Knowledgebase

One of the many features added to WordPress in 3.7 was automatically updating for minor releases. This means WordPress will automatically upgrade you from 3.7 to 3.7.1, but not from 3.7.1 to 3.8. This is a great way to keep your site up to date with any security releases. This is the best way to prevent hacks to your site.

There may be some cases where you want to do the updates yourself though, so WordPress provided a way to disable automatically updating your site. If you do go this route you still need to be sure to do the upgrades yourself as soon as possible to avoid issues.

While there are lots of warnings against modifying the WordPress core some users still do, so updates might break those changes. There are also situations where you might have your own methods for doing automated upgrades, and this could interfere with that.

All you need to do to disable automatic upgrading is to add this line of code to your wp-config.php file

define('WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', false);

When you log in to the admin panel you'll still be notified when there are updates available.