Updates can be a website owner’s biggest fear but they are also a necessity. Plugin updates are required to add new features, improve existing ones, ensure compatibility with new versions of other plugins, fix bugs, and so on.
As professional WordPress plugin developers, we constantly try to improve our plugins to offer you the best value and to ensure compatibility with WordPress itself and with other plugins/themes.
Before making a new update available, we thoroughly test the new version both manually and via automated tests to look for common bugs and issues.
While we do try our best to ensure no issues with any update, it is still good practice to first test any plugin updates on a staging site. If you need help setting up a reliable update strategy for your site, we recommend Codeable.
Plugin updates are only available to customers with an active license. All our licenses are valid for 1 year after which they auto-renew. If you’ve disabled auto-renewal and did not manually renew your license after it expired, you will not be able to update until you purchase a new license.
There are 2 main ways to perform a plugin update:
Automatic updates
This is the easiest (and recommended) way of performing an update. If you have an active license and an update is available, you can simply:
- Login into your WordPress website as an administrator
- Go to the Plugins admin page
- Find the Update notification below your DWS plugin and click on it
As explained in our article on Freemius, you can’t receive automatic updates if you opt-out of sharing non-sensitive data. That is because said data includes your license key and keeping track of its validity. It’s still possible to update manually.
Manual updates
If you prefer to update the plugin files manually, that is possible too. There are two ways of doing that, and the first step in both cases is to download the ZIP archive of the plugin version you want to update to. We have described how to do that here.
Manual update via (S)FTP
- Download the latest version of your DWS plugin and unzip it
- Connect to your hosting server via SFTP or FTP
- Upload the unzipped plugin folder to the wp-admin/plugins directory (if asked, choose to replace everything)
Manual update via the WP Admin area
- Download the latest version of your DWS plugin
- Login into your WordPress website as an administrator
- Go to Plugins -> Add New admin page
- Click on Upload Plugin -> Choose File
- Select the ZIP archive of the new DWS plugin version
- Click on Install Now
- Confirm that you want to replace the existing plugin with the new version