Source: Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/a-detailed-guide-to-wordpress-website-updating.html

Updating your WordPress website is good for its security, content and data integrity and also for good user experience. Each time your website goes down, is suspended, hacked, defaced, exploited and slowed down, it comes with an unpredictable but definitely unfavorable cost – users hate it. Sometimes, it makes your users frightened and they never want to visit again. This underscores the very essence of tight security for every website. Failing to keep your WordPress website updated exposes it a security loophole.

In this post, we focus on WordPress updates and strategies you need to adopt to keep your WordPress installation up-to-date.

1. How to identify an outdated WordPress plugin

You can manually scan your WordPress website to identify outdated plugins. The second way to identify an outdated plugin is to run the No Longer in Directory plugin.

2. How to Manually Scan WordPress for Outdated Plugin

WordPress has built-in plugins and also uses some third party plugins to add functionality to the site. To know whae an update is available for a plugin, you need to monitor your website.

For WordPress core, if a new version of WordPress is available, you can’t miss it, as you will see a message at the top of almost every page of your administration panel. You will even see another message at the bottom of these pages!

For plugins and themes, it is different, but if they are available on WordPress.org, then the CMS can tell you if a new version is released. All you have to do is visit the ‘Updates’ section of the WordPress dashboard.

You will see right next to this entry in the menu, how many updates are available. This number also appears in the bar at the top of your screen on all the pages of your website when you are logged in. If this number doesn’t appear, good news: WordPress and all your plugins and themes are up to date!

3. Find Updates with No Longer in Directory Plugin

The No Longer in Directory plugin is an excellent tool for maintaining the plugins in your WordPress site. It performs two checks:

Has the plugin been removed from the WordPress.org plugin directory?
If the plugin is in the directory, is it outdated (not been updated in over two years)?

The plugin will check the plugins on your site and list those that match either of those criteria. It only scans plugins that are listed in the WordPress.org, so it won’t scan premium (purchased) plugins. You should manually check to make sure those are still maintained by visiting the plugin author’s site.

3.1 How to use the No Longer in Directory Plugin

Install and activate it.

In the WordPress admin menu, under Plugins, click No Longer in Directory. No Longer in Directory only runs when you manually run it; it doesn’t automatically run in the background. So, as a site owner, you should manually run it every time you want to chec for updates (unless you’re covered by our WordPress Maintenance Service).

4. What to Do With Outdated Plugins

If you detect an outdated plugin, you can take the following action to address the problem:

If you don’t need the functionality that the plugin provides, delete it.
If you need the functionality that the plugin provides, replace it with an actively maintained alternative.

Hopefully you can find an alternative in the directory. If not, you’ll need to consider having a developer create and maintain one.

5. Why is Plugin Maintenance So Important?

We have in the introductory section tired to explain this point. Plugins that aren’t actively maintained can cause security vulnerabilities and compatibility issues, which could break your site.

6. Updating WordPress with a Single Click

Since WordPress version 2.7, it is possible to update WordPress quickly and easily with one click method. This method is preferred, as WordPress will automatically download and replace the right files by itself. That way, you avoid errors and save a lot of time.

To update WordPress in one click, go in the ‘Updates’ entry of the ‘Dashboard’ menu. If you don’t have the latest available version of WordPress, you will see the message ‘An updated version of WordPress is available’ before two buttons.

By clicking on the second button, you will download a ZIP archive containing the latest version of WordPress. You will then be able to create a new installation of WordPress or manually update your current installation.

The first button is the one click method. If you click on the ‘Update Now’ button, WordPress will lead you to another page which will inform you of the progress: automatically, it will download the latest version, deactivate your plugins, replace the right files and reactivate your plugins. All you have to do is wait just a few seconds or minutes.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/a-detailed-guide-to-wordpress-website-updating.html