Updating to WordPress 5 with Divi

  In this post you can read how you can update your site safely to WordPress 5, and also update Divi theme to the latest version. We’ll also explain how to make a back-up first, so if anything would go wrong, you can restore your site. After that you’ll see what your choices are after updating to WordPress 5 and Divi.

Creating a back-up of your website before updating

It’s a good idea to make a backup of your website before you do any major updates. This way, if anything doesn’t work out, or if you’re unhappy with the update and would like to roll back, you can.

For our clients – you may have updates set up already:

Please note if you are our client and you have the Divine Website Pack as the basis of your site, you already have automated back-ups setup for your site. To be sure, go into plugins, and see if UpdraftPlus is installed and active: If you don’t have automated back-ups set up, an excellent backup plugin to make a one off back-up is Duplicator. This plugin takes a snapshot of your site, which you can then download to your local computer. Then, if you’d like to roll back to your site, you can use the snapshot package to do so. See the video below for taking a backup with Duplicator and then updating WordPress.

Note: If for whatever reason you’d like to restore your site after you’ve updated, have a look at this video post about restoring your website from a Duplicator backup.

Updating WordPress

Whenever there’s an update in WordPress, whether it’s for a theme, a plugin, or WordPress itself, you’ll see a notification about it in your site’s dashboard.   When there are updates for your WordPress website, you’ll see notifications for it in your website’s backend.Clicking on it takes you to the update screen, from where you can do the updates. We recommend updating from top to bottom; so first WordPress itself, then any plugins that may need updating, and finally your themes. To update WordPress, click the ‘update now’ button. This temporarily puts your site in maintenance mode, and then installs the latest version of WordPress for you.

After you have updated, you’ll see find an overview in your dashboard area about what’s new in this version of WordPress, so you can have a look through this first, or continue to use your site as normal.

Updating your plugins

Select the plugins that have updates available, and update them. You can select them all and update them all in one go.

Updating Divi

To update Divi, go back to the update screen and scroll down to the bottom to see your available theme updates. Select your Divi theme by ticking the box, and then click the ‘update themes’ button. That’s it: you now have the latest versions of WordPress and Divi!

Your choices after updating WordPress & Divi

So now what are your options after updating WordPress to version 5 and Divi to the latest version?  Below are three options you can consider – we have explained more about your options in our post WordPress 5.0 | Gutenberg & your Divi Website.

Option 1: I want to use the new Divi experience with front-end builder & the Gutenberg editor

This option is what you get as standard after updating both WordPress and Divi, so you don’t need to do anything else. Please be reassured that you can switch back to the old WordPress editor at any time for now, using a switch in your Divi theme. Navigate to Divi Theme Options > Builder > Advanced, and toggle ‘enable classic editor’, and don’t forget to save your changes:

Option 2: I want to still use the Divi Back-end Editor

This is possible, but if you choose to use the back-end editor you can not use the new Gutenberg WordPress editor in your site. To set yourself up to use the Divi Back-end editor, go to your Divi theme settings. There you can enable the new Divi back-end builder very easily with a few clicks. Click the advanced tab under builder options, and enable the bottom two toggles labelled ‘Enable The Latest Divi Builder Experience’ and ‘Enable Classic Editor’:     Save your changes and now you can build your pages with the new Divi Builder experience. By default you get the new Divi backend builder, which shows a wireframe view of your page and from where you can also have a visual building experience in the backend of your site. But you can also toggle to the classic Divi backend builder experience, which shows a more abstract and block-based representation of your page:

Option 3: I don’t want anything to change for now

If you prefer everything to stay the way it was for now, until you have time and space to deal with learning new ways of doing things, that is possible too! To update to WordPress 5 but keep things the way you are used to for now:

1. Update WordPress and Divi as described above
2. Go into Divi Theme Options > Builder > Advanced, and only toggle ‘enable classic editor’
3. Save your changes.

Conclusion

After updating to WordPress 5 and the latest version of Divi, you can edit your posts and pages in several ways. You can either start using the new WordPress and Divi editors, or keep everything the way it was. And you can also switch from one experience to the other with a few clicks, so this way you can ease yourself into the new editing experience : )