How to Manually Update WordPress Plugins via FTP

Sometime your site may be break if plugins fails to update using WordPress Dashboard. You can solve this by manually updating the plugin. WordPress with a built in system to manage core, plugin and theme updates. You can just click on update link and it will update your plugins. But sometime these update get fail due to incorrect file permission, server configuration etc. If update interrupted midway then your site may break.

In this article I will show you how to manually update WordPress plugins via FTP without breaking your website.

Manually Update WordPress Plugins via FTP

First of all, you have to download the latest WordPress plugin you are trying to update. If you are using free plugin  you can download it from the WordPress plugin page. If you are using paid version then you can download from plugin’s website.

Login to your account and download the plugin to your local system. All plugins comes in .zip format so you need to extract them on your system.

Now you will need an FTP client such as FileZilla in my example I am using FileZilla ftp client you can use any FTP client.

Connect to your server using FTP you will need to enter server hostname or ip with your FTP username and password.

If you don’t have the FTP details then you can send email to your WordPress hosting company or you can also find FTP details in the cPanel Dashboard of your hosting account.

After connecting your server via FTP, you need to go to /wp-content/plugins/ folder. You can find all installed WordPress plugins on your site. Now rename your the plugin that you want to update.

Now you can download the renamed plugins as backup purpose in case of any issue you can easily revert your backup. After Download the renamed plugin on your local system, you can delete it from your server.

Please make sure your plugins should be deactivated. You can do this simply login to your WordPress admin area and visit the plugins page.

You will get an error that the plugin has been deactivated due to an error because you have removed the old version.

Now install latest version of the plugin.

Go to your FTP client and locate the new plugin folder on your local system, and upload it on the server.

After uploading the new plugin on the server go to plugin page and you can see the newly installed plugin and activate it.

Now check everything is working correctly also check the updated plugin version.

Congratulation! you have successfully updated your WordPress plugin via FTP.

Thanks:)