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When developers and content owners are asked to upgrade or patch their website they often shy away from the task, begrudgingly accept, or outright resist.  Why are they so unhappy?

Developers like to create new things, work with leading-edge technologies and solve challenging problems.  Content owners and Marketers like to work on engaging their audiences and driving outcomes.

They don’t like mundane, repetitive and mindless tasks.  No one does. Yet, that’s often what they are asked of when it comes to testing a website upgrade.  Review hundreds of pages, on different browsers or devices to make sure everything still works. BORING. BORING. BORING. And highly prone to error.

Their time is way too valuable to the organization to have them visually inspect page after page.

If your organization's website is large with hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of pages, you are probably all too aware of the dreaded but necessary task of upgrading.  You know that keeping your website’s components up-to-date, running the latest supported version has many advantages, including:

• easier to develop and support

• more secure

• able to take advantage of the latest features and capabilities

• better performance

But is the pain, worth it?

If you dive into the issue a little more, most of the time it’s not the actual process of applying the upgrade that stinks.  The preparation and actual software updating are not often hard. It’s the testing that is a time sink. And if the testing isn’t thorough, it’s the ramifications of dealing with the fallout if problems are later discovered that should have been caught.

So how do you keep your developers, marketers and content owners happy?

Take away the boring, mindless testing work.  Instead, offload as much of the manual testing to an automated process that does the visual inspection of your website pre-upgrade and then post-upgrade, and then compares the results digitally.  

No more getting cross-eyed reviewing hundreds of pages.  No more skipping over even hundreds of more pages that should be tested.  Let a computer do what it is great at doing. Repetitive, boring tasks that it can do much faster, more accurately and without any breaks.

Although not all manual testing can be eliminated, a large share of what organizations are doing today manually, or should have been doing but weren’t, can be done faster, cheaper, and better.  

This will keep your developers, content owners and marketers much happier. And will allow you to upgrade more often.

For a deep dive into the entire upgrade and patching process, please check out The Ultimate Guide to Upgrading and Patching Your Website.

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Don't waste time manually testing your next Website upgrade. Visit WebsiteUpgradeTester.com and sign up for a free trial.

For more detailed information about best practices on upgrading your website and improving your website maintenance processes, we recommend reading The Ultimate Guide to Upgrading and Patching Your Website.