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I maintain clients' Wordpress websites (~25 installations) as a part of my job. To do this quickly and efficiently I use Jetpack's "Manage" feature. In case something went wrong I have fully automated backups (Updraft plugin).

It works very well, but every time I do an update (which is a lot with Wordpress, themes and plugins update frequency) I have to go to the website and check if everything is ok.

Over a time I have experienced problems many times - mainly simple problems like "unable to connect" error in some plugin, not loading plugin in a sidebar, a changed font size after theme update and so on. Not very great problems and almost always easy to fix, but sometimes I overlooked them and made my client call me that his website is broken.

I wonder if there is any "proper" way to make post-update checks. I can't imagine that big agencies do it manually after every update for every client. The best idea i came up with is to automatically make screenshots of strategic places after every update and than watch them manually. I haven't found any articles about this in the internet, so I'll be very grateful if you can give me some clue how to do that.

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I don't know what big agencies do, but I can tell you one developer tool that can be used to automate this kind of testing: Codeception.

What this sort of testing is technically called is acceptance testing. Codeception allows you to write automated acceptance tests. It even has an extension that will take screenshots and automatically compare them for you.

Of course, Codeception tests can actually go further than just taking screenshots, they can actually fill out and submit forms, click buttons and links on the site, etc. (Of course, you probably won't want to test most forms on a live site, depending on what they do. :-)

Using Codeception may require you to write some code, but most of your tests will probably be very simple and will take minimal work to get going.

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  • There is also a WordPress specific module for CodeCeption. It is pretty awesome since you can do "acceptance" testing against via Selenium, but you can also do unit testing and functional testing in the WordPress database. You can also stub and mock WP functions. I'm trying to get a setup provisioning script going for cloud servers. wordpress-bdd.com/bdd-wp-aws
    – Jim Maguire
    Aug 8, 2017 at 4:29

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