When your WordPress installation is out of date you will have a yellow header on your dashboard home page, stating that your installation is outdated. Click on the ‘Please update now‘ link to begin the upgrade process.
You should now be on the WordPress update page. Click on the Upgrade button to begin the upgrade process.
WordPress will now download and install the updated patched files for your installation and automatically reload the page. If you have any Plugins or Themes that have updates pending you should now scroll down and update these.
For the Plugins just select the relevant plugins and click the ‘Update Plugins‘ button.
Likewise for the Themes just select the relevant themes and click the ‘Update Themes‘ button.
All done. Easy, so no excuses for your site not to be up to date!
Backups are important, you spend time working on your website and a single plugin update or XSS attack can put down your site forever! I suggest doing the following for WordPress backups: Create manual backups from time to time and set automatic backups with a plugin such as UpDraft.
If you’ve installed your WordPress installation via a tool such as Softaculous or Installatron, you can set backups directly in the installations screen.
Simply login to your cPanel and scroll down to web applications section.
Click on any installation and you ill be taken to the Installatron section where you can see all your installations. Choose the installation that you want to set backups for and click on the backup icon, as shown in the screenshot below.
A new page will open where you can name the backup and choose where to save it. You can send the backup to:
After you choose the location for the backup, don’t forget to click on the Backup button at the bottom.
That’s it after the backup is complete you can easily access it via the backups menu and restore them with a single click.
You can also backup WordPress manually by Filemanager or FTP, by downloading all files on your server along with the database!
To create a backup of your files simply open your File Manager from cPanel and create an archive of all the files on the server. Afterward, just download the compressed file and that is a complete backup of your files.
You can also create a backup by FTP by downloading all the files within an FTP client such as FileZilla.
Now that we have a backup of all the files on our server, let’s do the same for our database.
To create a copy of our WordPress database we’ll simply enter phpMyAdmin, select the database and export the tables in it. Sounds complicate, so here are screenshots to help. 🙂
Step 1. From your cPanel, under the Database section select phpMyAdmin.
Step 2. On the left side are listed all the databases for your cPanel account. Select the database used for the WordPress installation that you want to backup and click on it.
Step 3. Click on the Export button on top and you will be taken to the export screen where you can choose which tables to export.
Step 4. On the next page simply click the “Go” button and that’s it, the download should start automatically.
Using the left side menu of wp-admin panel, hover over to plugins, then click add new.
Using the search function, search for UpDraft
You should now see your search results, click install next to UpDraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin and afterward click on activate.
After installing and activating the Updraft plugin, navigate to its settings menu, located under Settings.
To create a backup click on the Settings, then set where to send the backup and what to backup(only uploads, plugins, etc..).
I recommend setting automatic backups to remote storage, for example I always set 3 backups weekly to Google Drive.