My Thoughts on Automated Updates in WordPress

This topic has caused a lot of discussion in the WordPress community. There has been great debate on whether this is a good idea or not a good idea.

I have a lot of experience dealing with WordPress security issues. I thought I would share my wisdom and experience on how I feel about Automated Updates in WordPress.

The problem with automated updates is if something goes wrong it can cause your website not to function properly.

I always like to have a good valid backup before I do website updates.

I want to start this off by saying the landscape is changing. The folks at WordPress are working on an automated way of rolling back plugin updates that do not work properly and cause site issues. Once this is widely available as a release, this might change this conversation.

Currently, for all websites, I do not turn automatic updates on. I prefer to make sure I have a backup before I do the updates. This allows me to roll back quickly if something goes wrong.

Imagine a large WooCommerce site going down and the money that could be lost if you are not aware of what has transpired. This is one issue that I do not want to have.

I know some webmasters like to turn automatic updates on for non-critical sites. I do not even like this approach.

So my take is to leave automatic updates off until WordPress has built-in rollback functions in the case of any errors.