WordPress updates are critical to keeping your website fast, bug-free, and secure. Staying behind schedule can slow down your website and expose it to many vulnerabilities.

Updating your WordPress application essentials such as core, plugins, and themes are easy with the WordPress admin panel. Still, it can become very tedious if you manage multiple websites or you are a digital agency that periodically manages your clients' website maintenance.

Executing updates is also not enough. You must manually check your website for errors because performance-related and version incompatibility issues are prevalent, which can drain your time and resources.

Cloudways has introduced SafeUpdates to help you automate your WordPress updates and streamline the maintenance process smoothly. SafeUpdates helps you automatically detect, test, and deploy updates error-free. From update detection to rigorous testing and safe deployment, SafeUpdates is a complete package to simplify your workflow and make website maintenance more manageable.

You can update your WordPress application essentials on-demand with SafeUpdates, but the true potential can be unleashed by scheduling the automatic updates, so they are timely done with no manual effort, so you remain focused on your business growth.

SafeUpdates is fully compatible with WordPress, WooCommerce, and WordPress Multisites.

SafeUpdates actively monitors your WordPress application to detect if there are any pending updates. Once updates are detected and executed, it does the following steps to ensure updates are safe and bug-free:

If updates are aborted during this cycle or the output is not as expected for any reason, SafeUpdates will abort the updating production application. Suppose the error occurs only after the live application is updated; SafeUpdates will roll back changes and restore your application to its previous working state as it takes backup before initiating the update process.

The SafeUpdates pricing structure is straightforward and offers discounts if you activate it on multiple sites. Please refer to the SafeUpdates pricing page for the updated pricing.

Log in to your Cloudways Platform using your credentials.

This step is about configuring SafeUpdates as per your requirements so you can make the most out of it.

On-demand refers to updating your WordPress application core, themes, and plugins manually on-the-fly. We recommend using on-demand SafeUpdates during off-peak hours to avoid any disruption. Here's how you can start on-demand updates:

Next, it will start the update process, and you don't need to wait until the updates finish because you can review the history later to check the status of the updates and whether they were successful or aborted.

SafeUpdates also backup your website before executing updates so it can always roll back in case errors occur after updating your production application. Please note that you also have the option to restore your website to the previous checkpoint in case you are not satisfied with the updates.

By scheduling updates, you unlock the true potential of SafeUpdates. Scheduling updates on your applications removes the hassle of manually updating your application's essentials, as SafeUpdates automatically runs updates at the scheduled time.

Here, you will find the history of updates (successful/aborted) executed by the SafeUpdates. It maintains the last 30 days' updates history for each application.

You can click View Details in the logs to view more information.

You can click Deactivate to remove your SafeUpdates subscription from any particular application.

Each SafeUpdates error has an error code associated, so you can easily troubleshoot the errors you encounter.

No updates available means:

What you can do to resolve this:

You may see this error if your server runs low on disk space. This is because SafeUpdates requires disk space equivalent to your application size to create the temporary staging site.

Using the monitoring tools, you can view your application disk usage and overall server disk usage.

What you can do to resolve this:

You may see this error when specific core, plugins, or themes fail during an update, or if we detect errors in the temporary staging environment after the update. This error is likely caused by the installation of a premium plugin with an invalid license on the application.

What you can do to resolve this:

You may see this error when our proprietary algorithm determines that the update may:

What you can do to resolve this:

You may see this error if the update is aborted when the specified core, plugins, or themes fail during the update or if we detect errors after the update in your production site.

We will roll back your website changes by restoring the backup we have taken before starting the SafeUpdates process.

What you can do to resolve this:

You may see this error if:

What you can do to resolve this:

You may see this error if the temporary staging environment we created does not match your actual website.

This should be a temporary issue, and you can reschedule the update to a later date. However, don't hesitate to contact our friendly support team for assistance if the error persists.

You may see this error code if the update is aborted when we detect problems or errors when updating the WordPress core, plugins, or themes in the temporary staging site.

What you can do to resolve this:

You may see this error code if the update is aborted when we detect problems or errors when updating the WordPress core, plugins, or themes in the production site.

We will roll back your website changes by restoring the backup we have taken before starting the SafeUpdates process.

What you can do to resolve this:

You may see this error if the update is aborted when we detect an unexpected problem with the SafeUpdates process. Our engineers are automatically notified when this happens and will investigate the problem as soon as possible.

You can reschedule the update to a later date to give our engineers time to resolve the problem.

We use WP-CLI to update your WordPress applications to ensure maximum compatibility with all plugins and themes. You may see this error if we can't recognize your WordPress application due to the following:

SafeUpdates does not support WordPress applications with modified core files or custom folder structure which does not adhere to WordPress standards.

We are improving support for WordPress installed in a different directory than your web root.

We use WP-CLI to update your WordPress applications to ensure maximum compatibility with all plugins and themes.

You may see this error if we are not able to connect to the following:

You can reschedule the update to a later date, as this is a temporary network issue that will be resolved quickly.

We use WP-CLI to update your WordPress applications to ensure maximum compatibility with all plugins and themes.

You may see this error if some of your WordPress core files have been modified, as their checksum does not match the official WordPress.org checksum.

Suppose the modification to the WordPress core files is intentional. In that case, you will not be able to use SafeUpdates as we do not support WordPress applications with modified core files, nor do we recommend such modifications to be done on your WordPress application.

If the modification of the WordPress core files is not intentional, you can reinstall the WordPress core files without affecting your existing content, plugins, and themes. This can be done with either one of the steps below:

We use WP-CLI to update your WordPress applications to ensure maximum compatibility with all plugins and themes.

You may see this error if the WordPress core, plugins, or themes fail during the WP-CLI update or if we detect errors after the WP-CLI update.

What you can do to resolve this:

We use WP-CLI to update your WordPress applications to ensure maximum compatibility with all plugins and themes.

You may see this error if we encounter a JSON parsing error during the WP-CLI update. This can happen if a problematic plugin or theme interferes with the WP-CLI operation.

What you can do to resolve this:

We use WP-CLI to update your WordPress applications to ensure maximum compatibility with all plugins and themes.

You may see this error if the WP-CLI operation timed out, which can happen if the server is under a high load.

What you can do to resolve this:

We use WP-CLI to update your WordPress applications to ensure maximum compatibility with all plugins and themes.

You may see this error if we detect problems with the WP-CLI tool in your server. Our engineers are automatically notified when this happens and will investigate the problem as soon as possible.

You can reschedule the update to a later date to give our engineers time to resolve the problem.

You may see this error if:

What you can do to resolve this:

That’s it! We hope this article was helpful. If you need any help, then feel free to search your query on Cloudways Support Center or contact us via chat (Need a Hand > Send us a Message). Alternatively, you can also create a support ticket.

Is SafeUpdates compatible with WooCommerce and WordPress Multisite applications?

Yes, it is fully compatible with WooCommerce and WordPress Multisite applications.

What happens when one plugin update is unsuccessful out of many?

SafeUpdates aborts the whole update when even one plugin or theme is problematic. SafeUpdates only proceeds with the updates on your production site when the updates and testing are successful on the staging site.

Can I schedule updates for all my applications at the same time?

Yes, you can schedule updates for all your applications in one slot, but SafeUpdates only processes updates for a single application at any given time and puts other applications in the queue if they are on the same server. This restriction helps to minimize the load on the server.

If your applications are hosted on different servers, the above restriction does not apply.

Why can't I view the history of the past two months?

SafeUpdates maintains the last 30 days' updates history for each application.

Does SafeUpdates also update premium themes and plugins?

SafeUpdates handle updates of themes and plugins regardless if they are paid or free.

Do I need extra disk space?

No, you don't need extra disk space, as SafeUpdates uses the same server's disk space to create a staging application temporarily and later removes it once updates are finished. In addition, the temporary staging application is also not storage-intensive as it does not include your media folder.