Marketers Delight 4.7 is Now Available: The Official Upgrade Guide

Earlier this week I told you what to expect in MD4.7 and what to do to get your site ready. Read that post for a longer explanation, but here’s a “pre-upgrade” checklist you can follow:

MD4.7 Pre-Upgrade Checklist

1. BACKUP YOUR SITE! MD4.7 moves and deletes many database tables from your site, and in the event something goes wrong, you need an original copy just in case
2. The MD Classic Sidebars is now deprecated. If you used the old MD custom sidebars option from the post editor, you’ll need to move to the new MD Sidebars system.. read how to migrate custom sidebars →
3. The Video Gallery and Bookshelf Drop-ins have updates. To be compatible with the new MD data format, the two current Drop-ins need to be updated in your child theme. Instructions below.
4. MD4.7 is only delivered to sites with an active license key. You can one-click upgrade your site to MD4.7, or download it from your account, but you must have an active license key to get the upgrade.

If you’re ready to upgrade your site to Marketers Delight 4.7, you can read the instructions below. But before I go there, I want to show you some of the performance gains from sites I’ve upgraded before the official release and why these gains are so important.

Website data from Query Monitor:

As you can see, the sites listed above experienced some massive performance increases after the Marketers Delight 4.7 upgrade.

That’s because MD4.7 successfully rewired each site’s database to pull custom data in a far more efficient way, and remove the older and unbelievably inefficient methods of the past.

Results may vary but I can guarantee that after this upgrade your site’s performance will improve, maybe even in a noticeable way.

Alex, MD4.7 is working perfectly this morning. It also seems faster to me. Congrats on a great job.
—Richard, MonarchHousing.org

This update brings with it, faster load times and better performance, but if history has taught me anything about MD – this is the beginning of something major.
—Ray, Raylosophy.com

Some amazing speed improvements! Thanks Alex!
—David, PressTitan.com

Yep loading time improved from 0.5s to 0.3s 😀 Upgrade was also flawless, no issues here. Great work over there!
—@kvnklk on Twitter

After playing around throughout the WP-Admin and publishing a few things, I’m thrilled with site speed after the update. The MD update is working perfectly and I wanted to thank you.
—Jake, NomadicHustle.com

How to Upgrade Your Site to Marketers Delight 4.7

To be as clear as possible, I’ve written out an interactive instructions manual to walk you through the entire upgrade process.

Optional Step
Install the Query Monitor Plugin to Monitor Your Site’s Performance Results

  I have completed this step

If you’re curious about your own site’s before and after performance results, install the Query Monitor plugin to your site (Plugins > Add New) to see how your site is performing.

This tool is also great to find out if any other plugins or scripts are causing slow loading times around your site.

Download Query Monitor

Step 1
Update Your Theme to Marketers Delight 4.7

  I have completed this step

Now we’re ready to begin the upgrade. With an active license key, login to your WP Admin and navigate to the Appearance > Themes section.

On this screen you will see a yellow upgrade prompt at the top, and to begin the MD4.7 update, you just need to simply click the “Update now” link. WordPress will walk you through the automated upgrade process and your old MD theme will be replaced with the cutting-edge and greatly reorganized MD4.7 theme.

If you are unable to perform the automatic update for any reason, you can manually download MD4.7 from your account and then reupload it to your site. To do this, you will need to delete the old MD theme from your site and reinstall the new .zip. Don’t worry, this is totally safe!

Step 2
Upgrade Your MD Database

  I have completed this step

Time for the grand finale! To complete the upgrade process and restore your MD content, Marketers Delight needs to upgrade your database.

After you are redirected to your Dashboard you will now see a red update nag throughout your WP admin urging you to run the MD database updater.

As soon as you see this update nag, click the “Upgrade database” button immediately to begin the database upgrade process.

From here, let MD4.7 do the heavy lifting and cycle through each update process to move and delete the new and old MD data throughout your database. Depending on how large your site is, this process can take a few minutes.

Welcome to Marketers Delight 4.7

One of the biggest advantages of Marketers Delight is that it aims to be an all-in-one platform that brings critical functionality to your site to help you build your audience, write better content, and make money with WordPress.

An advantage to baking so many tools into one package is supposed to be performance; to have an entire system that works together to for the most optimized experience possible.

Before MD4.7, I failed that last expectation miserably. And I’ve spent months paying for it through what turned out to be the toughest stretch in MD’s history, all the while your sites were becoming more bloated by the day.

Marketers Delight 4.7 sets things right, and rebuilds the foundation of your site for the future tools and products I expected to be here by now.

I’ll fill you in on all of that soon, though. For now I want to make sure you are able to cleanly upgrade to MD4.7 without any issues.

For any questions or troubleshooting, the best way to get support is through the MD Support Forums. I will be active there to help you through any issues.

In the comments below, I’d love to see your before and after results from the Query Monitor plugin. Just take screenshots of the stats, or write-in the old/new page speed, page size, and queries per page.

Thank you for being so loyal to Marketers Delight, especially through slow moving times like the past few months. That is about to be rewarded greatly with what’s coming next in MD.