The update button for plugins and themes in WordPress is supposed to inspire curiosity and excitement, or well at worst it’s supposed to be a chore. In reality though, it’s a source of stress, because your site could break when applying innocent-looking updates.
This is especially true for sites with complex functionality like eCommerce, or sites with heavy traffic that can’t afford any downtime.
Which is why we are very excited to announce that we are going to get rid of this button for all sites hosted on Urumi.AI with our AI Deployment Intelligence. Read on to find out how!
Why is this a problem in the WordPress ecosystem?
It’s not just about streamlining the update process, but addressing a broader issue. Having worked on both sides of plugin development, the core issue is that the coverage area is too broad. Working on a decentralised platform provides unlimited flexibility. However, this also makes it impossible for developers to test their code against every possible combination of plugins, themes, hosts, custom code, and data.
Inversion of blame
In an environment like this, the responsibility of testing and making sure that the site works as expected falls on the merchant or site maintainers. This represents an inversion of blame, merchants are required to maintain their site, and is one of the fundamental differences between SaaS-based centralised software and open-source distributed platforms.
This is harmful, because now merchants are expected to test things on staging before updating. Large plugins in the ecosystem will go as far as to say that this is standard practice. But does this make sense? Should we continue expecting merchants and site maintainers to handle the tedious work of constant updates while testing everything on staging?
At the same time, as per GPL license, WordPress itself along with plugins and themes are often given away for free. When someone installs it, they get the software as is, without guarantees. Passionate authors and plugins with commercial interests often go above and beyond to make sure their software works for everyone, but even so they can’t test it with everything.
Managed hosting falls short!
Some hosts try to present a middle ground by offering managed plugins and updates. They promise to take over this responsibility of updating the plugins of their customers.
Unfortunately, this approach falls short because while they update plugins, they don’t test them on each merchant’s specific site. In all the managed plugin models we have seen so far including very prominent hosts, unless an update causes massive failures across a significant number of sites, the update won’t be rolled back.
Issues from your individual site are just a small blip on their monitoring dashboard that they don’t have the bandwidth to investigate, and that’s not even considering visual regressions or functionality bugs.
This means your site might be running in a broken state, or worse it breaks during a sale or a marketing campaign.
We are taking this a few steps forward
As a company that promises full-stack AI eCommerce, this is something we care deeply about.
We don’t want to hold our customers in an inflexible SaaS walled garden, but at the same time, we also don’t want to compromise on quality and ease of use.
Our quality assurance flow is built from the ground up for AI, and central to that is our AI deployment pipeline. We are removing update functionality from production, and merchants will never see an update button.
Instead, whenever a plugin update is available, we are going to do several things:
- Automatically start a new staging environment and update the plugin/theme there
- Check the new code for security and performance issues via AI
- Run our AI-generated test suite specifically for the site, testing for visual regressions
- For WooCommerce sites, generate and execute functional browser tests for critical flows like adding to cart and checkout
- If there are errors, AI agents will try to debug it and forward a report to us
- We verify the report and send it over to plugin author after redacting sensitive info if the merchant has given us consent to do so
There are two sides to every coin. For us, this means merchants won’t be able to directly add or update plugins in production. They will always need to use a staging workflow, which we plan to streamline through improved user experience design.
Early access
If you’d like an early access to this flow when it’s available, please do sign up (no credit card required). We would love to discuss what you think about the flow and the impact it (and AI in general) can have on the WP ecosystem.