Excuse my ignorance here because I have very little experience in WordPress and I'm sure the answer could vary depending on what is being installed. I have contractor who is installing WordPress updates off hours for me and charging me. On average, I'd say they schedule out about an hour to an hour and half to run "Wordpress updates" and it happens at least once a week, sometimes twice. Is this a reasonable amount of time?
For example, a WordPress update one evening of 4 plugins took 1 hour to complete. Now, I have some experience in WordPress and know that it's simply a matter of clicking update and waiting, then verifying everything comes back and functions the way it should but is that overestimating the time it is taking? It seems like a bit much for me but wanted to get some advice from people who have more experience.
Thanks for any help.
Minutes. But they could be performing backups prior to updating, which does take additional time. You could probably shrink your schedule down to once a week, or once every two weeks.
It could be a lot of things.
* Developer has a minimum billable time frame of 1 hour. So even if something takes 5 minutes, he bills 1 hour
* Developer safely backsup your site before updating plugins, and then updates plugins and checks the site to make sure everything is working smooth (closer to an hour of time)
* Developer clones your site over to a staging environment, performs updates there to check for problems, and then performs on live site (close to an hour)
* etc etc.
It really depends on what exactly he is doing. For 90% of plugins I have them set to autoupdate in WordPress as they are safe plugins I’ve been using for years and never had any issues. Those just update automatically. The couple of rare plugins that I don’t trust to auto updates, I log in once or twice a month, make a backup, then click update and check the site.
In general though you are right. Updating a plugin on any normal host should take 30 seconds. So 4 plugins would take 2 minutes to do if all goes well. You really should just ask your developer what they are charging time for, or what their process is.
I do this once a month for clients. Pull site down to staging, pull to local backup. Update plugins locally, test and then update on production. Takes ~1 hour. I bill in 1 hour increments.
Hour sounds reasonable – and sounds like issues would be covered in that time as well. Risk/reward here of it could go perfect and take 20 minutes, or take 3 hours. So if they are balancing and accommodating for that. Sounds fair
I would put a cap on how often this happens. Plugins don’t need to be updated all the time. Often this is done once a month or similar, barring any kind of urgent emergency patch to address a severe security issue. Don’t let them have free reign to update your plugins whenever they want and bill you for the time.
Depends on the site.
For my wife’s portfolio, I’ll usually spend a half hour to an hour when she’s making updates, but her site is pretty bare bones. I only do this a few times a year
At work we update once a month (baring any security ones that we take care of day of), and we block off a minimum of 3h. A bunch of these are WooCommerce sites, enterprise level clients, multisite builds.
Sure we do have some smaller sites that are relatively easy, or we have Smart Plugin manager on and we only have to do minimal updates.
But most are a process of updating core and plugins locally (95% are custom themes, but we do have some paid ones), send it to staging for the client to give a once over in case we miss anything (they know their most traffic’d / used pages better than we will), give a run through GitHub for it noticing any vulnerabilities we should target for our custom themes. Then we back up production, fire off the build / update manually, then give another once over.
If it’s something like Gravity Forms or Akismet, they’re quick test kind of things. But any WooCommerce updates, Gravity Form add ons, UPS shipping, anything we need to test orders and key functionality, yeah it can grow real quick