Updating plugins

Plugins are how your WordPress website gets its features — online shops, event calendars, payment processing, forms, image galleries, and so on. Like the rest of your site, they need regular updates to stay secure, fix bugs, and stay compatible with the latest version of WordPress.

How those updates happen on your site depends on your Maple Care Plan tier.

Who handles plugin updates?

Essential Care Plan

On the Essential Care Plan, WordPress's built-in auto-update feature handles your plugin updates. We enable auto-updates for the plugins on your site that are safe to update automatically, and we leave a short list of higher-risk plugins (covered below) for manual review.

There's no extra cost for this — auto-updates are built into WordPress itself. The trade-off is that updates apply directly to your live site, with no staging or automatic rollback if something goes wrong.

Standard, Professional, and Enterprise Care Plans

On the Standard, Professional, and Enterprise Care Plans, we handle plugin updates for you using Pressable's managed update service. Updates run on a scheduled weekly cycle in a low-traffic window (typically Sunday at 3 AM in your time zone), with the following safety net:

• Staging first. Before an update touches your live site, your site is cloned to a staging environment and the update runs there.
• Health checks. Automated checks verify that the staging copy is still working after the update.
• Automatic rollback. If something fails, the update is rolled back automatically and we're notified.
• Performance reports. A report is generated after each update cycle so we can confirm everything is healthy.

You don't need to do anything — we monitor each cycle and follow up on anything that needs attention.

Plugins we don't auto-update

Some plugins carry a higher risk if an update goes sideways — checkout flows, payment processing, security, layout, and similar. For these, we don't auto-update on any tier. Instead, we (or you, on Essential) review the update manually, check the changelog, and update when it's safe.

Our default exclude list:

• WooCommerce and WooCommerce extensions — anything related to your store, checkout, shipping, or tax.
• Page builders and your site's theme — Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, Kadence, and similar.
• Advanced Custom Fields (ACF and ACF Pro) — underpins how your content displays across the site.
• Security plugins — Wordfence, Solid Security, Sucuri, and similar.
• Membership and access-control plugins — MemberPress, Restrict Content Pro, Paid Memberships Pro, and similar.
• Caching and performance plugins — WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed, WPOptimize.
• Payment gateway plugins — Stripe, Square, PayPal, Authorize.net.
• Any plugin with a pending major version jump (for example, version 4.x to 5.x). Major versions often include breaking changes that need to be tested.

If a plugin in any of these categories has an update available, we'll review it during your next scheduled maintenance cycle. Standard, Professional, and Enterprise clients don't need to take any action.

Updating plugins yourself (Essential Care Plan)

If you're on the Essential Care Plan and one of your excluded plugins has an update available, here's the safe way to do it yourself:

1. Log into your WordPress dashboard.
2. Go to Plugins → Installed Plugins in the left menu. A red badge shows how many updates are available.
3. Click View details next to the plugin to see the changelog and what's changing in this version.
4. Make sure you have a recent backup before updating anything major.
5. Click Update Now on the plugin.
6. Visit the relevant pages of your site to confirm everything still works as expected — especially anything the plugin powers (checkout, forms, calendars, and so on).

If anything seems off after an update, contact us right away.

Want managed updates?

If you're on the Essential plan and you'd rather hand off plugin update work entirely, upgrading to the Standard Care Plan includes managed plugin updates with staging and automatic rollback. See Do I Need Managed Plugin Updates? for the trade-offs, or contact us to discuss your options.