I have about 35 plugins that need to be updated, but last time I updated 10+ plugins, my website crashed because 1 of the updates didn't function with my theme. How can I prevent this from happening again?
By creating a staging site and testing on there first. If you’re experiencing crashes from updates then that typically means you’re running old software (plugins or theme) that you need to either update or replace.
As soon as the site gets bigger, and like you mentioned 35 plugins, that are a lot of plugins, you need to have a local setup side by side.
So let’s say you create a backup and set it up locally. Then test which plugins are conflicting with the theme. This is time taking but you can figure out the root cause of trouble.
If you still want to keep that plugin that creates trouble, you can talk to their dev to help fix it. Usually they help.
You could try something like ManageWP. Costs like 1-5 $ per month (u can cancel anytime) for the backups.
It’ll allow you to do safe updates (basically: creates a backup of the page, updates the plugins and if something fails, it restores the backup).
Imo the simplest solution with least effort and 1-5$ per website per month is completely fine.
Backup the site using something like ‘UpdraftPlus’, then update like 1 or 2 plugins. If the site is operating fine, do another backup and do another 1 or 2 plugins. Then when one fails, you can revert to the most recent and skip the ones in the batch that you had done. Keep doing this until you get to the problematic plugins.
If you manage just a single website, using a staging environment would be an excellent choice, as previously mentioned. This is especially efficient if your hosting provider offers a built-in staging feature (such as the one available with our SiteGround hosting – it speeds up the whole process very much).
However, if you manage numerous websites (as we do with over 50), using a staging approach can be quite time-consuming, believe me. To streamline our updates, we use the MainWP plugin to handle necessary site updates in this order: first we do the plugins, then we update the theme, and finally the WordPress core.
In case anything goes south, we rely on either the backups provided by SG hosting or the backups from the All-in-One WP Migration plugin stored on our 2.5 TB pCloud. This strategy has proven to be very effective for us thus far. 🙂
By creating a staging site and testing on there first. If you’re experiencing crashes from updates then that typically means you’re running old software (plugins or theme) that you need to either update or replace.
You can create a staging site with Local (https://localwp.com)
As soon as the site gets bigger, and like you mentioned 35 plugins, that are a lot of plugins, you need to have a local setup side by side.
So let’s say you create a backup and set it up locally. Then test which plugins are conflicting with the theme. This is time taking but you can figure out the root cause of trouble.
If you still want to keep that plugin that creates trouble, you can talk to their dev to help fix it. Usually they help.
You could try something like ManageWP. Costs like 1-5 $ per month (u can cancel anytime) for the backups.
It’ll allow you to do safe updates (basically: creates a backup of the page, updates the plugins and if something fails, it restores the backup).
Imo the simplest solution with least effort and 1-5$ per website per month is completely fine.
Backup the site using something like ‘UpdraftPlus’, then update like 1 or 2 plugins. If the site is operating fine, do another backup and do another 1 or 2 plugins. Then when one fails, you can revert to the most recent and skip the ones in the batch that you had done. Keep doing this until you get to the problematic plugins.
If you manage just a single website, using a staging environment would be an excellent choice, as previously mentioned. This is especially efficient if your hosting provider offers a built-in staging feature (such as the one available with our SiteGround hosting – it speeds up the whole process very much).
However, if you manage numerous websites (as we do with over 50), using a staging approach can be quite time-consuming, believe me. To streamline our updates, we use the MainWP plugin to handle necessary site updates in this order: first we do the plugins, then we update the theme, and finally the WordPress core.
In case anything goes south, we rely on either the backups provided by SG hosting or the backups from the All-in-One WP Migration plugin stored on our 2.5 TB pCloud. This strategy has proven to be very effective for us thus far. 🙂