Ensuring your WordPress site's plugins & themes are kept up to date is amazing for security. WordPress 5.5 released a way to enable plugins and themes to auto update. While great for some sites, with clients sites I actively maintain, I wanted to disable this so the client does not enable this feature. Along with manual updates to ensure things don't break, I keep a log of every update performed.
To disable auto updates, there are two lines of code to add to your current theme, hopefully you are using a child theme, as follows
add_filter( 'plugins_auto_update_enabled', '__return_false');// Disable plugins auto-update UI elements.add_filter( 'themes_auto_update_enabled', '__return_false');// Disable themes auto-update UI elements.
The first line tells the plugin auto update feature to return false, or disabled for plugins. The second returns false or disabled for themes.