The new auto update feature that arrived in one of the recent releases of WordPress may seem like a good thing on the surface, but can cause terrible problems. I recently had one of my websites completely destroyed because of the auto update that was applied. Ask anyone who has been around IT for a while and they will tell you, the first thing that you should do before applying a software update is take a full backup of your files and your database before applying the update. When you are using auto update it just does it for you and you don’t have the opportunity to take the backup first. I would always recommend applying software updates to a test environment first, to make sure that it is not going to break anything, before applying it to your main production website.
Here is how you turn the auto updates off. Go into your wp-config.php file in your website route directory and add the following lines down towards the bottom of the file, just before it says “That’s All. Stop Editing”:
/** Disable Auto Updates of the WordPress software */ define( 'AUTOMATIC_UPDATER_DISABLED', true );