WordPress is one of the most powerful CMSes (Content Management Systems) for bloggers — easy to upgrade, maintain, extend, and customize. Upgrading WordPress is easy: just click it from Admin Dashboard > Updates and press the Update Automatically button. But in some cases this won’t work.
If you have many plugins and customizations, WordPress automatic updates won’t work — and to be honest I don’t know why. So what happens if your update process stops in the middle? Well, your site will be inaccessible. So if you get this issue, don’t panic! Just go to your cPanel, FTP program, or any tool to access your files on the server. All you have to do is delete the .maintain file from the root, and your site will be live again.
Using the automatic upgrade feature is convenient, but not for me. I prefer to upgrade it manually because it’s much safer (IMHO). The other reason is that I’ve done customizations in the WordPress core, so if I use the automatic upgrade it will overwrite all my code — and I don’t want that to happen.
How to smart-upgrade your WordPress? Follow my guidelines below:
- First, before you do anything — BACKUP! Yes, back up all your files and database. Remember, shit happens!
- Go to the WordPress release information and change log. You can access it here.
- Take your time to read what has been changed and which files were revised/changed. For example, the latest WordPress release when I wrote this article is 3.0.2, and the release info is here.
- As you scroll down a little bit you will see “List of Files Revised” — so we only overwrite those files.
- Download the latest WordPress from the download page, extract it, get the revised files, and upload them via FTP.
- You are done! Your WordPress is upgraded.
Note: If you have modified code in the WordPress core that will be overwritten, I suggest you use a file comparator to see where the differences are and copy your code back over.