Always update WordPress plugins, seriously update them to the latest version. If you are worried it’ll magically break your site then try updating it on a staging site first.
What Is A Staging site
A staging site in a nutshell is a development site used for testing purposes. It’s basically an exact copy of your website but it’s only accessible and known by developers and it’s testers. The main reason for a staging site is to make sure updates don’t break the site. Now you might be wondering how to create a staging site. Pretty simple, use this easy-to-use plugin WP STAGING – Backup Duplicator & Migration – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org
Install and enable the WP Staging plugin, and run the wizard. It’ll create another website in the background while you go do other stuff or watch some puppies playing on youtube while you wait. After installing update the site and see if something breaks.
Support Engineer Tips
Always, ALWAYS ask for a staging site when possible while debugging their websites. We disable a lot of things and these tests raise the risk of crashing their site. Trust me I’ve done this once and it was a pain in the ass to apologize to the customer and explain what caused the crash.
Now there are a couple of instances where a staging site might not be needed, one of them is if the customer allows you to debug on their live website. So if it crashes it’s their fault as you stated it might crash.
Pro tip, if they provide the staging site ask for FTP access as well, the reason for this so you can always revert back the changes without having direct access to their server. In my case I usually test out snippets and remove some lines of code or plugin which has a high risk of breaking the site. Instead of always bugging the customers on resetting their website we can just do it ourselves and speed up the process.
Extra pro tip: ALWAYS ASK THEM TO TAKE A BACKUP.
Aight, that’s all i gotta say. Happy debugging!
