There was a huge debate on Digging into WordPress blog whether developers should let their client’s upgrade or not. We believe to educate our clients and encourage them to be self-sufficient therefore we have created an infographic that shows you a step by step guide to upgrade WordPress. For Backing up WordPress, we recommend using BackupBuddy Plugin to our clients. But we do have clients that do not want to deal with maintenance updates, so they want us to take care of them therefore we also have that option available. For these clients, we hide the WordPress Upgrade Message.
All you have to do is simply open the theme’s functions.php file and add this:
add_action('admin_menu','wphidenag');
function wphidenag() {
remove_action( 'admin_notices', 'update_nag', 3 );
}
There are plugins available that does this job, but we prefer to use the code above. Now remember, this only removes the upgrade bar that shows on all screens. It does not disable the Plugin updates or theme update notifications that shows up on the update page. For our clients that have us do the maintenance for them, we make sure that their site is up to date with all plugins, and the core.
Now Jeff Star posed an issue that he has to go in client’s dashboard to see whether plugins and such are activated. Well we already have a fix for that. We are using WP Status Dashboard (Our Tutorial on How to use WP Status Dashboard). This plugin/script lets us view all of our clients information on one screen, so we know exactly what needs to be upgraded on which client.
Remember, keeping your WordPress up to date is essential for site security. So if you do remove the nag, you need to stay on top of the upgrades for your clients.
Will you be doing this for your client’s site?? Do you have a better solution?
I tried this on a client site and it worked great except for the WP Status Dashboard shows an error after the code is activated. The nag message is removed as described above, but it seems WP Status Dashboard isn’t happy now.
I put the code into a site-specific plugin rather than the theme’s functions.php file. Would that make a difference?
@Renji This plugin should work:http://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/plugin-updates-blocker-plugin-for-wordpress-designers-developers/
How can I hide the plugin update count seen in the dashboard menu?
I will definitely be using this for my clients, I offer full service maintenance and don’t want my clients to be confused by the nag. Of course, if I had a client that was pretty web savvy and wanted to do their own maintenance, I wouldn’t remove the nag.
I only got two clients so far and told them to just ignore any update messages. They leave most things to me anyway. But it is good if there is a possibility to hide it before clients start messing about with things not having a clue what they are doing. Mind you, most of the time I haven’t got a clue of what I’m doing either.
I was wondering why you would want to hide the message but hiding it for clients makes sense.
Might come in useful in the future.
Appreciate the info.