Do you really follow all of the steps?

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 at 6:11 am

Got an email yesterday from a good friend with an SOS in it. Basically the message was I screwed up my blog and it no longer shows online.

Now I sent back on email asking exactly what they had done and got this response.

I uploaded wordpress by hand using the directions at http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress

I must have done something wrong though…

Those directions are very complete and I have never had trouble when using them. I have upgraded blogs literally hundreds of times for my own and my customers.

I checked the blog and the things that normally go wrong. After all this is not the first time I have had some one have trouble and give me a holler.

None of the usual suspects like a config file that had been overwritten had happened. Gave this person a call and started asking questions. Doing that showed there had been a step or two that were skipped.

In this case the problem was caused by not turning off the plugins before upgrading. As the blog was on a very, very old version the plugins were causing a huge problem. It was very easy to fix once I knew what step had not been completed before upgrading the blog.

[hidepost]The fix was quite simple. Just delete all of the plugins on the server and add them back after we regained access to the blog. Any time you have trouble with a plugin logging in through FTP to delete or rename the plugins will usually solve the problem.

There was one more important step that they had not done that could have created a major problem had we needed to reinstall the blog. Always get a data base back up before upgrading your blog.

You should also copy your wp-config file and any theme you are using that has been edited before upgrading the theme.[/hidepost]

The point of this post though is not the problem that was created or the fix. The point is that often we skip steps even though if someone asks you would say I did what this says.

This is particularly important when you are following some one else’s steps to get a result. Let’s take getting traffic to your blog.

In 15 Minute Blog Traffic I cover a number of steps to do regularly to increase the traffic to your blog. The key to making it work is to do them on a regular basis.

If you do them all and do them consistently the system works. If you only occasionally do them or only do one or two your results will be inconsistent.

So if you are following a system and find that it is not working take a minute to review and make sure that you are not skipping steps. All too often when you think a system does not work it is your implementation rather than the system that is causing your lack of results.

It usually is with me and I am sure that most of the time it is with you too.

Leave a comment and let me know if you have found this to be true.