How To Manually Upgrade WordPress To The Latest Version

While many web hosts nowadays such as GoDaddy and HostGator provide software that will automatically update your blog for you there are hosts that dont. WordPress releases updates to their publishing platform to introduce new features as well as fixing bugs and other issues. Unfortunately there are still a lot of people out there that have old versions of WordPress!

Not only are they missing out on some great new features, older versions have security exploits which could enable somebody to hack into your blog! Which is hopefully something that you don’t want, so I decided to write up this post to help those that have older versions and to make sure that people keep their versions up to date.

Of course there are also plugins that will automatically update your WordPress blog for you. However I prefer to rely on something that I know will always work and will never have a conflicting issue. Plus once you have it down, it goes pretty damn quick and it is honestly quite easy to do. So with that said, lets get started!

Downloading the latest version of WordPress

Of course to update your WordPress installation you need to have the latest files. The latest version of WordPress can always be found on the download page of WordPress.org. As of this post the latest version only has updates to 2 files however they still provide the entire WordPress installation just because. So, head on over to the download page and download the latest version.

Accessing your WordPress directory

Now, there are a few different ways to go about this. You can use your web hosts file manager program which most should have. Or you can also use an FTP program to connect to the server hosting your blog’s files. I personally use the latter method and the software that I use is FileZilla. FileZilla is an open source FTP program meaning it is 100% free to use and you don’t have to pay any money for it, my kind of software!

So either download FileZilla or open up the FTP program of your choice and connect to your web server. I am assuming you know how to create an account and such using FileZilla, if not learn how to setup an FTP account with FileZilla.

Uploading files into your WordPress directory

Now that you have the latest version of WordPress and you are connected to your blog’s server it is time to actually upload the files. When you download the latest update from WordPress they have the files zipped up in a .ZIP folder. Normally before I upload the folder to my server I unzip it onto my desktop. Once you have unzipped the folder to your computer open it up and then open up the wordpress folder inside. Here you will find the actual files to the WordPress installation.

So take these files, select them (Ctrl+A) and drag them into your WordPress installation directory on your FTP program.

Your FTP program will probably ask whether or not you want to overwrite particular files. FileZilla has an option to overwite only the files that are newer which can save you time because it will only upload the files that need to be uploaded. In case of WordPress 2.6.3 only 2 files are being updated instead of the 564 that normally make up the entire WordPress installation.

Once the files are all uploaded you should be up and running with the latest version of WordPress! If you have any questions or issues that arise while trying to update WordPress, leave me a comment below or send me an email and I will do what I can to get your issue sorted out.