How Daniel Used Visual Regression Make Updates A Superpower

WP Remote’s visual regression caught a 0.03% variance after an update.

Daniel was going about his day as usual, when WP Remote’s support team reached out to him. 

One of his sites had a 0.03% difference after an update. 

Anyone would ignore such a minor difference, and as did Daniel. Until our email. 

“Got an email from Aman: ‘Hey, by the way, there was a 0.03% change, and here’s what it changed.’ It was awesome that he was willing to look into that for me, because, at 0.03%, I don’t think to go check. Of course I do now after our conversation.”

The fact is that these changes happen all the time. Theme updates mess up CSS. PHP updates mess up analytics. Plugin updates change the design. 

It is a pattern. 

We reached out to Daniel to hear his perspective on how visual regression testing has changed his outlook on updates.


Updates are necessary, but stressful.

We’ve said this countless times: updated sites are well-maintained sites. But they don’t always happen seamlessly. 

Many agencies hide the red notification on wp-admin, signalling available updates for this very reason. No one wants their customer to run an update, and inadvertently break the site in the process. 

“A lot of times on customer sites that they’re going to visit often, I use a plugin that hides those notifications so they don’t even have to worry about it. They can go in and focus on the stuff they need to.”

Often, delaying a high-risk update is prudent. 

“Sometimes these updates are risky and I don’t do them right away. Elementor being one of them, it’s been giving me problems all month. I’ve had to even go on to sites and manually roll it back, which is a real pain.” 


Safe updates and visual regression is a powerful combination.

There are a few considerations when doing updates: 

  • Is it a critical update, maybe patching a vulnerability? 
  • Is it a high-risk update which might break the site? 
  • Will it work well with other plugins? 

And so on. 

WP Remote has a few features, working together in tandem, to make the update process as risk-free as possible. 

  1. UpdateLens scores the update on its risk factor.
  2. The safe update feature takes a backup of the site just before the update. 
  3. Visual regression checks the site before and after the update for any differences.

It is a powerful combination of features for the safest site updates.

“One of the biggest things for me is the ability to do safe updates and combined with that to do low risk updates.

Having this toggle at the bottom of the plugins update area, where I can see just plugins that are low risk to do the update makes for a very quick decision to go ahead and get those plugins updated. And then knowing that it’s going to do a visual check has been very encouraging.”

Additionally, there is no need to babysit an update while it is running. 

“WP Remote does a great job of notifying me that it might not be a great idea to do that update because of the high risk.”

“In terms of bulk updates, I’ll still go in and individually update websites if it’s a security risk but holding off has been a nice option to have.”


Visual regression is perfectly placed in the update workflow.

There are many monitoring tools that will tell you when something goes wrong on a site. But they cannot tell you why or how. 

“I was previously investigating multiple other tools with visual checks, and honestly I was really unhappy with all of them. Because they weren’t integrated with the update process, they would just throw errors randomly and send me an email. I had to go check the email, and make sure that I don’t miss them.”

You could be doing something entirely different, and have to context switch to resolve an error alert. 

“When I’m running it on pretty much every single one of my 60 sites, that’s a lot of sites that I have to make sure still look good and haven’t broken a layout.”

You need alerts to be contextual to be relevant and actionable. That means, any issues with the update process need to be flagged during the update process. 

“Whereas, with WP Remote, it’s all integrated in the process. Once the updates are done, I can scroll down the page, and make sure everything looks good. That’s just a huge piece of my workflow that now becomes not even a real thought process. It is just part of the steps that I go through.”

“I love that I can check it all within the same screen, so I’m not even having to go anywhere. I’m just it’s right there for me to look at, review, and move on.”

Multiply the time gained by 60 sites? The benefit really racks up.

“All of those things have helped with workflow, because, again, once you start tipping into almost 60 sites, there’s a lot of things that could go awry, if not managed appropriately.”


Customers are sold on the guarantee.

As a bonus, Daniel was able to leverage visual regression to win client trust.

“In fact, it’s even sold a couple of customers on moving over to our hosting. Because, not only could I do the reporting for them, but also could explain to them that there’s visual checks every time we do an update.”

For the more technically inclined customers, visual regression helped sell them a zero-downtime promise. Daniel explained how it caught a tiny change in his site, and the customer was impressed. 

“So I was speaking with someone who was pretty familiar with the web and software. I’ve known him for a long time, and he has always been very invested in tech. We were getting ready to build a website for his company. And as part of that, I wanted him on my hosting. So I was telling him about visual regression.

I told him that one of the toughest things about updates, in the past, is that you have to manually check every single website to make sure something didn’t break.” 

“I explained to him that I now had software that did those checks as part of the process, which meant there was basically zero downtime. If we ever did have to restore something, it would catch it on the way through the update process, instead of catching it later when there’s a problem or a customer complains.”

“That was very intriguing to him because, with his technology understanding, he knows how quickly software can break on an update. But because I’m able to offer that extra level of customer service with the visual checks, he was confident to stay with me for the hosting part.”

For the less technical customers, Daniel just tells them their site is exactly the same before and after an update. It is a guarantee he can give them. 

“I just explain it as we want to make sure that on every update, your site looks the same as it did before the update. By having software that does that check, we get to make sure that your site looks great. All the time, every day that we do updates. 

It’s encouraging to them as well. Especially when they see a report with 50-something updates during the month, it gives them a great example of the efforts that we’re putting in.”


Support is outstanding.

Daniel was inclined to ignore the variance, because it was 0.03% after all. Then WP Remote support reached out to talk to him.

“Aman reached out, which was such a great initiative in and of itself.”

He now relies on WP Remote’s notifications to make sure his customers’ sites are running as they should.

“I’ve also done every integration y’all have. So I get my Slack notifications, the emails—all of it. Depending on where I am during the time when that notification comes through I may need it in more than one place, just to make sure I go check it. So I love having those pieces and they’ve been very helpful as well.”


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