Who updates your WordPress?

This question is getting quite tricky recently. Now that a native autoupdater is included in the WordPress itself (it is one of the major new features in WordPress 3.7, that was released last week), will you ever again be required to click manually on the upgrade link in the WordPress admin? What will happen with the SiteGround WordPress auto updater? And after all, is it you, is it SiteGround or is it WordPress itself that is going to be responsible for the updates? Well, to answer this question we were once again led by our principle: we make sure that the majority of our customers get the best option by default, but we allow the freedom to anyone to change the setup to whatever suits him/her best.

What is the native WordPress auto update doing?

By default, everyone that has an active WordPress 3.7 or higher version should never worry again to update manually when it comes to minor versions update. All 3.7.x versions will be automatically applied at the background to your website by WordPress itself. Technically you may be able to click the update button in the back-end after a new version is officially released and before your installation is autoupdated but you need to be quite fast and lucky to do that. 🙂

Major WordPress versions updates, plugin and theme updates are not switched on by default and will not happen automatically. However, you can switch them on yourself by adding the appropriate lines in the wp-config.php file (see our tutorial on WordPress auto updates)

What is the SiteGround AutoUpdater doing?

As you can see SiteGround autoupdater does quite a few things more than the current default native update functionality. That is why we have decided for the time being to give our tool precedence over the native WordPress one. This means three things:

1. All new WordPress installs made through our system come with SiteGround autoupdater switched on, and WordPress native autoupdater switched off;
2. If you switch on SiteGround autoupdater we will automatically switch off the native WordPress core updates.
3. We will not switch off automatically an active SiteGround autoupdater, even if you switch on the native core updater manually, both will run simultaneously until you choose to switch off any of them yourself.

The balance between convenience and freedom

We are happy that we have been once again able to achieve this so fragile balance between freedom and convenience. We give what we consider is “more” to the majority of our customers by default – they have our own AutoUpdater switched on. However, at any point they can overrule our initial setup and make their own decision if they want to have their websites updated by us, by WordPress or manually by themselves.