How to Update Your Website Plugins on WordPress

How to Update Your Website Plugins on WordPress

Learn how to login to WordPress and update plugins by yourself. Access your dashboard to make updates and changes to your WordPress website.

Maintaining a website is like taking care of any property you own. As your website is an online portal to your business, you want it to be running at 100% otherwise you might lose potential customers.

Olive & Lake has website maintenance plans for our customers who want us to take care their website. Our maintenance plans include weekly reports, plugin and theme updates, security scans, daily backups, broken link checks, uptime monitoring, SEO keyword rankings and more.

Updating plugins is one small part of making your WordPress website run smoothly. There is a setting in WordPress to automatically update plugins, but we always turn this off. Updates can cause problems and break your website, it’s best that it’s done properly.

In this article, you will learn how to correctly update WordPress plugins.

1. Make a Backup

Before doing any kind of work on your website, it's important to take a backup first. If there are any problems, you can restore to your working backup. This is important, don't think it will be OK and just start updating. If something does go wrong, it's much harder to fix it than it is to restore a previous backup.

In some cases, you might want to make a "copy" of your website and test updates there first before updating plugins on your live site.

With Olive & Lake's maintenance plan, we always take a backup before making any updates.

2. Login to WordPress

Open your preferred browser on your computer and navigate to - https://yourdomain.com/wp-admin.

Make sure that you change "yourdomain" with your own domain name.

If you want to learn how to login WordPress, you can read this article "How to Login to WordPress".

WordPress Login

3. Plugins Page

When you are logged in the WordPress, you will see a vertical menu on the left.

Go down to where you see "Plugins" and click "installed plugins" to see your list of plugins.

Plugins

4. Update Plugins

You can see which plugins need updating when you see the message " This is a new version of (plugin name) available. View version x.x.x details or update now."

Click on "update now" to update the plugin. It might take a few seconds for updating.

After you have updated a plugin, visit your website to check everything is working correctly.

Update Plugins

5. Bulk Update

You can also update multiple plugins at the same time by using "Bulk Actions".

Firstly, check the box at front of each plugin name. Then, go to the top and click " Bulk Actions". You will see a list of actions. Select "update". Your plugins will be updated to the latest version.

Bulk Update Plugins

6. Clear Cache

Olive & Lake uses caching to ensure that WordPress pages load quickly. You will need to clear the cache after making any updates.

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