
I’ve been meaning to start doing some tutorials and since I’ve become somewhat of a WordPress dork, I’ll start with manually upgrading WordPress
. Sometimes you may find that your wordpress blog will suddenly fail to do automatic upgrades. Ack! Sooo frustrating!! I know. But don’t worry. Here’s an easy step by step way to manually upgrade your wordpress. It may seem pretty scary at first, but as long as you follow the directions, everything should be safe. First things first, always do a complete backup of your blog.
- Download the latest WordPress upgrade from WordPress.org.
- Extract it to your hard drive in a place you can remember.
- If you love your plugins, make sure their are compatible with the fresh install of WordPress. Do a quick Google search with the WordPress version and the plugin name.
- Backup your database. You can do this through your cpanel or through the WordPress databases backup plugin.
- Test the backup. It should look like a big text file of running together gibberish. If you don’t have that, then stop the upgrade
- Now backup all of your WordPress files. Backup the wp-admin, wp-content, wp-includes, and all of the files in your blog directory. You can do this through cpanel or with ftp. I like to use SmartFTP for or Cyberduck.
- Test the backup and make sure all the file are there especially wp-config.php and your wp-content folder.
- Install and activate the Maintenance Mode plugin. One note here – if you are backing up from a much older version of WordPress, skip this step. I find it can cause unnecessary problems and it’s better for your site to simply be down temporarily then to have to struggle to bring it backup later.
- Deactivate ALL of your plugins, except for Maintenance Mode.
- Logout of WordPress
- Now go back to FTP or your cpanel file manager.
- Delete the WP-Admin folder.
- Delete the WP-Includes.
- Delete all of the files in the blog directory such as wp-cron.php, wp-login.php, etc except for wp-config.php (that contains your database information). No worries if you accidentally delete it because you should have made a backup.
- DO NOT delete wp-content.
- Now you can upload the new WordPress files.
- Upload the wp-admin directory and then the wp-includes directory.
- Upload the main blog directory files such as wp-cron.php and wp-login.php. The upgrade files shouldn’t have a wp-config.php but, if it does, don’t overwrite yours.
- Now in your browser, go to your site http://www.yoursite.com/blog/wp-admin/upgrade.php
- You may be asked to login so go ahead and do so.
- If it was more than a .1 version upgrade, you may get a message saying your database needs to be upgraded. Click the button and upgrade.
- Activate and upgrade your plugins.
- You have upgraded your WordPress!
TROUBLESHOOTING:
1. Can’t login after upgrade.
Clear your cache. Clear your cookies. If you still can’t login, delete the plugins folder. You have a backup so they can easily be replaced. This is in wp-content/plugins/. If that doesn’t work, try searching the codex.
2. Main page loads but get 404 errors on all sub pages.
This may be a permalinks problem. Try deleting your .htaccess file and replace it with the backup version.