I won’t upgrade my WordPress blog because I am afraid of breaking it.
Does this sounds familiar?
In this article I will show you how to break this fear and start doing more yourself if you want it.
Why this type of article?
Well, I was reading The Flinch by Julien Smith and it occurred to me how many times I’ve heard my clients avoiding to take action because they were afraid of breaking something.
Fear it’s natural, especially when it’s at stake something you have invested a lot of time and money in.
That it’s why you need to take some measures that will help you be more confident in yourself.
Let’s say that you want to install a plugin, tweak the design, upgrade WordPress or test a new signup form.
If you are like most of us you will be put off by the thought that you might break something.
But if you will make sure you can repair what might break, you are covered. Here’s how…
Backup
The first and most important thing you need to do when you want to try something new is to backup. Backups are really useful not only for testing, but also to have something to restore in case of server failure or hacking.
I’ve heard a lot of stories where people lost months of work and money because the didn’t have a backup. Plus, it happened to me once, so I am speaking from experience.
In this case you will need to backup your website before testing, tweaking or upgrade anything.
To do this, just install one of the WordPress plugins that help you backup your site.
Create a Sandbox
Better than a backup is to work locally or on a different instance on the server and not on the live version of your website.
This way nothing will get lost and if something breaks it will not affect your main website.
Then if everything works you can go ahead and apply the changes to your main website.
Learn and Test
Once you get your setup ready and you are sure that you have a backup in place or your work locally, it’s time to have some fun and try new things that you’ve been afraid of.
You may want to learn how to update your logo or how you can change the spacing of your articles.
Or you may want to learn some CSS and change your footer. In order to do this you will need to learn how to do it. Obviously, right?
You will need to look for a WordPress blog, a Web Analytics book or an SEO guide and search the things your want to learn.
The Internet is full of information now and you will be able to find anything you want.
Then, once you’ve gathered the needed knowledge, you can start to apply what you’ve learnt. It’s as simple as that.
In Closing
I hope that this article helped you take action and I am glad if I contributed to that.
If the article helped, do share with us what you’ve accomplished or post your questions in the comments below if you have any.
Eugen,
You hit the nail on the head with the “fear of screwing things up” idea. It’s so true for many if us who sort-of know what we are doing with the back end of our sites.
How does one go about creating another instance to test with?
I have used MAMP on my Mac, and it was pretty simple to setup. But I always wondered if my hosting server were setup differently, therefore my MAMP-based local changes may not be the same as a host-based change.
Where do most problems happen? With plugins? Themes? WordPress database files?
Once again, thanks for the great tips.
Best,
David
Thanks David!
What can be different between your hosting provider and your MAMP installation are the PHP and MySQL versions.
But if they have older versions than your MAMP installation this means that they don’t take security seriously and you should look into changing the provider.
Using MAMP it’s a really good option in your case for testing purposes.
As for what issues can occur, I would recommend you to test new plugins and updates. Sometimes plugins add conflicts between each other when you update them or install new ones.
Plus, remember to backup!