AutoCare: automated maintenance
Evermade Care offers our clients a team of top professionals that takes care of online services and helps with small development needs.
Up until now, the Care team has only manually updated the site’s plugins. This is because the process includes, for example, a testing process and ensuring the compatibility of the plugins.
When everything plays smoothly in this process, the question that arises is:
Is this good use of a top professional’s time?
Creative work assistant
Creativity is what provides the greatest value to our clients. That is why we created an assistant that frees up our time for more creative work and customer service.
We call our new helper AutoCare 🤖. Its tasks include the actions that we would perform ourselves during a controlled and high-quality update process.
AutoCare’s to-do list:
- Check the need for an update
- Perform visual regression test, checks the appearance and functionality of the site before and after the update
- Test the update in a test environment before moving it to the production environment
- Take a backup of the production environment just before running the update
- Keep version control up to date with the changes
- Write detailed log of every step, so that debugging a possible failed update is as fast as possible
AutoCare works on a daily basis, and a Care team member is called to help only if AutoCare detects a problem.
Best practices automated
AutoCare follows our best practices in its update work. One of them is avoiding the installation of the first major releases.
This means that instead of installing, for example, version 6.0.0 of WordPress, we wait until the first minor fix version 6.0.1 is available, and update from the previous version 5.x.x directly to that.
This way, we can avoid the most common pitfalls that those major releases often bring.
Exceptions are made flexibly
- If a vulnerability is detected in the plugin, and the only patch version is the first release of the new main version, the plugin will be updated.
- If the first major release of the plugin has an important feature that our client wants to use immediately, the plugin can be updated.
Towwwer – our vulnerability monitor
This is where another of our best practices is naturally mentioned: checking the security vulnerabilities of plugins. This is helped by another assistant we have built – we call it Towwwer 🗼.
Towwwer composes a report of possible vulnerabilities of the site’s plugins and delivers it to our Care team. With the report, we can prioritize our work and act in accordance with our values regarding information security.
Security is always our highest priority.
Automation is our friend
Our new friends AutoCare and Towwwer increase the operational reliability of our Care service, reduce human errors and help our Care team bring joy and peace of mind to our clients.
Are you interested in our maintenance service? Read more about Care.
