How to upgrade WordPress manually

Upgrading Wordpress Manually

1. The first step of upgrading WordPress manually is to grab the latest files from the main site of WordPress. You can download the very latest files by going to the URL: http://wordpress.org/latest.zip




2. On your local computer find the find the .zip file you just downloaded and then unzip ( extract ) the files to a new folder before proceeding to the next step.




3. Now open this new folder that you extracted the files to and remove the folder "wp-content". This folder keeps all the images, plugins, themes, ect. that each wordpress site uses. Removing this folder prevents your WordPress site from losing any of its content when you copy over the files to your existing WordPress installation.




4. Now open an FTP connection to your site so you can transfer over the latest files for WordPress.
• On Windows and don't know how to create an FTP account? Click Here
• On cPanel and don't know how to create an FTP account? Click Here
  • Note: Our cPanel shared servers are setup to require Explicit FTP over TLS. See how to enable this in common FTP applications Here




5. Now in your FTP Application browse to the location you extracted your WordPress files to and move these over to the same directory that you have Wordpress currently installed.
• Important: Within your FTP application be sure to over-write all the existing files in the directory that Wordpress is residing, so that all the files for WordPress can be updated.




6. Once the FTP Transfer is complete your WordPress installation should be upgraded to the latest version. We recommend logging into your WordPress Dashboard to ensure it shows that your upgraded to the latest version.
• Note: The next time you login to your WordPress Dashboard you might get a notice that WordPress has been updated and that you need to update the Database to continue to your dashboard. In this case just click the button for "Update WordPress Database" and it'll automatically update.