How to manually update Wordpress via FTP

Hi, this is Ileane from basic blog tips. nope! actually it's Andy Bailey from commentluv.com
I am here at the request of Ileane who said that her daughter is dealing with a crappy
web host that wont allow automatic updating of her Wordpress. It's
just getting a problem and it can't do it. so it has to be updated manually by ftp. Now
in the past, her friend Devesh did it for her.
But now she wants to see a video on how to do it herself so the next time Wordpress updates,
she can do it via FTP on her own. This tutorial is how to update Wordpress via
FTP. You're going to need a few things, this is
what you will need. you need, the latest Wordpress zip file
you need a backup of your database you need an FTP client (more on that later)
and you need a backup of all your files which will require lots and lots of patience
ok, lets move on to the first thing - the latest Wordpress zip file
you can get the latest Wordpress zip file from wordpress.org/download/
you just click the button and it starts downloading , now once it's downloaded you open it and
extract it to somewhere stable say perhaps your desktop.
once it's done, close that we don't need that anymore
so we've got the first thing done the latest wordpress zip file and it's extracted
to your desktop next, we need a backup of your database.
now this is the dashboard of fiddyp.co.uk this is my personal blog that I don't update
very often mainly because I'm doing stuff for other people all the time.
now we need to do a backup of our database , if her daughter had cpanel she could have
done it with a one click thing to backup the entire site and the database.
but, this is doing the hard way. or the way that anyone can do it whatever their host.
so, let's add a new plugin and search for "backup"
now there are quite a number of backup plugins , one of the simplest ones is wp-db-backup
so let's install that. once it's installed and activated you'll find another option in your tools menu for "backup"
here's the page, you select all the tables that you want to backup. you can exclude post
revisions and exclude spam comments if you want to make it smaller.
then select download to your computer which is the easiest way and click backup now
this is the first part of 'lots of patience!' ok, the backup is done and now downloaded
next we need an FTP client. if you head on over to filezilla-project.org
you can download the filezilla client. the filezilla client is by the same people
that made Firefox , and it's called an FTP client.
a File transfer protocol, it's just a piece of software that you can use to transfer files
from your computer to the server that hosts your website.
so install it and open it and it'll look like this.
the host, that is the address of your server normally it is ftp dot and then your domain
name, your website name you put your username and your password and
click connect. and there it is connected this is the root
of the site so you can click the little plus sign
and it'll show you all the folders within that.
now you're looking for public_html or httpdocs or www
one of these will have all the folders in it that is your wordpress website , that's
if you installed it to the root directory. so let me just raise this up there,
now what we're going to need to do with this is backup all your files
easiest way to do this , go to the desktop , we right click , choose 'create directory'
and this is a web backup. there's the folder there, double
click it to open it and what we're going to do is
select all the folders in your root directory , right click and download.
this is the second part of 'lots of patience' ok and that's just finishing up now , let
me tell you that took a bloomin age! but, at least now we have a backup of the
database and a backup of your files so if things go a bit curly we can do
something about it. we can restore, we can reimport the database.
right, now, wordpress , let's have a look here. now Wordpress say in an ideal situation
you would deactivate all of your plugins. So when you're going to do an update,
go to your plugins and select them all, choose deactivate and then apply
that will deactivate all your plugins. but because I'm going from 3.1 to 3.1.1 I'm gonna
just overwrite the files. so, how do we do that?
let's go back to filezilla , we go to the directory, the Wordpress directory that we
downloaded to your desktop and we're uploading to public_html or it could be httpdocs
now you're gonna select all, you can click the top one and shift + click the bottom one
, that means you press shift on the keyboard and click the bottom one.
now you do not need to upload wp-content , you don't have to worry about config-sample
if there is a htaccess in here or anything like that you don't need to upload that either
so what we're gonna do is use up more of your patience because this will take a bloomin
age too! so what we're gonna do is right click and
then upload. first thing, is it comes up with this dialog
box saying what do you want to do because there are files there that already exist.
choose apply to the current queue only because that will overwrite. it will take this action
and this method so apply to the current queue only, we just
queued all of these files and we set it on it's merry way.
ok so that's just finishing off now, next step is to go to your blog and refresh
the dashboard, that will detect that there are new files and will tell you if you
need to update your database. I'll click on dashboard, "database update
required" so we click on the button and it was updated
successfully, click continue. and well well well, we're now on version 3.11
let's just confirm that the blog still loads it does! there it is in all it's glory, we
have just updated Wordpress. wasn't that easy?