“Not Our Bug”: Why WordPress Site Owners Must Take Ownership of Their Own Site Reliability

If you’ve spent any time managing a WordPress website, especially one with eCommerce or lead generation, you’ve probably run into a situation that goes something like this:

You wake up to find out checkout is broken. Or a contact form is throwing errors. Or users are stuck on a login loop. You trace the issue to a recent plugin update, only to be told by the plugin developer:

“We haven’t been able to reproduce this issue on our sandbox site, so it’s likely specific to your site’s configuration or a conflict with another plugin or theme.

Here’s one of my favorite (and all-too-real) examples, this actually really happened to a client just last week:

I’m able to replicate this issue on my end. On initial investigation, this seems to be an issue caused due to recent changes in the WooCommerce plugin itself. Have you recently updated the WooCommerce version on your site?

And just like that, the burden falls on you, the agency, freelancer, or site owner, to figure it out in a timely manner. No refund. No quick fix.

While this isn’t always the case, this isn’t exactly rare either.

Why This Happens (And It’s Not Always the Plugin Developer’s Fault)

It’s easy to get frustrated, but it’s worth stepping back to understand how WordPress works.

WordPress is an open-source ecosystem where no one controls all the moving parts. That flexibility is its strength and its curse. You can install plugins from hundreds of different developers, all built to different standards, with different assumptions about how your theme, hosting, or other plugins behave.

Plugin developers often do their best. They test against a range of versions, ensure compatibility with core updates, and might even run some automated tests of their own. But their testing is limited by what they can reasonably cover. Most rely on:

• Unit tests for isolated logic
• Basic integration tests with core WordPress, WooCommerce or common plugins used with their plugins
• Manual QA for common configurations

What they don’t do is test their plugin on your specific setup, ie. your theme, your stack, your cache rules, your checkout flow, your form builders. That’s not negligence. It’s just impossible.

You Can’t Outsource Accountability

Here’s the hard truth: when a plugin breaks something critical on your site, you’re still the one who loses.

• You lose sales when checkout fails.
• You lose leads when forms stop submitting.
• You lose trust when a bug makes your site unusable.

And your customer doesn’t care if a plugin caused it, they just know your site doesn’t work.

That’s why relying on plugin authors to “own” their bugs isn’t a strategy. You need to take ownership of your own site’s performance and reliability. Especially when your business depends on it.

Automated Testing is How You Take Control

You don’t have to guess when something breaks. You don’t have to rely on user complaints. You don’t even have to click through every flow manually after every update.

That’s where automated testing comes in.

By setting up tests that simulate your users’ most critical actions like submitting a contact form, checking out a product, or logging in, etc. you can:

• Catch failures instantly, before your users do
• Get notified when updates break core flows
• Prevent lost revenue and leads
• Save time manually checking every function after plugin updates

Think of it like insurance for your business logic. If you’ve ever had to frantically debug a live checkout issue during a promo or explain to a client why their site was broken for two days, automated testing pays for itself the first time it catches something before you do.

Tools Like CheckView Make This Easier Than Ever

If you don’t have time to build and maintain a full testing suite, automated testing software like CheckView are designed specifically for WordPress and WooCommerce sites.

With CheckView, you can:

• Set up test flows for forms and checkouts with no coding
• Run tests daily or on-demand after updates
• Catch form plugin changes, JavaScript errors, and more
• Get alerts before your users hit a broken flow

It’s like having a QA tester constantly monitoring your most valuable site features, so you can stop hoping nothing breaks and start knowing.

In WordPress, stuff breaks. That’s not going to change.

But whether you let it hurt your business or not? That part is up to you.

Start testing like your business depends on it, because honestly it does.