This code snippet will demonstrate how to disable your WordPress plugins from checking for updates and displaying update messages in the WordPress Dashboard.

There may be times when you may wish to disable WordPress from checking for plugin and core updates. You may have developed a client website and the client is now contacting you every time they see an update message in the WordPress Dashboard. This isn’t normally a problem, however lets imagine that you manage 50+ client websites and each of those clients are contacting every time an update message is displayed.

Reasons to disable WordPress plugins from checking for updates

As well as the valid point I have made above there are other reasons to disable WordPress plugins from checking for updates.

Some, not all plugin updates can break a WordPress site. Especially if you have had to manually modify a plugin to work with your theme design. If you go ahead and update the plugin it is going to over write the manual changes that you had made to the plugin.

Downside to disabling checking for updates

There is a downside to using this code snippet and adding the script to disable the update checks. Most updates are created for a reason, the most important reason being that of security. A user may have found a vulnerability in a plugin and has notified the author of this threat. The author then goes ahead and releases an update fixing this vulnerability

If you disable WordPress from checking for core updates you may miss out on some really great new features.

How to disable WordPress plugins from checking for updates

To utilize this code snippet you will need to navigate to your theme folder wp-content/themes/mytheme and open up your site’s functions.php file.

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<?php remove_action( 'load-update-core.php', 'wp_update_plugins' );
add_filter( 'pre_site_transient_update_plugins', create_function( '$a', "return null;" ) );
?>

<?php remove_action( 'load-update-core.php', 'wp_update_plugins' );
add_filter( 'pre_site_transient_update_plugins', create_function( '$a', "return null;" ) );
?>

And it is that simple, the above code snippet is recommended for WordPress version 3.0 and above.