This is post #16 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101. Subscribe now so you don’t miss future posts.
As you work in WordPress, sooner or later you’ll notice a yellow notice bar appear across the top of the screen. WordPress is always checking to see if a newer version is available for you. If there is, this yellow bar is how it lets you know about it.
Updating WordPress is very simple. It’s totally automated and the update runs very reliably. And keeping up to date is important – many of the updates protect you from newly discovered security issues, fix other problems, or add new features.
On the dashboard screen below you’ll notice the yellow bar notice across the top, and also another tally of updates over on the left.
Click on the “Please update now” link. You’ll see the following screen.
The warning about backups is important, but we’ll cover that in a future post. Also, since we’ve just got a test environment running and the update process is known to run smoothly, let’s just go ahead and click the “Update Automatically” button. That’s the one you’ll use all the time. There’s not really a need to download the update first, so we might as well just have it installed automatically.
After you click the “Update Automatically” button, you’ll see a status screen like the following. The whole process takes just a minute, so you’ll see this pop up pretty quickly.
That’s it! You’re done. WordPress is now up to date and you can click on the “Go to Dashboard” link to bring you back to the dashboard.
When you get there, you’ll notice the “updates” count over on the left has been decremented by 1. Why isn’t is zero? Because there are other components to WordPress that get updated – third party plugins. We’ll cover updating these in a future post.
This is post #16 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101. Subscribe now so you don’t miss future posts.