Puneet Ghanshani

Chief Architect at Microsoft

4 minute read

Wordpress 3.3 has been released a couple of days ago and GoDaddy has already allowed upgrading it through its panel.  And as an enthusiast you could upgrade it yourself as well.  But using Wordpress on Godaddy has never been simple and straight forward.  So a few tips before you mess up during the upgrade exercise.

Backup your database

Go to your GoDaddy MyAccount and select the website you would want to upgrade the Wordpress version for.  Click on Web Hosting option to launch the Web Hosting Control Panel.

Click on Database -> MySQL database and select the wordpress database and click on Backup.  It would take anywhere between 10 minutes – 4 hours for a backup to be created in _db_backups folder on your site.  You can mention some other folder as well.  But I would prefer to have it kept same

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Disable your plugins

You could login into your Wordpress admin to disable all the plugins, or alternatively, just rename the existing folder to plugins_old folder using FTP client, or GoDaddy FTP Manager.

I prefer to rename it to plugins_old before proceeding with the installation.

Download the latest Wordpress package

Download the latest Wordpress package from the wordpress website - http://wordpress.org/download/   You may choose to follow any one of the approaches

  1. Approach One: Download, extract the zip file into a folder.  Use a FTP client to
    1. Delete the folders (wp-admin, wp-include) of your website
    2. Upload the folders using FTP
  2. Approach Two: Use GoDaddy File Manager
    1. Open the File Manager
    2. Click on upload button to upload the wordpress.zip file to your websiteimage
    3. Once uploaded, un-archive the wordpress.zip file to the folder that has your wordpress files.  Remember to tick ‘Overwrite’ option while doing so.
    4. Once completed, delete the wordpress.zip file

Approach Two will not take you more than 5 minutes, while approach one can be very slow and boring process.

Visit the website. It should be working, but wait!!!

Now if you visit your website, it should be working with the new Wordpress 3.3 update.  But you still have to enable your plugins so let’s follow the steps:

  1. Using FTP client, or File Manager delete the new folder ‘Plugins’ created under wp-content folder
  2. Rename the plugins_old to Plugins folder
  3. Visit the admin page of the website
  4. It will request you to upgrade the database.  Ideally this should work the best, but if it does not you still would have the data backup with you.
  5. Once the upgrade is complete, you can visit the admin area and check all your plugins running as usual

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