How Does Pagely Handle WordPress Core & Plugin Updates?

Keeping WordPress up to date is important to keeping a secure, healthy site. At Pagely, we make that process much easier by offering automated updates of WordPress core, plugins, and themes. There are many reasons we are a trusted solution for thousands of WordPress sites across the world and being critical of WordPress core and plugin releases does not fall short as one of them.

Our seamless system performs updates automatically in the background, without any user intervention.

This means you can toss away those fears and put the panic emojis at bay. Below we’ll discuss further how we approach updates for both WordPress core and plugins.

Note: If you wish to modify the WordPress core files/directories, that won't be possible on our platform. Maintaining security remains a priority and in the event the WordPress core files we manage are overwritten, we'll revert that and perform any upgrades as needed.

Deployment of WordPress Updates

WordPress Core Releases

Major core releases are usually non-crucial and consist of general feature enhancements. We delay these releases for a couple of reasons:

• To give plugin and theme authors more time to update their code to work with the new major releases.
• Like any other major software update, there are bound to be a few bugs that weren’t identified when released. These bugs are soon corrected in the subsequent minor release.

Because of this, we typically won’t push major WordPress releases until the first minor release. 

Minor releases aim to strengthen security and dispatch bugs and are therefore pushed out within 24-48 hours of their release date.

If you'd like to expedite an update, feel free to reach out to our support team and we'll be happy to apply it for you.

Plugin & Theme Updates

All WordPress plugins are updated automatically. If you plan to customize a plugin and wish to avoid updating it to retain the changes, you will need to change the plugin:

• Folder name
• File name
• Plugin Name header comment in the plugin file

WooCommerce Plugin Updates

The WooCommerce plugin is an exception to our update process and the only automatic updates we apply are patch/bugfix versions.

For example, if you're running WooCommerce 1.3, our automated system will update your WooCommerce version to 1.3.3. Updating to WooCommerce 1.4, a new minor release, will need to be done manually within WordPress.

This ensures that your site still gets critical security updates, while avoiding potential breakage from major and minor version upgrades.

Opting Out of Updates

Can I Opt Out of WordPress Core Upgrades?

Although we do not recommend it, VPS customers may place a version hold as a short-term fix for issues or dependencies that may arise.

These version holds are applied account-wide. This means the versions for all apps/WordPress instances across the account will be locked while the hold is in place.

To request a WordPress version hold, please submit a ticket to our support team.

Note: Legacy Shared accounts cannot place a version hold. 

Can I Opt Out of Automatic Plugin Updates?

We can temporarily disable plugin updates for all customers. These requests are applied per app and will disable updates to all plugins.

Please note that this is not offered permanently, and, for security purposes, plugin updates will be re-enabled after 45 days.

To request a plugin version hold, please submit a ticket to our support team specifying the WordPress site(s) you would like the plugins disabled for. 

Are There Rollback Options?

We make nightly backups of everything, so we can always rollback if needed.

Keep in mind, a common cause of issues is simply an outdated plugin being incompatible with a newer version of WordPress. In these cases we have a handy self-service WhiteScreen Eliminator that allows you to disable your plugins and/or reset the theme to its default.

As always, if you have any issues with your site after a WordPress core, plugin, or theme update, our support team is here and happy to help troubleshoot or rollback as needed.