Automatic Software Updates for WordPress Plugins and WordPress Themes

Updating premium WordPress plugins and themes is a multi-step process that can be quite annoying and time-consuming for WordPress site owners.

Those who use your WordPress plugin or WordPress theme must be prompted each time you release a new version. They are then required to perform the software update process on their website admin, in some cases even having to upload the downloaded files onto their site using an FTP connection!

WordPress has substantially improved and automated the process of running plugin and theme updates. But when it comes to premium WordPress software and products, the user experience is still not satisfactory when compared to the way most software is updated outside of the WordPress sphere.

If you’ve ever heard of the term ‘conversion rate’, then you know that this sort of manual process leads to a poor user experience which will hurt yours.

Don’t let the limitations of premium WordPress software updates drag your conversion rate down!

Automatic Software Updates With Freemius

You can automate this process and make it painless for your customers. When you deploy your product with Freemius, software updates for your premium WordPress plugins and themes are simple, smooth, and intuitive.

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1-Click Updates

The new software version is automatically populated on the user’s WordPress admin dashboard with a push notification and a 1-click update option:

Mimicking the smooth automated software updates for plugins and themes hosted in the WordPress.org repository, Freemius enables the same seamless update process for your premium WordPress products.

A Private and Secure Repository for Premium Versions

When selling premium WordPress products, you require a secure repository that’s connected to your licensing engine to serve your product from. By using Freemius to monetize your WordPress products, access to your paid plugin or theme version is done via our secure API, which is a gatekeeper to our secure, scalable Amazon S3 storage. Only customers with a valid license key will get automatic software updates or will be able to access the secure links.

Automatic Software Updates Comparison

There are several popular systems that enable automatic software updates for your WordPress products, be they plugins or themes. Here’s a quick comparison between the different capabilities of:

The Freemius Software Updates mechanism

The Easy Digital Downloads Software Licensing extension

And the WooCommerce Software Updates extension

Price

Free

Free

$129 / year
(for 1 website)

REST API

Secure repository

Free

Your hosting
Your hosting

Integrated with licensing

Integrated with recurring payments

Integrated with software licensing

Customer email notifications

Subscriptions management

Automatic Software Updates Comparison

Price

Free

Free

$129 / year (for 1 website)

REST API

Secure repository

Free

Your hosting

Your hosting

Integrated with licensing

Integrated with recurring payments

Integrated with software licensing

Customer email notifications

Subscriptions management