Upgrade from 5.5 to 5.6 and Mobile Friendly

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Hey there,

I built a web site several years ago to help a family business and wanted to ensure they were mobile friendly for the Google change. They are currently on 5.5.2.1 and the google mobile checker shows they are NOT mobile friendly.

My questions:

- Will updating to 5.6.3.3 make the site mobile friendly? I did some google searching and found mention that switching to a mobile format is now part of the core feature set. True?

- How risky is it to upgrade directly from 5.5.2.1 to 5.6.3.3? Any steps or different route I should be taking besides just following the download and upgrade path?

thanks!

 
frz replied on at Permalink Reply
frz
I believe there's a change in the most recent version of 5.6 to make robots.txt not exclude CSS by default, which is one of the things google is looking for.

The biggest real thing to worry about with mobile ready is if your theme is responsive or not. Generally most 5.7 themes are responsive out of the gate, while most 5.6 ones (because of being initially released in 2009) are not. Upgrading the core of the CMS isn't going to do anything for that.

Always with upgrading we'd suggest taking a backup first. Depending on the availability requirements of a client sometimes we make a stage and upgrade that to see how it goes.
quartzsitervshow replied on at Permalink Reply
Thanks Franz. A couple things I'm still not clear on...

1) will our existing theme that was developed for 5.5.x continue to work on 5.6.x ?
2) you mention 5.7, is that in a production release yet? Is that what we should upgrade to?

Thanks!
ramonleenders replied on at Permalink Reply
ramonleenders
You can not upgrade any 5.6 version (or below) to 5.7.x. You will have to manually convert pages and files and everything you have (may change in the future, but I wouldn't bet much on it, as the COMPLETE file structure changed).

As for the first question, not sure what all changed in between versions, but as Franz suggested, you could make a staging website and upgrade to see what happens.