estimate an hour worth of work.  Depending on the size of the website and the availability of back up files, this could take ten minutes or two hours. Your WordPress website or blog consists of the following: MySql Database The WordPress Core Your WordPress Theme (or theme framework and child theme) WordPress Plugins Images Additional Files (PDFs) One of the most important things you can do before beginning any upgrade is to backup the website. This backup should include both files (theme, images, etc.) and your MySQL database.  Even though lots of hosting companies offer free backups, we still recommend saving a backup to your local hard drive or a third party backup service like Dropbox or BackupBuddy. WordPress is run on a MySQL database. This is what holds all of your posts, pages, links, menu structure, and settings. Backing up this database is the first step in the upgrade process.  I like WP-DBManager, which is a WordPress plugin.  It allows me to create database backups directly from my WordPress admin panel and I can skip the whole phpMyAdmin or cPanel experience. I leave that to my coders. Once you have that done, you can download a copy of the website files to your hard drive.  I typically do this via Filezilla, which is a robust and free FTP software package for Mac and Windows. Now that you've backed up everything, you can start the upgrade process.  I recommend using the upgrade process available via WordPress' admin panel.  It is