How to Disable Automatic Plugin and Theme Updates on your Child Sites

WordPress 5.5 introduced a new automated update feature for plugins and themes.

If you are already using MainWP to professionally handle plugin and theme updates for your client sites, then we suggest limiting your clients ability from setting plugins or themes to be automatically updated.

Your clients hired you to update and test plugins before being updated and letting them set updates automatically defeats that purpose.

If you need examples of why automatic plugin and theme updates are not a good idea then you only need to look at the breaking changes in the recent WooCommerce 4.0 release or the very recent Yoast SEO 14.0 release. A

The whole range of plugin updates can cause issues on a site where it is updated on, and it is always worth testing plugin and theme updates on a staging site before running those same updates on a child site.

We recommended you use the Code Snippets extension save the code snippets below to your connected WordPress sites.

The code snippet to disable all automatic plugin updates is:

add_filter( 'auto_update_plugin', '__return_false' );

Snippet Type: Execute on Child Site

See code on Github

The code snippet to disable all theme automatic updates is:

add_filter( 'auto_update_theme', '__return_false' );

Snippet Type: Execute on Child Site

See code on Github

The code snippets examples above use built-in WordPress filters to remove the UI for automatic plugins or theme updates.

If you want additional information WordFence did an excellent write up “WordPress Automatic Updating: What do you have to lose?“