WP Toolkit – Smart Updates

Smart Updates is a premium feature available in WP Toolkit 3.x
and later. It helps you keep your production websites up to date without
the risk of breaking your website. Smart Updates analyses the potential
consequences of installing updates and advises you whether doing so is
safe.

To keep your websites secure, you need to regularly update WordPress:
themes, plugins, and core. However, these updates can potentially break
you websites. Manual updates require your attention and cannot guarantee
that your websites will continue working.

To ensure a WordPress installation is always updated safely without breaking
your website, we developed the Smart Updates feature, which does the
following:

1. Clones the installation, and then analyses the clone and takes
   screenshots of the website’s pages (including dynamic content and
   carousels).
2. Updates the clone, analyses it again, and then takes screenshots of
   the website’s pages again.
3. Detects issues (PHP issues, HTTP response code errors, changed page titles, and others):
   not only those the update can cause but also those that existed before the update.
4. With manual updates, Smart Updates shows you the “before” and “after”
   screenshots and the forecast whether it is safe to update or not.
   Here you can compare the screenshots, see and download the detailed report about the found issues,
   and then decide whether to update the production website or not.
5. With autoupdates, Smart Updates automatically updates the
   production website unless there is at least one issue caused by the update.
   Otherwise the update is not performed. In both cases, you
   receive an email with the results of analysis and the “before” and
   “after” screenshots.

Using Smart Updates

Smart Updates is a paid feature, which you can get from your hosting provider.
You can use Smart Updates with both manual and autoupdates.

To enable Smart Update:

1. To get the Smart Updates feature, ask your hosting provider.
   You enable Smart Update separately for each installation.
2. Go to WordPress and turn on “Smart Update”
   on the installation card.

You have enabled Smart Update. Now you can use it with manual or
autoupdates.

To use Smart Update manually:

1. Make sure you have enough disk space for a full copy of the installation
   that you want to update.

2. On the installation card, click “Check updates”,
   select updates you want to install, and then click Update.

3. Wait…