Should I activate auto-update for plugins and themes on my WordPress website? The short answer is rather yes than no, but it is important to understand the risks that enabling automatic updates on your WordPress website brings. Always assess these risks, depending on the kind of website you are running and how important the website is in your business strategy. And then consider your alternative options that may not be free of charge, but mitigate some of these risks.
Why should you update in the first place?
There are two main reasons to keep your website updated. First reason, and especially valid in 2026, is security. New versions of plugins are often fixing newly discovered security vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit and take over your website.
The 2nd reason is that technology updates and evolves beyond just your WordPress website. The server that the website is running on gets updated, browsers get updated. And plugin’s updates often bring support for these changes.
The risks of enabling automatic updates
No matter how well software is tested, there is always a risk that when something changes something else breaks or stops working. I was running my personal website on auto-update for a few years, when I was working full-time, and my website was not directly bringing me any revenue. I can confirm, it would break time to time. It never went fully down, but often some styling would change, layout would slightly shift, and in one or two cases the contact form stopped working.
WordPress automatically rolls back the core version, or a plugin version if there is a fatal error after auto update. This functionality has been implemented to WordPress 6.6 issued in July 2024 and makes auto-updates much safer.
So the main risk is in something breaking silently due to a plugin incompatibility or a small change. The risk is proportional to how well the website is built and architected. Simple and well-built brochure website or blog is less likely to be affected than for example a complex e-commerce or booking site.
That is why for our clients, we always perform quality test of the website looking for any changes or failures after the updates, test major version releases on staging environment and have reliable backups always in place.
Safe updates with automatic visual regression
Website hosts (like Kinsta or Cloudways) and website management tools (such as WP Umbrella, ManageWP, and MainWP, to name a few popular ones) naturally started to provide solutions for safer automatic updates, including visual regression tests after automatic updates. How it works is that a screenshot of the website before each plugin update is triggered. Then it is compared with a screenshots taken after the update and if there is any significant difference in these 2 screenshots, the system will automatically roll back that update and notify you.
It is an additional safety layer on top of the automatic rollback of a plugin on fatal failure, but doesn’t ultimately solve all the challenges. This service, while usually being billed separately, only allows you to specify a limited number of URLs that will be tested and visual regression doesn’t catch all the issues, like problems with forms, shopping cart flows or other interactive elements and features.
Solutions for revenue critical websites
There are several quality assessment systems and workflows to efficiently detect failures beyond visual change and efficiently report problems in real time. With such systems in place, it is important to specify what happens when something is flagged, both critical, and non-critical. Smaller issues can be resolved without causing greater impact. Setting up QA tests and processes, internally, may be challenging. So this is where website maintenance plans are suitable solution to consider.
The alternatives
The natural question people are asking more and more is whether WordPress is worth all these risks, and potential troubles. The answer will be mostly the economics of the specific case. No platform is fully immune to failures due to some level of system update. The cost for closed and more centrally controlled platforms (like Webflow, Wix, or Squarespace) will scale differently than WordPress website. While starting up will be cheaper on WordPress, cost of maintenance or resolving post-update issues may add up. On the other hand, as traffic increases, or advanced functions and integrations are required, these managed platforms start to ask for premium price and fully controlled self-hosted WordPress website start to make more sense.
