Matthias, thanks for sharing your pain.

In fact, your concern is everyone’s: plugins and themes updates might break your website. With security, this might be the biggest handicap for WordPress users.

But I think the solution to this problem lies elsewhere than reducing software updates.

WordPress as a whole has come a long ways for quality, but it’s definitely a work in progress.

Here are the things that have improved recently:

What is WordPress doing to help solve crashing website?
– they added fatal error protection
– a new troubleshooting mode to solve plugin problems
– Health check status
– minimum PHP version is increasing
– auto updates of core

What are hosts doing about it?
– updating PHP version
– offering staging servers
– including backups by default
– competition has improved the offer considerably

What are plugin authors doing about it?
– larger plugins are faster to solve bugs
– include quality in their development process

What are site owners doing about it?
– they’re choosing better hosts
– they’re selecting quality plugins
– they’re paying for quality plugins and themes which sustains development and quality

On a final note, we’re considering auto updates by default for our own plugin. This would solve a lot of issues for our support team!

I’m administrating about 40 customer sites with over 200 different plugins. When I started my business many years ago I had to install about 20-30 updates on all sites per week. These updates mostly contained a lot of changes.

But in the last years, the frequency of updates being provided by plugin and theme developers has increased dramatically (and the number of changes per release has decreased). Today I have to install between 100 and 200 updates every week! Of course, I’m using a WordPress management dashboard to streamline the update process and I set up a plugin on many sites to run a lot of plugin updates automatically. But the problem is (in the past and still today), that I can’t install all plugin updates without checking the change logs and testing the the new releases on local test sites. A lot of plugins are relevant for the proper presentation of the websites frontend and I can’t just install them without testing. As a consequence, I have to invest a lot more time today in testing and installing updates. And believe me: it’s not a funny job. It’s boring and I would rather invest my time in building new stuff for my customers.

I am very grateful that all the developers regularly update their software. But I would prefer that they wouldn’t release a new version for every little code change, apart from security fixes.