Should you auto-update plugins and themes?

Update WordPress plugins, themes, and core as new versions become available.

Ideally, your WordPress site should be ready for auto updates of any shape or form. Updates to WordPress core, themes and plugins should just be applied and your site should run smoothly. Right? Right.

Is your site ready for automatic updates of everything? If not, why not?

But maybe your site isn’t ready for that level of automation. I have to ask: why not?

It’s one of the bigger reasons sites get hacked, crash and just plain don’t work. Things are out of date, not patched, not updated or upgraded and hackers get in, software gets old and things just don’t work as well as they’re supposed to.

You might not be ready for auto-update-everything because you probably:

• Have some custom code somewhere in the files of your theme. Yeah, you can’t update your site. You could use a child theme, though.
• Use a really old theme and updates to anything (core, plugins, theme) might break something. Maybe it’s time to update that theme.
• Have complex plugins that do something that might just break. Everything. So you have to wonder, what is this plugin doing and why is it so complex?
• Are just scared your site will break and you won’t know about it until some friendly visitor to your site tells you it’s down or broken. This is probably the main reason to not do too many automated upgrades.

I checked everything that would update anything. The site I was working on was a fresh site with no content yet and would probably remain simple. So why not? We’ll see how it goes.

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