‘It works on my machine’, ‘We can’t test that in staging’, ‘It seems to have been broken for a while’… This sounds familiar to many of us, and this is what I want to fix with this talk! I will share practical & easy ways to approach observability in WordPress, and move beyond logs to investigate and fix issues on websites, plugins & themes. I’ll demonstrate how modern observability turns reactive firefighting into proactive problem-solving, drawing from our experience maintaining some of WordPress’s most popular plugins.
The audience will discover:
- How to implement error monitoring platforms like Sentry to catch issues before users do (thanks to an open-source & free WordPress plugin!)
- Using Metabase for data-driven insights to proactively observe and understand issues (open-source & free!)
- Visual regression testing with BackstopJS to prevent UI breaks (open-source and free!)
- Real-world examples of how these tools helped our teams manage daily deployments effectively
Whether you’re a plugin/theme developer or managing WordPress sites at scale, you’ll learn practical approaches to spend more time building features instead of fixing bugs.