Last Updated on January 19, 2020 by Christopher G Mendla
When you open your WordPress dashboard and update your plugins, be aware that your site will be down for the time it takes to update the plugins.
In most cases, this is only a few minutes at most. However, if you just spent money on Adwords, Facebook or other advertising, you could be losing out. Your users will see the following message
Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance.
Check back in a minute.
- Plan for outages – Set a strategy for applying core and plugin updates.
- Stay on top of your plugin updates. Updating plugins more frequently is a best practice as far as security. It also means shorter periods of downtime spread out over time as opposed to less frequent, but longer periods of downtime.
- Do your plugin updates during low traffic times. You can use logs and Google Analytics to find the day of the week and time when the traffic should be lowest.
- Check the actual current traffic before updating. It is possible that a post on your site just went viral. Google Analytics Realtime report is a great way to check.
