Said It Here

How to stop software updates from breaking your production website

Automatic updates can introduce version conflicts that crash live production websites and disrupt operations. To maintain stability, teams disable auto-updates on live servers and instead route updates through isolated staging environments for testing before manual deployment.

What people tried

Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.

  1. 1
    Disabling automatic updates completely and performing manual updates regularly (at least once a week)
  2. 2
    Enabling auto-updates and hoping updates do not break the website
  3. 3
    Running auto-updates exclusively on staging sites rather than production sites

In their words

Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.

“In my current company, I noticed they’ve disabled automatic updates for WordPress and plugins.”source ↗

“Many companies do this mainly to avoid conflicts with new versions.”source ↗

bikashkumar01 · r/Wordpress · 36 upvotes

“I ran their compatibility scanner and it spat out a spreadsheet of errors so my site is not fully compatible.”source ↗

“I'm not sure where to go from here - I can see that some of the error messages have to do with specific plugins, but I'm not sure what to do about that.”source ↗

Vlerremuis · r/Wordpress · 6 upvotes

“I never have Auto updates on in production. Only staging sites. It's all about stability”source ↗

NeonX91 · r/Wordpress · 1 upvotes

Where this came up

r/Wordpressautomationpluginssoftware maintenanceweb developmentwordpress

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