How to catch website changes that break your customer journeys
Websites rarely break on their own. They break because something changed - a deploy, an app install, a plugin auto-update, a theme tweak, a tag added through a tag manager by someone in marketing on a Friday afternoon.
The change is usually small and the damage is not
An auto-updating plugin. Convenient until the release that changes a selector your checkout depends on.
A tag manager change. No deploy, no review, no rollback - and a script that throws an error early enough to stop later handlers binding.
A theme update. Renamed classes, restructured templates, a button that is now a link.
A third-party script. Reviews, chat, consent, analytics. You did not change your site; they changed theirs.
The common thread: none of these produce an error page, and most happen without anyone on your side pressing deploy.
Why staging does not catch it
Staging has different data, different apps, different scripts, and no real traffic. The failures listed above mostly involve things that only exist in production - a live payment provider, a real consent banner, an app installed on the live store only.
And the changes that cause most breakage never touch staging at all, because they are not code. A plugin updating itself on the live site does not pass through your pipeline.
How SiteOps handles it
Four steps, none of which involve writing a test script.
What it does and does not do
- It tells you the journey broke, not which commit did it. It narrows the window to the last run, which is usually enough to find it.
- It checks the journeys you recorded. Coverage is what you chose to cover, not the whole site.
- Visual changes are not flagged unless they break the journey. This is functional monitoring, not pixel diffing.
Common questions
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