those too
but
the process is still complex
so in in the so that’s one number
that’s one of the
first problems you will come across
the second thing is that the environment
it’s never a perfect replica
so you’ll you’re changing the urls you
are in a different environment all
together
you might not even be receiving
traffic so a stating site is never a
perfect
replica and so whatever tests you run
here whatever updates you do here
there’s a
small chance that it might not
apply perfectly to the live site
this is an another one so we spoke about
how the premium plugins
the good and the bad of it one of the
challenges of premium plugins is that
suppose you are doing it on a staging
site and you’re trying to update a
premium plugin
as in a few premium plugins throw
errors there because they need you to
have an additional license
to update on the staging site
and yeah so this comes with
additional cost sometimes it
comes with overhead of fix doing or
doing a fix
finally doing this process you can
imagine
is one additional step to the to the to
to your
to your process and it makes it more
time consuming
so you need to create a staging site you
need to do updates here then you go back
to your live site and do another update
it you can imagine it can become
it can take up quite a bit of time but
you have reduced risk
for sure and this is something which we
recommend doing for all
all your websites which are important
where you don’t want to take a risk
so this this is again something which
is quite common in this
in among people who
deploy software and that is to set up a
maintenance page
so during the process
of doing the update things can break
and or
that transition period of the update
things can become unstable so your while
your website
might be perfectly okay at the end of
the
update process during the transition
phase
things can become
become unstable and
it becomes even more you know it can
become even more pronounced if you are
running an ecommerce store people might
have things in their check
checkout page they might be about to
go to the payment page and or they
might have completed payment some of
those
callbacks and it
can fail if it was if it’s
if the site is undergoing
this maintenance so it’s good to put up
a page which tells your
visitors that
your site is getting updated
and it just allows them to have
to have appropriate expectations they
will come back later which
we all and
complete whatever they were they
wanted to accomplish
it also gives you leeway in case things
go south
you know then having a maintenance page
means that you can work in the
background
while and resolve the issue and then
once only once everything is proper
you can remove the page and things
will be okay
so so we have this is again something
which
we think is a very good practice to
follow
this takes me to the next step which is
visual regression testing
now
through visual regression testing we
check
so the basic idea is to check if a site
is broken
you know we spoke about what
updates being one of the biggest reasons
why a site breaks
now how do you know that a site has
broken
right and us
you need to check so after doing the
update you need a mechanism to go ahead
and go about checking whether the site
has broken is broken or not
and the site can break in many ways
the whole site can break with the
white screen of death maybe a couple of
pages or
a few of the pages break
after the update maybe only a part of
the page breaks after the update
and finally
maybe the pages look fine but some
workflow breaks after the update maybe
the checkout process stops working or
you’re you’re not able to log into your
wp admin or
the form to collect leads maybe that
breaks
after the update
so this brings us to this so how do
you solve for this you solve
this obviously by testing after you do
an update
now testing is difficult and time
consuming
and yeah you know anything that is
difficult and time consuming
and manual we tend to avoid so
we often see that we’ll do an update and
will not go ahead and actually
test whether your site is functioning
correctly after the update
because of this the nature of
the problem
and this is where in such problems are
best solved
through automation and the automation
when it comes to
testing websites is one of the ways of
testing it is
visual regression testing so the basic
idea is that you take a screenshot
before
before doing the update and you take
another screenshot after you have
completed all the updates
once the both are are
done then you compare the two
screenshots
if there is any difference then the
software will
alarm you okay so
and you can do this for
as for as many pages that you have
okay so here you can see that this is an
example of
a visual regression test being run where
you have
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image before of of the site before
and after and you can see that that font
size has changed
and the visual regression test is able
to catch that
so there are many many advantages of
running a visual regression test
it is it can be fast so you don’t need
to do it there’s no manual work involved
also it can cover multiple pages
something which you might not
do otherwise and can also cover multiple
devices
so you know sometimes you might test it
on only on your desktop
but you might also want to some things
might break on a
on a mobile device so
which through visual regression test
because it happens in an automated
manner
you can also test on multiple devices
there are a few disadvantages of running
a visual regression test
if your site has animation sliders we
see that we have often seen that
running a visual regression test on it
breaks
because there’s the screenshots are
never not easy to capture
in those situations
also these tests you can imagine are
actually fairly difficult to run while
there are
quite a few software out there there’s
still parts you need to build and create
so it’s not easy to run
a visual regression test
so this brings me to slightly some more
advanced topics
so things which apply
to more complex websites
you know websites which might have lead
forms
websites which might have which might be
a woocommerce store
so for this a visual regression test
might not be sufficient
you will need to go beyond this you will
need to set up automated testing of the
important workflows there are tools
out there
but as part of this presentation we
i’m not going to go
any further into this you there are
other way other
important things to test when you do an
update for example you might need to
check the seo
of the website if that is fine there are
updates based on
people now do updates you through git
and i think
that’s a fantastic way of doing it but
again
we have seen that that git based updates
are used only by a very small fraction
of WordPress site owners and
there are other other other topics
around updates
which can be discussed but maybe i’ll
leave that to question and answer
all right so that’s it from me thank
you
i’m here to answer any questions
you
