How I Learned to Update WordPress (manually)

Posted on By jennego

Geekery post! (Sorry.) In this post, geekery takes us to web development! (Hey at least it’s not about like say, CSS…well, today anyway) This is the story of my harrowing adventures with a WordPress upgrading error. Yeah, it was really easy. Yeah, I felt stupid after.  In my defence, it is scary when the website goes offline…

But okay, so I have some experience in web deign and development but not a lot (i.e. not enough to get a job or anything but enough to design some of my own stuff, make static sties and play with the CSS) and since I don’t do a lot of it my approach at the moment is keep working at it until the thing works.  (There must be a better approach to that…)

So this is how I learned how to re-install WordPress manually.

  1. Log into WordPress admin. See update bar. Go hmmm. Click  “Update Now”.
  2. Stare at error screen in horror
  3. Go AHHH!
  4. Refresh error screen in horror.
  5. Wonder why I didn’t back it up when it said I should. Oh yeah – it was supposed to work.
  6. Go to another browser, stare at error screen in horror.
  7. Google error.
  8. Read about it for a while, desperately searching for some easy fix.
  9. Look at manual update instructions.
  10. Hope that there is something less threatening then that
  11. There isn’t
  12. Find a step by step instruction guide (with illustrations)
  13. Make a back up
  14. Update the wordpress installation manually (seriously, it involved  replacing a few files and folders from the WordPress install! Not hard at all! Really. All you have to to do is leave the wp-content folder and wp-config file alone and just replace the rest.)
  15. Cross my fingers
  16. Click the big upgrade database button on the page when I navigated to the site.
  17. It works!
  18. 1 hour later after the error page, breathe a sigh of relief!

Things I learned from that experience

  • Things can be a LOT simpler than you think
  • Always back up
  • Don’t click the upgrade now button on WordPress willy-nilly, assuming it will work because though it usually does – it may not!
  • Error pages are designed to induce panic to people with little programming experience