Some of you may have noticed yesterday that my blog was down (or you didn’t, unless you’re family and check it every day). Anyway, it was. What happened? I updated a plugin.
If you’re on WordPress, you’re probably familiar with that little red notification bubble telling you one of your plugins has an update. Most of them get regular updates and improvements, and it’s never been an issue for me before. I check the box, click update, and go on with my day. Not the case yesterday.
Basically, the developer of one of my plugins (not the one seen above) released a faulty upgrade… and it completely messed up my site. I couldn’t get into anything. When they released a fix a short time later, I was already out of luck. No more blog.
I won’t bore you with the whole process of how I got it back up (unless you want to email me and ask), but suffice it to say it was a stressful day. Lessons learned:
- Make sure your site is backed up regularly to a place you can get to if it goes down. Thankfully, I have backups through my hosting provider (BlueHost), so I was set on this. I was able to get to my backups even though I couldn’t get into my dashboard.
- Utilize all your resources. I eventually got it back up with the help of a blogging facebook group I joined maybe two weeks ago. I was in a few already, but I’m so glad I recently joined this one. Between some fixes they recommended and one last check by BlueHost, I was back up.
- Wait to update your plugins. If I hadn’t updated immediately, I probably never would have had this issue, since the developer released a fix within hours of when I updated. From now on, I’m giving any updates a few days before I hit that update button. Just in case.
What lessons have you learned from blogging on WordPress?
4 Responses
Glad it’s back up! I’m the worst at updating my plug-ins.
Me too! And now I’m waiting at least 24 hours to update mine. That was not a fun day.
ahh I’m new to WordPress so this is super helpful!!!
Oh good! I’m just waiting 24 hours – I figure that’ll get any bugs out!