I logged into our site and saw a message on the dashboard that “Version 4.7.4 is available! Please notify the site administrator.”
In addition the Dashboard Updates page is missing-the one where you click on the update to install it. It was there two weeks ago when I last update 3 plugins, not sure why it is gone.
Anyway, I am an extreme novice at all of this; so accessing php & ftp whatever, whatever’s makes no sense to me. The last several “version” updates were one click installs. So I am curious how to get this feature back. I do not want to have a replay of last year when our site was down for three months because the previous administrator did something and locked up the site and the hosting service, so everything had to be redone.
https://milehimobileconcrete.com/

In addition the Dashboard Updates page is missing-the one where you click on the update to install it. It was there two weeks ago when I last update 3 plugins, not sure why it is gone.

Hard to tell why “it is gone”.

To rule out any theme or plugin interference, try:
– Flushing any caching plugins you might be running, as well as server and/or browser caches. Not just your browser, but any op cache or content network cache as well such as Cloudflare. If your host provider has a “Purge Varnish” option or if you can ask your provider to flush memcache on your server. If you are using SiteLock, manage your caching there.
– deactivating ALL (yes all) plugins temporarily to see if this resolves the problem (plugin functions can interfere). If this works, re-activate them individually (one-by-one) to find the problematic plugin(s).
– switching to the unedited default Theme (Twenty Sixteen.) for a moment using the WP dashboard to rule out any theme-specific issue (theme functions can interfere like plugins).

Alternately, consider MANUALLY updating. Download a fresh copy of the WordPress .zip file to your computer, unzip it, and use that to copy up all files and folders EXCEPT the wp-config.php file and the /wp-content/ directory. You may need to delete the old wp-admin and wp-includes folders and files on your server before uploading the new ones. Please read the Manual Update directions first.

If you haven’t already done, always backup everything (including your database) before doing any actions, just in case something really goes wrong. You can never have enough backups!