One of the ways to maintain it is by doing updates to your the site and this could be your plugins the core of WordPress or your themes and you can always tell when your site needs updates by a little icon here which usually shows you the updates that are needed we’re gonna throw a bit of the caution here however you can disable automatic updates but by and large we really recommend that you allow at least the core automatic updates to happen simply because older code it just opens up your site to security breaches where hackers can go in and hack your site and then you also want to make sure that you have a backup of your site before you do any of this.
1.Using Plugin – Easy update manager
So the first method we’re going to use is by adding a plugin so we’re gonna go to plugins add new and we’re searching for easy updates manager this is the one. we want so let’s go ahead and click install now and don’t worry if you don’t want to use a plugin stick around for the second method where we will show you how to do how to disable automatic updates without using a plugin. we also want to activate the plugin .great now that’s installed you might see this depending on your hosting the provider they may have already set automatically set the automatic updates to be disabled because they’re handling it for you if you see that then that’s likely the cause so now we can come over here your dashboard button so we can go to update options updates options setup.
it’s a mouthful and down here under general is where we want to make the changes now you can disable all updates however if you do that you won’t even get a notification so you will have no idea when or if you have any updates that you need to handle so we don’t recommend you doing disable all updates instead let’s go down here to configure each one separately, in fact, one of the things we recommend is to go ahead and allow auto-updates of all minor versions of WordPress core updates and then under plugins, you can disable. what you want to do is disable the auto-updates.
If you disable the plugin updates then again you won’t see any of the icons or the notifications that you need to update so for both plugins and themes then you can also enable notification emails and you can add an email here as well and now you’re pretty much set for that now the other cool the thing that you can do is you can go under logs and with logs, you can see previous versions or previous updates that have happened and you can even roll back if needed.
So if something happens then you should have a log here of what happened and you should have an activity where you can go and roll it back meaning go back to the last known good state of your website the other cool thing is with easy updates manager it integrates with updraft plus so that means as we said you want to make a copier and backup your website before you do anything well it integrates with updraft plus world will automatically create a backup of your site before it makes any changes which are very cool and then if you really want to get into it their pro the version has some really cool features where you can schedule your automatic updates for maybe a low traffic period of your site or even on the weekends and things like that.
2.Using Wp-Config File
Now if you’re not wanting to add another plugin to your the website then let me show you the methods that you can do to disable it for an instance when you saw that notification up here that’s because the hosting provider for this site is already disabled the automatic updates but if you want to do it on your own you’ll want to head over to your hosting provider, so you can log in and get to your file manager .however it works with Bluehost or SiteGround. you’ll need to log in to your hosting account and any all of them are a little bit different but basically you want to get to your cPanel where you can scroll down and find your file manager and then open it up to your website and once you’re in your website folder it’s usually at the base of your website scroll down and you’re looking for wp-config.php we can highlight that we’ll come up here and edit and go ahead and edit and then you’re searching for if there’s a
define( ‘WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE’, false) );
if there’s already something in there then you don’t want to add it again, for instance, this has been added by SiteGround the best thing to do is just scroll down until there’s not anymore until you don’t see any more code start a new line and then add this bit of code so we’ll go ahead and save that and we can close it.
3.Using Functions.php
Then the last thing you need to do to disable automatic updates of your plugins and your themes are we need to add another bit of code to the functions.php in your themes so again we are in my website folder and we are looking for WP-content.
We are gonna click into that folder going to click into the theme that we are using and right now we are using the Astra the theme for this one we are looking for the functions.php. we are gonna highlight that and come up here and click Edit so We can edit this and with this, we want to just scroll all the way down until we don’t see anything else we are gonna go to the end of the last line and we want to do return a couple of times so we have a new line and we are adding two lines of code so the first one will be this and then the second one is this so basically it’s auto-updating plugin return false meaning we’re not going to update it.
1 | add_filter( ‘auto_update_plugin’, ‘__return_false’ ); |
Disable automatic WordPress theme updates:
| 1 | add_filter( ‘auto_update_theme’, ‘__return_false’ ); |
Same with the theme and then we’re good to go once you’re done with all that just click Save and now automatic updates won’t happen for your theme .your plugins or your core WordPress
Note: when you do the code method this is the theme-specific so if you ever change to a different theme then your automatic updates for your plugins and for your themes will start happening again.
