How to Update WordPress Plugins? Find out with this simple guide how to update manually or automatically WordPress Plugins.
Owning a WordPress website means you’ve likely encountered the task of updating WordPress plugins. You may be wondering why it’s important to update WordPress plugins, so in this post, we’ll cover how and why to keep your WordPress plugins updated.
Guide: WordPress Plugin Updates
When new versions of WordPress plugins are released, you’ll receive a notification in the WordPress dashboard that an update is available. You’ll see several icons in your WordPress dashboard that indicate available WordPress plugin updates.
It doesn’t stop at installing and activating WordPress plugins. WordPress plugins should be actively maintained and improved with new version releases by the person or team who created the plugin.
New version releases mean WordPress plugins get better through bug fixes, added features and hardened security. You should take advantage of WordPress plugin updates as often and as quickly as possible.
From the WordPress dashboard, if you visit the Plugins page, you’ll see the details of the available updates. From this page, you can see the next available version number and the option to update the plugin.
How to Update WordPress Plugins
So now that we now that we have seen available updates, how do you go about running these updates?
If you are familiar with any form of social media, you will recognize the red notification circle with the number of notifications in the center. The same notification method applies here for available WordPress updates.
1. From your WordPress dashboard, click on “Updates” and you will be guided through a process to install any available updates. Get into the habit of installing update to WordPress core, WordPress plugins and WordPress themes as often as they are available.
2. Select the plugins you wish to update and click the “Update Plugins” button.
3. All done! Once the updates have completed, you’ll receive a success notice.
WordPress Plugin Auto Updates
Updates occur all the time and that might get a little annoying. The good news is, you have the option to automatically update WordPress plugins.
Auto-updates are initially disabled by default, but enabling this feature is pretty simple.
To enable automatic updates to WordPress plugins you will need to add a filter to the “functions.php” file.
// Enable automatic updates for plugins
add_filter('auto_update_plugin', '__return_true');
Thanks to itheme.com for this guide.
