A lightweight WordPress plugin that gives administrators granular control over which auto-update notification emails are sent.
By default, WordPress sends email notifications every time a plugin, theme, or core update runs automatically. On busy sites this can generate significant noise. WP Update Email Control lets you selectively silence those emails without affecting the updates themselves.
- Disable plugin auto-update notification emails
- Disable theme auto-update notification emails
- Disable WordPress core auto-update notification emails
- Simple settings page under Settings > Update Email Control
- Upload the
wp-update-email-controlfolder to/wp-content/plugins/ - Activate the plugin through the Plugins menu in WordPress
- Navigate to Settings > Update Email Control and configure your preferences
Check any combination of the three options to suppress those email notifications. Unchecking an option restores the default WordPress behaviour. Updates continue to run normally regardless of these settings.
This plugin only controls email notifications. It does not disable or delay automatic updates. To control updates themselves, use a separate plugin or the relevant WordPress filters.
- Per-type granularity for core emails — The WordPress core update filter distinguishes between
success,fail,critical, andmanualupdate types. Future versions will expose separate controls for each, so critical failure alerts are never accidentally suppressed. - Custom recipient override — Allow admins to redirect update emails to a different address instead of suppressing them entirely.
- Always-on failure emails — A safety toggle to ensure failure and critical update emails are always delivered, even when a category is otherwise disabled.
- Test email button — Send a dummy update notification directly from the settings page so admins can verify email delivery before making changes.
- WP-CLI support — Add command-line commands to read and toggle settings, useful for CI pipelines and managed hosting environments.
- Multisite support — Add network-level setting overrides so network admins can enforce email policies across all sites from one place.
- Option caching — Cache the plugin options at
initrather than querying the database on every filter call. - Uninstall cleanup — Add an uninstall routine to remove the plugin's database option when the plugin is deleted.
- Internationalisation — Wrap all user-facing strings in WordPress translation functions to make the plugin fully translation-ready.
GPL2+