The Best Way to Update Plugins on GoDaddy Managed WordPress

GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress service is a great, low cost way for beginners to get started with building a WordPress site.

This is because you can manage your WordPress site easily from within GoDaddy’s online control panel.

If you ever have technical issues, GoDaddy offers very good basic FREE phone support with its Managed WordPress service… GoDaddy’s telephone support almost always comes through with a solution for no extra charge.

However, one problem that happened consistently with one of my websites on GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress was updating plugins. Whenever I updated plugins on one instance of WordPress, my site would go down temporarily, or become unresponsive entirely.

Problems With WordPress Plugins

Really, when you think about the complexity of WordPress behind the scenes, the fact that a website functions at all is a freakin’ miracle…

Unfortunately, it’s never a miracle when your website goes down. And a WordPress weak point is plugins.

Very common problems with WordPress plugins include:

• They can sometimes conflict with each other.
• They can conflict with WordPress themes.
• They can be no longer supported by their developers.
• They can get hacked.

For any and all of the above reasons, you must always maintain your website’s WordPress plugins.

However, updating plugins can sometimes cause your WordPress site to crash.

This can happen on any WordPress hosting platform. Sometimes you can get the White Screen of Death (read this article for getting your WordPress site to recover from a WSOD during a plugin update).

However, if you are using GoDaddy Managed WordPress and having trouble with your site going offline or going down and becoming unresponsive for a long period of time, you may only want to use the third of these options below.

The Three Ways to Update Plugins on GoDaddy Managed WordPress Are:

1. Updating them from within the Managed WordPress dashboard (not recommended).
2. Updating them while they are still activated from within your WordPress website dashboard (not recommended).
3. Deactivating the plugin(s) prior to updating them, then reactivating them.

The Best Way to Update Plugins on GoDaddy Managed WordPress

The best way to update plugins on GoDaddy Managed WordPress is the following:

1. Deactivate the plugin
2. Update it
3. Activate it again

Step 1: Deactivate the plugin

Step 2: Update the plugin

Step 3: Re-activate the plugin

I found that using this approach provides three benefits:

1. My site does not go down or become unresponsive.
2. The plugins update more quickly.
3. It’s easy to troubleshoot a bad plugin that may be causing a conflict with something else on my site.