Updating WordPress Installations Print

To keep your website secure, you need to regularly update the WordPress core, as well as any installed plugins and themes. You can do this either automatically or manually:

• Manual updates give you control over when updates are installed. For example, you can wait and see if installing a particular update caused issues for other WordPress users. However, you need to remember to update regularly to avoid falling behind.
• Automatic updates give you peace of mind by keeping your WordPress installation up-to-date. However, updates can sometimes break your installation, and with automatic updates, you may not learn about it right away.

For security reasons, we recommend that you configure automatic updates.

To update a WordPress installation manually:

1. Go to WordPress. If your WordPress installation needs updating, you will see “available” next to “Updates” (below the website screenshot).
   
   
   
2. Click “View” next to “Updates”, wait for WordPress Toolkit to load the list of available updates, and then select the updates you want to install.
   
   
   
   

3. Click Update.

The selected updates will be applied.

To configure automatic updates for a WordPress installation:

1. Go to WordPress and choose the WordPress installation that you want to update automatically.
2. Click “View” next to “Updates”, and then click “Settings”.
3. Choose the desired automatic update settings. You can configure automatic updates separately for WordPress core, plugins, and themes (for example, you can choose to enable automatic updates for plugins and themes, but not for WordPress core). Follow these recommendations:
   • Selecting “No” next to “Update WordPress automatically” turns off automatic updates of WordPress core. This is insecure.
   • If your website is publicly available (production) and you are concerned that applying updates automatically may break it, select “Yes, but only minor (security) updates”.
   • If your website is a non-public (staging) version of a WordPress website, select “Yes, all (minor and major) updates”. This will keep your staging website up-to-date and ensure that, should an update break something, it happens to the staging website and not to the production one.
4. Click OK.

If you are concerned that WordPress automatic updates may break your website, use Smart Updates. With Smart Updates, WordPress installations are always updated safely without breaking your website.