One item that did not make it into the WordPress For Dummies book (not because it’s not an important piece, but because there is only so much room in a book and my editor kept me on a tight leash on actual page count!), is the process of upgrading your WordPress blog. This is important to know because WordPress releases new version so frequently (like almost every 4 months) – so, knowing how to manage your own upgrade is good info to have.

STEP ONE – BACK UP YOUR DATABASE AND FILES!!

This is a crucial step. If you get to the end of your upgrade and find that something has gone wrong, if you haven’t backed up your database and files, you might be completely out of luck with no one to blame but yourself! I did a post here: How To Back Up Your WordPress Blog – have a read and then do it. Before you upgrade, it’s a very good idea to verify your backups…that is, to make sure the system backed up your files correctly.

It can never be said often enough: Backup your blog!

There are two things to keep in mind here:

1. Your posts, comments, trackbacks, link lists, categories and WordPress option settings are all stored in the MYSQL database on your web server account
2. The images you’ve uploaded, the plugins you’ve installed and the theme templates you’ve uploaded are not stored in your MYSQL database

Why is this important? Because when you back up your blog, you essentially need to do two things:

1. Back up the MYSQL database to ensure you’ve backed up all your blog data and option settings
2. Backup any images, plugins and themes so you have backups of those, as well

These two things require two different methods. Let’s do the easy one first: