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When logged into your WordPress Dashboard, have you ever found yourself asking the following question: "I know I have about eight plugins, so why does the number next to "Plugins" say that I only have one or two?"
When you see the orange number next to the word "Plugins," it doesn't represent the number of plugins you're using. It's WordPress' way of letting you know the number of plugins you need to update. The creator of the plugin has made modifications to it, and you need to upgrade your copy of the plugin to take advantage of these revisions. Click on the word "Plugins," and you'll see a yellow band at the bottom of the plugin(s) that need(s) to be updated.
You can choose to download the plugin or to update automatically. It's usually easiest to update automatically, and it definitely a time-saver. If you download the plugin to your computer, you'll have to wait for the download to complete, find the location of the plugin on your hard drive or other storage and then upload it to WordPress. By clicking "upgrade automatically," WordPress does all that for you.
Even if you decide to update automatically, consider downloading the plugin once you're done with the upgrade. It's a good thing to have a folder where you keep all your plugins in case you have to reload some of them and they're not available online anymore. You may also decide to use the plugins on another blog, and you'll have quick access to them.
MAKE SURE TO BACKUP YOUR BLOG BEFORE UPDATING ANY PLUGINS. Most often, this is an unecessary precaution, but the one time you should have backed up and you didn't, thinking "It'll be OK," will be the one time it's not OK. Don't take chances with your content. Make sure to create a backup before you update plugins, themes or even the WordPress platform itself. An excellent choice for creating backups is the WordPress Database Backup plugin.
Because blogging is such an integral part of the social media scene, you want to make sure to keep your plugins up-to-date at all times so that the integrity of your database is not compromised.
This process really is that important.
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