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Title is not a typo. A friend has a small business website running on WP 3.6.1 and using Twenty-Twelve theme. This is not mobile capable, among other complaints. Hasn’t been maintained/updated since 2017. He wants me to fix it.
WP Admin Dashboard offers a link to start the upgrade to 6.0.1 – easy! **But what’s the risk?** And what if it’s all broken afterwards?
I could set up a dummy subdomain with a fresh, separate WP 6.0.1 install, and copy over his pages/media to this, to see what happens. I worry that the new site needs a significant amount of manual work to look like the old one. Alternatively, making an all-new site (theme configuration etc) would also be many hours of work.
What are your thoughts?
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Download a backup, and restore it into Local (from localwp.com). Do the upgrades and watch what happens. I reckon it’ll work fine.
I’m not a dev, but personally I’d go with your plan and make a new site on a subdomain. Yeah could be a lot of work, depending.
Backup everything before progressing. You never know you need a backup until you need a backup:)
You can backup the files and the database which will comprise the entire website. There are plugins to help you with this or you can do it manually in the cPanel of your host account as you wish. Plugins are easier usually.
[https://themegrill.com/blog/best-wordpress-backup-plugins/](https://themegrill.com/blog/best-wordpress-backup-plugins/)
Then I would probably just update it in situ knowing I can revert it with my backup method of choice as I want. If there was a lot of traffic on the site I might do this when there aren’t many people on the site.