Updates

Open the website and go to WordPress › Updates. The top card shows the installed WordPress version and whether an update is available. Click Check again to ask WordPress for the latest.

Safe updates

The Safe updates switch covers every update on the website: core, plugins and themes, whether you start it or the schedule does. It is on by default.

With Safe updates on, each update:

1. checks the website is healthy before it starts;
2. takes a restore point;
3. runs the update (for core, it also updates the database);
4. runs health checks on the website;
5. rolls back to the restore point automatically if the checks fail.

With it off, updates simply run, with no restore point, no health checks and no rollback.

Tip

Keep Safe updates on. A failed update then costs you a few minutes, not an evening.

Update by hand

• WordPress core: click Update WordPress and confirm Back up and update.
• All plugins or all themes: on the Plugins or Themes card, click Update all (N) and confirm. They update together, after one restore point, with one health check.
• One plugin or theme: click Update next to it on the Plugins or Themes page.

Updates run in the background. Follow them in the activity panel.

Update automatically

Automatic updates run once a week, at night (UTC), in a window Netkeel picks for each website so that sites on the same server don’t all update at once.

• WordPress core: under Automatic updates, choose Manual, Security and minor, or All releases. Security and minor keeps you on your current major version; All releases also installs new major versions. Until you choose, core updates are Manual.
• Plugins and themes: choose which ones update automatically on the Plugins and Themes pages, with Enable auto-updates on each item or for several at once. See Plugins and themes.

See what happened

Recent updates lists the latest runs, each marked Scheduled or Manual, with the result:

• Updated: the update worked.
• Rolled back: the update or the health check after it failed, and the website was put back as it was. The reason is shown underneath.
• Failed: the update failed. With Safe updates off, nothing was rolled back.
• Skipped: a scheduled run didn’t start, for example because the website was being moved or wasn’t healthy.
• Unclear: the update was still running when Netkeel stopped waiting. No rollback was attempted; check the website.

If a rollback keeps happening, try the update on a staging copy to find out what breaks.