Important tip: updating premium plugins

Here’s a quick tip that you may not be aware of but can be important.

Avoid updating inactive plugins

When updating premium plugins (we’re not just talking about UpdraftPlus here, but any and all of them), do not update them whilst they are inactive. This is because, while they are inactive, WordPress will not look for updates in the right place. WordPress relies on them being active to tell it where the right place for updates is. If your premium plugin is inactive, then WordPress will look up for plugins with the same identifier in the WordPress.org free plugins directory… and then merrily replace your premium plugin with something perhaps quite similar, and perhaps completely different (depending on what identifiers that directory is using).

WordPress bug and workaround

This is a WordPress bug. There’s no way in WordPress for an inactive plugin to indicate to the core of WordPress how it is to be updated. If the WordPress core team doesn’t fix it somehow, we’ll have to see if we can send them a patch ourselves, time-permitting.

What to do if it’s too late

If it’s too late for you, and you’ve already done this, then you’ll need to de-install UpdraftPlus and install it again.