Before you upgrade WordPress

1. Ask yourself do I really, really need to upgrade? If you don’t, don’t upgrade most times it is more work than it should be especially if you’ve had your blog online for years like I have.
2. Backup your database. It tells you to do this, but really do it. Not just an export of the data from WordPress itself but some backup from your host. If your host doesn’t let you make quick easy free backups of your database, get a new webhost! In 2025, I had to find a new web host again, not because of lack of backups but many many other issues. Also there is a difference between an XML export of your blog and full backup of your database which is probably going to be .sql file. You can also backup all your files which is usually a tar ball for perhaps even a gzipped tar ball.
3. Write down your current version of WordPress. You may have to roll back so you need to know where you came from. Plus if you haven’t upgraded in a while, you may have to make a number of modifications for different fixes and releases. WordPress has archives of old releases so you can roll back.
4. If things don’t work, delete plugins. This is a usual source of upgrade headaches, some plugins are not well maintained nor were they designed necessarily for the current version of WordPress. As WordPress has developed, more features are built in so you need less and less plugins.
5. Beware the database language encoding issues. Next to bad plugins or necessary changes to themes, the biggest problems I have is with my database having non-latin characters in it and my desire to keep them displaying correctly. This also returned in 2025 when I moved web hosts.
6. You may need to update PHP, MySQL, or some other code library, this can put an end to your WordPress upgrade if your host won’t do so, of course you could get a new host, or you could ask yourself again, “Do I really need to upgrade WordPress?” Sometimes it is best to ignore WordPress’s pleas to upgrade.

Although I am no longer running the latest version of WordPress, I did install Disqus which works fine with WordPress 2.7.1. I retired a few more plugins and my latest comments seem to be a lot different than I remember. We’ll see if Disqus leads to more comments.

It is now 2025 and I’m updating old posts after encountering issues my 中文 in my blog posts again. In 2019 I also made major changes to my WordPress installation and one of the changes I made was getting rid of Disqus as it was slowing down my blog, I was getting buried in spam and Disqus had done something to get blocked in China. Now on many of my old blog posts I have disabled comments but this post is apparently not popular with spammers.

This entry was originaly posted on January 20th, 2010, it was last edited on August 10th, 2025 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: MySQL, PHP, WordPress.