Updating Your WordPress Plugins and Themes

Posted by Madhavi on Feb 22, 2012 in Featured, WordPress 101 | 0 comments

Updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes is a very important part of maintaining your WordPress website. Often, this can appear to be a very daunting task. But the recent updates to WordPress have made the process of updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes very easy.

As a WordPress website owner, it is a very important part of your website’s maintenance that you regularly update your WordPress installation – and this includes updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes.

Importance of Updating Your WordPress Plugins and Themes

There are several basic, and very well founded reasons as to why one should regularly update the WordPress plugins and themes. Lets look at those reasons before we get into the ‘how-to’ part of this post.

Regular updates will ensure that your plugins and themes perform their best, and give you the best of what they are supposed to do.
Often updates include more features – who doesn’t like more features?
Updates also mean that some bugs, security related patches and so on are added to your plugins and themes, making your site data more safe.

Most theme and plugin developers are very active members of the WordPress community, and updates to their themes and plugins often involve either or all of the above mentioned factors.

Updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes means that you often get more features and bug fixes for your plugins and themes. These updates also ensure a compatibility with the latest versions of WordPress itself. So yes, it is very important to regularly update them.

Updating Your WordPress Plugins and Themes: How To

The latest versions of WordPress have made it relatively simple and easy to go about updating your WordPress plugins and themes. Here’s a step-by-step process of how to go about updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes:

The first step, of course, is seeing that updates are available. And that notification is now present right in your dashboard toolbar – right at the top of your WordPress Admin interface.
The second step is to click on that notification, and you will be taken to the updates page. You can also go to this updates page by moving your mouse over the ‘Dashboard’ icon (looks like a house) and then clicking on ‘Updates’ from the menu that pops up.
The third step is selecting the plugins and themes you want to update, or selecting ‘Update All’ and clicking on the button to set the update process in motion.
And finally, you will see an update page, where the results of the process will be displayed. Ta-Da! You’re done!

With such a simple and easy process, now you don’t have any excuse not to update your WordPress Plugins and Themes regularly!

Meanwhile, here are some pictures that should give you a fair idea of the process stages:

WordPress Updates in Dashboard Toolbar

WordPress Updates Step 1

WordPress Updates Step 2

After The Update

Video: Updating Your WordPress Plugins and Themes

And, of course, if you are like me, and want to see how it is done in a video, then here’s a really nice video for you!

In Conclusion…

Updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes is a very important part of maintaining your WordPress website. And the process is fairly easy, and simple to do.

So, what’s your excuse for not updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes regularly?