Developing a website can be a daunting task. But thanks to Content Management Systems (CMS), web development has become a lot bearable.
After the development of a website is finished, that website needs to be on the web, where it has to face tons of competitors. Since most websites rely on search engines for visibility, they may as well appeal to those search engines. And to do that, WordPress websites owners can use the 'All in One SEO' plugin.
According to its developers, the plugin's features "are highly optimized for Google and other popular search engine algorithm because we follow the most up to date SEO standards and SEO best practices."
With the plugin, owners of WordPress-powered websites can rest a bit easy, knowing that the tool will manage their on-site SEO optimization.
That until a botched update was released.
In the update, according to user reports, the All in One SEO plugin for WordPress unilaterally turned on automatic updates.
Making things worse, the plugin that was updated to have the automatic updates turned on without consent, also coincided with a major upgrade.
All in One SEO was updated from 3.7 to a the next major version at 4.X on November 14, 2020. The major version of the plugin was full of bugs that the developers of the plugin had to release a second update for 4.X shortly after.
From November 14th through December 2020, the developers of the All in One SEO plugin released a total of twelve updates to fix a large amount of issues, and squashing a number of bugs.
In comparison, a similar plugin called Yoast SEO only published three updates within that same time period.
Due to the many changes introduced in the newer version, and also because of the bugs, the automatic update caused multiple websites to suffer outages and other unintended behavior or errors.
Automatic update for WordPress plugin is a feature meant to allow the developer of the plugin to push new updates to users automatically, without requiring the webmaster of the WordPress-powered website that use the plugin to do any manual action.
For simple WordPress websites that run out of the box without much change, and for smaller websites, this automatic update may not cause serious issues.
But to most unfortunately, their sites have been customized and are rather complex. They may have thousands or more web pages already ranking well on search engines, powered by numerous APIs and tweaks. As a result, the automatic update that introduced new codes and bugs to the system crashed their sites.
Some website owners have backups in place to ensure that they can revert whatever change that are introduced to their site. But with the automatic updates turned on, owners couldn't update their site before the update happens.
So unsurprisingly, many website owners are angered by this new version of the All in One SEO plugin.
A list of negative reports about the automatic update feedback started to fill the WordPress plugin's repository support page.
Many website owners felt that automatic updates should always be a user's choice, and not the developer's. Many website owners said that automatic updates should never be turned on by default.
Following the barrage, the developers of the All in One SEO apologized and stated that they are removing the automatic updates.