How do you know when to update a WordPress plugin?

Your WordPress dashboard will automatically notify you when a plugin needs to be updated. You’ll see an icon next to the Updates tab, and another icon next to the Plugins tab showing how many plugins have updates available.

In your WordPress Settings tab, you can choose to have plugin updates automatically installed or install them manually.

Automatic plugin updates are great if you find yourself frequently making plugin updates yourself, whereas manual updates are ideal if you want to review the newest version of a plugin before installing it on your site.

In this post, we’ll show you how to do both. Let’s start by covering how to manually update a WordPress plugin.

How to Manually Update a WordPress Plugin in the Dashboard

1. In the dashboard, go to Plugins > Installed Plugins.
2. Read the version details of the plugin update.
3. Update the plugin.
4. Alternatively, you can bulk update your plugins

How to Manually Update a WordPress Plugin via FTP

1. Download the plugin .zip file.
2. Extract the .zip file.
3. Use a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Client to connect to your site’s server via FTP.
4. Navigate to the “wp-content/plugins” folder and delete the folder of the plugin you’re updating.
5. Find the extracted plugin folder you just downloaded, right-click it, and press “Upload”.
6. Visit your WordPress dashboard and website to ensure the plugin is active and functioning correctly.

Use a plugin for theme and plugin update

Download plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/stops-core-theme-and-plugin-updates/

Free Features Include

• Disable all updates with one click
• Enable automatic updates with one click
• Deeply customize your automatic update settings
• Use logs to determine what and when something is updated
• Hide plugin and theme updates (if custom developed)
• Select which plugins and themes can be automatically updated
• Disable core, plugin, theme, and translation updates
• Force Updates to check that automatic updates are working
• Integrate with UpdraftPlus
• Configure email notification settings

How to Manually Update a WordPress Plugin

1. Login to your WordPress dashboard and go to the “Plugins” section.
2. Locate the plugin you want to update and click on the “Deactivate” link to deactivate the plugin.
3. Download the latest version of the plugin from the plugin developer’s website or a third-party plugin repository. The plugin file should be in a `.zip
4. Extract the plugin file to a local folder on your computer.
5. Then click on “Add new plugin”
6. Click on “Upload Plugin” then choose plugin zip file from your local computer
7. Then wait for upload, After upload click on “replace with current version”
8. Install and update done.