JOIN US LIVE on Feb. 25th to Learn how to Escape Fulfillment Jail and Scale Your Agency | Find out more

How To Disable Automatic Updates in WordPress

on 6 Feb 2025, by Veronica, in Blog, WordPress, Guides

by Veronica

Have you ever discovered that your WordPress site broke for some reason, only to realize later that the cause was an automatic update? If that's why you're here, keep reading.

First, disabling WordPress plugin updates is not always necessary due to their benefits, such as security updates that make WordPress sites more secure and reliable. Additionally, manually updating your plugins can be time-consuming. However, there are situations where an automatic update might break your website because of the multitude of plugins and themes available on the market that aren’t tested with the new update.

What are auto-updates?

Auto Updates is a feature of WordPress that automatically installs updates without your intervention. It removes the need for the developer to manually check for new updates and releases.

Wordpress Updates include:

Core Updates: minor and major releases
Plugin Updates
Theme Updates
Translation file updates

By default, automatic updates are enabled for minor releases, with the possibility to turn on auto updates in wordpress for all the new versions, but by design, plugins and themes auto updates are disabled.

Why should you disable WordPress plugin updates?

First of all, new updates can cause compatibility issues with custom plugins and themes, which may break your website and result in a website outage. As well, the WordPress auto update feature can install unwanted features—features that should be tested and manually configured before updating the main site—potentially leading to unnecessary extra work from your side.

What are the pros and cons of disabling Auto Update?

Pros:

You have more control over the changes and updates that are made to your website, themes, and plugins.
You can test each update to ensure it works properly with all your plugins and themes.

Cons:

You may miss important security updates, leaving your website vulnerable.
Manually updating your website, themes, and especially plugins if you have many can be time-consuming.

How to disable auto update in WordPress

If you decided that disabling auto updates in WordPress is necessary, you should know that there are several methods you can choose from to disable auto-updates on your website.

Method 1: Disabling auto updates from the WordPress dashboard:

The first and easiest method to disable automatic updates directly from Wordpress. In the wordpress dashboard, you can control everything related to auto-updates, including plugin updates, themes, and core updates.

Disabe Major updates in Wordpress dashboard

1. To disable major releases in WordPress, you can pick Dashboard ➡️ Updates:

2. Click on “Switch to automatic updates for maintenance and security releases only”.

How do I disable plugin updates in the WordPress dashboard?

Go to the Installed Plugins page by hovering over the Plugins menu on the left and clicking on the Installed Plugins
There you can see the list of plugins you have installed on your website

3. You can disable specific plugin updates in WordPress and choose to manually update just a few custom ones that may create conflicts and leave others on auto-update.

How do I disable theme updates in the WordPress dashboard?

Go to Themes Page.
Hover over the installed theme and click on Theme Details.

3. There you can click on disable auto-updates to turn the automatic updates off.

Method 2: Disable using an auto-update WordPress plugin

This time you’ll have time to install a new plugin called Easy Updates Manager.
After you’ve installed it, head over to Dashboard ➡️ Update Options

3. From there you can see that you have multiple options for every type of update.

4. Let’s go through each of these options:

WordPress core updates: You can choose between disabling core updates, auto-updating all minor versions, or enabling auto-updates for all available updates.

Plugins Updates: Here, you have more options, but the most important are the last three. You can disable or enable auto-updates for all plugins or choose which plugins need automatic updates and which don’t, which is what we’ll do now.

To disable auto-updates for specific plugins, go to the Plugins tab, where you’ll find all the plugins installed on your WordPress site.

Now that you’re here, you can choose which plugin updates to keep and which updates to turn off.

Themes Updates: As before, theme updates have basically the same options as the plugin ones. We will focus on the same three options. You can disable or enable auto-updates for all themes or choose which themes need automatic updates and which don’t, repeating the same steps we followed for plugins.

To disable auto-updates for specific themes, go to the Themes tab, where you’ll find all the themes installed on your WordPress site.

There you can choose the specific themes that need the updates enabled.

Now that we’ve covered the easiest way to manage auto-updates in WordPress, it’s time to move on to a more advanced method.

Method 3: Editing wp-config.php file and adding filter code

To edit the wp-config.php, you can use File Zilla, an FTP (file transfer protocol) solution, to access the server where you can find the desired file. Follow the steps below to edit your config file with FileZilla:

Access your wordpress site with the help of File Zilla
Acces the /public_html/ folder

3. On the /public_html/ folder you can find the wp-config.php file

4. Save the wp-config.php file on your PC.

5. Open the field with any text editor and add:

*** define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', true); ***

above ***/* That's all, stop editing! Happy publishing. */***

6. Save it and upload it back to your website.

Next step is adding filter code to the wordpress themes function.php file.

Head over to the Tool Section -> Themes Filed editor.
On the Themes File Editor, open the functions.php file.
There you can add the following lines of code:

***add_filter( 'auto_update_theme', '__return_false' ); ***

***add_filter( 'auto_update_plugin', '__return_false' ); ***

4. Great job. The problem is solved :)

How do I undo a WordPress update?

To undo a wordpress update, you first have to have a backup to undo the last update. There are several ways to save a backup, but the most convenient one and the one we recommended is with a plugin that automatically creates backups at a certain period of time.

Here’s how you can do it:

First, choose your backup plugin. Some popular plugins are UpdraftPlus, BackWPup and Duplicator. In this example, we’ll use the UpdraftPlus plugin.
From the WordPress dashboard, we go to the Plugin → Add New Plugin tab.

3. From there we search for our desired plugin, in this case UpdraftPlus, and click install.

4. After installation, we click activate.

5. After activation, we’ll be redirected to the Installed Plugins tab, where we go and click on the settings below the newly installed plugin.

6. After clicking on the Settings, we are redirected again to a page where we again click on the Settings tab.

7. Here we can see that we can choose if we want to schedule our backups and what types of backups to schedule.

How can Brizy help you build better sites?

Brizy WordPress is a platform with a drag-and-drop builder for WordPress that replaces the WordPress editor with a live front-end editor, designed for creating more complex layouts and designs live. It lets you access the full capabilities of the Brizy AI builder within Brizy Cloud. Benefits of Brizy WordPress include:

Full control of your data, hosting all your files on any provider that supports WordPress;
Flexibility and customization;
Access to all the plugins and themes available on WordPress;
Better SEO with plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank Math.

If you currently use WordPress, Brizy WordPress is a great solution that lets you optimize the work involved in designing and customizing your website while reducing the time and need for a front-end developer.

FAQs about Disabling Wordpress updates

Can I disable specific plugin updates only?

– Yes, you can. In the section “How to Disable Auto Update in WordPress,” you can find how to turn off auto update for specific plugins only or for multiple ones.

Will disabling updates impact the security of my WordPress site?

– Yes, certain updates fix bugs and code vulnerabilities that may leave your website unsafe.

Will disabling updates impact the security of my WordPress site?

– Yes, certain updates fix bugs and code vulnerabilities that may leave your website unsafe.