Know which plugin updates will break your sites — before you apply them.

Every week we read the actual code of every WordPress plugin release and tell you what it removed, what that breaks, and which updates you can apply without thinking. Free, every Monday.

The changelog says "bug fixes and improvements"

So you click "update all" on sixty sites and find out what actually changed when a client rings. The tools that exist don't close this gap: security scanners tell you whether a version is hackable, and screenshot tools tell you something broke after it broke, and only if the breakage was visible.

None of them tell you what is in the update.

So we read the code instead

For every release, we download it and the version before it and compare them. We pull out everything outside code can depend on — the hooks it fires, the functions and classes it declares, its shortcodes, blocks, post types, REST routes and templates — and look at what disappeared.

If a release only adds to that surface, we say we detected no impact and how many changes we checked to get there. If it removes something, we name the exact symbol and say what happens when it's gone — for the sites that use it.

Like this

MEDIUM RISK

Yoast SEO

28.2 → 28.310M+

Medium risk: 2 method signature changes, 2 removed classes, 1 raised WordPress requirement.

5 changes
  • Yoast\WP\SEO\Builders\Indexable_Builder::__construct() now requires more arguments than before.
  • Yoast\WP\SEO\Bulk_Editor\User_Interface\Bulk_Editor_Integration::__construct() now requires more arguments than before.
  • The class Yoast\WP\SEO\Introductions\Application\AI_Brand_Insights_Free_Trial was removed. Code that instantiates or extends it will fatal.
  • The class Yoast\WP\SEO\Introductions\Application\AI_Brand_Insights_Post_Launch was removed. Code that instantiates or extends it will fatal.
  • Requires at least — Minimum WordPress raised from 6.8 to 6.9.

Not a mock-up — a real entry for Yoast SEO 28.3, from a past issue. See what shipped this week →

Who it's for

Agencies and freelancers running ten or more WordPress sites, where "update all" is a weekly gamble and one bad release costs an afternoon and a client's trust.

What you get, every Monday

What we won't do

We don't guess. Where a hook name is built at runtime we can't resolve it, so we say nothing rather than invent a verdict. We never say an update is "safe" — we say no impact detected, and how many changes we checked to get there. And we never read the changelog. The method, and its limits →