 Three o'clock, get started. It's an interesting room. It sounds like the acoustics push it all out. I love it, it's nice. I have a pretty loud voice and I get real excited so I talk loud so I don't really need a mic so that's good because if you saw me hold a mic subconsciously hold it sideways like I'm in a rap battle or something so it's always funny, people make fun of me. But yeah, so anyways, my name's Dustin Mesa. All of y'all here to hear about WordPress upgrades which is a big part of my experience with WordPress. Follow me on Twitter, I will post the link to the slides once I'm done here, probably like half an hour afterwards and you'll want them because there's good steps in here and I don't want you having to like rush and try and write them all down. All right, so just a little bit about me. So I work at WP Engine. I've been there three years now. I'm the director of customer experience operations. We do a lot of stuff as the customer experience operations team but one of them that we do is we own WordPress upgrades for the entire WP Engine platform. So it's about 300,000 sites. I used to work for Rackspace Hosting. I was there for five years. I was a senior manager of Cloud Operations so I've been in the hosting industry for eight years and I went to UTSA, University of Texas, San Antonio, Gold Roadrunners. I have a BA in business management which didn't help me at all for the jobs that I got. So why should you listen to me? So I own the entire WordPress upgrade process at WP Engine. I have four for the last three years. I've been upgrading WordPress since version 3.5 so for some of you that's forever ago and for some of you that's like, oh yeah that was just the other day I've been doing it since like 1.1 or whatever. But it's been a good while. I handled every upgrade deferral request at WP Engine for the last two and a half years. So what that is is if somebody believes that they cannot upgrade to the next version they, we've now automated this so they can do it themselves but they used to submit a ticket and give a reason why and I would usually work with them to try and help them get to the point where they could. And it's all of those interactions that led me to create this talk and is all the kind of expertise that I have around this. And at WP Engine we performed over two million site upgrades. So we've been doing it for a while and we've done quite a few of them. So quick disclaimer around this talk. So my advice in this is based on my experience and what I've seen work for customers. Now with two million upgrades I've seen a lot so it's gonna cover probably everybody in the room. But every site is unique, right? They're customized, they're different, right? If they're the same site Google would see it as duplicate content and knock you on SEO. There's most likely exception to every rule that I talk about here. Don't jump to an automatic, I think I'm an exception. You probably aren't. You probably didn't win the exception lottery as I like to say. And you will need to dedicate time to this but believe me it's well worth it. So I'd like to start off with a survey so the WordPress Security Learning Center conducted their 2015 WordPress Security Survey and the number one answer to the question what steps do you take to secure your site? The number one answer was I keep WordPress up to date. And that those first three really are the most just critical things you can do to keep your site safe. And I just love that keeping WordPress up to date is number one. So the community has spoken keeping WordPress up to date is important, it's very, very important. That guy's taking pictures, I'm gonna wait until he's got it. Boom. So what are people saying about upgrades? There are so many updates, I can't keep up. So they just come at me, there was one after another. I've got to run a business here, I can't just be upgrading WordPress all the time willy-nilly. WordPress upgrades always break my sites. So every time I do it, my site breaks and I just can't have that because I'm running my business on this site and I can't be dealing with broken sites. So I'll tell you if that's the case, you are doing something wrong. You are modifying core or you are doing something very bad because WordPress upgrades to a well-coded site, they don't break every time, believe me. How could I ever know what an update will do to my site? That's a fair question. That's a very fair question. There's 300 new features in the last release, right? Wow, how could I even know what all of those are gonna do to my site? This is my favorite. I don't need the upgrade because my site just works. Oh man, it just works, of course, right? I don't need to service my car because it just works. Duh. And I always stay one version behind so they can work out the bugs. That's a fun one. I wish Norcross was here. He'd probably cringe at that one. I can't tell you how much time he works working out the bugs before they release. So with that comes a sense of anxiety for some people around upgrades. If they're afraid, all these questions are running through their mind and they get what I like to call button anxiety. They don't wanna push the upgrade button. They're like, oh my gosh, I have no idea what it's gonna do. If it breaks my site, it's gonna be crazy and maybe I'm gonna lose my job if I break the site again, I don't know. There's so many things and it causes it. And to be honest, that struggle is real. So before I joined WP Engine, I had never used WordPress and so WordPress was new to me. WordPress is new to me. My only experience with it really is what I've learned at WP Engine. And so sitting on one side of the fence I didn't understand why people were so reluctant to upgrade. And then I kind of stopped and I thought about it. And I was like, listen, I need to put myself in their shoes. I can't just be this big brother saying you've got to upgrade and I have no tolerance for non-upgrades. And so this quote really stuck out to me. For every external struggle, there is an internal struggle. Look inside first. And so I started thinking about our customers. I started thinking about the sites they have it and I understand now, I get it. They're mission critical. They really are what drives them. In some cases it puts food on the table, right? And I think about, wow, no wonder they don't want to push that button. Why would you want to jeopardize something that's putting food on the table? Why would you want to jeopardize the ability to take care of your family? That's crazy, right? And so after thinking about it, I was just like, man, I get it now because one time somebody called me crying because we were gonna upgrade their site that night and we just could not. And I was just like, this guy is crying because we're gonna do an upgrade. There's more to this than I am considering. And so I thought about it and it is real. It makes sense. You're getting pulled in two different directions. Why do you wanna spend three hours getting your site ready if those three hours could be used marketing your new business, right? And getting more money and growing it, which is the reason you started a business, right? So I get it. You're getting pulled in different directions. It's much more than that. So I wanna break that down. I want to expose upgrades and show you a way to manage all of that and lose the anxiety. I don't want anybody to call me crying again because we're gonna upgrade their site. So let's talk about an upgrade real quick. So what is an upgrade? There's three kinds of upgrades. There's a feature or functional upgrade. Now, these are the big boys. These are the ones that change stuff, do stuff, add stuff, all of that. These are the ones that we're really worried about, right? An upgrade that adds or removes features functionality and it's a major or minor version increase. So when we go from three to four or we go from four, three to four, four. The next type is called a maintenance upgrade. These should be your best friends because these are just like bug fixes. An upgrade that fixes bugs, it doesn't add or remove features or functionality. So it's a point or dot release. So we just went from four, four, one to four, four, two, right? So that was a point or dot release. And then the third type is security upgrade. These are also your friend. This is an upgrade that closes security vulnerabilities. It does not add or remove features or functionality unless the functionality itself is vulnerable. So every now and then they just can't fix it and they have to remove it, right? But we're talking about something crazy like a post class or I mean, it's not like we're removing the editor because it's unsafe, like no, they'd fix that, right? And so those are also point or dot releases. So we're kind of scared of majors, the major and minor version increases, but the dot releases, they're our friends. These are awesome. They're making our sites better without having to do anything. So how does an upgrade become an upgrade? How does a build become a law? So you start with, you've got core contributors, right? The people who help build WordPress. And then you've got the community, the people who wanna help build WordPress even more, right? But in their spare time, they work together. They understand what features we wanna build into WordPress and they work on them and then you get a beta release. And it could be beta one, beta two, beta three, beta four. There's multiple betas as we kind of go through the release cycle. Those betas then get tested by the same folks up here and they get created into bug reports and then those same folks up there go and fix those bugs and then maybe they do another beta or if they feel like all the bugs are fixed and no more functionality is getting added and everything looks really good, they make what's called a release candidate. And the release candidate is when the WordPress foundation basically says, hey, we think we're done. This is it. This is gonna be it. If nobody raises their hand and says there's a problem, right? And so everybody goes together and tests the release candidate and all the plug-in devs and everything and so we're then a release candidate becomes an upgrade about usually two weeks after. So now that we know what an upgrade is, let's talk a little bit about maintenance. It is a must. How many in here own a home? Yep. Would you ever let your home get like that? Of course not, right? Your home is where you're fed. You have your family, it provides shelter. You would never let that happen, but people let that happen to their site. We own cars. Can you imagine if your car broke down on the side of the road and you just didn't care about it? You're like, oh, I'm not gonna do any maintenance. I'm not gonna fix it. I'll just leave it there. And somebody's like, hey, you have a car? And you're like, yeah, it's right up the road on the turnpike, right? Next to the manatees. It's just like, yeah. No, you don't have a car that doesn't drive. We all know this, like an uncle or something, somebody who just won't do a little repair on their computer. Hey, it works fine like this, it's no big deal. Well, okay, I guess you don't care about your computer. And then my fave, which is, hey, do you own a boat? Yeah, I own a boat. We can swim out to it and then we can fish off of it and it can't go anywhere and we can only use half of it, the half that's above water, but yeah, I own a boat. This is what people are letting their sites get to. And they say, yeah, I own a site. Yeah, I maintain my site, I run my site. You don't run your site if you're letting this kind of stuff happen, right? So if you do all of that, right? If you listen to me and we do this, we get something that's amazing, right? We get that well-oiled machine. You get more horsepower, it is faster. If you are on the latest version and everything is up to date, you are faster, no doubt about it. You are tuned perfectly, right? Wordpress understands itself. It knows, they make changes every release to say, I wanna work this way better. I wanna do this more efficiently, all that kind of stuff. You get all the options. It's always funny to me when someone's like, how do I make a menu or change a comment? And I'm like, well, you just go here, here. And they're like, I don't have that. And I'm like, well, show me. And they're on like three, two. And that feature didn't even exist. And I'm like, oh my gosh, if you upgraded, this is just point and click in the UI, but you're on three, two, what's going on here? It's crazy to me that people don't want all the options. And then you get that fancy car alarm because it's always secure. Wordpress is very secure. It's WordPress users that make it less secure. So that's all well and good, right? I can stand up here and tell you everything's gonna be great. This is how you do it and this is what you're gonna get. But I really wanna show you. I wanna go through it. I want to give you those step-by-step instructions. So let's get started. Step one, get to know your site. So this is awesome, right? So many people don't know their sites like we really should, right? I just bought a new house in Nashville a few months ago and I'm getting to know my house, right? I'm peeking around. I'm up in the attic like, what's this look like? What's this do? What's this do? I'm just getting to know my house because I wanna maintain it. I wanna take care of it. I wanna understand it, right? I walk along the floor and I just look at the lines of the wood and I'm like, oh cool, there's a little mark there, right? I don't know. So you're gonna get to know your site. Starting with the cataloging of your plugins. So you're gonna take a look at all your plugins. You're gonna open up your favorite spreadsheet or doc or whatever. And you're gonna catalog them. You're just gonna write the names. You're gonna list them out and then you're gonna rank them high below in respect to the criticality of your site. Now, please be very real with yourself when you are ranking them. It does you no good to put every plugin as high, believe me. But if you are running an eCommerce site, well, WooCommerce is definitely a high criticality, right? Because it's really what powers it, right? But your slider might not be high. What if the slider stopped working? Like are you gonna stop getting sales? No, WooCommerce still works, right? So you've gotta be real with yourself here and I'll show you why. And then you place a few sentences of notes on the front end functionality. So what does it do, right? What does this plugin do for me? WooCommerce allows me to process an order successfully, right? You know, slider makes the images move back and forth and show different ones, right? It's just a little note, just so you know. So you can just refresh yourself because there'll be some that you're like, I don't really know what this one does, right? And maybe I need to just kind of figure out what it does real quick and then, hey, now you've got it marked down forever, you'll know what it does. And then you provide exact instructions for how to reproduce that functionality. So in WooCommerce, you'd say, I go to my store, I add an item to my cart, I go to the cart, I check out, and then I get a receipt, right? Whatever your WooCommerce workflow looks like. So you kind of detail exactly what it is. So we'll do it real quick for my site. This is the site I made for my, it's my wedding site. Funny story, I told my wife, you know, she did a lot of the wedding stuff and I gladly let her, but I told her, I said, I'll take care of the site. I will make the site. Well, I guess I wasn't moving fast enough for her and one day I come home and she goes, hey, don't worry, I made the site. And I was like, what do you mean made the site? And I was like, show it, show it to me. And she shows it to me and I'm like, what did you use? And she goes, wicks. And I mean, I almost lost it. I was thinking to myself, if this is the site that like my coworkers go to when they get an invitation, I'm gonna be laughed at by the company. They're just gonna get out, right? So I was like, as calm as possible, I explained to her the predicament she tried to put us in and I said, I will get working on the site right now. And I did and I let her pick the theme so she felt a lot better. So here's what we've got, right? So starting with the Kismet. So I have Kismet disabled. It's because I don't use it, but let me caution you, don't leave plugins disabled and installed. A Kismet is one of the safest plugins in the world so I trust it to stay there and be disabled, just in case I wanna be able to comments one day. But do not, if you're a disabled, you're a plugin and it's gonna be disabled for a long time, just delete it. Please just get rid of it. You're leaving security holes in your thing. Plugins aren't like Pokemon, you do not wanna catch them all, believe me. Trust me. So I've got a Kismet, it's disabled. So literally it's a low correcality, right? And there's no reproduction because it's not on. We've got contact form seven. So contact form seven is what we use to submit like a question. If you had a question about the wedding, it came to me and my wife. So that's probably low correcality. Like if that broke, people would still be able to come to my wedding, they'd still be able to RSVP. They have my phone number so they can call me, so I'm not worried about it, it's low, right? And to reproduce it, I go to the contact us page, I fill out the form, I click submit and I would expect you to email us the owner of the site. Layer Slider WP, it moves images from our engagement photos on the front page. My wife might call it a high but I'm gonna call it medium because I'm trying to be real here. So medium, medium correcality, I know my wife would say the page is just worthless without it. So it's medium and to replicate functionality, I just go to the homepage and I should see sliding pictures of our engagement. Love it, that adds a love it link similar to like it on Facebook to post pages and custom post types. That is low, I do not care about it, I don't care if somebody can't love my post. So that is low. To replicate it, I go to a post or a page, I click the love it button and the love it counter should increase by one. RSVP and wedding invitation. So this is where we sent people to RSVP for the wedding. I will call this high because the main reason for the site was to get people information about the wedding and to get their RSVP. So that is a high critical plug-in to me. To replicate function, I go to the RSVP section of the site, I fill it out, I click submit and I as the site owner would expect to get an email. So there we go. Vantum push menu, that's just something that makes a push menu if on a mobile phone, it replicates the Android kind of slide thing. That is low, I do not care if people can't use the push menu, it's on their mobiles, it's not a big deal. To replicate, I go to it from a mobile phone and I click the menu button and I should see the push menu. And then retina. Once again, low, I don't care if my family members don't see our pictures in retina. Yeah, to replicate it, I would use a retina MacBook and go to the site and inspect one of the elements and see the retina image just returned. All right, so I just did it. I just created the list of plugins. Everything's there, right? Boom, we did it. Not bad, took like six minutes, something like that. And I threw in a story. Cool, so now we've done the plugins. Do the same thing for your theme. And then any custom functionality that you've built. Now this is not a lot of you. A lot of you do not have a custom functionality and that's good because it means this process is simple. The theme, my theme, I have like nothing special in it. All the special things the theme does actually are done by those plugins that came with. So for me, there's no theme functionality really other than it's like pink and it's wedding. So I really just wrote the theme, makes the wedding theme active. It's so stupid, I just go to the homepage and look. List of functions, rank them high, medium, low for me. I guess I put the, I think I put the theme as medium. Well, I put it as high because the site would be really weird with that. But anyways, place a few sentences of notes on fun functionality, provide exact instructions for how to reproduce the functionality. Boom, step two, get to know your devs. This is fun guys, this is really cool. So for the high critical plugins and themes, you want to contact the dev or the support team for that plugin. We're gonna contact them and we're gonna get to know them. We're gonna tell them, hey, I love your plugin. I trust it to run my site. It's high criticality, it's a big deal for me. And here's how I'm using it. It's just kind of giving you an overview. If it's gravity forms, it's like I use it to collect forms for inbound sales or whatever. And just explain to them a little bit about it. 15, thanks. You're gonna open a dialogue with them on that functionality, you're gonna ask them. So the way I'm using that, is that a core functionality? Is that a core part of the plugin? Or is that more of like an add-on, right? So Jetpack, pretty math probably isn't considered the core part of Jetpack. It's probably more of an add-on, right? But then you talk to them about, well, what's the future of that function I look like? Gravity forms will probably tell you that the forms part of the gravity forms plugin is sticking around for a long time, so that's good. But Jetpack might go, well, we don't really see people using pre-math, and I don't know if we're gonna keep pre-math around. So we might get pretty math. I mean, if it broke, we might fix it, I don't know. You kind of feel them out. How is that? You're trusting this for your business. How are they feeling about it? And then what kind of development cycles do they have? How do they get ready for new versions of WordPress? You're kind of setting the stage here. You're like, I'm just curious. What do you guys do to test new versions of WordPress? And when do you test it? Do you test it with betas, or do you just do release candidates? So you get to understand what's their flow? What do they do like? And that'll be able to kind of help you later down when you're ready to do all this, but so yeah, you're opening that dialogue. And then you find at least one alternative to each of these plugins. So sometimes that's easy. If gravity forms, I can do ninja forms, right? If it's a slider plugin, there's 100 of them. If it's a retro plugin, there's probably a thousand, right? So it might not be that easy, right? So you gotta have to do some digging. Probably, this is where time comes in. But once you find an alternative, you can probably keep it forever, right, as the alternative. Step three, we get to know the future. So on wordbreast.org, in the blog section, they have done an awesome thing where they categorize the different types of blog posts. One of those categories is releases. And that's where they talk about new releases and betas and release candidates. So you subscribe to the releases section. When a beta release post is sent out, they send an email or they do the post and they talk about the different things, right? And I'll show you one in a minute. And if those things that are coming, you think that they impact one of your plugins, email that plugin dev, say, hey, did you see the beta that came out today? Looks like it impacts passwords. What do you think? You think it's gonna impact the plugin? Have you guys tested it yet? What's your plans? And then identify if any of your custom functionality may be impacted. And if so, it might be a good time to test the beta. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But now you have an idea of what's coming and how the site may be impacted. There's a good chance that whatever was in that beta actually didn't impact any of the plugins. And it's like, okay, cool, this is good news, right? That's awesome. Smooth sailing so far. Here's what a beta post looks like. Kind of just bullet points things. Menus can now be managed with Customizer. Take control of another piece of your site with Site Icon. Put a lot of work into better passwords. Ooh, there's one that might impact something. If you run like a membership site and you have a custom login form, wow, how does my custom login plugin deal with the new passwords? Probably a good idea to email the dev and say, hey, how are you guys doing with the better passwords that WordPress is releasing? That they talk about the less beta, right? So you're getting ahead. Because you know your site, you know what might be impacted, right? But you don't have to find out for sure. That's the plugin dev's responsibility. So, those come out. We're already subscribed to releases. Eventually, after so many betas, a release candidate's gonna come out. If you remember, that's when WordPress says, we think we're done. Definitely contact the devs of your high plugins. And unless they've told you already that it's not impacted, I would contact them and just say, hey, I saw a release candidate. It came out. What is your guys' plan for testing? How's it gone? You know, just give me an update. Then you create a staging site. So I hope all of you are utilizing a managed WordPress host like WP Engine, Pagely, SiteGround. I hope all of you are using somebody that has easy, easy staging, one-click staging. If you're not, you're doing yourself a disservice. There's no doubt about it. Because if you're gonna take all this time to do all of this, and you're not spending a little more for a great managed WordPress host, you know, you get what you paid for. Let me put it that way. So you create your staging site and you install the WordPress beta tester plugin. So it's super easy. It installs just like anything else. And what that allows you to do is upgrade to a release candidate or a beta, right? And so you install it and then you just click update to release candidate and then it just updates WordPress and boom, you're on the release candidate. So you're there. You're in it. Here's what a release candidate email looks like. It's very general. It's just like, hey, if you haven't tested it, do it. Down there, they say developers, please test your plugins and themes against WordPress 4.2 and update your plugins tested up to version. Ooh, see WordPress wants to hold them accountable too, just like we do. So now that you've created your staging site, you've upgraded to the release candidate, it's time to test. So on your staging site, update all plugins and themes, but you shouldn't have to write because we're always accumulating up to date anyway. Easy, peasy. Execute the steps that you wrote down in your list. Execute those steps to recreate the functionality that you documented earlier, right? So just like my site, remember, we go, we go look at the slider, we go, we submit an RSVP, we submit a contact form. You document each result and then specifics about any failures because those specifics are what you're gonna need to give to a dev if something happened, right? So if it failed, say, well, at the last step where I pushed checkout, it produced an error and the error said this, right? So you wanna kind of capture those details that are important for troubleshooting. And then you execute any backend functions that are unique to your site and document failures. So that a lot of you, that won't be anything. But for some of you, that might be, I don't know if you have like an integration to your external, you know, your external CRM, right? You push data between, you wanna try that, you wanna try it out. But so many of you don't do that. So it's cool. Step four, hey, it's go time. So how are the results? If there are no issues, boom, skip the test files. Skip to step five. If there are issues, let's dig in. So the issues with the medium or low plugin, you have some options. So if it's medium or low, you can do nothing because you already said it's not critical to the functionality of your site. All right, here's where being real helps, guys. Hey, you know what, I don't have to do anything if the retina plugin just doesn't work, right? It's okay, I'm fine with it, right? Or, and this is probably what you should do first, you contact the plugin dev and find out what their timeframe is. You tell them, hey, I tested this on the release candidate, I got this type of failure. What is your plan, right? And any dev worth their salt already knows and they have a plan. They'll say something like, yep, we plan to have an update out in a week and it'll beat the WordPress upgrade. So perfect, you know that you'll be ready once the WordPress upgrade's there because they're gonna make an update. Or they might say, listen, this is gonna take longer than we thought. We think we're gonna have it ready two weeks after the upgrade, okay? Now you know, you have to wait two weeks before you do the upgrade. But that's cool because you know there's no anxiety, it's okay. Or you can replace the functionality. You can build something, you could go and try and find another plugin. Now what if it's a high critical plugin? Those are the ones that we said are the ones that drive our business. So you definitely contact the plugin dev, give them every piece of information, reiterate what it is you do with that plugin and why it's critical to your site, right? Maybe you don't have to do that with commerce, that's pretty self-explanatory, but maybe with pretty math you would. I don't know. So this will completely determine when you can upgrade because if they say we're not gonna be ready for two weeks after the upgrade, cool. We definitely know we're not going guys, we're not gonna upgrade yet, we're waiting for their update. Or you can replace the functionality. We can go to that backup plugin that we researched and found, right? It kind of just depends. What do you want to do? If the dev came back and said, we're never gonna fix it, it's time to go to that backup, right? Time to implement that other plugin. Or you could build something custom to replace it. You need to build your own plugin if you want. So I talked about devs being responsible, devs wanting to do the right thing from their customers. This is a message that the devs put out there after a security release came out. And this specific plugin, this plugin developer admits he was doing something wrong. He was not doing WordPress the correct way in his plugin. And the security release broke it because it was a security vulnerability. It said, no, no, nobody can do this anymore. And it's not the right way anyways. So it's okay, right? To break. So he says, we're updating the views plugin today so we resolve all short codes before passing the WordPress process content. This is a straightforward change which takes us one day to complete. Would have been great to receive a heads up about an upcoming change in WordPress so we could do this change on time. So here's a plugin dev who wants to do this so no one cites break. These are the kind of devs you want to be doing business with. We received a huge amount of support requests through this, but this isn't the issue. We can deal with a wave of support issues. This time it wasn't our fault, meaning they didn't know. But sometimes what works as mentioned above is seeing our clients, folks who build WordPress sites for a living. That's all of you. 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. I agree, I absolutely agree. This is a great demo here. Many of them run hundreds of sites. They cannot afford to stop everything and fix content on so many sites. Especially not if they are currently away for their family vacation. I don't know, that's total sense. What others have asked here and I would like to ask too is set up a mechanism that allows WordPress core developers to privately communicate such upcoming issues with plugin developers. We are your partners. This is the kind of dev you want to be doing business with, ladies and gentlemen. They are out there. They care about every single one of you, right? These are the ones. So once we know, once we know what's gonna happen either all our tests are passed or we know that it's gonna be two more weeks and then that update comes out and we upgrade it. So basically once we're in the clear, hey, we got our worry-free upgrade guys. We know, we know what's gonna work. So once all issues have been resolved you will have a much better understanding of your site. You know my site really well now. You know like every piece of functionality about it and you haven't even seen the front page, right? So you're gonna know your site inside and out, which like we said is important. And you won't fear the upgrade button. Ooh, think of all the anxiety we have. Think of all the surprises we have in our life that we don't want. Think about when your kid comes home from school and says he got suspended. Nah, it's not a good surprise. Nobody wants that, right? Nobody likes those. So here's an opportunity to get rid of one of those sources of surprises in your life that can cause you a lot of stress and anxiety. That's awesome. I wish people built talks about how I could relieve points of like places where I get stressed out. Like what if somebody just told me your house will never break? It's like, yes, oh my God. So here I am giving you that calm, that sense of you know, just everything's gonna be fine. Now you will be ready for any maintenance or security upgrades that are released. No testing needed. Like I said, they're your friends now. You love them. You're like, yay, they just fixed something. Yay, they closed it. You know, a vulnerability. And you don't even have to worry about it. Just sit back, relax. Your manager WordPress host will just upgrade it for you. And you will have a game plan for the next functional upgrade. It gets easier and easier. So preparing for next time. If you just documented everything we did, this process will take half the time in the future. It is so much faster the second time, the third time, the fourth time. So we don't even have to do an hour worth of stuff, right? It's much less. You've already got it all. If you manage lots of sites, the testing plans and communications to get, devs get even easier because there's tons of overlap. You know, we have customers who have like 100 sites. They use the exact same plugin for so many of those sites. So they just have to open one line of communication with those devs. It's so easy. This scales really, really well. Ensure you plan your time accordingly over the next quarter. So now you know that there's not really, probably gonna be like three emails about betas that you're gonna have to read. So let's budget like 10 minutes, three times over the next three months. There's gonna be a release candidate email that you need to read and then contact plugin devs about. So let's budget 20 minutes for that. And then you definitely know you're gonna have to do all of this, the testing. Let's budget an hour, let's budget two hours, right? That's not bad. We're just talking about two and a half hours over three months to be ready for all upgrades. That's excellent. That is, I mean, that's just so easy. I mean, you know, I can't beat it. And then following this plan takes time. It really does, but it also means a lot less surprises. And like I said, man, I could do with less surprises, believe me. Cool. Questions. What do we got? Yes. Yeah, so what I rounded off were managed WordPress hosts. So these are hosts that just specialize in WordPress and they've built things like staging sites into your workflow. So it's just one button and it's a staging site. So somebody like WP Engine, somebody like Pagely, somebody like SiteGround, kind of those things. You can Google manage WordPress hosts and see a lot of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What else? Any other questions? Yes. So yes, the main thing you're gonna be concerned about is that you now have plugins probably to deal with. So whereas there's a chance you didn't have plugins before, unless you were paying for them. So now you're gonna have plugins and you're gonna have to do a lot of what I just said there. WordPress.com is super easy because it just works because it's such limited functionality that you literally never worry about upgrades. But on this, on .org, you do have to worry about upgrades. There's more maintenance involved in your site for sure. Kind of like going from renting a house where there's not much maintenance. It's like cleaning the dryer, replace the air filter to owning a house where it's like, ooh, there's a lot of maintenance you probably don't have to do. The devs, huh? So just using gravity forms to do exactly what the forms do. So it's not, if it's a high criticality of your site, like if you're capturing all your leads through gravity forms, it's probably not a bad idea. You wanna have that peace of mind that something that is critical to your business is being taken care of. I agree, gravity forms is a premium plugin and you're not gonna have to talk to them a lot. Maybe you don't even do the first intro email just to let them know, hey, thanks, I'm using your plugin for forms, right? But you will probably wanna do it if you catch issues, right? To just kind of say, hey, I need to understand. How's gravity forms gonna react to this? What's it gonna do, right? And you can, you can feel good about gravity forms though, right? So you're rarely gonna have to do it, but it's not the worst idea in the world. Yeah. Yeah, most likely, yeah, most likely you're not gonna be the first person that ever found it on something like gravity forms. And so it is good to kind of just stay up to date. And that almost is your line of communication, right? If they're good at what they do and they manage their forms, that might be the line. Anything, yeah. So definitely it's in staging, you start in staging. So you're gonna upgrade plugins, you upgrade them in staging. That way if the site breaks, it's no big deal because nobody's going to your staging site. That would definitely do it in staging. And then you basically do it one plugin at a time. Don't push update all, because something's gonna break and then you're gonna have to take it apart one at a time. Yeah. What else? Anything else? All right, cool guys. I'll be at the WP Engine booth if you have questions. Thanks.