Most important thing on regularly updating your Magento webshop brings is not only that you’ll get newest features, but also security fixes, which is highly important for your Magento store’s safety.

Not updating your Magento can result in not only a bad performance, but it makes your shop an easy target for hackers.

Before you start updating Magento

Whatever version you’re updating, we always recommend you to follow these steps first:

• Make sure you jave a recent and working backup. Both a file and database backup. In case anything goes wrong while updating, you could need to restore your data easily.
• Check the versions release notes to see what changes have been made.
• Choose a quiet moment to update your Magento. Preferably when there’s less traffic on your site.
• If you can Test the update on a staging environment to make sure all aspects of your shop are compatible with the newest version.

Updating Magento using Magento Connect Manager

The easiest method of updating Magento is via the built-in Connect manager by following the steps explained below:

1. Log on to your Magento backend;
2. Navigate to System >> Magento Connect >> Magento Connect Manager;
3. Login with your admin credentials

Updating Magento 1.7 or 1.8 to version 1.9 works slightly different then updating from an older version:

1. Go to “Manage Existing Extensions” and click “Check for Updates”. Extensions that can be updated will have a yellow background colour;
2. Click on the dropdown menu behind the extensions that can be updated and choose the newest Magento version;
3. You can select everything that need an update, or you can simply select Mage_All_Latest. then scroll down and click on “Commit changes”.
4. You’re Magento is now updated (always check if there’re any error message reported.

Updating Magento via SSH

Updating Magento via SSH can be done via the following commands:

go to the root of your Magento installation
 chmod 550 mage
 ./mage mage-setup .
 ./mage config-set preferred_state stable
 ./mage sync
 ./mage install http://connect20.magentocommerce.com/community Mage_All_Latest --force
 php shell/indexer.php reindexall
 rm -rf downloader/.cache/ var/cache/