Don’t Update That WordPress Theme – Read This First

Sacramento WordPress Owners Update Correctly

When you started building your WordPress website you took great effort in customizing it to look and function like the super site you wanted. You pasted little snippets of code here and there until you just had to congratulate yourself on your awesome design skills. However, this becomes a real problem when a new version of the theme you’ve chosen is released to perhaps fix some vulnerabilities or add some really cool features.

Being the perfectionist that you are you immediately click the update link. Boom! You just made a big mistake that could kill all your custom work. Here are a few things to consider before making this mistake.

  1. Use a FTP client to back-up your theme folder. I use FileZilla. At least, this will give you a way to put things back in order if problems arise.
  2. Make a backup of your sites SQL database. Most backup plugins do this quite easily.
  3. Here’s a complicated way that some suggest.
  4. I like to create a child theme right from the beginning or at least before I upgrade the theme I’m using. My favorite plugin to do this is Child Theme Configurator. It’s easy and I use the free version.
  5. Once you have the child theme created, activate it and see if everything is good.
  6. If all is good you should be able to update your theme now but make sure you do step 1 and 2 first, just in case!

Get A WordPress Maintenance Service

WordPress is wonderful but you need to keep everything up-to-date. If you don’t want to do it yourself, get an inexpensive service like WPSanity.com.

WordPress Maintenance Service

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