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Having difficulty updating Wordpress

Hi,

I am attempting to update my Wordpress website but am having issues. Firstly when I go to the Updates page it doesn't actually give me the option to update from the Dashboard.

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I'm currently on a very old version. I tried to update manually from File Manager by copy the wp-admin and wp-includes from a fresh Wordpress install but when I do that I just get a white screen of death (with no errors reported).

Any idea why my site is crashing like this?

Any input would be much appreciated - otherwise I will just try to setup a new WP install and start copying files over and see if that works.

Thanks

Pavel Nagaev

Try this. I have done manual updates many times. It is very simple procees.

https://www.wordfence.com/learn/how-to-manually-upgrade-wordpress-themes-and-plugins/

or

https://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress#Manual_Update

"I just get a white screen of death (with no errors reported)." It could be plugins, you should disable them before upgrading, try to enter to dashbard using direct link http://yoursite.com/wp-admin

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David Favor

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Kosta Kondratenko

ASKER

Well this is strange - even though my dashboard is showing 4.3.1 in the version number at the bottom - when I go to upgrade Wordpress through the manual link:

mysiteurl.com.au/wp-admin/upgrade.php

I get a page that says:

'No Update Required

Your WordPress database is already up-to-date!'

So not sure where to go from here. I have tried manually uploaded wp-admin and wp-includes folder from latest Wordpress install but then I just get a white screen of death with no errors.

Terry Woods

You will also need to overwrite all the files in the base folder (wp-activate.php, wp-blog-header.php etc). If you downloaded a fresh copy of WordPress, the one file in the that folder that isn't present in the installation files is wp-config.php which contains your database connection username and password etc. You don't want that overwritten anyway. Don't delete it. There may be other files (not from the WordPress core install) in there you don't want to delete, so the cleanest way to update the files is to just overwrite them with the latest ones.

When you get a white screen of death, you can determine the error by adding these lines to the very start of your wp-config.php file:

@ini_set('log_errors','On'); // enable or disable php error logging (use 'On' or 'Off')
@ini_set('display_errors','Off'); // enable or disable public display of errors (use 'On' or 'Off')
@ini_set('error_log',__DIR__.'/error_log'); // write errors to base WordPress directory

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That code will cause errors to be logged to a file called error_log in your base, which can help you track down the cause of the error.

If necessary, you can temporarily move all the plugin folders out of the wp-content/plugins folder into a spare folder somewhere, which will prevent any plugins from causing errors. Once the site is running, you can move them back as needed.

Kosta Kondratenko

ASKER

Thank you everyone for your help. You guys are lifesavers!

David Favor

Likely because of what you stated above...

"I tried to update manually from File Manager by copy the wp-admin and wp-includes from a fresh Wordpress install but when I do that I just get a white screen of death (with no errors reported)."

This means you have mixed old/new version WordPress files.

Going through the brute force upgrade sequence (unzip latest.zip + navigate to upgrade.php) will likely fix everything.

WordPress is very forgiving.