Every plugin update carries a small moment of risk: for a second or two the plugin is offline while files are replaced, caches are cold afterwards, and if an update goes wrong, you want as few visitors as possible to notice. That raises a simple question WordPress itself never answers: when is the best moment to update?
Burst already knows the answer, because it watches your traffic around the clock. The Smart update timing feature turns that knowledge into two practical tools on the Plugins page: a recommended update time for manual updates, and scheduled automatic updates that run during your site’s quietest hours.
What you get
1. A timing hint for manual updates. Every available-update notice on the Plugins page gets a short addition from Burst, for example:
Currently 12 live visitors. Based on average Burst traffic, the quietest moment to update is in 6 hours.
The live visitor count refreshes every 20 seconds while you’re on the page. If nobody is on your site right now, the hint tells you exactly that — with zero visitors, right now is always a fine moment, whatever the statistics say.
2. Automatic updates during your quiet window. In the auto-updates column of the Plugins page, each plugin gets a small clock icon. Click it and Burst enables automatic updates for that plugin, but confined to your site’s quietest hours. Prefer to manage everything at once? Enable “Schedule auto-updates during quiet traffic periods” in the Burst settings, and every plugin that already has WordPress auto-updates enabled will update inside the quiet window instead of at a random moment.
How Burst finds your quiet window
Burst looks at the last 28 days of your own visitor statistics and counts unique visitors per hour of the day, in your site’s timezone. The four consecutive hours with the fewest visitors become your low-traffic window. For most sites that’s somewhere in the middle of the night — but if your audience is international, it might surprise you, and that’s exactly the point: the window is based on your traffic, not on an assumption.
The window is recalculated every week, so it follows seasonal shifts, growing audiences and daylight saving time automatically. No traffic data yet? Then Burst simply keeps WordPress’ default update behavior until the first calculation has something to work with.
How the scheduled updates run
Once a day, during the low-traffic window, Burst triggers WordPress’ own automatic updater — the same battle-tested mechanism that powers core security updates. That matters: Burst doesn’t reimplement updating. Backup emails, failure notifications and compatibility checks all behave exactly as WordPress intends. Burst only decides which plugins may update and when:
- Plugins you opted in via the clock icon get their automatic updates enabled by Burst, restricted to the window.
- With the site-wide setting enabled, plugins that already have WordPress auto-updates switched on are shifted into the window. This setting never enables auto-updates for a plugin that didn’t have them — it only improves the timing.
- WordPress’ own twice-daily update checks keep running, but for managed plugins they only proceed when they happen to fall inside the window.
Two details make this robust in the real world. First, the check rides on Burst’s always-running hourly task rather than a separate scheduled event, so there is no bespoke schedule that can go missing. Second, there’s a catch-up: the quietest hours of your site are, by definition, the hours with the fewest visits to trigger WP-Cron. If a whole day passes without the window check firing, the update run happens at the next opportunity instead of silently skipping a day.
Settings
You’ll find both toggles under Burst → Settings → Integrations → Smart update timing:
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Show recommended update time in plugin overview | On | The timing hint and live visitor count on the Plugins page |
| Schedule auto-updates during quiet traffic periods | Off | Runs all WordPress-enabled plugin auto-updates inside the quiet window |
The per-plugin clock icons work independently of the site-wide setting, and every hint on the Plugins page links straight to these settings, so suggestions are easy to switch off if they’re not for you.
Good to know
- Nothing updates that wouldn’t update otherwise — except plugins you explicitly opt in with the clock icon. The site-wide setting only changes timing.
- Your data stays yours. The calculation runs entirely on your own server, on your own Burst statistics. Nothing is sent anywhere.
- Hosting requirements are the standard ones for WordPress automatic updates: cron must be able to run (WP-Cron or a server-side cron job) and automatic updates must not be disabled by your host (
DISALLOW_FILE_MODS/AUTOMATIC_UPDATER_DISABLED) or by a version-controlled deployment.
