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1. Update to your latest minor release version first before upgrade to recent major release. A May 2017 example: a customer was considering an upgrade from 5.4.1 to 5.5.4 (latest release at that time). The correct sequence would have been: 5.4.1 → 5.4.12 → 5.5.4 instead of  5.4.1 → 5.5 → 5.5.4 .

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   Why we go that way? Because when a customer reports issues when migrating from 5.4.6 to 5.5, for instance, then we will support a workaround/patch and later release the fix also in 5.4.7. The fix of the issue in 5.4.6 when migrating is usually located in version handlers. Then at some point, we drop 5.4.x because of an outdated technology stack (such as Java versions and security support from third-party libraries), upgrade to 5.5.x, and the process repeats. So going with the latest release of each major release will free you from the issues and bring you the improvements.

2. Update all external libraries required by the Magnolia release to which you intend to upgrade.
3. Carefully look for "change" or "changes for ..." sections in the release notes since.
4. Because the upgrade process takes time and is vulnerable to incidents, please minimize the risk by cleaning up your system, removing unused data, reindexing everything and doing a full backup first.

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