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Tame WP plugins & themes with Kinsta Automatic Updates


It’s a familiar sight for those who manage WordPress websites: those red dots with the white numbers in the admin dashboard that remind us how many plugins and themes are due for an update. We dutifully attend to those updates, but we know that the next time we log in to WordPress, those red dots will probably be back.

Sure, the WordPress CMS supports the auto-update of plugins and themes, but you’ve got to be brave — maybe reckless? — to let those updates run unattended on mission-critical websites.

At Kinsta, our customers can manage plugin and theme updates for any number of websites without even logging in to WordPress admin dashboards. Our MyKinsta dashboard for managed hosting customers provides a central location to manage the WordPress native auto-update settings for multiple sites, as well as Kinsta’s own advanced update manager — one that offers protection from site-stopping update failures.

Kinsta Automatic Updates is a premium add-on that lets site operators decide when plugin and theme updates should be attempted and can roll back site changes if an update goes wrong.

In this article, we closely examine Kinsta Automatic Updates and explore how you can take advantage of the feature for powerful hands-off management of plugins and themes.

A quick introduction to Kinsta Automatic Updates

The three pillars of Kinsta Automatic Updates are:

  1. Update scheduling: Launching updates on the best days and times for your website, running automatically to reduce your maintenance overhead.
  2. Visual regression testing: Detecting update failures by comparing auto-generated screenshots of site pages captured before and after update attempts.
  3. Rollback protection: Automatically restoring sites from backups in case of update failures, preventing unexpected downtime.

That’s all backed by logging of update activity and optional reporting out via email. And it’s integrated seamlessly with a MyKinsta interface that makes it easy to discover the status of all plugins and themes on a given site or across multiple sites:

A partial list of WordPress plugins in MyKinsta, with vulnerable versions highlighted in red.

Kinsta Automatic Updates helps make sites more secure by eliminating the drudgery that can result in website operators putting off updates of what could be vulnerable plugins or themes.

The service also plays well with the native WordPress auto-update option. You might decide that a site’s staging environment is not critical, so allow WordPress to update its plugins and themes while you point Kinsta Automatic Updates at the live site.

This premium add-on costs $3 USD a month for each environment — like live or staging — in which it is active. There is no limit to the number of plugins or themes you can manage within an environment.



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