WP Alpha comes with an inbuilt AI-powered SmartUpdates system that takes care of patching WordPress core, plugins and themes. The system clones your site, takes screenshots of up to 100 pages, deploys the pending updates on the test clone, then checks the error logs and compares before and after screenshots to make sure the site still works correctly. If all is OK it deploys the updates; if an issue is detected it stops the update process and emails you to explain what went wrong.
The system can also run in semi-automatic mode, where it clones the site and does the testing but waits for your OK before deploying updates. SmartUpdates is not switched on by default, so follow the steps below to enable it.
Step by step
- Log in to the hosting admin console. Open WordPress, either from the sidebar or from the menu on the left, to load the WordPress manager.
- Find your site and use the updates on/off option to switch the system on.
- Open the update settings. By default everything is updated automatically. If you want more control you can change this, down to a plugin by plugin basis.
- On the plugins and themes lists, use the auto update option beside each item to choose whether it is updated automatically.
- To run updates yourself, check for updates and then start the update manually. The system still clones the site and tests the updates, but waits for your OK before patching the live site. Checking for updates can take a minute.
- To see what the system has done, go to the Dashboard tab and open Logs. You will see each event, including screenshot runs, the plugins that were updated with their previous and new version numbers, and whether any issues were found during testing.
If you switch automatic updates off, the system will not run on its own, but you can still push updates manually.
Things to check
- Storage space. Because the system clones your site, it needs room for a full copy. A 50 GB site adds another 50 GB of usage while it runs, so make sure your plan has enough storage overhead.
- Plan limits. Hosting plans have limits, including on databases. In the video one update run failed because the database limit had been reached by a number of staging sites.
- Error emails. When the system finds a problem it emails you. Open the logs to see which step failed and why.
When to contact support
Contact us if an update keeps failing, if the logs report a problem you do not understand, or if you are unsure whether your plan has room for the clone. Bigger sites, or sites where you want to manage updates more closely, may suit the manual approach, and we can help you decide.
Our support team can help: log a ticket from the client area or start a live chat.