Introduction
WordPress by default supports auto updates for all the plugins that are hosted inside WP.org. This is the reason that the option to auto-update the plugin is visible inside the WordPress dashboard for the plugins that are directly downloaded from the WordPress store; however, for the plugins that are downloaded from some other site, especially for the premium plugins like Astra Addon Pro, can not be auto-updated by default.
Core WordPress Bug
This seems to be a bug as WordPress prevents the plugins that are hosted by some other websites such as the Astra Pro Addon plugin, to get updated automatically. This is the reason by default the “Enable auto update” option is not visible on the WordPress dashboard.
How to Fix This?
There is no fix to this error; however, whenever there is a new update available for our paid plugins like the Astra Pro add-on or Premium Starter Templates, the option to enable the auto-update will be available next to the plugin. If the user updates the plugin using the auto-update feature at that time, it will be automatically enabled.
Will this be enabled for future updates?
The answer is yes. Once the user updates the plugin by enabling the auto-update feature, for all future updates, the plugin will get updated automatically.
Here is a working demo of this feature:
In this example, we have manually triggered Auto Update cron using the WP Crontron plugin. You can see the Astra Pro plugin has been Auto updated to the 3.9.1 version.
Once the plugin gets auto-updated, the auto-update option is again not available on the plugins page for our paid plugin. This is because of the bug from WordPress.
