StagingPilot lets you stop worrying about WordPress updates.
Automated testing for every update, done safely before your real site is affected
WordPress maintenance can be a real time-suck. Maintaining a staging environment, updating and deploying updates, and diligently testing them are all tedious tasks.
With StagingPilot, every part of the process is automated. StagingPilot even automates the testing by doing visual comparisons of screenshots from your site before and after each update. It uses a bunch of fancy algorithms and AI to determine whether your site broke.
If everything looks good, the updates are deployed to your live website. If something breaks, StagingPilot halts the process and makes sure that nothing gets deployed. You get a chance to look at a simple before/after view so you can see what broke and fix it before resuming automatic updates.
If you manage a lot of WordPress sites, you’re familiar with the drill. It’s time for a better approach to updates.
Testing Updates Safely
The StagingPilot platform is unique in that all updates and testing are carried out on a temporary staging server, so that StagingPilot can identify any issues before they get to production – you don’t have to worry about any messy rollbacks/restores or issues rolling back production databases.
StagingPilot performs updates and testing on an isolated staging site that is spun up each time updates are queued. StagingPilot syncs the staging environment with production so that we have an identical copy of your live site – installs/deletions, updates to plugins or themes, etc. We also pull the latest database down from production, so we have identical content.
StagingPilot then verifies that the new staging site visually matches the production site before proceeding with any updates so we’re extra sure that the environments are in sync before any automated processes run.
It’s important to note too that if there any any plugins that you want to specifically exclude from updating on a site, StagingPilot can handle that too!
Intelligent Automated Testing
Once the staging site has been created, “Before Updates” and “After Updates” screenshots are taken of site pages. Again, note that these updates are happening safely on the staging server, not the production site. Another important distinction of StagingPilot is that while others may offer automated testing, they are only checking the homepage of your site. Staging Pilot looks at multiple pages throughout your site. And you can always add any specific pages that you want to test!
StagingPilot examines the “Before Updates” and “After Updates” screenshots to intelligently decide if any one page “broke” from an update. A white screen is clearly a problem, and checking to see if the images displayed on staging and production are identical is also obvious, but neither of those happen very often.
Basic image comparison just isn’t enough.
If you have testimonials on your homepage for example, the page could change 20% every time you load it and that could be normal. We analyze each page to set a smart default, and in this example we will only flag an error when that homepage changes more than 20%. But the contact page might be really simple and we would flag that if it changes even a slight 3%.
Automated Browser Testing
StagingPilot is powerful enough to run full browser tests. Any testing that you can do in your browser can be automated. That means StagingPilot can fill out forms, click buttons, log in to membership sites, log in to the wp-admin, publish content, and verify that these things executed correctly after every update.
If you’re interested in doing lots of advanced tests like these, we can point you at developer resources to write your own, or our Support Team is available for additional consulting in this area.
How Do I Get Started?
We are working on our new Pantheon integration, so it’s not possible to sign up for a new account today. Please look for an announcement from Pantheon in 2020.
More Questions?
Please also feel free to reach out any time via the blue Messenger icon in the lower right hand corner of the screen to start a live chat.
We’ve also put together a FAQ page to cover common questions for additional information.
You can also contact us via email at support@stagingpilot.com and make sure to check out our latest News posts and follow us on Twitter and Facebook !
