Tame WordPress plugins and 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:

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.

How to enable Kinsta Automatic Updates

Whether you want to assign Kinsta Automatic Updates to a single plugin in one environment or to every plugin and theme across hundreds of environments, MyKinsta makes it easy.

Let’s look at various ways you can initiate the add-on in MyKinsta.

All plugins and themes within a single environment

Enabling Kinsta Automatic Updates for a single environment might be the most likely scenario for many customers.

To get started, navigate to WordPress sites > sitename/environment > Plugins and themes and then click the Change button on the Automatic updates card:

As you can see in the image below, the next step is to choose one of the available update options:

• Manual (no automatic updates)
• WordPress (native) auto-updates
• Kinsta Automatic Updates

Before we get into what happens after you click that Continue button above, let’s look at the other ways to reach this step.

A specific plugin or theme within one environment

You can enable (or disable) automatic updates for a single plugin or theme. Below, we click the kabob (three-dot menu) beside one of the plugins to activate the drop-down menu.

After selecting Change automatic updates in the drop-down menu, we see the Select type dialog we saw above. This time, we’re told this automatic update change applies to just one plugin.

Plugins and themes across multiple environments

Do you have many websites? The ability to set automatic update options across multiple environments might be what you’re looking for.

It all starts on the WordPress sites page, under the All sites tab. You may have used MyKinsta’s Bulk Actions here, and that’s what we will do in this case.

After using the checkboxes on the left to select any combination of environments (including all), we click Actions for a drop-down menu that includes Change automatic updates:

After selecting Change automatic updates, we are back at the Select type dialog again (below). This time, we are reminded that we are updating settings for eight environments.

Just plugins or just themes across multiple environments

The final example illustrates selecting multiple plugins or themes in a collection that could span multiple environments. It starts with the Plugins or Themes tab at the top of the WordPress sites page.

We’re using just Themes for this example:

With multiple themes selected, Change automatic updates is again an available Bulk Action. After selecting the option, we would see the Select type dialog we saw above for multiple environments.

Now that we know how to get started with Kinsta Automatic Updates let’s look at how to configure the add-on.

How to configure Kinsta Automatic Updates

Once we’ve chosen plugins and themes we want to manage and selected Kinsta Automatic Updates (rather than Manual or WordPress auto-updates), clicking the Continue button brings us to the Settings dialog:

Let’s take a closer look at Kinsta Automatic Updates settings:

Testing frequency

Select the days of the week on which you want Kinsta Automatic Updates to install new releases of plugins and themes.

Remember that developers can issue new releases at any time. But if you are not available to follow up on update messaging on weekends, you might want to deselect those days.

Note: If you have many releases to be updated the first time Kinsta Automatic Updates launches, they might not all get processed on the first day. The system will attempt to catch up on the next scheduled day.

Testing time window

This is the time of day you want the automatic updates to run. These times should reflect your own time zone.

Sensitivity

The visual regression tests compare the pixels in screenshots captured before and after an update attempt. This sensitivity setting allows you to specify how strict you want that comparison to be. A higher value can detect more subtle changes but can also result in more false positives.

Test URLs

You can add up to five URLs pointing to pages on your website that will be used for the visual regression tests. If you leave the field blank, the test will evaluate the site’s homepage and four random pages.

If you provide one or more URLs, only those links will be followed.

Hide selectors

Some dynamic content can cause a visual regression test to fail. An example might be a carousel that presents images in a random order. If you can’t be sure which image will appear on the page’s initial load, there’s a good chance the test’s two screenshots will not match,

You can solve this problem in many cases by passing the CSS selector for the element enclosing the dynamic content. For example, div#rotator would cause the screenshot software to set to none !important the display property of any div with the ID rotator.

Enable WordPress maintenance mode

Select this option to display a WordPress maintenance page when the updates are running. The maintenance page would be in place for the length of time it takes for updates to complete — not necessarily the values selected for the Testing time window.

How Kinsta Automatic Update settings are applied

It’s important to note that these settings apply at the WordPress environment level. Even if you selected plugins and themes individually for Kinsta Automatic Updates, they will share the settings applied in the dialog above.

When the selected plugins or themes span multiple WordPress environments, site-specific settings like test URLs and CSS selectors probably don’t apply to all. So the Settings dialog will look like this:

If you need to specify test URLs or hide selectors after enabling Kinsta Automatic Updates in this way, you must navigate to the appropriate environment in MyKinsta (WordPress sites > sitename/environment > Plugins and themes) and modify the settings there.

Configuring email notifications

One last thing to set up: Kinsta Automatic Updates email notifications!

Navigate to username > User settings > Notifications to enable email notifications for successful and/or failed updates:

Viewing the Kinsta Automatic Updates

The logs of Kinsta Automatic Updates are found at Plugins and themes > Kinsta Automatic Updates:

Click Details to view information about the plugin or theme update. Click on the plugin or theme name to reveal the screenshots used for the visual regression tests:

Summary

Kinsta Automatic Updates eliminates the biggest burdens of WordPress maintenance: the risk of site-breaking updates, time-consuming manual updates, and security vulnerabilities from outdated plugins. With Kinsta Automatic Updates, site owners and agency managers can save themselves hours of work each month.

Not a Kinsta customer yet? Learn more about our powerful Managed Hosting for WordPress.

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