About Us

Our Story

Upgrading your Website is often looked at as a necessary evil, sometimes only getting done after chronic procrastination. The worst part of the upgrade is often not the upgrade itself, but the testing. Completed in the traditional manner, testing a large website is a slow and painful manual process that is prone to error and not the best use of your valuable resources' time.

WebsiteUpgradeTester.com was created to spare web developers, content owners, and website managers from this unnecessary evil, allowing them to upgrade faster, more often, and with considerably less pain to take advantage of new features, bug fixes and security patches.

We saw this pain first hand for over a decade. As a subsidiary of PaperThin, Inc., one of the early Content Management System (CMS) vendors, we had hundreds of customers with large websites who upgraded several times a year to deploy the latest new release, service pack or security patch. These customers spanned many different verticals and included notable organizations such as these:

Our support and professional services teams helped dozens of these customers each year with their upgrades. We would often perform the upgrade directly or would work with the organization's technical team to do so. On many more occasions than you would think, the upgrade would be completed on a staging server while production was frozen, only to be delayed by days or weeks from going live because the site testing by the customer was not complete. Even worse, sometimes inappropriate changes were not caught causing embarrassment or even requiring the upgraded site to be rolled back after its launch.

We knew there had to be a better way.

During this time, we also had developed some technologies for one of our larger customers, the National Park Service. They had deployed our CMS enterprise wide, which means each and every national park had their website managed under the www.nps.gov. Their sites were originally split across seven geographical regions, each having its own authoring and deployment servers. In order to facilitate better reuse of content and shared code resources, they decided to consolidate these seven regions into one large region.

The merging of these regions was a huge testing effort, as all of the sites combined had hundreds of thousands of pages. They engaged us to perform this migration and to develop the testing tools to ensure its success. The outcome of that work, is the predecessor to the WebsiteUpgradeTester.com tool.

Since early 2018 we have been beta-testing the WebsiteUpgradeTester.com tool with dozens of our customers. From large government and university sites, to mid-sized organizations.

We are proud to now make this cloud-based tool available to everyone. It is platform independent and can be used to test your website upgrades on any CMS (Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, etc.), Web Platform (PHP, .Net, Java, etc.), or Application Framework (Ruby on Rails, jQuery, Bootstrap, etc.).

Thanks to all who have helped make this product what it is today.

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