Increased Flexibility with (More) Auto-Update Schedules

Managing WordPress sites is a constant balancing act. Auto-updates are a great way to cut down the manual grind of site maintenance, taking care of smaller or low-risk updates without you needing to lift a finger.

Now, with more options to schedule these auto-updates, you have the increased flexibility to make sure they run exactly when you want them to.

Available scheduling options

Based on your selected start date, you can choose:

1. Every day
2. Weekly, on a selected weekday
3. First, Second, Third, Fourth, or Last weekday of every month
4. A specific date of every month
5. Last day of every month

Auto-updates now fit cleanly into your agency’s operating cadence, without changing how you already work.

Avoiding peak traffic times 

For a plugin on a high-traffic media site or the database of a WooCommerce store, a brief moment of maintenance mode or a slight performance dip during a sale can cost thousands. 

Agencies can now pinpoint the exact window, say 3:00 am on a Wednesday, when traffic is at its absolute lowest, ensuring the fewest possible users are impacted by the update process.

Protecting the agency’s work-life balance 

For trickier plugins, you still want the convenience of auto-updates, but you also want a contingency plan. 

(Apart from our Safe Updates, that is.)

It’s a classic situation: an update triggers at 5:00 pm on a Friday, breaks a site (or 50), and one of your developers spends their entire weekend on a support call with the plugin developer.

You’re paying overtime, the developer has lost their downtime, the sites have gained downtime, and it is all an unfortunate (and avoidable) mess. 

Instead, schedule more significant auto-updates for Tuesday mornings at 10:00 am. You ensure that if anything goes sideways, the full team is already in the office and ready to jump on a fix immediately.

Preventing server crashes on shared hosting 

When an agency manages 100 sites on a single shared server, triggering 100 simultaneous updates can cause a massive CPU spike that takes it right down. 

The new scheduling options give you the flexibility to stagger updates, perhaps group them at various intervals. One set at 1:00 am, another at 2:00 am, and so on, keeping server resources stable and every site snappy.

Syncing with client reports

Agencies that send out weekly maintenance reports on Fridays want those reports to show a 100% success rate. 

By running updates on Thursdays, they have a 24-hour buffer to verify everything is perfect before the automated report is generated and sent to the client’s inbox.

Your schedule, your auto-updates schedule

Ultimately, auto-updates should work around your schedule, not against it. These new options give you the flexibility to decide exactly when maintenance happens across all your managed sites.

By aligning them with your agency’s internal logic, you can keep every site current while staying in control of your team’s workload and your time.

Log in to your dashboard to test drive these new options and fine-tune your maintenance cadence.