If you recently updated WooCommerce Subscriptions to the much awaited and hotly anticipated version 2.1, you may find that there are a few nifty new features.
Things like automatically retrying failed payments are now a thing, and much more.
But, as with any update, you may run into issues and incompatibilities. This will be particularly so with this release, which is a somewhat major version shift, which introduces said nifty new features.
How to Update WooCommerce Subscriptions
In tech, there often is not a “right” or “wrong” way to do things, but in the case of e-commerce websites in production and making sales, it is inarguably the wrong thing to do to just hit the “update” button without at least taking some precautions!
As an absolute bare minimum, you must always backup before doing anything. In fact, you should backup your database and files regularly whether or not you are doing an update. This gives you something to fall back on should anything go wrong.
Do it in Staging
The best (most right?!) way to do your updates, is to do this in a staging environment. A lot of good hosts offer auto staging, and indeed, WooCommerce Subscriptions is smart enough to know when its working in a staging environment and turn off things like billing cycles, which is helpful to remember.
A staging environment is essentially a complete copy of your working (live, production) environment, at “another” url, where you can hit update and see what happens.
So, if you didn’t have auto staging, you’d copy your database and files into a subdomain (like stg.mydomain.com) and then hit update on everything there. Then test everything as much as possible, particularly payment features, and other mission critical stuff. If it all goes through correctly, you are free to do this in production, after of course backing up, because sometimes things that work in staging don’t work in production (maybe a minor version release popped through while you weren’t looking or whatever).
If all of this sounds too much for you, you are in the right place. We do this type of thing for our clients all the time at Silicon Dales – just contact us!
This is especially true if you hit update and got a white screen, or something else broke and you don’t know how to fix it – that’s what we do, fix WooCommerce sites!