One of the great things about WordPress is the ability to plugin new functionality effortlessly through it’s backend interface. Most of the popular plugins get updated very frequently and WordPress does a great job of letting you know this by highlighting which plugins have updates.
If you’re like me, this highlighted number screams for attention and you just love hitting that automatic update. This type of behaviour is fine for personal blogs which get very little traffic, but if your employment is based around blog performance for your company this can be a very dangerous move.
There are good updates and then there are bad updates
Keep in mind, these updates that come through are mostly from people who’ve created their plugin through their spare time and depend on their community for feedback on performance and issues. So when an update goes out the the WordPress world, there’s no guarantee that it’s gone through a stringent testing process.
README
Most plugins when they upgrade will have a log of what has been changed (a ‘changelog’) and these notes are available through a link under the plugins page. Make sure to read through this and gauge if upgrading is really necessary. Security fixes, performance boosts, and must-have new functionality are usually the only things worth upgrading for but you’ll have to judge on your own what’s best for your situation.
Have a development version and production version of your blog
It’s a pain, but it’s definitely necessary to have a mirror copy of your blog. Having this copy, your development copy, is where you can break stuff and not sit in suspense after you upgrade and start hitting refresh on the homepage – praying that your baby is still whole. When upgrading plugins, all you need to copy to the development server is the wp-content folder and I usually do an entire database dump because it’s fast, but you’ll need to configure your environment to take into account for any URL changes for you development domain.
For further information, please refer to the following: