How and Why to Update Your WordPress Plugins

Plugins are one of the main elements and benefits of a WordPress website. They allow you to customize and add special features to your website. Keeping them updated is essential to the security and performance of your website. Outdated plugins can make your website vulnerable to hacking, cause it to crash, and create all kinds of issues if they aren’t maintained properly. 

So if you’re the one in charge of your WordPress website, make sure you get familiar with the steps for updating your WordPress plugins, which are outlined below. You can also get a visual walkthrough of the process in this video.

5 Steps to Updating Your WordPress Plugins:

1. Start at the dashboard of your WordPress website and navigate to your plugin list on the left-hand menu a little more than halfway down the page. 
2. Once you open the plugin list, find the plugin that needs to be updated. It is typically indicated by yellow and should have some type of verbiage about needing to be updated.
3. Before you update, it’s a good idea to make a backup of your WordPress website, so just in case anything goes wrong you’ll be able to revert the changes to the prior update.
4. Next, you click on the update and wait a few seconds for the update to complete. And like magic you’ve updated your WordPress plugin!
5. Lastly, is it best practice to make sure that everything is still functional after the update. You can do that by determining what the plugin affects and checking on how it’s working. Check the plugin schedule to make sure everything is still operational. If the plugin’s events look to be working, you know the update was successful.

And that’s how to update your WordPress plugins. For more WordPress maintenance tips, subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us @PulleyWPSupport on Twitter for updates to the blog.