How to disable theme updates on WordPress to avoid losing my changes?

Open the style.css file and change the theme name and information that is in the comment at the top. This will essentially turn your theme into a child theme and no updates will affect it.

/*
Theme Name: Your Theme Name
Author: Name
Author URI: Your URL
Description: This theme is...
Version: 1.0
*/

if you want to do something clean follow these steps:

  1. Search and replace all "originalThemeName" in your wordpress project with something personalized, like "newThemeName";
  2. Edit the style.css of the theme and set a proper version number (like 1.0 if you just deployed in production)
  3. Rename the folder of the theme with your "newThemeName", then reactivate it from the admin panel.

done, it will no longer compare the original theme with the wordpress themes directory, so it will not find any updates.


Increase the version number in the style.css to something really high, and you should stop getting the update notices.