Since we released the Safe Updates feature we have gotten a lot of positive feedback from you all. Making updates safer is something that we have been prioritizing recently, and right now we are back with an additional perk; the rollback option. In a nutshell, if we detect any type of issue during the update, you are now able to enjoy a fully automatic rollback to its original state.
Safe Updates ensures your update of WordPress core, plugins and themes is safer than ever. Let’s quickly recap how Safe Updates are performed.
It’s a 7 step process:
- Step one – creating a restore point for your website
- Step two is sending HTTP requests to the website before the actual update to make sure everything is working smoothly on your website
- Step three – creates a before screenshots of your website
- Step four is running the updates
- Step five we send a HTTP request again to check your website response after the update
- Step six we take an after update screenshot of your website
- Step seven is your option to go in and see the screenshot comparison
What’s the rollback option?
The rollback option is an automatic restore in case something goes wrong during the update. The Safe Updates will follow the usual 7 step process, and at the end if we do detect any issues with your website you can choose to automatically restore your website to it’s previous state (to your latest restore point). When we ping your website if we get a status code between 400 and 599, we will initiate the automatic restore.
With the added rollback option you can be sure that ManageWP has your back when it comes to updates. Not only do we have the security of our Safe Updates, but now we have the automatic rollback, which ensures that your website is restored in case of any issues.
How do I set up the rollback option?
When the first time after introducing the rollback option you run Safe Updates you will get the following screen.
Automatically the rollback is enabled. That means unless you check the box, we will go ahead and run the automatic restore on the selected website. If you don’t want to enable automatic restore make sure you check the box.
The global settings for automatic restore on Safe Updates can be adjusted by going to Advanced Settings. There you will see two options, one giving you the rollback on all website.
You will also be able to adjust automatic restore on a per website basis. To do that you can go to the individual website, select the Website Settings and there you will find the Safe Update tab. You can choose to apply global setting or to customize them for the website in question.
Rollback notifications
When a rollback is performed you will get a notification telling you all of the details of your rollback. When it was performed, on what website we detected the issues, and to what restore point we rolledback (it will always be your latest restore point).
Next up – bulk Safe Updates
When we talk about Safe Updates, the most requests you sent us is the ability to do updates in bulk. You’ve got 20,50, 100 websites – it does not matter, it’s still a matter of a few clicks. You can focus on important stuff while Safe Updates quietly takes care of your updates in the background
Feedback
What do you think about our Safe Update automatic restore? Let us know how you get along with this feature, and how we can improve it so that you will never again have to worry about website updates. We aim to have the safest updates in town!
Steve
I like this feature, it’s immensely helpful, though I do have a couple of comments:
1. It took me some time to figure out that “rollback” and “restore” mean the same thing(?) in terms of features. These 2 terms are used interchangeably in numerous places and honestly created the confusion in the first place. It would help if it were more consistent.
2. Initiating Safe Updates manually from a website dashboard doesn’t require FTP settings, but scheduling Safe Updates does (either on a per website or global basis)? This doesnt make sense to me, given that once the manual initiation has started, it completes automatically and would rollback based on Advanced settings… Or am I missing something? The only thing I can think of, is that in the case of a failed update that you initiated manually, you would then be asked for FTP details in order to restore from the last backup.
Thanks..
LiveMNC
Great !
This is nice feature. It’s helpful for all of us, because we required safe update and secure restore process.
adrian
Hey guys,
Quick question: does the user have the ability to rollback on it’s own ( but not from the latest restore point – because that could be a month ago for the free backup ) ?
My question is related to the graphic or functionality distortions that may occur while updating some of the plugins.
Thanks
Nemanja Aleksic
Sure, at any time you can go to your Backup screen, pick a restore point in the calendar, and roll back to that point in time.
It’s useful when you realize that something broke after days, or even weeks went by.
Amparo
: ) Hi Nevena,
Thank you for this new feature! In Step One, do we create the Restore Point for our websites, or are restore points automatically created by GoDaddy with this new feature?
luca
Yes, you guys are awesome…
Next on the list the ability to update plugins if the plugin is present in dropbox, rather than having to select the sites, go to add plugin, go to external storage and install from there :). If you have many website you need to grab a screensgot of the sites that need the update and then go and select the sites you need, which is a bit cumbersome and annoying..
Keep up the good work 😀
Cheers,
Luca
Anthony
Love it!! ManageWP is amazing 🙂
The one thing I would like to see with ManageWP though is a ‘features requests’ area, where uses can post features that they would like in future releases, and others can vote on them.
Thanks
Nevena Tomovic
That’s a great idea. I will pass it on certainly
info
I love this feature Nevena. Thank you.
I have a question now, I’ve been pushing this for a while but haven’t gotten a response. Can we get maintenance and coming soon global templates? It’s a brilliant part of ManageWP for me, and currently I have to copy my coming soon/maintenance templates over to each new site every time i add a new site. I have about 30 sites on my work account and about 75 on my personal account, so you can tell how that gets repetitive!
Nevena Tomovic
Hey yep I see exactly what you mean. When you say global, do you mean bulk activating maintenance mode on websites, or the ability to customize your own templates and then apply them on more than one website. Or both? 🙂
mike
This looks like a very cool feature I will have to give it a test drive, Thank you.
Something that might be of benefit would be a setting to be notified if the Update Failed and then allow the user to make the choice of doing the Restore Manually.
Just my 2¢,
Mike
Nevena Tomovic
Hey Mike,
If you don’t enable the automatic restore you will get the option of restoring manually if something goes wrong. You get a notification with the issues detected and then you can choose to either restore or not.
Hope that answers your question.
Nevena