Managing WordPress updates

On newly created WordPress sites, updates are enabled by default on Onyx. This means your WordPress sites will automatically update to the latest minor versions and translation files (e.g. 6.x.x to 6.y.y). WordPress does not automatically perform major version updates e.g. 5.x.x to 6.x.x).

Themes and plugins will not be automatically updated. We recommend that any WordPress, theme or plugin update should be tested thoroughly on a staging version of your site prior to updating on your live site.

Always ensure you have good, up-to-date backups of any site before performing an upgrade, and especially if your site has e-commerce or transactional functionality - put the site in to maintenance mode before updating.

Disabling All Updates

To completely disable all types of automatic updates, core or otherwise, add the following to your wp-config.php file:

define( 'AUTOMATIC_UPDATER_DISABLED', true );

Disabling Automatic Updates

Alternatively, you can disable automatic updates in WordPress by adding this line of code in your wp-config.php file:

define ( ‘WP_AUTO_UPDATE’, false);

Enabling automatic updates of Themes & Plugins

Should you wish to enable automatic updates of themes or plugins you can do so by adding one or both of the following to your site’s functions.php file, ideally in a child theme.

add_filter( 'auto_update_plugin', '__return_true' );

add_filter( 'auto_update_theme', '__return_true' );

Using plugins to manage this through the WordPress GUI

There are a number of third-party plugins you could use to achieve these results without editing WordPress files. To control automatic updating you could try Easy Updates Manager. To enable the ability to rollback to previous versions of themes or plugins you could try WP-Rollback.

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Updated on: 24/01/2024