How to Enable/Disable Automatic Plugin Updates in WordPress Without Code

WordPress plugins have the capability to update themselves. Sometimes that’s good but sometimes it breaks your site at 2 AM. 🤷

You do get control over this behavior through the WordPress dashboard, though, but it’s a bit clunky. You have to click through each plugin individually – the tiny “enable auto-updates” links. If your site has 20+ plugins then this can take forever. And there’s really no quick way to see which plugins have auto-updates turned on.

There’s a better approach that takes about 60 seconds. No, really!

As you’d expect, this is done with … another plugin. But it’s a really simple one! It gives you a single screen where you can toggle auto-updates for all your plugins and themes at once – via global rules. Or, you can also pick individual plugins to auto-update. Everything’s visible in one place, with clear controls that actually make sense.

This guide shows you exactly how to set it up. No code, no headaches, just straightforward control over when your plugins update.

How auto-updates for plugins work by default

By default, WordPress will only notify you of a pending plugin update – whenever the update is ready to be installed. But then, you will have to do the update yourself.

If you want to turn auto updates, you need to click any of these links next to each plugin you have:

As you’d imagine, if you have lots of plugins, this can be troublesome and time consuming.

So, there’s a better way:

How to enable/disable automatic plugin updates easily

First, go ahead and install this free plugin: Disable Updates – Updates Manager.

Just go to your WordPress dash, into Plugins → Add New, and input “Disable Updates” into the search box. Look for the plugin that is authored by Themeisle:

Click on Install Now and then Activate.

Then, go to Settings → Updates manager. You’ll see this:

There’s a handful of cool things you can do here. For example:

(1) Pick the type of updates you want to allow for plugins. There are options for:

• Manual updates – the default WordPress behavior – you will get notified of a new update being available, but the update won’t install on its own
• Enable auto updates – the updates will be installed automatically
• Disable updates – this disables the updates completely – you won’t even see the update counter on the Plugins page

(2) You can do the same to your installed themes.

(3) If you want to control the other elements of your WordPress install, like your WordPress core, translations, and even other components, you can do that in the plugin interface too:

Control your plugin updates one by one

Now the best part; this plugin also lets you control the updates for each of your plugins individually.

To do that: first turn on auto-updates for plugins and save settings:

Then, switch to the Plugins tab:

On this page, you can pick whether you want to disable updates, turn auto-updates on, allow translation updates, or even hide any of your plugins one by one.

What’s a possible use case?

For example, you can enable auto-updates for things like cookie banners, analytics plugins, security plugins, and similar. Basically, turn them on for any plugin that does its job in the background and doesn’t require much maintenance from you – the site admin.

However, for plugins that are more user-facing and have a higher chance of breaking any of your layouts or site functionality, you can choose to update them by hand. Those would be plugins like WooCommerce, SEO plugins, LMS plugins, or your page builder even.

Conclusion

Yeah, that wasn’t hard, was it?

Just one simple plugin can give you some truly granular control over individual plugins and their updates while also being very easy to use and comprehend.

Check it out, and let us know in case you have any questions about this topic!

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