When we started working on the Safe Updates feature, we wanted to give you a better way to update WordPress websites. Now it’s time to tackle the other challenge: Running Safe Updates across multiple websites unattended, while you’re drinking coffee and watching Netflix.
Safe Updates has been launched in April 2017. We’ve constantly been tracking and improving the success rate, with 45,169 safe updates performed to date. And now that we rolled out the automated restore capability on July 20, we performed 34 automated rollbacks, with 100% success rate.
So we’ve got the reliability part nailed down. The next logical step is to take one of the things you love most about ManageWP – being able to run WordPress core, plugin & theme updates with a click, and apply it to Safe Updates.
When you log into your ManageWP dashboard, you will see the new Safe Updates button in the Updates widget, on the Overview tab. Mark whichever updates you want to run, and hit that button. The Updates widget will show you the progress for each website, so you’re free to shift focus on other matters.
Once the job is done, you’ll get a notification, so you can run through them to confirm that everything is in order.
Safe Updates in the future
If you’re using Safe Updates, you’re already doing your WordPress updates in the most reliable way. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t improve. We will keep improving the success rate and the issue detection capability, but we also need your feedback: are we doing a good job? What’s missing from Safe Updates? Is Blade Runner 2049 going to be a worthy sequel? We want to know.
FAQ
What is the difference between the regular bulk update and the bulk Safe Update?
Safe Update is more reliable. We do a backup of your sites just before the update, so you could roll back the update if something goes wrong. We also do a couple of different checks to confirm the success. The Safe Update steps are laid out here.
Should I use the visual comparison option when I run Safe Updates in bulk?
Depends. Visual comparison step takes extra time, so if you are in a hurry, skip it. On the other hand, if you leave the update unattended and come back after a while, you can afford to have that extra step.
Does Safe Updates cost extra?
No. It does require a premium Backup add-on on that website since we need the backup to roll back if something goes wrong, but Safe Updates itself does not cost extra – just like the Clone add-on.
Steven
I really wish you would allow tracking of updates outside of ManageWP so us developers can perform our own safe updates (testing them locally, then on staging and finally deploying to live via git and ssh) and have them added to the client reports. This is the only reason why our company has not brought ManageWP Premium and we have a lot of clients as do the bigger agency types so I imagine there are a lot of other companies are needing and waiting for this feature too. It’s like we’re being punished for doing things the right way whilst non developer types who are mostly just doing everything through ManageWP get to show off the updates to their clients in their reports even though they are not providing best practices with their services.
cliff
I will echo those who say they’d like to be able to schedule the unattended updates for a time of light load. That would be tremendous!
Donna McMaster
Thanks! I really appreciate how you all keep adding new features to make our jobs easier.
Jo Wagner
Super! Thanks a lot for all your hard work.
BarryTolson
Many moons ago when I backed up with ManageWP, via my own S3 account, I could schedule the time of the backup to the early hours of the morning, sometimes the backup broke the site, this has now changed with ManageWP sequential backup. Now wouldn’t it be great if I could do that with the updates so that they occur when the Client’s World, the Client too, is asleep?
If things do go wrong we then have time to correct this before the client becomes aware plus the bonus of not seeing ‘Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute’, during working hours.
Nemanja Aleksic
Would you be willing to turn on the automated backups indiscriminately, or would you rather preselect a set of updates and schedule them?
BarryTolson
Let me get this straight I meant plugin/theme updates. I’m very happy with the backup system as it is.
I’d be happy to just set it to go for all sites at a specified time and sort any mess out later. At the moment the final act before going to bed is to update all the sites. I then check the following morning if things need fixing.
Nemanja Aleksic
Thanks for the additional info, makes sense. I’ll see what we can do to make this happen.
info
This is a fantastic update and seems to work brilliantly, thanks guys 😉
BRanden
is it possible to schedule these so it’s totally hand’s off? if not that would be great…
Nemanja Aleksic
We’re currently considering this, but we still need more user feedback on the use case.
vee
+1 for scheduled, automatic backups and updates 🙂
Mmulder
Does Safe Update delete posts when performing a rollback ?
Nemanja Aleksic
Safe Update creates a restore point just before the update, so it would be very unlikely for a post to be published between that restore point and the update. But yes, if you roll back, all changes made to the site after the restore point is made will be deleted.
Ian
Great work! It seems, however, that the screenshots you’re taking aren’t full screenshots and only contain what’s above the fold. They used to be more full shots. Can we get the full-length screenshots back please? 🙂
Nemanja Aleksic
They should be full page. The next time you compare screenshots, could you check if there’s a small scroll bar on the right edge? It’s easy to miss if you’re not expecting to see it.
Johnny
Awesome, now speed up website maintenance even more! Thank you – Awesome people and great work!
Dominik
Do the Safe Updates feature delete WP Cache (W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache etc.) after the upgrade and before taking the screenshot?
Nemanja Aleksic
Yes, cache is deleted so you could see the actual website, not its outdated image.
jillyn
So happy to see this functionality released! Thank you!