Episode 190: My WordPress 5.9 Upgrade Strategy

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Show Summary

Rob Cairns talks about his WordPress 5.9 Upgrade Strategy that he used on 127 websites.

Show Highlights:

1. Planning is key.
2. How Rob did his updates.
3. Why you must backup before doing an upgrade.

Show Notes

Hey everybody, Rob here again in today’s Quick, uh podcast episode. I want to talk a little bit about WordPress 5.9 in my WordPress upgrade experience.

I think it’s really important that people don’t get afraid of upgrades and they actually do some planning.

And personally I think.

That’s a really good thing.

So we all know 59 at the time of this record came out last Tuesday. What did I do to prepare?

The first thing I did was.

Tuesday morning I did one last backup of all my clients websites and that’s over 100 of them.

And I basically prepped them to be ready to put 5.9 in.

Then I sat back and kind of kept an eye on Twitter and social media in other channels because I thought this was important enough for we said if something was coming out.

We don’t. I was also keeping an eye on the make.wordpress.org slack channel, which kind of gave me some inside baseball or an inside track on to how it was playing out. We knew on Tuesday that.

The word press release party, if all went well, would start at 7:20 UTC, which was 2:20 PM Eastern Time. So I decided to join the release party, which I don’t always do. I was around and anticipate.

Meeting and I did some testing during a release party. I tested an app from release candidate 4 for five, nine to the release. I also did some testing from five point 8.3.

To roll the five nine release and those weren’t really well.

And as we know, Drooly party played out really well.

Then I decided to upgrade over 100 sites manually. Actually 127 to be exact zero. Normally when I do upgrades I do a backup and then I use Main West and I do them all in one shot with five nine. I wasn’t taking any chances I actually.

Upgraded sites individually.

And then I checked each site as I went for basic functionality and then threw it back to my clients to do the final checking.

I should tell you I haven’t heard any screaming any concerns.

Any issues beyond the usual?

Where can I find this or where can I find that?

The other secret to the 59 upgrade is don’t turn on full site editing unless you absolutely need it turned on right now and I decided to do the 59 upgrade and not turn FC fully on.

I do have FC full site editing turned on on a dev site development site which I’m playing with because eventually Cadence will be 100% FC and that will make my life much easier.

Why did my day play out?

Well, well, First off, I had a plan where most people get into trouble with upgrades is frankly they do not have plans in place to deal with them.

And if they do not have a plan in place to deal with them.

How do you?

How do you do it?

You don’t, and then they panic, and then they make mistakes.

The second thing I do is I do a checklist.

Did I do a backup of all the sites at the host level?

Did I do a backup of all the sites at the site level?

Did I do the upgrade?

Did I test and I checked them off?

Frankly in a spreadsheet, but a electronic checklist never did.

And by doing a checklist and having a plan and making sure you do a backup ahead of time.

Because if you ever have to revert you, can you actually put yourself in real good shape?

So think about that, and if you haven’t done your 59 upgrades and a lot of people still haven’t, I’m sure go ahead and do it. Last I saw there was over.

10 million in downloads from wordpress.org on the counter. So I mean the release is getting out there.

Yeah, there’s some minor bugs, but there’s no show stoppers. I’m sure eventually there’ll be a 5.9 point one and it’ll be really interesting to see what the road map.

To six hours.

And I’ve got surprises on this podcast coming up in next couple weeks about that road map.

I’m not going to divulge what they are, but all I can say is you want to stay tuned and listen to some of the guests we’ve got coming.

So that’s kind of how I do upgrades for five.

By the way, this is the same process I would do for any upgrade, and it makes sense.

So really if you want to take care yourself, make sure and I really stress this wholeheartedly.

Make sure you have a plan.

Make sure you take a backup and then any upgrade, whether it’s the five, nine or any other release will be easy.

Rob Cairns .

Both founder and chief creator of amazing ideas at stunning digital marketing talking about.

How we did this upgrade to five nine and you can apply this to any other release, so keep that in mind.

Planning is key.

Have a great day.

Bye bye for now.

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