How To Upgrade Your WordPress Install

This arti­cle is all about how to upgrade your Word­Press instal­la­tion.  The rea­son you want to do this is so that you can stay up to date, avoid poten­tial secu­rity flaws, and of course, being able to enjoy all the cool new tools and usabil­ity fea­tures that get added dur­ing each major release.

This arti­cle is old and now things are MUCH eas­ier, check­out this link to learn how to update word­press 3.

Keep­ing with Enlight­ened WebMastery’s approach of keep­ing things sim­ple, this guide is straight to the point.  I went ahead and shot a video which you can see below that shows how to do this, as well as giv­ing a high level overview.  This is very sim­ple. You can find the video, below the steps below.

Here are the steps

• Log into your host­ing account, nav­i­gate to your Word­Press instal­la­tion, and down­load your wp-content folder.
• While your here, go ahead and backup your wp-config.php file.
• Google up “Word­Press Data­base Backup” or click here -> http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup
• Install the plu­gin, and use it.  Either down­load a copy of your backup, or have it emailed to you. (this is just precautionary)
• Nav­i­gate to your dash­board, and under plu­g­ins, deac­ti­vate every­thing (in case it is not compatible)
• Visit WordPress.org and down­load the lat­est version.
• Decom­press the .zip
• Using your FTP pro­gram, login to your server, and delete the wp-admin, and wp-includes.
• After­words, select every­thing in the new word­press folder (that you unzipped) but your wp-content, and wp-config-sample.php.
• Copy those to your server, over­write as necessary.
• While those are trans­fer­ring, open up your “backed up” wp-config.php file, and take note of the login, pass, and hostname.
• define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘puty­our­db­name­here’);

/** MySQL data­base pass­word */ define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘your­pass­word­here’);
/** MySQL host­name */ define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘local­host’);
/** MySQL data­base user­name */ define(‘DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere’);

After you have replaced that infor­ma­tion from the wp-config to the wp-sample-config, rename the wp-sample-config to wp-config.php.

• Upload that file to your server now.
• Then log back in to your dash­board, and reac­ti­vate your plu­g­ins one by one.
• Your done.  Enjoy!

Video Overview

Be sure to check out the rest of the site for more tuto­ri­als and videos. Also, I rec­om­mend sign­ing up for my newslet­ter (click­ing here) so you can get all the lat­est training.

Tagged as: How to upgrade wordpress