WordPress’ popularity makes it the perfect target for hackers – locating a single vulnerability is enough to compromise an alarming number of sites. How is the average WordPress user supposed to secure his site against these odds?
There are plenty of ways to secure your WordPress site(s), but the priority should always be to keep the WordPress core files, plugins, and themes up to date. However, all of those updates can be hard to keep track of, and that’s where automatic WordPress updates come in.
In this article, we’ll be going over the pros and cons of automatic updates. Then – once you’ve you’ve reached a verdict on automatic updates – we’ll teach you how to enable them throughout your entire WordPress site.
Automatic WordPress updates often get a bad rap, but they offer several noteworthy benefits. For example:
With just the pros in mind, automatic updates sound pretty good, right? Well, hold onto your horses. It would be irresponsible for us to teach you how to enable them without first discussing the downsides.
We’ve already seen the good, now let’s talk about the bad and the ugly:
Despite the risks, it’s possible to enable automatic updates and not have your entire site come crashing down – otherwise, we wouldn’t teach you how to do it. It’s just a matter of minimizing your risks.
As far as updates go, major WordPress releases are the biggest source of compatibility issues. Before you enable them, make sure that your themes and plugins are being updated regularly by their respective developers. Plugins and themes that are updated regularly are the least likely to give you problems.
Furthermore, we would advise against enabling automatic WordPress core updates if you rely on lots of plugins for essential features on your site. Or, at the very least, make sure you have a recent andcomplete site backup before the update is installed!
If your hosting provider uses Softaculous, then you should be able to enable automatic WordPress updates from cPanel. However, the process of enabling automatic updates does vary from one host to the next. We’ll walk through one common scenario, but if it doesn’t match the options provided by your host, get in touch with your host to determine if they offer this feature and how you can enable it.
To set up automatic WordPress updates with Softaculous, navigate to cPanel and select the WordPress option, usually located under a One-Click Installers section:
Updating WordPress automatically is a controversial topic. From a security standpoint, automatic updates are a no-brainer, but they can produce presentation and functionality issues. Let’s briefly recap the pros and cons to help you make up your mind: