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The last time I performed the updates for one of my client’s sites, a particular version of Elementor broke the site. I had to use a backup from managewp, and create a new server under my digitalocean.
My question is how do you guys tend to handle sites like these? Have an entire other clone of the site used for testing?
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Test updates on staging first!!
I perform updates on lives servers, late at night (on around 100 sites – that I built so I know what plugin quality I’m dealing with). Haven’t had a problem in years. Run updates frequently. You should always be running the latest version of everything. Learn how to rollback a plugin version.
Use Local for WP to spin up a local clone of your site and update, then test to make sure nothing breaks. You can clone your site from live to local and vice versa, using a plugin like WP Migrate.
First, is ideally don’t let things get so far out of date that it’s more than incremental changes at any given time.
Second, back it all up. Then backup your backup.
Then staging depends on the host, but generally just clone it using whatever tools available and do all the updates. If it works, go do the same on live. If not, debug.
Depending on the site, I’ve been known to do a “quick and dirty” by adding everything to GIT, creating a branch, doing all the updates, if it’s good letting it ride. If there’s an issue, checkout main without the changes to restore the previous state and then go through the hassle of pulling down locally with GIT and debugging. Not appropriate for all sites…but it doesn’t sound like this one has an active repository with any type of CI/CD pipeline you’d be interrupting…else it wouldn’t be way out of date.