Enable Automatic Plugin Updates in WordPress Without Code

One of the best things you can do for WordPress site security it run updates in WordPress often, ideally as soon as they’re available. Making WordPress automatically pull in plugin updates for you is a great way to make that happen. Automatic plugin update can happen with some PHP code, but there’s actually a great plugin that lets you get this feature from just installing it. It’s called “Companion Auto Update“, and it’ll keep your WordPress plugins and themes up to date without breaking a sweat.

There are a few really cool features of the Companion Auto Update plugin. One that should comfort some people who are hesitant to let all their plugins update automatically all the time is the fact that it has a settings screen where you can turn off the automatic updates for certain plugins. I know that I’m most scared to update WooCommerce, but which plugin(s) you turn it off for is really up to you.

Here’s the video explaining:

And if text is more your speed:

How to Automatically Update Plugins in WordPress (without code)

  1. Install and activate the “Companion Auto Update” plugin. It’s by Papin Schipper.
  2. That’s it.
  3. If you want, go to “Tools > Auto Updater” and select the plugins that you *don’t* want to automatically update. Those are on the “Select Plugins” tab of Companion Auto Updater. Hit “Save Changes”.

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Anil Verma
July 1, 2020 12:37 pm

hope this will work

Gray
January 24, 2019 5:00 pm

I’ve installed this on a number of my client’s sites hosted on Siteground. Unfortunately, the plugin doesn’t seem to work across these sites. Any ideas of what’s going on with the server that would prevent this?

Mike S.
January 2, 2019 11:57 am

Thanks guys, great suggestion!

This sounds like a great idea especially for plugins like Yoast, which pushes updates so often I’m tempted to uninstall it (get your isht together, Yoast developers! There’s no way on God’s green earth you legitimately *need* to push updates every other week.)

Would love to hear you expand on the perils of WooCommerce and why the auto-update is a bad idea on that one.

Jack
November 5, 2018 7:57 am

Unfortunately this plugin apears to be closed and is no longer available. After some research I found that Companion auto update is also a great plugin to handle updates.

Keith
October 24, 2017 12:04 pm

A great companion to this would be some sort of service or plugin that checks your site daily for errors. I manage several sites and checking each one everyday is never going to happen. But if a plugin update causes a white screen of death or some other display error, it would be great to be notified about it. If someone knows of something like this, please let me know.

For now, I’ll stick with InfiniteWP which does all updates (themes and core) for all my sites with the click of a button.