Plugins and Themes

You can manage your plugins and themes for all of your sites or on an individual site level directly from MyKinsta.

Automatically update plugins and themes

With Kinsta, you can enable auto-updates for your plugins and themes for each individual site using either:

• WordPress auto-updates: WordPress automatically installs plugin and theme updates twice daily. It does not run a regression test, so it cannot identify whether an updated plugin or theme causes issues.
•  Kinsta Automatic Updates: Kinsta provides automatic daily updates for plugins and themes, which is free for the first month and just $3 per environment per month thereafter. All plugins and themes are updated for your site even if they are inactive, and any newly installed plugin or theme is seamlessly added to Kinsta’s Automatic Updates, ensuring you stay protected against vulnerabilities without any extra effort.
  In addition, Kinsta performs a visual regression test on your site, comparing your homepage and four other randomly selected pages from your sitemap before and after the update. This helps detect any significant differences caused by the update. If an issue is identified, Kinsta automatically restores a backup taken prior to the update, ensuring your site remains stable and secure. These backups are available for three days within Backups > System-generated, with a note specifying which plugin was updated when the backup was taken.
  Kinsta uses ScreenshotOne to capture and compare screenshots before and after the update. These screenshots, along with images highlighting any differences, are securely stored for 60 days. If your domain has strict security rules that block requests from unknown origins, you may need to configure an allowlist to enable these screenshots. You have two options to achieve this:
  1. Set up a rule that permits requests containing the User-Agent:kinsta-bot header.
  2. Allow traffic from ScreenshotOne IP address ranges.

You can enable auto-updates within WordPress sites > sitename > Plugins and themes > Automatic updates > Change.

Select WordPress auto-updates and click Change auto-updates or select Kinsta Automatic Updates and click Continue.

If you select Kinsta Automatic Updates you can then choose the Time window within which you want the updates to occur.

You can adjust the Sensitivity level to determine how strict the visual regression test is. Higher sensitivity increases the likelihood of detecting differences but may also result in more false positives.

If you want your site to display a maintenance page when the updates are running, select Enable WordPress maintenance mode. The maintenance page only appears while the updates are running and not for the entire duration of the Time window.

When you have selected the required options, click Continue.

This creates a Kinsta Automatic Updates add-on; the price details are shown on the next screen, to confirm the add-on, click Change auto-updates. The subscription will appear on your next billing cycle and is automatically prorated for your current billing period.

When an update is identified and installed, it appears within Plugins and themes > Kinsta Automatic Updates.

Click Details to view the information about which plugin and theme updates were successful or failed and how many did not have an update or were excluded. For any successful or failed updates, you can click on the plugin or theme name to show the screenshots taken before and after the update and any images highlighting differences. These screenshots are stored for 60 days.

Exclude a plugin or theme from automatic updates

To exclude a plugin or theme from being updated automatically, click the kebab (three-dot menu) on that item and click Change auto updates. 

Select Disable and click Change auto updates.

Automatic update notifications

You can set up email notifications for failed or successful updates within your username > User settings > Notifications.

Disable automatic updates

You can disable automatic updates within WordPress sites > sitename > Plugins and themes > Automatic updates > Change. Select Disable and click Change auto-updates.

If you have enabled Kinsta Automatic Updates, this removes the add-on; if you’re in the first 30 days of your WordPress Hosting plan, a prorated fee for the add-on will be added to your next invoice for the time period it was enabled. If your WordPress Hosting plan has been active for more than 30 days, you will receive a prorated credit for the add-on fees to your Account Balance for the remaining days of the current billing period. The credit is automatically used to offset money owed to Kinsta on your next invoice. For more information, refer to our WordPress Hosting Money-Back Guarantee.

Plugin and theme vulnerabilities

MyKinsta scans each plugin and theme daily to identify security vulnerabilities. If a security vulnerability is detected in the latest, current, or upcoming version, an exclamation mark is shown, and the version number is highlighted in red.

Manage plugins and themes for all sites

To see a list of plugins and themes installed on all sites, log in to MyKinsta, click WordPress sites, and then click the Plugins or Themes tab. Within these tabs, you can filter and manually update, activate, or deactivate your plugins and themes.

Filter plugins and themes

You can filter your plugins and themes to display only those with available updates or only vulnerable plugins or themes. You can also filter by status to show active or inactive plugins or themes. The example below shows active plugins with an update available.

Update, activate, or deactivate multiple plugins or themes

To update or activate multiple plugins or themes, or deactivate multiple plugins for multiple sites, select the checkbox on each plugin or theme, click Actions, and select the required option.

The confirmation window shows which plugins or themes will be updated, activated, or deactivated and the environments to which this change applies. To continue the action, click Update, Activate, or Deactivate plugins or themes.

The action may take a few minutes, and a backup of each site is automatically generated.

Update, activate, or deactivate an individual plugin or theme for multiple sites

To update or activate an individual plugin or theme or deactivate a plugin for multiple sites, expand the plugin name, select the sites, click Actions, and select the required option.

The confirmation window shows the plugin or theme and the number of environments to which the change applies. To continue the update, click Update, Activate, or Deactivate plugin or theme.

The action may take a few minutes, and a backup of each site is automatically generated.

Update, activate, or deactivate an individual plugin or theme for an individual site

To update or activate a single plugin or theme or deactivate a plugin, expand the plugin name, click the ellipsis next to the version number, and then click the required action.

On the confirmation message, click Update, Activate, or Deactivate plugin or theme.

The action may take a few minutes, and a backup of your site is automatically generated.

Manage plugins and themes for an individual site

To see the plugins and themes installed on your site, log in to MyKinsta, select your site, and click on the Plugins and themes tab. On this page, you can:

• See a list of WordPress plugins and themes installed on your site, the status, the version number, the latest update, and if the plugin uses the WordPress automatic update feature. This includes custom plugins, provided the plugin appears when you run the wp plugin list WP-CLI command.
• Activate a theme.
• Activate or deactivate a plugin individually or in bulk.
• Update each plugin or theme individually or in bulk.

The current version of the theme or plugin is shown in the Installed column, and if an update is available, the latest version will be shown in the Latest column. The Automatic update column indicates if the plugin is configured to use WordPress’s automatic update feature.

Update plugins and themes

In MyKinsta, you can update plugins and themes for one or multiple sites, including staging sites, simultaneously from the WordPress Sites page. Select the checkboxes next to the sites you want to update the plugins and themes for, click Actions, and choose Update plugins or Update themes.

Any plugins or themes that have available updates are shown; select which plugins or themes you want to update and click Update plugins or Update themes.

While the update process is underway, actions on the Plugins and themes page for each site that is updating are disabled. Once the process is complete, a success message appears.

You can also update the plugins or themes for a single WordPress site within WordPress Sites > sitename > Plugins and themes. To update a single plugin or theme, click the kebab (three-dot menu) on that item and click Update.

To update multiple plugins or themes, select the checkbox next to each item and click Update. The checkbox in the table header can be used to select all items in the list.

In the Update modal/pop-up that appears, click Update to confirm the updates you want to perform and start the update process.

While the update process is underway, actions on the Plugins and themes page will be disabled. Once the process is complete, a success message appears.

Activate plugins and themes

You can activate your plugins and themes within WordPress Sites > sitename > Plugins and themes. To activate a theme or a single plugin, click the kebab (three-dot menu) on that item and click Activate. You can only have one theme active at a time; activating a new theme deactivates any other theme.

To activate multiple plugins, select the checkbox next to each item and click Activate. The checkbox in the table header can be used to select all plugins in the list.

In the Activate modal/pop-up that appears, click Activate to confirm which theme or plugins you want to activate.

While the activation process is underway, actions on the site’s Plugins and themes page will be disabled. Once the process is complete, a success message appears.

Deactivate Plugins

You can deactivate your plugins within WordPress Sites > sitename > Plugins and themes. To deactivate a single plugin, click the kebab (three-dot menu) on that item and click Deactivate.

To deactivate multiple plugins, select the checkbox next to each item and click Deactivate. The checkbox in the table header can be used to select all plugins in the list.

In the Deactivate modal/pop-up that appears, click Deactivate to confirm which theme or plugins you want to deactivate.

While the deactivation process is underway, actions on the site’s Plugins and themes page will be disabled. Once the process is complete, a success message appears.

Errors and troubleshooting

There may be situations where an update fails. If this happens, an error message will be shown on the Plugins and themes page.

If an option to restore a backup appears on the page, click Open Backups to begin restoring a backup.

If a plugin or theme cannot be updated from MyKinsta, you can try updating from the WordPress dashboard or updating the plugin or theme manually.

If you see an error message that WordPress is not available and you should reinstall WordPress and try again; this is usually due to a Bedrock or other non-Standard WordPress installation with a custom public web root (document root). Start a new chat with our Support team, and they can add a new wp-cli.yml file to the ~/public directory, with the path pointing to the site’s WordPress installation.

Banned and incompatible plugins

Our platform at Kinsta is optimized for reliability, performance, and security. Because of this, there are some plugins that are not allowed or won’t work properly in the Kinsta environment.

Generally speaking, we don’t allow caching, backup, or related posts plugins.

If a plugin is on our list, it’s because our sysadmin team has identified an issue with it. These problems are typically tied to performance or functionality. We are always working with third-party plugin developers to ensure compatibility with our platform. For example, WP Rocket used to be on our banned list, and now we are partners with them.

Banned plugins

Caching plugins

Using caching plugins will deteriorate performance and, in most cases, don’t work on our platform. We already have different types of server-level caching implemented, both object caching and page caching, which is much better than any plugin can do on a PHP level. Learn more about how we handle WordPress caching.

• Cache Enabler
• LiteSpeed Cache

Backup plugins

Kinsta already provides daily automatic backups and downloadable backups for all your sites on your account; therefore, backup plugins are not needed in most cases. They can also cause unnecessary performance issues and eat up your bandwidth.

Note: This list is not exhaustive; all non-incremental backups are not allowed.

• All-in-One WP Migration
• BackupBuddy
• BackWPup
• Duplicator Pro
• Snapshot
• UpdraftPlus — at this time, UpdraftPlus is banned for existing sites on Kinsta. However, UpdraftPlus is allowed for newly created sites. In the future, we plan on lifting the restrictions for existing sites as well. With UpdraftPlus, you can only perform one backup per month; this limit is set by the plugin developer and cannot be changed. Therefore, we recommend you choose a full backup when performing a manual backup and use that option when creating a scheduled backup. Due to the restriction, some settings can be automatically adjusted, disabled, or not available.
• WP DB Backup
• WP DB Backup Made

If you do want to save backups offsite, see our post on incremental backup plugins you can use at Kinsta. Incremental backups are where the backups are only made when changes have been made to a file or database tables. If you want to migrate your site to Kinsta using a migration plugin, we recommend using the free version of Duplicator or Migrate Guru. These plugins offer specific options for migrating your site as opposed to using a backup file. You can also refer to our blog post for Migrating a WordPress site manually.

Image optimization plugins

We do not allow server-based image optimization plugins or packages/software due to performance impacts. This also includes the installation of packages to be used by image optimization scripts. Our post on image optimization contains plenty of WordPress plugins you can use that compress images on third-party cloud servers. These are fine to use at Kinsta.

Video conversion plugins

We do not allow server-based video conversion and compression plugins or packages/software. This includes packages like FFmpeg, which may be required by some WordPress plugins. If your WordPress site requires video encoding functionality, we recommend integrating an external service like Cloudinary.

Performance plugins

• Better WordPress Minify
• P3 Profiler
• Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
• WordPress GZIP Compression: GZIP is already enabled on all Kinsta servers.
• JCH Optimize (reasons: constant PHP stress, high bandwidth usage, can’t cache, can’t optimize for CDN)

Misc plugins

• Allow PHP Execute
• Dynamic Widgets
• Exec-PHP
• Inactive User Deleter
• Pipdig Power Pack (P3)
• WP RSS Multi Importer
• WordPress Popular Posts

Security plugins

A lot of security plugins cause performance issues due to their always-on and scanning functionalities. At Kinsta, our infrastructure configuration and Cloudflare integration may impact the functionality of certain features in security plugins like IP blocking, geolocation-based rules, and more.

If your site is hosted at Kinsta, you don’t need to install a third-party security plugin because we have many popular security features built into our MyKinsta dashboard and infrastructure. For example, our IP Deny tool lets you block rogue IP addresses before traffic hits your WordPress application, and we have a variety of rate limits set on popular WordPress endpoints. Our free Cloudflare integration also includes additional security features like a secure firewall with a customized ruleset, DDoS protection, and more.

If you’re not hosted on Kinsta, we recommend utilizing a proxy solution such as Cloudflare or Sucuri in front of your site if you need extra protection or help to decrease malicious and bot traffic.

Social media plugins

• Facebook Instant Articles & Google AMP Pages by PageFrog
• Facebook Open Graph, Google+ and Twitter Card Tags

Nulled plugins

Nulled plugins typically refer to premium WordPress plugins or themes that have been hacked or contain modified code designed to cause harm or collect information. These are obtained from a third-party website (not the original author or creator) and sometimes are made to work without a license key.

We offer a free hack-fix guarantee here at Kinsta, but this guarantee doesn’t apply if you’re using a nulled plugin.

Incompatible plugins

• WooCommerce Amazon & eBay Integration: Requires PHP function proc_open which is disabled in our environment due to security reasons.

Complete list

Feel free to compare the list below against your current /wp-content/plugins/ directory. Note: the updraft plugin listed here is a different plugin from Updraft Plus.

all-in-one-wp-migration
allow-php-execute
amazon-ebay-integration
backupbuddy
backwpup
backwpup-pro
bwp-minify
cache-enabler
codistoconnect
duplicator-pro
dynamic-widgets
exec-php
inactive-user-deleter
jch-optimize
litespeed-cache
login-wall
p3
p3-profiler
pagefrog
rvg-optimize-database
sg-cachepress
snapshot
updraft
wonderm00ns-simple-facebook-open-graph-tags
woocommerce-amazon-ebay-integration
wordpress-gzip-compression
wordpress-popular-posts
wp-rss-multi-importer
wp-db-backup
wp-db-backup-made

Disable WordPress maintenance mode

When you update, activate, or deactivate plugins and/or themes on your site, WordPress displays a maintenance page that reads:

Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.

This page is a built-in maintenance mode in WordPress and is usually cleared automatically once the updates are complete. Occasionally, an issue may arise and cause this maintenance page to get stuck, which requires a bit of manual intervention to fix.

Clear the WordPress maintenance page

To clear this maintenance message, you must connect to your site with SFTP or SSH and delete the .maintenance file in your site’s public directory (aka root directory or document root).

Once you’re connected to your site and viewing the public directory, you’ll see a list of your site’s files and subdirectories. Look for and delete the file named .maintenance.

Prevent WordPress from getting stuck in maintenance mode

A few scenarios may cause the maintenance page to get stuck and not clear automatically. To prevent this, here are a few quick tips:

1. Make sure plugins/themes are compatible with your version of WordPress before updating.
2. Update plugins often so you don’t have to run a large number of updates at once. We’ve made this easier for you with our Plugin and Theme Management feature in MyKinsta.
3. Avoid updating a large number of plugins or themes at the same time. Depending on the plugins and the extent of the update needed, run 2-3 at a time, or even 1 at a time to avoid potential conflicts or connection issues.

Wordfence

Wordfence is a free WordPress security plugin designed to protect WordPress websites from online threats, such as malware, hacking attempts, and other security vulnerabilities. It includes an endpoint firewall (WAF), a malware scanner, login security features, live traffic, and rules-based blocking. 

If you’re using Wordfence at Kinsta, it requires additional configuration to optimize the firewall; for more information, refer to the Wordfence documentation.

It’s important to note that while Wordfence is a powerful security tool, no security plugin can provide absolute protection. You should also follow best practices for WordPress security, such as keeping plugins and themes updated, using strong passwords, and regularly backing up your websites.

FAQ

Can I update plugins and themes on multiple sites at the same time?

Yes, you can update plugins and themes for multiple sites, including staging sites, simultaneously from the WordPress Sites page. Refer to Updating Plugins and Themes for Multiple Sites.

Can I choose which version of a plugin or theme to update to?

No, you can only update to the latest version of a plugin or theme.

Can I use this feature to downgrade a plugin or theme?

No, you can only update to the latest version of a plugin or theme. You cannot go back to a previous version.

What if there’s an issue with an update? Can I undo the change?

While there isn’t a built-in way to undo an update, we make a snapshot of the environment just before the update, which you can restore. Note: Snapshots created before a plugin or theme update are only available for two hours.

Can I still manage my plugins and themes in my WordPress dashboard?

Yes, you can continue to handle plugins and themes through WordPress.

Can I use this feature on any site?

Not quite. While the feature will work just fine on most sites, there are some situations that will prevent this feature from working:

• Issues that prevent us from running WP-CLI.
• Premium (payment required) and custom (built by you or your developer) plugins or themes may not have a publicly available update endpoint, so they cannot be updated from MyKinsta. In some cases, we may detect that a new version is available, but the update process fails due to not being available via the standard WordPress endpoint.