Help! WordPress Won’t Do Automatic Updates!

As you may have seen WordPress 3.7 just got released and with it automatic updates. Now, in some cases, people may discover that their particular sites can’t update automagically. In my findings in the sites, we manage for clients the most common reason is that you have had to update WordPress previously by entering your FTP credentials. If you’ve done that once, changes are WordPress remembered those for you, but in this case, those credentials need to be placed in your wp-config.php file in order for the automatic updates to work.

Luckily, all you need to do is add the following lines:

define( 'FTP_USER', 'username' );
define( 'FTP_PASS', 'password' );
define( 'FTP_HOST', 'ftp.example.org' ); // this usually can be 127.0.0.1

If this doesn’t work, you may need to add a few more constants–find more here–but in my experience, this solved all the issues we encountered. If you need help from a WordPress specialist, feel free to contact me.