 I'm very excited to be here. I live in Austin, Texas. So I made a nice nice trip up I was in I was a last week. I was at work at Scranton and word camp Boston doing the same talk So y'all are getting a nice evolved version It should be good I'm not gonna use the mic just because I have a pretty loud voice anyway. So might as well just use use that Yeah, if you really want me to yes, so all right You you got it. So here's the deal Because I'm uh, I'm a Is it on I think it's on on on there we go. So Let me apologize in advance because I'm a white kid from the suburbs in the 90s I watched a lot of gangster rap and Basically by the time I a microphone was first put in my hands ever My natural thing was to just go like this And so all my being I fight to hold it like this But as soon as I get wrapped up in my presentation, it's gonna go straight back to like this So yeah, yeah, I want to just warn everybody. That's kind of how it's gonna go So I will literally do my best to do this, but I mean it like probably in two minutes I'm just gonna be up here like this. So yeah, it's it's plagued me all my life But what are you gonna do? All right, cool. So You can follow me on Twitter at slides out later Yeah, let's dig right in. So there I am. There was me with my 20s haircut. I Currently work at WP engine, which is a managed WordPress host If you since this is the all-users group if you haven't heard it yet this this word camp Definitely get your site to a managed WordPress platform because they do a lot of the things That will surprise you about WordPress for you. It'll be a lot easier. There's tons of them. Just go do your research They're great. But anyways, I'm the director of customer experience operations So I care so much about our customers and our kind of support employees and make sure they have everything They need to do their job to provide the world-class support that we are known for That's one of the reasons why I did this talk because at WP engine I am in charge of WordPress upgrades across our entire platform And so I have a lot of knowledge around that and I said, you know what I want to give back to the community I want to make sure people understand what upgrades are all about why they're important before that I was the senior manager of cloud operations at Rackspace hosting So I have a good hosting background And then I went to I got a my bachelors in business management from UTSA That's like the UNC of Asheville for the University of Texas University, Texas, Antonia So why should you listen to me? Well, I started it off. I own the entire WordPress upgrade process at WP engine I've been upgrading WordPress since version 3.5 for some of you that might not be a long time But it's really like two and a half years. So it kind of is a long time considering WP engines only be a company for five years I've handled every upgrade deferral request for the last two plus years And what that is is any time a customer says I can't upgrade my WordPress version for whatever reason they would contact me and Tell me their reason and I would have a conversation with them and try and help them get to the point where they could upgrade it and understand it So I've heard literally thousands of reasons why someone can't upgrade their site and a lot of them are who we But we'll talk about that a little later And at WP engine we've performed over a million upgrades just while I'm there It's probably two million since before I was even there. But yeah, we've got a lot of experience upgrading WordPress So quick disclaimer my advice is based on my experience and what I have seen work for customers Really that kind of just leads to every site is unique So I'm talking in some generalities, but these generalities have worked for hundreds of thousands of sites, but every site is unique I'm going to give you some rules here. There's most likely an exception to every rule Mainly because of number two and then to do this what I'm going to kind of walk you through You're going to need to dedicate some time, but I'm telling you it's well worth it and I'll prove that value Later down the road But yeah, let's talk about upgrades. So what are people saying about WordPress upgrades? There are so many updates. I can't keep up. So there's coming at me left and right. How can I ever be ready? WordPress upgrades always break my sites always hands down. They always break my sites Most of the time that is very false if it is true It usually means that someone's done something very bad like modified the core WordPress files, which is a huge universal no-no That's probably the only rule that there is no exception to just FY How could I ever know what an update will do to my site? That's a very fair question You know some functional upgrades can contain like a hundred and forty different changes. That's a lot of changes How could you ever know what that's going to do your site? Well, I'll show you here I don't need the upgrade because my site just works. So that's one of my faves I love hearing that from people. I guess that's kind of like saying Well, you know what we all have cell phones. It's kind of like saying I don't want to update my my iPhone because my site just works But if any of you have tried that strategy very quickly You will not be able to start downloading new apps things will start stop working You'll run into bugs that were actually fixed with the new version. So, you know, that's an interesting one But it's just not it's not a real reason And then I always stay one version behind so they can work out the bugs. I love that one, too. That's That's pretty cool. I don't I can't I mean there's so many crazy analogies that would kind of stay that way I don't want to upgrade my pacemaker because I want to stay one back So I can work out the bugs. But um, yeah, this is I mean, this is this is a lot of the feedback I've heard I'd say by far probably these five kind of just comments represent Probably about 70% of really all the reasons people have said why they can't upgrade WordPress and You know what what it kind of boils down to is when you've got these thoughts in your mind You get what I like to call button anxiety You don't want to push that upgrade button. You're very afraid You know, you're I mean you're literally those things that I just put up there racing through your mind What is it going to do to my side? It's always going to break my side I don't know what is going to happen and that's a real thing. I mean button anxiety is real believe me I'm you know, I've talked to tons of customers who have it and But usually it's it's not just because of the button This quote over here is one of my favorites when it kind of comes that it has nothing to do about with WordPress But I found it and it kind of works for every external struggle. There's an internal struggle look inside first So I mean the struggle is real. That's for sure if you think about if you have the mindset that every time I upgrade it's going to break my sight well, that means that you're gonna have to do more work after the fact and Most likely the reason you started your site was because it's part of a business and that business probably has a completely other thing to do So, you know, you could be working on a marketing campaign to get more sales for your business Or you could be getting ready for your WordPress upgrade that in some people's mind. That's a no-brainer. I'm doing the marketing Right, I'm just gonna make sales. Who cares about my website right now. I got to get these sales going You know the struggle is real guys There's there's trade-offs to be made and a lot of the times when people don't make an informed trade-off That's where that button anxiety comes into play, right? They don't know what they're getting into so it's like, you know Is the trade-off I can't do my marketing campaign for a day for a week for a month How long am I going to be you know stuck fixing my site? And you know, it's real everything here is real But what I'm going to do here in the rest of this kind of presentation is give you a five-step plan For how when it's time to push that button, you know exactly what's gonna happen And you know what trade-offs you might have to make and then you can make your informed decision And as my wife will tell you I love to make informed decisions Anyways, let's get started with what is an upgrade so you know I found myself making this presentation, and I said you know what I bet a lot of people don't understand the full upgrade It kind of the world right which makes a lot of sense because when I started WP engine I sure didn't understand it. I was like, what do you mean? There's this there's this And this is this right here is one of the real big reasons why people say there are so many updates I can't keep up and I'll show you why so there are three kinds of upgrades The first and this is this is the scary one right this is the one that really kind of could break your site And this is the one that you got to get ready for and I'll show you how it's a feature or function upgrade I mean it's an upgrade that does just that it adds or removes features and functionality So something that was working before might not work the same way So your site might kind of not work in that way. There's lots of different things that can go on in one of these I promise you the WordPress community is not trying to break things on purpose just so you have to go fix them It's always for the greater good And there's usually a lot of context around the changes that I'm going to show you kind of how you can get those and understand more So that's the scary one The next kind is a maintenance upgrade So this is an upgrade that fixes bugs it does not add or remove features or functionality And this is what you call a point or dot release So if you look at like right now we're on version 4.2.3 So the last number is what changes in a maintenance kind of release so 4.2.x And then the third kind is a security upgrade and this is a hot topic right now a security update just came out this last week So it's an upgrade that closes security vulnerabilities. It does not add or remove features or functionalities Unless the functionality itself is vulnerable. So that one right there that happened this week Right WordPress released the security update. It was to do with a cross scripting site vulnerability And what they did was they changed the way short codes worked in WordPress now that broke thousands of sites now to be fair There are millions of WordPress sites. So we're talking about it broke a very small amount I think it WP engine out of like 300,000 sites. I think we saw maybe 15 customers come in and say well This broke my site. So you kind of win the lottery in that case But the thing is it still was a vulnerability, right? Like yeah, it may have broke and when I say break their site It didn't like take the whole site down like something didn't work this form didn't work or this slider didn't work or something like that So it's not like your whole website was down, but the thing is that's a trade-off that you should be comfortable making You want a secure site which is worse your contact us form doesn't work for a week while you know somebody fixes it or your whole site gets hacked and I mean, you know your sites down. It's malicious it Google tags it as malware and you lose all your SEO like that is Catastrophic and if you think of a big business that is absolutely unacceptable that can never happen So the big enterprise customers WP engine love that we do automatic security upgrades as soon as they're released Because they want because as soon as that security upgrade does get released There are thousands of jerks out there that figure out what the vulnerability is and then they script it and then they just Tear across the internet trying to find sites that are vulnerable and then they go and take them over and I mean That's dumb, but it's the world we live in so those security upgrades are really important Those are also point or dot releases just like I said the one release this week 4.2.3 The three is what changed. We were on 4.2.2 All right, so now you have an understanding of what kind of upgrades there are out there which ones are scary and which ones aren't I'll tell you that kind of at the end of this you should be when a maintenance or security upgrade is released You should be like jumping for joy because you know that one your site's gonna get more Secure or two there are bugs that WordPress fixed and things are gonna get faster and more efficient So let's talk about kind of how the upgrade process works before it ever hits your site And is kind of ready for the button push so you've got core contributors These are the amazing people who really don't get paid that are Just working on WordPress core all the time making it better Including functionality, you know building things making it more secure then you've got the community That's all y'all and myself and we are saying things like well We really want native ability to do custom fields in WordPress, right? And if enough people are saying that well the core contributors are gonna go build that right because it's you know They're building for the community and when they do that It becomes a beta release and that little n means because there's multiple versions So there's like beta one beta two beta three multiple betas can happen before it kind of goes on to the next set where You've got your beta and then awesome people in the community and the core contributors They all test it they kind of you know update staging versions of their sites and they test it and then they file bug reports They're like whoa. Hey, this doesn't work. This doesn't work. This doesn't work So they find all these bug reports and then once The WordPress community and the core contributors and the foundation feels like all right. We're good. There are no more bugs This is what we want. We've got all these features into it It becomes a release candidate and a release candidate is what it basically that's WordPress saying to the world All right, this is done. We think Everybody go test it as much as you can and if we finally bugs will fix them But we really think this is good to go and hey if we don't hear anything back in probably a couple weeks We're shipping it as a real upgrade All right, so there's kind of your how does an upgrade become an upgrade kind of thing like the member back in the day Like how does a bill become a law? I'm just a bill right? So this is I'm just an upgrade. Nobody remembers that Well, I'm just kidding. Okay. Good. All right one two all right cool so With that I want to get to kind of a this is near and dear to me I alluded to it about upgrading your iPhones and everything but maintenance is a must right and this shouldn't be a new Topic to anybody who who owns a house raise your hand who owns a house here? Oh lots of us Would you let your house do that if you knew that you had a hole in a you know in a wall or in a pipe Would you just go? Well, I don't want to fix it. I don't have enough time, right? Well, that's not true because your house is very important to you So you would never let it get that way. I'm willing to bet that just the same amount if not more own a car Right, you would never let your car do that and then it just broke on the side of the road and you know People are like, hey, do you have a car? You're like, of course I do it's over off You know 240 just on the side of the road. It doesn't work, but I have one. That's that's like what you're doing to your website You're like, yeah, I have a website. Oh cool. Is it up to date? Is it safe? Is it secure? Well, no, no, it just sits there and you know, it's all weird, but it's cool Like I have a website. That's not that's no business wants to hear that, right? How many of y'all know that guy the guy who just won't fix his computer instead He just straps on a fan to the side and just runs it, right? So I'm guilty in college I had a Pentium 3 laptop and afterwards I'm half guilty afterwards they realized that paying threes can't ever go into laptops because they overheat But if I wanted to use my laptop I literally had to put a box fan on my lap and then the computer on top of it Otherwise it would overheat in about 25 minutes. So it's crazy. So hey, I'm guilty of it, too But then I kind of realized well the computer is really really important to me So I bought a new one and then I mean, I'm sorry if you have a boat Because you know you're paying a lot of money for it But you would never let a hole in your boat go right somebody's like, hey man, you got a boat Of course I do half of it's above water. We can sit on it and fish No big deal like that's not a thing guys We're laughing at this but this is exactly what people are doing to their websites and in some cases Their website is their livelihood So forget the fact that a boat is just something for fun unless you're like a fisherman or a shrimp burrito And that is your livelihood in which case they would never let their boat do that But y'all are doing that with your websites and it's it's your number one source of income sometimes So maintenance is a must now if you do that Here's what you get you get a well-oiled machine You've got more horsepower. It's as fast as possible. It is tuned perfectly so efficient You've got every bug fix that WordPress has to offer. So it's running smooth All the options feature rich right things, you know I can't even tell you how many times people are like, wow I really wish WordPress did this and then we kind of look in their site and we're like well It does you just didn't upgrade it can do it just push the upgrade button You're gonna be able to do it people don't understand you get all the options and then Best part is you get that fancy car alarm. All right, if someone even looks at your car it goes You know, you're nice and secure your sites not getting hacked Right and hopefully you're on a managed WordPress host and then their security's rock solid and then hey, you're good You don't have to think about it. So it's really easy for me to get up here and kind of explain to you Hey, here's what it looks like. Here's you know, here's the American dream, right? No big deal go do it But it's not easy to go do it I've had lots of customers who have said like well, how how can I do that? Like I understand that's right on on paper. You are a hundred percent right and I agree with you But how can I ever be ready for all that? So that's really what this the rest of this presentation is about It's the reason I created this was I want to go to as many WordCamps like hand and give you guys a Five-step way to be ready for WordPress upgrades so that you can say you're driving that well old machine So let's dig into that So step one Get to know your site. So there's a lot of things here So you you are free to write down if you want you can take pictures of slides people do that too But I'll also be posting the slides so just in case you don't want to do all that But anyways step one get to know your site. So this is important a lot of people don't know their site They think they do but they don't and it starts with cataloging your plugins So you just it's really easy you just go ahead and check out all the plugins You can go to the plugins page and you can actually just copy and paste right into like Excel, right? You leased each plug-in inside of something like Excel or numbers or open office sheets or whatever you want to use and Then you rank them you make a column called rank and you rank them high medium low in Respect to the criticality to your site. So what that means is if you're running Let's say you're selling hair bands, right? You make the best hair band in the world and you sell them on your site So a plug-in like WooCommerce is probably a high Criticality because it does your sales But a plug-in like a retina plug-in that make sure that your images are in retina when a retina MacBook goes to it Don't kid yourself. That's not a high priority, right? If the retina plug-in stopped working today, would your business fail? Would your site stop doing its job? No, it wouldn't it wouldn't be as nice. I agree, but it's not high criticality and Don't fool yourself Stay stay true to this because if you call everything high it just means more work in the end But if you're if you're real and upfront about it, it's gonna be a lot better Place a few sentences of notes on the front end functionality. It's real easy I'll go through a whole example with one of my sites and Then provide exact instructions for how to reproduce the functionality So it might you know if it's WooCommerce it might be something like order a product, right? And make sure it actually does it and you get an email as a site owner and everything like that But let's let's do it right talk is cheap. Let's do it. This is my site. This is my wedding site that I built I Tell you what when we first I mean me and my wife got engaged and we knew we had a male site One day I come home from work and she's like I built us a wedding site on wicks and I was like No, like come on I worked for a wordpress company like we can't build our son Everybody at work that's going to the wedding is gonna make fun of me. And so I mean she obliged and you know This is the one when I got she got to pick the flowers and the cake and everything But I got to pick the website platform guys. So that's a pretty big win for me So here it is. All right, so we'll go down real quick This is all the plugins that I run in the site. It starts with a kismet, which is not even activated I'm a kismet is the best way of mitigating comment spam We haven't turned comments on in the website, but I kept it there just in case I do but boom a kismet Isn't even activated. So low priority right off the bat, right? Contact form seven so what contact form seven does for my site is it's a contact us page Where friends and family can contact us if they have questions about the wedding or questions about the venue or questions about Since everybody that we invited we knew I know they have either me or my wife's cell phone So if contact form seven didn't work, I probably wouldn't be that worried about it. They could call me Everyone knows how to get a hold of me So I'm gonna call that low right the function the functionality of the site Which is kind of for the wedding and the RSVP and stuff that still works if that plugin doesn't work So it's low Then we've got layer slider. So all that does is on the home page. It's got It's got a real easy just floats through and it just shows pictures. It's literally just scrolls through the engagement photos and stuff once again My wife might call that high I'd call it low, but hey happy wife happy life. So I'm gonna meet in the middle. We'll call it medium So the layer sliders medium Love it. So that literally just adds like a like it link like on Facebook But it adds a love it link to all my pages. I am gonna call that low RSVP and wedding invitation so we asked people to RSVP via the website and That's an important one. So that's high for me for sure. That is a high priority plug-in Vantum push menu it just implements a different way to navigate So it's the navigation drawer the UI pattern on Android. So I'm gonna put that low as well I'm not really worried if someone can't use my wedding website on their mobile And it's just a navigation thing like the site will work And then the last one is good old WP retina 2x So make your images Christian beautiful on retina displays. Once again, I am gonna call that low It's all right if the retina doesn't work my site still really does its job, which is getting people to RSVP All right, there you have it. We've cataloged. We've ranked them higher low I did the few sentences on what the functionality is now. Let's do the how do you test them? So really easy contact form 7. All right You just fill out the contact form and make sure I as the site owner get a copy of whatever I put in there Nice and easy layer slider. I just go to the home page and is the slider there really easy to test Love it. I just go to any page I want and click the love it button and the love it count should go up by one digit very easy RSVP and wedding invitation I just use the RSVP Field and make sure that I as the site owner get the email with all the details that I put in Vantum push menu. It's low. I don't even care. I'm not gonna test it But all I do is go to it on an Android machine and then WP retina Since that might be actually important to some of you you just go to your site with a retina MacBook inspect the element It should say retina There you go. So we just built the spreadsheet for my site Probably took us 10 minutes. I think and I threw in some fun anecdotes. I hope But yeah, there you go. 10 minutes. Here's my site. I'm done with step one if you would Part of step one. So you do the same thing for themes and custom functionality What's nice is my theme all it does is give me a set of colors So my theme I'd probably say is medium And I just make sure that my color scheme that's there already is still there. That's how I test it You rank them you place a few sentences pride the exact instructions on custom functionality isn't interesting one guys Because WordPress is so popular lots of people create custom things inside of it, which is awesome, right? I love it. It still amazes me to see all the cool things people do with WordPress at WP engine But it's important because usually that custom functionality Because it's not a plug-in. It usually means that it kind of is really custom And so it's something that you want to pay a lot of attention to here So make sure that if it's something a dev built for you Ask him to fill out that one section of the sheet for your custom functionality, right? And then that way now you know going forward But really go to whoever built it and ask them to fill that out Not not a ton of first-time sites will have custom functionality But as you continue to grow your WordPress business, you know, you'll have more and more So step two get to know your devs. So this is important It could be the devs you hire or it could be the devs that work on your plug-ins And so first kind of the first part of step two is for the high critical plug-ins and themes is the ones that we said We're high. So if you remember, I only had one Which was the RSVP plug-in you contact that dev or their support team Now I've had questions about how do I contact them? So what's cool is if it's a big plug-in they probably have a website just for that plug-in like woo Woo commerce they have woo themes. They have a website. You can contact their support from there Maybe it's a smaller plug-in. So they don't have their own website or anything You just go to the plug-in on the wordpress.org repo So you just search in plug-ins and find it and wordpress requires that you have a support tab On that page and that tab tells you how to get in touch with the support team of the devs So every single plug-in in the world will have it. So that's good Yeah, then you let them know the specific functionality you're using right and this is because You kind of talk to them about well, is that functionality like the main part of it? So if I contacted the contact form seven guy and said hey, I'm using your plug-in for forms Okay, well good news. That's the main functionality. So that's good because I would think that if he's gonna keep that Plug-in up to date. Well forms are gonna continue to work since that's the main part. However, if you're using something like Yoast SEO and you're only using like one of the functions to make Custom tags or custom post types That's probably maybe kind of a side function, right? The plug-in is called Yoast SEO So it's probably the SEO part. That's the main part. So open the dialogue and ask him say hey I'm using this functionality. Is this core part of the plug-in or is it more of an add-on? And then figure out what the future of that functionality looks like and there's a chance that if you said to Yoast Hey, I'm using the custom post type. What you know? Hey, is that something you guys are actively developing? What's the future look like? They're gonna be he's gonna be real honest with you and he's gonna say well You know, I don't know that that thing is coming after thought We made it just because we kind of wanted to put a lot of things in this to make it even more You know attractive for people to download But I guess if it broke, I don't know if we'd fix that. We might just remove it. Oh red flag, right? You're using that for a high critical function of your plug of your site. So that's a red flag And what you do when you come into one of those red flag situations and really you should just do it for all the high Criticality plugins, but you find at least one alternative to each of those plugins. It's not hard So if I was doing contact form 7 gravity forms would be the you know the next one for every one plug-in type There is out there. There's usually about 10 and sometimes there's hundreds So it's not hard to find that alternative just find it and just note it just note it in that sheet Really easy. You don't have to go research it or anything just kind of find it and say, okay, this is good All right, so get to know your devs That's awesome. So now we have we have an existing relationship with our developers who develop our plugins We've asked them some very important questions and we understand where that piece of functionality kind of lives Inside of their ecosystem, right now. This is the fun part. You get to know the future So if you go to wordpress.org Slash blog there's their blog. It's very very active They it's so active that they split it up into like seven different categories and one of those categories is releases And that is where they blog post about betas and release candidates and real releases now There's only like Usually about six or seven of those a quarter So it's not gonna fill up your inbox. You're not gonna spam It's not gonna be a ton and you just read it and it's not like you really have to do anything out of it Maybe but so you subscribe to the releases, right? The first kind of post they do is a beta post this talks about when a beta is ready So if you remember how an upgrade becomes an upgrade a beta then is tested and bugs are found Sometimes multiple times beta one beta two beta three. So you just kind of keep an eye on that and you read it If in your reading of the beta plug-in you see something that you maybe kind of sets off a little alarm bell You're like whoa this functionality that's changing might really impact this plug-in Contact the devs tell them say hey I was checking out this beta release post and I saw that you know This is happening and I'll give you a great example actually so I have a beta release post on the next slide Then you identify if any custom functionality may be impacted So if so it might be a good idea to have whoever built that test that beta with that custom functionality Remember custom functionality while rare is usually very important to your site So you kind of want to take an even more proactive approach around that Now you have an idea of what is coming and how the site may be impacted. So here's a beta post, right? So I'll just read it real quick. So they say stuff. We're still in development We don't recommend you run in our production site never run it on the production site For three is do out next month, but to get there. We need your help testing what we've been working on So menus you can now be managed with the customizer which allows you to live preview changes You're making without changing your site for visitors until you're ready cool So it sounds like they're built. They're building in a way to preview menus and customize them That's awesome because sometimes you got to install a plug-in to do that So this is a great thing because now WordPress is about to get rid of a plug-in you might have you can just say Okay, I don't need that plug-in anymore because the functionality it does is now built into WordPress now you have one less plug-in Which means one less code base that can be coming secure one less plug-in that you have to test when getting ready for upgrades and One less plug-in that you have to just maintain and know and understand, right? So that's great I love it when word I wish I could run zero plugins That would make me so happy because that just means every single thing I'm doing in WordPress is supported by the whole community That'd be awesome. So it's always good when something gets rid of a plug-in Let's jump to the third bullet It says we put a lot of work into better passwords throughout WordPress now WordPress will limit the lifetime of password resets No longer send passwords via email and generate a suggest secure password for you try it out Let's know what you think so one of the most common reasons people create WordPress sites is a membership site, right? You have some content that you think is so like cool that you only want to give it to member Right and so membership plugins kind of keep track of all those people and they you know You can split them into different roles and whatnot But one thing that's very kind of custom about membership plugins is they create users over and over and over and over again Well, what are users have to do when they create themselves? They have to set a password So ooh, this would be a red flag in my mind if I ran a membership site I would probably contact my membership dev and say hey guy or girl What do you think about this new beta release and better passwords like oh, you know I have some really finicky users and they don't like to set like crazy long passwords What is this going to do to them right and so hopefully if they're a real good depth shop They already knew this was coming shoot They might even have helped build it to make their plug-in even easier, right, but maybe they didn't so they're like Oh, hey, thank you user. This is awesome. We're gonna test it out and then they come back to you and say Oh boy, there were bugs sure enough. This really hurt the plug-in. So we are now we've got months of a head start We're gonna fix this we're gonna make sure it's fixed by the time the real upgrade comes or they come back and go No, no problem. Doesn't matter. We are already hooked into the right thing and all that still works So we're good to go right, but hey, that's anxiety, right? That's button anxiety right there that you just washed away very nice So I didn't take a picture of the whole post, but there's like two more bullets after this So it's not long. You just kind of give it a read, you know, do it at night, you know, whatever You don't have to do it immediately. You know, it's not an upgrade coming right now So second part of step three Subscribe to the releases. Yep. Yep when a release candidate post is made So if you remember release candidate means WordPress thinks they are ready. They're like, hey, we're ready to go This is gonna be an upgrade if nobody says anything. It's coming in a couple of weeks. All right, sweet. That's for real, right? Contact your devs. Definitely content. If one release candidate is out WordPress makes a call out to theme and plug in developers and says hey test this release candidate So all of your devs should be testing it already. So contact them and say hey, how's the release candidate? Testing going, you know, hey, here's my functionality if you remember I contacted you before How is it gonna play? He's gonna play nice with that. You're getting ahead of everything You've got weeks now before really an upgrade will happen probably a little more just because some bugs might be found But man, you're getting way ahead of the game now guys and you're forcing the devs If for some reason they're not you're making them test it, which is really good. They should be Then you create a staging site and this is awesome So I just saw a lot of faces go blank So if you listen to what me and other people in the WordPress community to say which is make sure you're on a managed WordPress Platform doesn't matter which one because they basically all have it You have one click ability to make a staging site and it just makes like an exact replica of your site And you can test it and it never impacts your production site It is like the best thing to happen to websites since I don't know probably the internet But this is good. This is really cool guys So find a good managed WordPress provider. They will have this one click. It's super easy and Then install the WordPress beta tester plug-in. So I know it's a long name. I don't know why they call it that Well, it's a functional name. I guess but WordPress beta tester. This is the official Plug-in from WordPress the foundation that allows you to install beta or release candidate upgrades to your site So we've made a staging site. We've installed this cool Plug-in and then we did the three clicks it takes to upgrade to the release candidate. All right So now this is hot. This is high-tech stuff guys I can tell you that there are really good companies out there that don't even do this to their sites yet So you're already way ahead of the game Here's real quick. What a release candidate post looks like so we've made more than a hundred and forty changes since releasing beta Four a week and a half ago release candidate means we think we're done but with millions of users and thousands of plugins themes It's possible. We've missed something We hope to ship WordPress 4.2 on Wednesday April took a 20 second, but we need your help to get there So this is the call. This is just you know, they're not even going through all the stuff It's just like hey call to action time here guys We want you to start testing it and that's what you're about to do So it's time to test here. We go on your staging site Update all the plugins and themes now You shouldn't have to have you shouldn't have any to update because it's a big rule always keep your plug in the themes updated Right for the same reason we're about to keep core updated is because security functionality features yada yada but smiley face because Everybody does have to update some but you shouldn't have to Execute the steps to recreate the functionality you documented earlier So the document that we put together go through there the last column was how do you replicate this? So just go through those steps shouldn't take you more than a couple hours the most like if you have 40 plugins You should really reevaluate your site. That's too many But yeah, you know if you have a reasonable amount of plugins two hours, right? That's not bad for kind of the peace of mind. You're about to get Document each result and specifics about any failures and then execute any back-end functions that are unique to your site So I know this is a little ambiguous and man. It's a little vague Execute any back-end functions that are unique to your site. You don't have to go make a post You don't have to go make a menu, right? Those are things that have been done thousands of times to this release candidate This is if you have something very custom that is on the back end you want to go do it We really don't worry about that much because back-end functionality doesn't usually break which is nice But it's time to do that, right? It's time for the most part every single one of you on your first five sites You won't have any of those so it's no big deal Hold on actually let's do this thing So we'll take my site and we'll run through this real quick the steps So if you remember we add a kismet don't have to do anything because it's deactivated We have the love it button so we go to any page literally. I'll just type it in Mesa wedding comm Enter click a page click love it boom it increased by one. I just did that test in the past I have the contact form so I click the contact us button and then I put in a contact and I write a dust And I'm testing my form and I push enter and then bam I wait and I get an email Okay contact forms working the RSVP So I go to the RSVP and I pick and I say all I'm bringing 10 people because I'm really dumb I'm bringing my kids to a wedding and I'm coming to the roasted dinner and I'm coming to this ceremony and the reception go Okay, cool. I as the site owner just got an email and it said all that stuff I just put it in sweet. It still works What else the retina plug-in? So I run a PC because I'm a dinosaur But I go to my wife and I go hey, can you go to the wedding website on your macro quick with the staging one? And she goes okay I did and I'm like how's the slider look and she's like oh the slider looks good Okay, I already just tested the slider right there so slider works and then I'm like hey Can you just inspect one of these pictures real quick? She right clicks and she says inspect element and then I go and I read in the element says retina and I go Perfect, the retina is working too. Thanks, hon And then we're done. I think I just did them all I just did all this stuff I just tested and I mean I know I talked about testing it So let's just say for you know, whatever argument's sake 30 minutes. Let's say it took me 30 minutes to do that It's not bad 30 minutes to know that when it's time to upgrade everything's gonna work That's that's good stuff. And so now it's step four. It's go time How are the results if there are no issues skip test five if there are issues? Let's dig in So if the issues with a medium or low criticality plug-in you have a lot of options and Those options are you could do nothing? So I told you right if the retina plug-in didn't work What would I do probably nothing? I don't care and I probably would I wouldn't even worry about it I'd be like whatever blah uncle Dave doesn't need his retina plug-in You can contact the plug-in dev find out what the time frame is for an upgrade let him know Hey, I was testing my site with the release candidate and I noticed that though The images aren't showing up as retina. What do you think is gonna happen there? Like, you know, you know fix that. What's your time frame yada yada? If they're like, oh, yeah, no, we've been testing it to we totally understand We're gonna make an upgrade in we should have an upgrade like one week after the upgrade comes Okay, cool. If it's just a functional upgrade, which is what we're testing for Hey, maybe wait, maybe wait that week because it's like I'd rather have the retina plug-in work So I'll just wait a week and wait for the upgrade to happen and then I'll go ahead and make it happen Right or if they're like, I don't know. This seems really hard We've got a lot of other plug-ins and we care about them more and so I'm not I don't know We might not even get to it for a few months. Okay in that case you probably want to upgrade and just blah, right? Oh, well, I'll wait whenever they do it. They do it. That's no big deal to me. It's the retina Or you can replace it. So good news is there's like a hundred retina plug-ins out there. So I probably just go find one Maybe look at the support for it real quick and just make sure it says like there's not a hundred people screaming Oh, this breaks in the new release candidate and as long as that's not the case boom I just go and replace it easy peasy take you like two minutes to replace it So, you know, hey medium or low you've got some real options here, right and all these options these Literally are your trade-offs, right? How long is it going to be what am I what am I not going to do because I want to do one of these right? Hey, if you do nothing then, you know, there's no trade-off, right? You can keep working on your business But if you replace the functionality, maybe that's harder. I don't know But you're making that informed decision, which as I said is my faith So what if it's a high-criticality plug-in now this will happen one day There's no doubt in my mind. It'll happen one day in your life You'll have you'll be testing this and whoo the high plug-in doesn't work. Oh boy This is a problem first thing you do. It's basically the only thing you do you contact those devs contact them immediately and be like Hey, listen this plug-in is Super important to my business. I run my whole side off of it. You know, I built my whole side around it And it doesn't work in the release candidate. What do you what are you gonna do? What's going on? You know, I tell me just tell me tell me everything tell me you have a fix Tell me what's gonna happen, and they're going to they're gonna be very open about it They're gonna tell you well Maybe we're not gonna fix it and that's bad right and so maybe you can't upgrade or maybe you replace it Or maybe they say yeah, yeah, no, we're way on top of it. This is our number one priority We're gonna make sure we don't have an ETA yet, but we hope to have one soon, you know And then you're like, okay I'm just gonna set a reminder to check back next week and ask them if they have an ETA It's just kind of the due diligence with following up on them making sure but it's but it's making an informed decision So here I just I just added a slide this morning. This is notes from a plug-in developer And this is based off of the 4.2.3 release that I said just released this week And so I'll read it real quick We are updating the views plug-in today so that we resolve all short codes before passing the WordPress to process content This is a straightforward change which takes us one day to complete. Oh, that's awesome So they they made that post there's a chance you don't have to contact them because devs are so ahead of the game That they're right there, right? You're like all sweet man. These guys are the greatest They go on to say which is kind of important because this is kind of WordPress at large Would have been great to receive a heads up about an upcoming change in WordPress so we could do this change on time So he's literally telling WordPress. Hey, I would have loved for you to tell me this now WordPress says well It was a security issue and so there's you know, that's really tricky But I can tell you that that right there that sentence right there That's echoed from a lot of the plug-in developers that broke with this last update They're all saying hey, we want to be more in tune with you guys We want to serve our customers better so they go on saying we received a huge amount of support requests through this That's people following this plan right saying hey, it's broke. Why why tell me? But this isn't the issue we can deal with a way to support issues this time It wasn't our fault, but sometimes it is now I would argue that it was their fault because they coded it improperly I've read a lot about this issue and they kind of everybody who didn't break was like Why would you ever code it that way anyways? But there's a hundred ways to code stuff. So whom I I'm not a dev So I'm not passing judgment They say what worries us as mentioned above is seeing our clients folks who build WordPress sites For a living losing their faith in the system They feel like the system sees them as little ants and not as humans people don't like seeing their problems being dismissed That's great feedback, right? I want to tell that to WordPress every day Many of them run hundreds of sites They cannot afford to stop everything and fix content on so many sites Especially not if they're currently away for their family vacation Always have a backup plan if you go on vacation What others have asked here and I would like to ask too is to set up a mechanism that allows WordPress core developers to privately communicate such upcoming issues with plug-in developers and in the very end it says we are your partners and Here you go guys. This is a dev who wants to do all of that for you They are here saying I want to make sure my plugins are ready. I want to make sure that I don't let my customer suffer This is the kind of symbiotic relationship that we are building right here in this whole plan This is awesome. I wish every plug-in developer was this awesome So step 5 remember we skipped here if you had no failures step 5 you got a worry-free upgrade coming This is exciting once all your issues have been resolved you will have a much better understanding of your site You will know it so much better than like your friend will know their site and that's actually cool But take it from me a nerd who runs the windows left up You won't fear the upgrade button that is probably the best thing that's gonna come out of that I mean I had a guy on the phone He was crying because he told me he had no way to get his 10 sites ready And I said well, what do you have to do? Maybe I can help and he said I have no idea what I have to do You won't fear the upgrade plug in the button You won't cry to me on the phone one day, which is great I don't want any of you crying unless it's happy because you won't fear anymore That's a big deal guys. Can you imagine if I had told that guy a month before? Hey, I've got a five-step plan and you won't have to call me crying You know like I've never called you crying and I'm like, yeah, you will He wouldn't have to do that like he would probably feel so much better because of that and I mean I would too You'll be ready for any maintenance or security upgrades that are released no testing needed and those are the ones that are the majority One functional upgrade a quarter is currently what WordPress is doing So you only have to do this once a quarter But there's usually like three or four maintenance and security upgrades a quarter So that means four out of five upgrades. You're just ready You're good to go and if you're on a managed platform like WP engine We're gonna upgrade it for you and you just sit back and relax and you'll never have to worry You can keep making those marketing campaigns You can keep driving sales to your business keep doing what you love because I promise you not any one of you in the audience Started a WordPress site because you love to upgrade it. That's not a thing You did it because you love that whatever you're building your side about and Then you will have a game plan for the next functional upgrade That's really important because now you never fear any more upgrades because you're equipped You know what you're gonna do you're ready to go and what's that gonna do? So preparing for next time is awesome If you documented everything you did so everything we just did right here This process will take half the time in the future because you will know your site already You'll know how to do that testing. You'll start getting smarter about what you think may be impacted in those beta and release candidate posts So what took remember? I said 30 minutes, right? What took us 30 minutes will take us 15 minutes next time And if you tell me you don't have 15 minutes to make your sure your site stays maintained Well, you better sell your house sell your boat sell your car sell your computer because you don't have time for anything If you manage lots of sites the testing plans and communication to devs gets easier Because as you start to build more and more sites you find plugins you like so every time you want to make a contact form You use contact form 7 and then hey you have a hundred sites But you're only sending one email to the devs going hey contact form like it just gets easier, right? It does and then testing is the same too You probably only need to test one of those sites for contact form 7 not all 100 Because I mean it works one way and one it probably works the same in the other so you're gonna cut it down even more Ensure you plan your time accordingly though because if you don't just have one site Maybe you have 10 well 10 times let's say 20 minutes, right? Okay. It's 200 minutes So now we're talking about two and almost a half hours So that's I mean that's a good chunk of time But it's not really a ton for a quarter right to make sure all your sites are ready all your customers are happy all your businesses are Running but you just got to plan it. You got to make sure you plan it Don't pack your schedule so jam-packed that you can't do the two and a half hours and Then following this plan takes time, but it also means a lot less surprises I've given you lots of examples of why people how people aren't surprised on this and why that's a good thing But guys, it's like the best thing who I mean everyone hates bad surprises all of us do I hate I hate it when I walk into my house. I'm like, man that thing broke or you know Oh, here's a bill that I didn't think was coming. We all hate those if you can get rid of every bad surprise in your life Wouldn't that be awesome? Well, I can show you how to get rid of bad surprises in your WordPress site Which might be a lot of your life. I don't know All right, that's it. I've talked enough Who's got questions? Well, this is good. Okay The staging site. Yeah, so I'm gonna tell you right now You should just it will take you hours to create a staging site from scratch That alone should rect it should should justify the cost of moving to a managed provider So forget WP engine you can go to any of them. There are ones that are cheaper than WP engine You don't get as much but you get staging sites. That's for sure It's rule one to WordPress guys if you have a site that is at all critical to your life You it should be on a managed WordPress platform I don't want to I don't want to tell you how to do this in two hours, right? Because it's not worth your time It's not worth your time to do it to make a staging site from scratch. It's not Get yourself on a managed host Because then there's a hundred other reasons to by the way Yeah, the reasons. Oh, absolutely. Oh my gosh. I give you a top hundred Okay, so I think staging is probably like it's actually number two to me But staging site is one of oh top three. Oh the top three managed services, but yeah, absolutely. Sorry about that Yeah, so I'm biased so WP engine is number one I would probably say, you know what? I'll just give you the first few the ones that are so they're big hosts That offer managed WordPress as one of their services like go daddy, right? And it's cheap however, I'm gonna steer you away from them because I think that a Company that only does WordPress is that much better at it? So WP engine all we do is WordPress page Lee all they do is WordPress Precibel all they do is WordPress now some of the ones that kind of do maybe just WordPress and a little more Pantheon site ground flywheel. Those are some more I would say that those three though. Those are the ones that I really would suggest researching WP engine page Lee pressable. Yes. Oh WP engine Page Lee just take the word page and the add ly at the end and then pressable I'm gonna press the button the button is pressable. Yeah as far as Like how much does a managed WordPress host cost? Yeah, so We have so WP engine. We have 30 plus thousand customers We have ever the whole gamut all the way from the top like the most expensive all the way to Literally people doing their wedding websites, right? So for one site just to do one site at WP engine It's $29 a month, but to do 10 sites. It's $100 a month and then to do 25 sites It's $250 a month and then our enterprise packages start at 600 and go up from there And then as much as you really want and think you need we'll give it to you But it's awesome because I'll tell you what maybe you make your first site somewhere else But as soon as you've got four or five sites the the amount of efficiency that you will gain by going to like WP engine It's amazing because here's here's the best part about it. All we do is WordPress So we have over a thousand custom server rules just for WordPress You will not be able to run WordPress faster anywhere else in the world And that alone like if you just wanted to go stand up ten sites on some just box somewhere You'd have to figure those thousand out which are I mean I would say impossible. We've done it over the last seven years, right? So yeah, that's kind of what that is Do you have a question or no? Who's saying hi? Oh, hi anybody else Sure Absolutely Okay. All right. Cool. So I digress anybody else have any questions about upgrades before I go into my spiel All right, cool. So manage WordPress host. Here's the deal They take care of everything that you don't like to do about with WordPress. They take care of it for you speed So no more caching plugins. No more having to like tune all that stuff. It's all built into our network It's all built in the whole stack has speed in mind via caching, right? Security so we upgrade your sites for you automatically So you're at least your core WordPress will stay up today and then we have so WP engine No, no other WordPress hosts have this yet but we have a Smart algorithm that sits at our network layer that watches all the traffic that comes in and Finds bad traffic and then learns and then blocks it So we literally are staying so ahead of the game for you. It's not even funny, right? scalability So if your site has let's say you get you know 100 visitors a day and then man you write it a blog post It's so awesome and it goes viral and you get 10,000 visitors a day Piece of cake at WP engine. It's the server that your site isn't even gonna break a sweat It's just gonna work You're gonna be so happy that your big break finally happened and your site's still up because I'll tell you what on these other Places that aren't managed WordPress hosts those suckers are going down and they're not there to help you They don't know WordPress. They can't help you. They're just like whatever the server's up Sorry, your site's down like that's it. So speed security scalability support so No, not at all because you still have to make sure your site's ready We're gonna do the upgrade for you So the button pressing itself isn't done by you, but you still want to make sure it's ready But yeah, and then support so because we're only a managed WordPress host We have over a hundred support guys. They're all WordPress experts When you have a big problem with your site and you contact your host and go, I have no idea what to do They're gonna go. Well, neither do we we don't know WordPress. What does WP engine do? It helps We might not be able to fix it because it might be in the code itself, right? Not the platform or whatever, but we're gonna tell you exactly where to go to get it fixed We're gonna offer you suggestions, right? We might even fix it. Don't tell anybody that we're not supposed to fix code But we do it. I mean when we see it's gonna take two minutes, which do it for you Those people love our customers. They really do Those those are the four main reasons the four s's there's a hundred more. Just go to WP engine.com and start reading All right, cool. All right, I think we're probably at time. Yeah. Oh boy. I missed my wrap it up thing I'm so sorry. All right. Yeah, one more minute. That's it. So cool. Thanks guys so much I really appreciate it. I'll be around if you have any questions or whatever and look at this