WordPress Version 5 5 Auto Updates

When should you use WordPress auto-updates and when should you not?
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This segment is from Episode 318 of the Beyond Social Media Show
▶️ https://youtu.be/Q21TncPwYvQ
? https://beyondsocialmediashow.com/walmart-drive-in-theaters/


WordPress 5.5 Auto-Updates 0:36
David Erickson: It will basically allow you to flip a switch and just have WordPress auto-update itself, the core WordPress, or any plugins or themes that you've got installed on your WordPress site.

WordPress Auto-Updates Options 0:49
David Erickson: You have the option to turn auto-updates on for individual plugins and themes directly. It can be turned off--it's going to be turned off by default. So when WordPress updates to the newest version, it will be turned off by default. You'll only have an on and off toggle switch. So you won't have the option to select different types of updates like only security updates, or only minor releases, etc.

Why WordPress Is Auto-Updating 1:20
David Erickson: The reason they're doing this is to improve the security of WordPress installations across the board and make it easier for people who maintain sites to maintain them.

Potential Problems To WordPress Auto-Updates 1:32
David Erickson: They do point out some potential problems and let's list a couple of them.

Concurrent Updates Can Fail 1:37
David Erickson: Concurrent auto-updates can fail. If you've got a bunch of plugins and you turn on auto-update; you have all those of those plugins updating at the same time, the load on the server can cause--depending upon the type of of hosting you have--the load on the server for all of those updates, all of those plugins updating at once can cause them to fail. So that's something you would have to be concerned about.

The difficulty in determining what changed. When I update WordPress sites and there's several plugins that need to be updated, I update them individually.

BL Ochman: I do too.

David Erickson: I update one, check out the site, see if everything's okay. Okay, worked; update the next, do the same thing. So if you're updating a bunch of plugins simultaneously, you don't necessarily know what changed if something goes wrong. If it breaks the site, you don't know which plugin broke the site. So that's an issue.

Compatibility Problems With Major Plugin Releases 2:36
David Erickson: Major version releases could have compatibility problems. You've got minor updates, bugs that are fixed and stuff, but then some plugins have major updates and they have been known in the past to have compatibility problems with the core WordPress.

Absence Of Canary Releases 2:53
David Erickson: And then the lack of Canary releases for testing issues. So a Canary release is, you released it for a small subset of your users, like five percent of your users get the get the release to test to see if it's okay. And then if it's okay for that five percent, you roll it out for the entire population. If you're doing auto-updates, then obviously that's not happening.

Attended Updates 3:18
David Erickson: At the moment, nearly every update you do on your site is an "attended update," you attend to the update. You know when your site has been updated when you do that, you can read the developers change logs. So if you're thinking about maybe I shouldn't update this one, you can check and see what the developers changed. If you update every plugin, you're more likely to be able to determine any problems that way.

Full Auto-Updates 3:59
David Erickson: They say there's three approaches you can use to the auto-updates: you can turn it on for all plugins, which I will do for some sites, like just basic brochure sites that content doesn't really change. I'd flip on the auto-update switch for that because it saves me time and I don't have to go in and do it individually.

Selective Auto-Updates 4:26
David Erickson: Auto-update for some plugins or for all plugins. If you've got a mission critical site. If you're doing ecommerce, if you got an enterprise wide site, you're probably going to turn them all off and do them individually because there's too much at stake.

WordPress Auto-Updates: What Have You Got To Lose?
? https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2020/08/wordpress-auto-updates-what-do-you-have-to-lose/

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