How to Disable Automatic WordPress Updates?

Did you know that WordPress can update your website for you? This can contain plugins and themes in some cases.

Despite the security benefits, these updates have a low risk of breaking your website.

To address this issue, the WP 5.5 version included a significant security feature upgrade. Directly from your WordPress admin dashboard, you can enable automatic updates.

You can also disable automatic updates in WP, which gives you more control over your site. This allows you to test updates for compatibility and avoid feature changes that you do not want.

Despite being useful to the majority of WP users, this function has a few drawbacks. Hence, resulting in disabling the WordPress automatic updates.

We’ll start by going over the pros and cons of disabling WP automatic updates in this article. Also, we’ll discuss why and how you can disable automatic wordpress updates.

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Why Is It Required To Disable Automatic WordPress Updates?

Automatic updates in WP are generally beneficial. We recommend that most users leave them enabled. But, disabling some or all automatic updates can be helpful in some cases.

The major reason for disabling automatic WP updates is that they can cause a site to malfunction. Most of the time, updates are thoroughly tested, and no issues will arise. This is notably true for the WordPress core, as well as many popular themes and plugins.

Developers can’t test their programs with every possible combination of plugins and themes. Thus this is a limitation.

If you have tools installed that are designed for a specific version of WP or rely on other plugins. Updating one of them may cause issues with the others. This could set off a chain reaction that takes down a whole site or cripples task functionality.

Unwanted feature modifications are another potential concern with automated updates. If you recall the uproar around the launch of the Block Editor, known as Gutenberg, you’ll remember it. Despite many warnings, many users’ workflows were disrupted due to a lack of preparation.

So, if your site is essential to your organization. The best practice is to check and test modifications before making them live.

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The Benefits and Drawbacks of Disabling WordPress Updates

But, before proceeding, you must know that disabling automatic updates has both benefits and drawbacks. Let’s take a closer look at the most significant considerations.

The Benefits of Disabling Updates

• You have more control over your website’s updates.
• You can ensure that all your plugins and themes are compatible with new upgrades. This prevents site issues and functionality breakdowns.
• You don’t have to worry about theme and plugin updates that overwrite manual changes.

The Drawbacks of Disabling Updates

• It’s possible that you might overlook important security updates, leaving your website vulnerable.
• Manually reviewing and applying updates might take a long time. Especially if you have many websites to update.

Configure and Disable Automatic WordPress Updates

Installing and activating the Easy Updates Manager plugin is the simplest way to do this. Take a look at our step-by-step instructions on how to install a WordPress plugin if you’re not sure how.

After you’ve activated the plugin. Go to Dashboard » Updates Options to customize your settings.

You can select to ‘disable all updates,’ but this is not something we encourage. The reason for this is that it will prevent all update alerts from displaying.

Instead, you should choose your preferred settings. You can turn off plugin and theme auto-updates and keep the core WP auto-updates enabled.

Note: If you select ‘Disable plugin updates’ and ‘Disable theme updates’ instead of ‘Disable auto updates.’ Then the update notification in your plugins and themes lists will be hidden.

Easy Updates Manager maintains track of what’s been changed. So you can revert to a previous functioning version if something goes wrong. Go to Dashboard » Updates Options and then to the ‘Logs’ panel to see this.

Easy Updates Manager also comes in a premium edition with a slew of extra features. It works with UpdraftPlus so you can run an automatic backup of your site before applying updates.

Also Read :- Easy Guide on How to Install a WordPress Plugin (2022)

Disable Automatic Updates without using Plugin

A few code snippets can disable automatic updates for WP core files, plugins, and themes. Here’s how to get going.

You have to add the following code to your WP-config.php file to switch off automatic updates for the WP core.

All your automatic WordPress updates will get disabled.

You can prevent theme and plugin updates while receiving minor core changes. You can do this by adding the following filters to your theme’s functions.php file or a site-specific plugin.

Disable automatic plugin updates in WordPress:

WordPress disable auto update

Should I Disable Automatic WordPress Updates?

Essentially, the decision is yours to make. Automatic updates are safe for most beginners and most WP sites, and you should not disable them. You can safely turn off automatic updates if you run an online store or don’t want to lose business due to a faulty site. To protect your website’s security, make sure you manually install such updates regularly.

Conclusion

WordPress is a well-maintained platform that improves with each update. These updates fix bugs and security loopholes while also adding new functionality. This creates a strong motivation for WordPress users to maintain their sites up to date. The whole procedure is a lot easier and more simple with the addition of automated updates.

But, because some of these upgrades may harm your website. You should weigh the benefits and drawbacks before allowing WordPress to update automatically.

We hope that this post has helped you to disable wordpress auto update.