How to Update a WordPress Plugin Manually Using cPanel

How to Update a WordPress Plugin Manually Using cPanel

Whenever you read a security guide, it’s mentioned that you should always use the latest version of a WordPress plugin because someone might have discovered a vulnerability in the older version, which may lead to a website hack.

And I am sure; you don’t want to ruin your hard work because of a simple plugin. Once in a while, people click the update now button from the admin panel.

But when you’re locked out of the wp-admin area because of a plugin, you require to either deactivate all the plugins or update that one particular plugin.

In both the cases, you need to use cPanel. In this tutorial, you’re going to learn how to update a WordPress plugin manually using cPanel.

Assuming you have good WordPress hosting set up, let’s get started!

A Step By Step Guide to Update a Plugin

Let me make you understand the simple concept. As you already know, the first thing is to find out the location of the plugin folder, and then replace it with the new one.

So, you need to go through a process. Let me start.

Step 1:

Login to your cPanel account provided by your web hosting company

. Find out the file manager icon and click to open.

Most probably, you can see the file manager under the Files’ section.

If you use Bluehost, Siteground, Inmotionhosting, Hostinger, or any other reliableshared web hosting company, you don’t need to worry about finding the icon.

Step 2:

By default, you may see the home directory.

You need to navigate to the left-hand sidebar to open public_html.

A few web hostings display an option to select the directory when you click on the file manager icon. Proceed as per your situation.

Step: 3:

As you may already know, the data of

Your website is stored in the wp-content folder. Click to open.

Step 4:

You can see themes, plugins, and other media folders.

Click on the plugins‘ folder.

Step 5:

On this page, you can see all the plugins you have available on your website right now. Let’s say; you want to update Jetpack from WordPress.com.

Step 6:

Download the plugin from an official WordPress plugins repository and click on the Upload link from the main navigation menu of cPanel.

Step 7:

A new tab opens up on the browser displaying a button to choose a file from your computer. Once you do that, the uploading process starts.

Click on the link back to the plugins’ directory.

Step 8:

Now you can see the ZIP file of the plugin, Jetpack in this example.

Right-click and choose Extract

.

A popup appears to choose the path of the file. As you can see, it’s /public_html/wp-content/plugins. Click on the Extract File(s) button.

Step 9:

Depending on your web hosting, you may either see an option to override all the old plugin file or directly notice the extraction.

A popup appears, from which you need to click on the Close button.

Congrats, you have successfully updated a WordPress plugin

.

Was that So Hard to Update a WordPress Plugin

Every time people encounter with a problem on their WordPress website, they start to fret. Instead, they should try to find a solution.

Updating a plugin using the manual method may be old for many people, but it can save you in a tough situation. All you need is to replace the old folder with the new ones.

Conclusion

Don’t you think it’s one of the most straightforward tasks you have ever done? If you are still relying on your technical guy, you must think again.

I hope it was not a big deal to update a WordPress plugin manually using cPanel.

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