Are you planning to update your wordpress website yourself and should you handle it yourself? There is no one answer and it all depends on the complexity of your website and how much revenue it is earning for you. If its a basic website that brings in very limited users per day, you can take the risk and update the active theme and plugins, but if your website is receiving tons of visitors that are converting into paying customers, it is not advised that you upgrade the website. That being said, if you still want to go ahead with upgrading the wordpress core and installed themes / plugins, it needs to be handled correctly. A side note , if your website is running slow, we would suggest to check for any infection and if found, you would need to get wordpress malware removed before you can proceed with the updates.
For any wordpress installation, before performing any core wordpress update, we should update all the themes and plugin for getting the latest available updates for currently installed wordpress version. Once the plugin and themes are updated, we need to do some Quality Assurance by randomly checking some frontend functionality, and if there is a woocommerce plugin installed, testing product add to cart, checkout etc to confirm that nothing broke in the process. Remember, we will need to do another theme + plugin update once we update core. The process we are currently following is a two-stage one. If anything goes wrong during the process, you will need to get in touch with a WordPress Development Company to get it fixed. Also a side note, made sure that you create multiple backup/restore points throughout the process, and if multiple backups are not possible, at-least take an initial back of the system to make sure that you can go back to a working installation if anything goes wrong.
Now we will perform the wordpress core update, that is update the wordpress itself. It a quick process and wont take more than a minute to complete, unless you are on a really slow server. If you are not confident enough or feel that your current wordpress based website is too tricky and may break, we suggest to create a dev environment where you can test all updates before performing the same updates on live site. Ok, lets proceed, once you have updated core, lets update the themes and plugins again, as there might be new updates available with the latest version of wordpress installed on your business website. Once complete, we would need to thoroughly test the front to make sure everything is working as usual. QA is very critical part of the updates as any issue left behind may result in lost customers. At Zycoon Media, we handle the WordPress Updates in a streamlined process, while the above process is a simplified version for the masses, our experts have tools and system perfected to handle wordpress updates. We copy the website over to our development server to test locally if the updates are possible and if there are any errors during the process, we test the fixes on the dev server first before deploying the updates on the live site.