Automatic updates in WordPress are important to improve website performance. WordPress is an open source platform. It allows great opportunity for the website developers to make a website free of cost. Due to this, it also attracts a lot of hackers making websites vulnerable. Due to this, updates keep coming. Therefore, you should not stop auto updates in WordPress at first. You may say that your website has nothing to attract hacker interest. But if you look at the list of reasons for website hacking, you will find a few.
It is better to enable auto updates in WordPress or do it manually from time to time. Plugins also require timely updates. On the other hand there is a scenario where some plugin update can disrupt one or more functions of the website. Because of this your website may stop working. The best strategy is to check what has been updated in the plugin before proceeding with the change. Therefore, I recommend you should disable auto updates in WordPress.
4 ways to stop auto updates in WordPress
What kind of update you really want to disable depends on your needs. You can select between four different ways to disable automatic updates in WordPress.
Disable auto updates of WordPress
First of all you can set this condition at the root level. Open wp-config.php file and write the code below.
define( ‘WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE’, false);
This will disable WordPress automatic updates.
Disable auto updates for Plugins
Plugins are responsible for various website functions. Therefore, you can only disable plugin automatic updates
add_filter( ‘auto_update_plugin’, ‘__return_false’ );
Disable auto updates for Themes
You should do it when you make changes to the basic design of a theme. If you enable auto updates of any theme, the update may overwrite your manual changes. Due to this you may have to do these changes again. Therefore, you can use this code in the wp-config file.
add_filter( ‘auto_update_theme’, ‘__return_false’ );
Use a Plugin
Using fewer plugins is always better to improve the performance of a WordPress website. But if you do not want to edit the config file, a plugin can do the job. WP Auto Updater is a good plugin for this purpose. You can also install the Disable Automatic Updates plugin to stop auto updates in WordPress.