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With Safe Updates you’ll never worry about WordPress updates again!

Last week we wrote the Safe Updates announcement and why you should be excited about it. Today I am happy to announce launch of Safe Updates – an automated process that ensures your update of WordPress core, plugins and themes is safer than ever.

Best of all? Safe Updates is completely free for everyone with the premium Backup add-on!

There are many great things you could say about WordPress, but keeping it up to date is not one of them. You have to constantly update your websites, since exploits show up all of the time. At the same time, these updates require verification and tend to break your websites in so many ways. Having to go into each website and test it manually can be time consuming and not very efficient.

With Safe Updates this is no longer the case. With a click of a button you can perform updates on any website and we show you any errors you might have. We check the entire website for any changes, and let you make the decision if you want to accept them or roll back.

Safe Updates is a fantastic new feature that takes the pain out of your update cycles. We built it with the goal of helping you scale updates across dozens of websites.  Safe Updates will allow you to:

  • Reduce time spent updating stuff
  • Increase the success rate
  • Troubleshoot issues faster

Here is how to run Safe Updates

Safe Updates runs in 7 automated steps.

When you go to the individual website and have a look at the dashboard, on the Updates widget you will see an additional button “Safe Update“. Select the plugin(s) that you want to run the Safe Update on and by clicking the button you will initiate the first step – 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, and step three it creates a before screenshots of your website so that you can make a comparison when the update is complete.

Step four is running the updates. In step 5 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, and the final step, step seven is your option to go in and see the screenshot comparison. Screenshot comparison lets you drag the slider across and immediately see any changes to you website.

safe updates

Safe Update perks and pricing

 

Safe Updates are just another way that we want to make sure you have the best care for your websites, and keeping your client’s and your own websites protected. I sat down with our head of Engineering, Sergej Grivcov, and asked what he thought. He said,

Our incremental backups have made it possible for us to create this feature, because they only have to detect the changes on your website before running Safe Updates, making the whole process faster and more reliable.

Safe Updates is a free upgrade for everyone with the premium Backup add-on. If you are not using our premium backup solution, and already have a backup set up with someone else, by signing up for our premium backup starting at only $2 you get the Safe Updates feature. We think $2 per website for this feature is definitely worth it!

And if your website is hosted on GoDaddy servers, it’s free since all GoDaddy hosted sites get premium Backup and Uptime Monitor for free!

A few things to remember, for now Safe Updates do not support multisites, and they can be run on individual websites only. But, this is only the beginning of our Safe Updates feature, and like with all of our features we work on improving them and customizing them to best suit your needs.

Next step for Safe Updates

Our next step for this feature is automated/scheduled Safe Updates. Like with our Performance Check and Security Check, you will be able to schedule when you want to perform your Safe Updates.

We are getting one step closer to a perfectly safe way to fully update your website and keep track of any changes post updates – all of this with one click for hundreds of sites. 

We think this is the next big thing in WordPress website management, but we want to hear from you. What do you think? Test it and tell us all about it.

 

Nevena Tomovic Avatar

42 responses

  1. Hugo Avatar
    Hugo

    Maybe something for the future. The latest WooCommerce (3.0 I believe) update was a big update. Product pages didn’t load on one of my clients websites, after the update. However, with this screenshot feature, it wouldn’t see this change, since it only screenshots the homepage.

    Maybe we could add 2-3 web pages in the settings where screenshots should be taken? That way it can become a more reliable feature.

  2. Dean Avatar
    Dean

    I love ManageWP.com and I rarely have problems, although I’ve not been able to use the clone feature after several attempts, everything else is brill. I agree with Hugo, if any changes that are made away from the homepage aren’t displayed then this would only be useful for the instant restore. For example I recently updated a testimonial plugin that took down 5 of my websites, after manually checking each one I could see the changes but a screenshot wouldn’t show me this. Great move forward though, I look forward to automating more!! 🙂

  3. me@kevin-abrams.com Avatar
    me@kevin-abrams.com

    Agreed, really cool feature however plugins can often be used across the site and leveraged on different pages. I am also curious if this is only taking a screenshot of the top of the page or does it compare the whole homepage including below the fold?

  4. Ulrich Avatar
    Ulrich

    This is a nice feature but I feel it is not making use of the full potential.

    I think full page screenshots are needed and a way to define a list of additional pages to check too.

    Having the screenshot comparison only shown in the notifications is not ideal when working on updating multiple sites at the same time.

  5. jeffandape@gmail.com Avatar
    jeffandape@gmail.com

    Hugo has a point, predefined pages to compare is a must.

    Would like to add this to the main overview as well instead of just individual pages. The purpose of this is to speed up updates and confirming they go well. If we have to perform a “safe” update on each individual site… that defeats the purpose of reducing time if you have a bunch of sites.

  6. Donna McMaster Avatar
    Donna McMaster

    Thanks, Nevena! I’m curious. Your first paragraph says, “We check the entire website for any changes,” but the example only shows the home page. Are there other consistency checks that we’re missing?

  7. ian@addedlovely.com Avatar
    ian@addedlovely.com

    Great first step – look forward to it evolving. As others are saying if you can check multiple URLs (key templates) this would be great.

    Also be nice to auto diff the image and then you can highlight the area that has changed.

  8. Floyd Bucheit Avatar
    Floyd Bucheit

    As a non-technical person – it is too risky for me to make the changes that you suggest to speed-up and streamline our website. Do you have a service or someone you can recommend to help us out? Thanks !

  9. hr policies and procedures in dubai Avatar
    hr policies and procedures in dubai

    Really great post. Now i learn new things in the social media opportunity to growing business. Thanks for this article.

  10. karl_s Avatar
    karl_s

    More fantastic work from ManageWP!

    You guys (and gals) keep reinforcing my loyalty with every improvement. Would that other companies did the same!

    Thank you. 😀

  11. vostrader Avatar
    vostrader

    Good innovation. It worked great until I hit a 500 error and the site was no longer accessible for the restore and I had to go back to the server and restore from there.

  12. Steven Avatar
    Steven

    I would prefer you to allow each site to have a staging and live version so the updates are done on a staging site, manually checked and then rolled out on live once good. Even better would be to allow pointing of just the updates to a local version so they can be put through version control and deployed outside of Manage WP but with the updates still showing within the client reports.

  13. Paul Kouwen Avatar
    Paul Kouwen

    Love this new feature and for a simple website it is great.

    I also would like to point out how to check if the responsiveness of a website is not broken after an update.

    Keep up the good work.

    Paul

  14. Davide De Maestri Avatar
    Davide De Maestri

    That’s really nice but it doesn’t prevent error caused by plugin updates, do it? What happen if during update a plugin cause a 500 error?

  15. Todd Avatar
    Todd

    I like the idea here, but at this point I have concerns like others. I need the ability to check at least one different page/url for each plugin. Also some plugins are admin-facing only, but still must be checked. And some plugins effect UI, like menu dropdowns, popups, or toggled areas (like Gravity Forms conditional fields). I’m not sure how screenshots can help with these. Again, I like the general idea here — because WordPress updates are so annoying and time-consuming, due to the risk of compatibility problems — but this Safe Updates would only help if it’s as thorough as I am.

  16. justin.matt.web@gmail.com Avatar
    justin.matt.web@gmail.com

    Is it wrong that I love you guys more than my motorcycle for all of your hard work? Thank you for this!

  17. erikdblair@gmail.com Avatar
    erikdblair@gmail.com

    I am very pleased with this update. Adding more benefits increases my value perception and brand loyalty. Thank you for constantly raising the bar without raising the rates.

  18. simon@srhdesign.co.uk Avatar
    simon@srhdesign.co.uk

    This sounds amazing! Will it be available as a separate addon without having to use the Premium Backup addon?

  19. Roger Cook Avatar
    Roger Cook

    This worked well, until I selected multiple plugins and “update all”. Each time it updated the first plugin only and finished, whilst leaving the plugin overview showing the updates in progress status. Eventually, after a very long time, this times out and you can do the next, I only had three to do and it took ages – apart from the last one, which zoomed through. So it looks like there is an issue with more than one item being selected.

  20. jason@papertower.com Avatar
    jason@papertower.com

    Please consider making a form of this wherein the scanning is performed but we’re simply notified (via Dash and Slack) if the update caused issues. We have backups elsewhere and don’t want to pay a significant increase (percentage-wise) in price just to get this feature. It’s a very cool feature, but not really worth it for those of us that do our backups elsewhere.

  21. Abe Avatar
    Abe

    I love this feature 🙂 For now, it seems I can only run the safe update on each individual site. Or, am I missing something here? It would be nice to run the safe updates in the overview area? Right now I need to go to each individual site to run this update. Is this a future enhancement?

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