Updating Your WordPress Website by “Sandboxing”

Today I want to introduce you to an updating technique called “sandboxing”. This is the maintenance process that we use over here at WP Butler. So let’s get into what it means to be sandboxing websites.

If you want to know more about our maintenance service than head on over to wpbutler.com.au/sitecare and check out our monthly plans where we take care of it all for you.

Sandboxing Websites

Now, even the most experienced WordPress developers can run into problems when they update plugins.

So you’re probably wondering why are they getting caught out? The reason is plugin incompatibility. This is where a plugin created by one developer doesn’t work well when installed alongside a plugin created by another developer. The plugins just don’t end up playing nicely together which can cause things to break.

To prevent things potentially breaking on the live site after doing updates, you should first his all plugin updates on a staging site or what we call a sandbox environment.

Now if you haven’t heard or you have to come across these terms before, both of them are just simply copies of your website. In this staging or sandbox environment you have the opportunity to review the site and catch any errors before going live with the updates. This is particularly important when running updates on an ecommerce site. Sandboxing websites is a great way to troubleshoot issues without pain.

Can’t stress this highly enough as any issues on an ecommerce website can in fact end up costing you sales. In fact, take WooCommerce for example, which is the most popular ecommerce platform on the planet. WooCommerce states that all significant updates are performed in a sandbox environment before applying the updates to the live site. So if these guys are telling you it’s a good idea you should probably take their advice.

Additional Tips

And here’s another little tip about updates. If you have more than one website admin, make sure any other website admin does the following. Make sure they don’t just go ahead and do the updates when they see them in the dashboard. It’s best to leave the update responsibility to just one person. Multiple admins is a very common way that plugin updates can get out of hand. And it can cause other problems on a website aside from plugin issues.

So if you want to make sure your website plugins are updated properly and to take the hassle out of website maintenance once and for all, you might just want to head on over to wpbutler.com.au/sitecare and check out our monthly plans. We’ll catch you next time.