How to Disable Automatic Updates

Have you ever gone to check on your WordPress site, only to find your WordPress theme broken, plugin functionality crippled, or major features moved and changed? If so, you may have been surprised to find that the WordPress auto update was to blame.

In WordPress, there are four types of automatic background updates:

1. Core updates
2. Plugin updates
3. Theme updates
4. Translation file updates

Core Updates

Core updates are subdivided into three types:

1. Core development updates, known as the “bleeding edge”
2. Minor core updates, such as maintenance and security releases
3. Major core release updates

A WordPress user can avoid this problem by disabling auto updates in WordPress. This gives you more control over your site, enabling you to test updates for compatibility and avoid potentially unwanted feature changes. Of course, it also means you’ll need to manually update WordPress to the latest version in order to patch potential security holes.

In this article, we’ll explain why you might want to disable automatic WordPress updates. Then we’ll show you how to do just that, using code or a simple WordPRess plugin. Let’s dive right in!

Why WordPress Updates Automatically

WordPress automatically updates the core WordPress software for security reasons.

Sometimes, it may also update a plugin or theme to fix a potential threat. For instance, a WordPress plugin or theme might be updated to remove a critical vulnerability. If that plugin or theme is used by a lot of websites, WordPress core team may push out an automatic update for that.

Apart from those situations, WordPress lets you decide when you want to install updates.

We don’t recommend turning off automatic WordPress updates. They’re an important security feature.

However, in some rare situations, updates can break your website or affect its functionality. This could lead to you losing business and customers.

If you’re confident that you can manage manual updates yourself, then you can safely disable automatic updates in WordPress.

Why Disable Automatic WordPress Updates?

Generally speaking, automatic updates in WordPress are a good thing, and we’d recommend that most users leave them enabled, especially for a security update. However, there are some cases when disabling some or all automatic updates may be beneficial to a WordPress user. 

The main reason to disable a WordPress automatic updates is that they can sometimes break a website. Most of the time, updates are thoroughly tested, and there won’t be any problems. This is especially true with WordPress core, as well as many popular themes updates and plugins.

With that being said, developers can’t possibly test their software with every possible combination of plugins and themes. If you have tools installed that are built for a certain WordPress version of WordPress, or rely on other plugins, a WordPress update can cause compatibility issues with the others. In rare cases, this could cause a chain reaction that brings down an entire website or cripples mission-critical functionality. 

Add below code in active theme

// Disable core auto-updates
add_filter( 'auto_update_core', '__return_false' );
// Disable auto-updates for plugins.
add_filter( 'auto_update_plugin', '__return_false' );
// Disable auto-updates for themes.
add_filter( 'auto_update_theme', '__return_false' );