Well the automated WordPress updates looks promising and easy to maintain the website. While WordPress depends on the developers who made WordPress. Then WordPress plugins which your website uses and their authors and compatibility as well. At last the author of your WordPress theme you are using for your WordPress website.
If you have set your WordPress to update automatically or plugins to update automatically or the theme. There are chances you will get into problems sometime and receive error like. “An automated WordPress update has failed to complete”. This can be very risky cause your live site can go down for several hours without your notice even.
Well as you are already here in this post which means you have noticed the failure of WordPress update. And now you are trying to find out the ways to fix the automated update problem and get your website back to normal.
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Turn off maintenance mode if your website is in it.
First of all check if your website is in under maintenance mode and if the answer is yes. Simply access the root folder of your website via FTP or cPanel File manager. And find the .maintenance file and remove it so website can get back to normal. Once you have removed the .maintenance file now you can try to update WordPress, Plugins or Themes manually one by one.
If you need detailed instructions about how to remove Briefly Unavailable For Scheduled Maintenance click here.
Turning off the maintenance mode can bring you back to site’s admin panel where you can try to update your website again.
What actually cause automated WordPress update to fail?
When WordPress, plugins or themes are being updated automatically there are few steps involved and if any step fail for any reason between you get error an automated WordPress update has failed. If this is happening again and again then the problem can be with resources and limitations on your localhost or web hosting. Let’s try to check the steps and see where problem exists.
- In automated update WordPress downloads the new package from either WordPress respiratory or plugin or theme’s author’s website.
- After download is complete WordPress unpack the downloaded package.
- WordPress puts your website in maintenance mode and remove current files to replace with new files.
If any step from above given steps breaks between then the problem will come up of an automated WordPress update have failed.
Helpful: Increase maximum execution time on your server or localhost.
Nothing working? Try to update your WordPress, Plugin or Theme manually
Well nothing yet have worked for you? I guess its time to update your WordPress, plugin or theme manually. First of all please identify what is the actual problem is it core WordPress update? Plugin update or Theme’s update. Whatever it is please follow the related post below.
- How to update WordPress manually Via FTP or cPanel
- How to update WordPress plugin Manually via FTP or cPanel
- How to update WordPress theme manually via FTP or cPanel
Turn off WordPress automatic Updates
You can simply turn off WordPress automatic updates by clicking next to each plugin or theme. And to disable WordPress core updates kindly add following code in your wp-config.php file.
What if you don’t want to use a plugin? You can disable automatic updates in WordPress by adding this line of code in your wp-config.php file:
| 1 | define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', false ); |
This will disable all automatic WordPress updates.
Disable WordPress theme and plugin updates keep WordPress updates on.
If you want to receive minor core updates, but disable theme and plugin updates, you can do so by adding the following filters in your theme’s functions.php file or in a site-specific plugin. This can be helpful because WordPress release is very careful release while themes and plugins are questionable and author reputation is also a big factor to consider. Follow following code examples to add in your functions.php in theme to disable plugins and theme updates.
Disable automatic WordPress plugin updates:
| 1 | add_filter( 'auto_update_plugin', '__return_false' ); |
Disable automatic WordPress theme updates:
| 1 | add_filter( 'auto_update_theme', '__return_false' ); |