Guide WordPress

How to update WordPress without breaking your site

Back up, update one thing at a time, and check the site immediately — the order that keeps an update from becoming an outage.

iFastHosting Support Team Updated 26 August 2026 7 min read Beginner

Updates get a bad reputation from a small number of bad experiences, almost all of which trace back to the same missing step: nobody took a backup, and nobody checked the site afterwards. Do both, in order, and updating WordPress is routine.

Why sites break during updates

WordPress core itself rarely causes problems — its update process is mature and well tested. The risk sits with plugins and themes, which come from many different developers working to different standards. An update can break a site in three ways:

A plugin update changes behaviour your site depended on, or removes a feature you were using.
Two plugins stop agreeing after one of them updates and the other has not caught up.
A theme was never updated for the new WordPress version and breaks against it.

None of these are reasons to avoid updating — an unpatched site carries a bigger and more certain risk, since known security holes in old versions are exactly what automated attacks scan for. They are reasons to update carefully.

Before every update: take a backup

Not the nightly automatic one — a manual backup taken minutes before you update, covering files and database together. If anything goes wrong, this is what gets you back to exactly where you were with no loss. Backing up a WordPress site covers the fastest way to do this from your control panel.

Skipping this step is the actual cause of most "update disasters"

A broken update with a fresh backup is a five-minute restore. A broken update with no backup is a rebuild. The backup is what turns updating from a risk into a non-event.

Update one thing at a time

If your dashboard shows updates for core, three plugins, and a theme all at once, resist the urge to click "update all" and walk away. Update them one at a time and check the site between each:

Update WordPress core first
Go to Dashboard, then Updates, and update core. Load the front end and the admin area to confirm both still work.
Update plugins one by one
Start with the plugin most central to your site — the page builder, the shop plugin, whatever the site cannot function without. Update it, check the relevant page still works, then move to the next.
Update the theme last
Themes are the most visible if something goes wrong, so check the homepage and one inner page immediately after.

Doing it this way costs a little more time than clicking one button, and in exchange you always know exactly which update caused a problem, rather than staring at three simultaneous changes trying to work out which one broke.

Test on staging first, if the site matters enough to justify it

For a site where downtime has a real cost — an online shop, a business's main site — the safest approach is a staging copy: a duplicate of the live site where you can run the same updates first, in private, with no consequence if something breaks. Setting up a staging environment covers how to create one. It is extra effort that is worth it in proportion to what the site is worth to you.

What to check immediately after updating

Do not assume silence means success. Spend two minutes checking:

The homepage loads with no visible errors or layout breaks.
You can still log into wp-admin.
A representative inner page loads — a blog post, a product page, whatever is typical of the site.
If the site takes orders or submissions, that a test order or a test form submission actually goes through.
The browser console shows no new JavaScript errors, if you know how to check.

If something breaks anyway

Work out which update caused it, since you updated one thing at a time and know the order. Deactivate or roll back that specific plugin or theme rather than reaching for the nuclear option of restoring the entire backup — a full restore also undoes any content changes made since the backup was taken.

If the site will not load at all, start with fixing the white screen of death or recovering from a failed update, depending on what you see. Only restore the full backup if the specific rollback does not resolve it.

Automatic updates: how much to turn on

WordPress can apply certain updates by itself without anyone clicking anything. How much of that to enable is a judgement call:

Update type	Sensible default
Minor core updates (security and maintenance releases)	Leave automatic — these are narrowly scoped and tested extensively before release
Major core updates	Manual, so you control the timing and can check afterwards
Plugins and themes	Manual for anything central to the site; automatic is reasonable for minor utility plugins where a brief issue would not matter

See how WordPress auto-updates actually work for the detail behind each of these settings and where to control them.

A routine worth keeping

Check for updates on a fixed schedule rather than reacting to the red notification badge — weekly is reasonable for most sites. Take a backup first, update one thing at a time, check the site after each, and note what you changed. Following the same order every time is what makes updating boring, which is exactly what you want from it.