Hi,
Thanks for the report — and good news: this is not a WP STAGING bug, and nothing is wrong
with your site.
Since June 2026, WordPress.org holds back every new plugin release before it is served to
already-installed sites. The initiative is called “Protect The Shire”: new releases sit in a
review queue first. It started as a 24-hour hold and was reduced to roughly 6 hours in
mid-July 2026. The hold applies to the update-check API, which is what your site asks when it
looks for updates — and both the automatic updates and the manual “Update now” button are
gated by that same clock.
What is not held back is the plugin directory page and the download itself. So the moment we
publish a release, the new version is visible on wordpress.org, in our changelog and in the
notice inside WP STAGING, while your existing installation is not yet allowed to see it. If
you click “Update now” in that window, WordPress re-checks, is told there is no update, and
prints its own message: “The plugin is at the latest version.” That message comes from
WordPress core, not from us.
So the options are:
- Simply wait a few hours and then go to Dashboard → Updates → “Check again”. The update will
appear and install normally.
- Or keep doing what you did: uploading the ZIP manually works immediately, because the
download is not part of the hold. Deleting and reinstalling the plugin has the same effect.
That also explains why your staging site behaves differently: a freshly created or freshly
installed copy fetches the ZIP directly, which is never delayed, and if you update the staging
site at a later point in the day the hold has usually already expired.
Nothing to fix on your side, and no data is at risk in the meantime. We are looking into
wording our own update notice so it makes this waiting period clear instead of pointing you at
a button that WordPress will not act on yet.
