Site two years out of date – options?

  • I have been asked by a friend to help with his WordPress site. It is over two years out of date (everything – WP, plugins, themes). He is running 4.2.15 and has over 80 (out of date) plugins.

    From looking around, when a lot of folks face a situation like this, they seem to think it is easier to “just start over” with the latest versions and import the content.

    What advice would you give to someone facing this situation?

    Besides staying updated in the future? ??

    Would you (1) Just try to update? (2) Start again and import the data from the site?

    Thanks for any thoughts and input!

    • This topic was modified 7 years, 8 months ago by dmz94.
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • Hello,

    Well, 80 plugins, I’m even surprised buy seeing that amount of plugins, new or old :D.

    To the matter at hand though for such a long time being out of date I would advice the following:

    1] Check that all of those plugins ( I guess needed ) have a 4.8 version. If not then there’s no point of updating either way as they might not even work correctly any more.

    2] If they do have a 4.8, keep a backup of everything, or even better duplicate the whole site in a clean environment and do the updates slowly, usually long term plugins adapt to changes to support old version as well so there might be a good chance for everything to work pretty much as supposed to.

    3] If either of the above fail the only way would be a fresh install & setup from scratch unfortunately. Tedious work but would always be the best choice as scrap data won’t exist anymore.

    Best regards,
    Konstantinos

    Hi dmz94,

    Another thing to add to the excellent reply above, is that you are able to ‘deactivate’ plugins in the plugin dashboard.

    That way you can start to turn off ones that may not be needed and see what affect it has on the site. If it makes no apparent difference you can then think about deleting them.

    Good luck.
    Drew

    Thread Starter dmz94

    (@dmz94)

    Thank you for your help and suggestions. Much appreciated!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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