Why You Should Never Enable WordPress Auto-Updates

Sumit Singh
3 min readMay 23, 2024

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WordPress features and characteristics always improve website quality by adding features for both WordPress SEO and the user interface.

Typical on each WordPress site, an estimated 8–10 plugins are used to optimize page speed, add SEO tags, cache static content, and so on.

Most SEO companies prefer to use plugins like Yoast SEO, Rankmath or All in one SEO to ease their SEO work.

When you don’t have any good WordPress programmer friends or you don’t want to waste your energy, using plugins can just be useful.

It can, however, be dangerous. Because if you do not update the plugins to the most recent editions, your site might well be jeopardized.

Every day, several plugins face potential challenges such as placement or XSS attacks.

If your plugin is directed for one of these menaces and one of the hackers discovers you’re using it, then you’re toast. Your website has vanished.

Nowadays, most WordPress hosting companies offer backup services.

However, if you use affordable hosting as we do, you might not have had a comprehensive backup of someone’s site.

Auto-updates help to solve a problem

When you enable Website auto-updates for plugins, the security issue is resolved. Even if you don’t visit your site for a year, it will have all of the most recent security updates.

That is unquestionably a good solution for the majority of static content websites, such as business or portfolio sites.

When auto-updates are enabled, WordPress uses a cron job to compare installed plugin versions to the most recent.

WordPress cron jobs must be enabled on your WordPress hosting for the driver to work properly. Otherwise, your scripts will only be updated if you manually visit the admin page.

That is a pleasant path, and everyone works automatically for you.

Auto-updates cause a problem

When you enable auto-updates for all of your plugins, you run into an issue. Compliance. When your plugins are updated automatically, you may run into some compliance difficulties.

Because plugin writers may believe that everyone reads the changelogs, the newest version of the plugin may not feature the function our theme developer utilized.

Perhaps a plugin decided to entirely change its settings profile without moving proper choices, or they deleted part of the previous functionality that was crucial to your website’s success.

Then, when you return from your trip, you discover that WordPress has hacked your website!

Have your website started to malfunction, or your SEO statistics have plummeted?

All of your efforts could be for naught if the plugin developers make a poor decision.

CONCLUSION

Our advice, which we follow on all of our websites, is to disable plugin auto-updates if you care about SEO, monetize your website, or have a critical webpage that must be available at any time.

However, if your web page is a blog site, a portfolio, or even a business website (with just local SEO), you should consider using it as that type of website is not maintained on a daily basis.

They are updated on a regular basis, usually by a WordPress development company or freelancer.

Finally, if you don’t know how else to enable auto-updates, you should actually allow them.

Request your web developer or hosting service to do it for you!

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Sumit Singh
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Highly experienced and results-driven Digital Marketing Expert with over 5 years of experience in creating and implementing effective digital marketing strategy