Sunday 12 May 2019

Why does Wordpress suck so bad?

Yesterday morning I had my business website running smoothly, all the pages finally done and approved, my Google Ads setup and sending traffic to the site, and even all the plugins (traffic, appointment booking etc) all behaving. Then I decided to risk doing the recommended 'Wordpress update' and it all went belly-up.

I'd had a similar problem several months ago when I just had my basic website structure in place, so I wasn't too fussed when I had to delete all the files in my domain folder and start from scratch. But this time, having spent months getting my website more-or-less finished, I was very wary of doing the upgrade - why fix what isn't broken?

However, since it is generally 'recommended' that you keep wordpress and plugins up-to-date (to fix known bugs etc.) I decided to 'give it ago'. Unfortunately, the update failed and left my website displaying a 'server error 500' message. I then spent a couple of hours going through the recommended 'fixed' of a) renaming the htaccess file, and then (after that didn't work) renaming the plugins folder. (which didn't work either). Short of paying GoDaddy support to try and fix up my Wordpress installation, I'm left with trying to use the 'Manage Applications' tool to upgrade WP to 5.1.1 (which didn't do anything). Then revert it back to 5.0.3 (I'm still waiting to see if that get my site working again).

What amazes me is that Wordpress is such a widely used product for websites, yet the automatic update process can fail so easily and leave the website in a corrupted state (it's happened to me twice for two different updates within a couple of months). Surely as a popular, modern content management tool Wordpress should be able to gracefully revert to the current/previous working state if an update fails?

If/when I get my website working again I'll have to look seriously into using both and FTP app and a wordpress backup/restore plugin to (hopefully) make the process of reverting to an earlier (working) version of my website less painful. I had hoped that the first time the Wordpress update process left my website unusable was an isolated instance, but it seems that this is quite likely to happen every time I do a routine update of Wordpress ;(

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