1st step is to Back Up your website.
Anything can go wrong during WordPress website update process. There are several 1000s of plugins out there. When you mix it with 1000s of theme and plugins, the combination of multiple plugin will throw an error. It is hard to know which is a good plugin update and bad plugin update that breaks the site.
So it is mandatory to take a back up locally or remotely. If anything goes wrong , we will restore your site as how it was before. If you have a busy website, we recommend using staging server to test update before doing it on live website.
We provide our own backup software to back up locally, but if you prefer other backup solutions, we are open to use it.
Pre- Update site checking
Before we do the actual update, we will see if everything on the front end works the way it should. For some reason, if something is broken before we do the update, we will let you know and ask you to fix it and fix it on behalf of you.
This is very important because something that is already broken may not get fixed with new updates, it can even get worse.
Also we get a caution list from you such as what plugins to update, what plugins to skip, what functionality often gets broken or needs to be handled with extra care.
Once we know everything is a go ahead, we will proceed to update process
The Update Process
We do not just press the update button. We only update maximum 2 plugins at a time. For every plugin update, we visit important page types and make sure the site is intact. We also disable all cache type to make sure we are not fooled.
We have categorized plugins based on the functionality, for example some plugins does not affect core purpose of the website, such as analytics, pixel integrator, back-end enhancement plugins,. We update these plugins first. Plugins that are more important such as woo-commerce, WordPress core, Sliders and so on, we update these at last. We take one more back up after doing less important plugins then run the high importance plugins.
If every plugin update goes without error, we do a final check of the site, mainly important page types and post types, forms, test order etc…
Integrity Check after update
After update it is very important to check for website integrity. We do a through checking of all functionality of website to make sure everything works the way you wanted.
Starting from home page, we check every important page type, post type. We also check forms on the website to make sure that goes through. If you have woocommerce website, we do test order to make sure the order process works as before.
There are more checks we can do based on your requests.