How to Disable WordPress Automatic Updates

Few days ago I have noticed that couple of the sites I host got their WordPress version automatically updated and I was not really happy about it. I am aware that on managed WordPress hosting, automatic updates for users are happening for a long time now but was not aware that this functionality is now available for all WordPress users.

First thing I thought was “who on earth approved this?”. I have a lots of custom plugins and on some of the sites I have worked on core WordPress files so automatic updates could be disastrous and will result in bringing my clients sites down. On every new WordPress release I have to test plugins compatibility and only then I would upgrade to a newer version.

It would be nice if you can switch this options somewhere within dashboard so hopefully we’ll get this in the future. In the meantime you can use this code to disable automatic WordPress updates by adding this line of code to wp-config.php file:

define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', false );