Cloudways SafeUpdate – WordPress Updates Made Easy

What is Cloudways SafeUpdate?

Put simply, it fully automates keeping your WordPress website updated. This includes WordPress core, themes and plugins. Don’t worry though, if you want to manually start the process or choose precisely what and more importantly, what isn’t included in the SafeUpdate process, you can.

How does it work?

Once activated, your monthly subscription starts and you get access to a range of settings. Let’s quickly go through the settings you have to manage the process.

First of all, we have the ability to manually initiate an instance of SafeUpdate using the On-Demand tab. You pick and choose what will and what won’t be included in the update. You can choose from WordPress Core, plugins and themes on either a group level or by picking the individual items you want to include. This is perfect if you know you have some plugins that can be problematic and you’d rather manually handle those.

Once you’ve selected what you want to include, click Update and then grab yourself a drink and something to eat as the process can take between 5-15 minutes, and sometimes longer. Considering what’s actually going on behind the scenes, it’s a pretty reasonable amount of time.

Next, is the Schedule tab where you can configure when you want to run an automated instance of SafeUpdate.

You can choose to enable/disable SafeUpdates, the day of the week and the time you wish to have the updates run. You can also choose the customise the list of what will be updated using the custom update list option and finally, you can enable what notifications will be sent out. This makes it easy to get notifications before a scheduled update as well as after a successful update or if something goes wrong and the update is aborted.

While this is useful, it also shows a shortcoming of the current system. You can only pick a single day/time and not have this run on a more regular basis. This limits the update cycle to a single instance per week. For many users, this will be fine but may be a limitation for others who want to have this run more regularly.

Finally, you get the History tab which is a log of all update cycles, what was updated and information on aborted updates.

The Process

For the tech-curious reading, here’s exactly what is happening during the whole process. You’ll see a lot of the process is what you would generally do while updating a live website, but having it automated with a level of redundancy saves time and potential headaches.

• Create a staging site
• Synchronise the staging site
• Update the staging site (based on your preferences)
• Validate the staging site (to ensure things have gone correctly)
• Update the production site (providing everything has checked out).

As you can see, it would potentially be a time-consuming process to do manually. Having it automated can easily save you hours a week if you manage more than a couple of WordPress websites with regular updates.

SafeUpdate Pricing Options

You’re probably wondering how much all this wonderful peace of mind is going to set you back now aren’t you?

The good news is that it starts at $3 per month per application, or in other words, $3 per month for each website. The even better news is, that if you have more than 5 websites, that drops to $2 per month per application. In my books, that’s pretty good value for a service that safeguards your website and your sanity.

If you combine this service with a regular website backup, you give yourself a certain level of redundancy should you need it.