I once had a client—a high-traffic membership site—call me at 2:00 AM because their renewals were failing. They had just pushed a “minor” update to their custom payment plugin. On the surface, everything looked fine. But under the hood, a simple typo in a filter meant that 15% of renewals were getting canceled. Total nightmare. They lost thousands in that one night. The developer who pushed it was a good guy, but he relied on manual testing. He clicked around, saw the “Thank You” page, and called it a day.
That was the turning point for me. I realized that if you aren’t using automated unit tests in your WordPress development, you’re basically just crossing your fingers every time you hit “deploy.” Manual verification is a trap. It works until it doesn’t. Trust me on this: the time you save by skipping tests is usually spent four-fold debugging a production crash on a Friday afternoon.
Why your manual testing is failing you
My first thought back then was to just be “more careful.” I tried to build a massive checklist of things to click before every release. It worked… for about a week. Then we added a new feature, and the checklist became a book. The reality is that human beings are terrible at repetitive tasks. We get tired. We skip things. A machine, however, doesn’t. This is where a proper testing suite changes the game.
To get started, we usually rely on the WP-CLI scaffold command. It’s the standard way to lay the foundation. You can check the full technical specs over at the official documentation on developer.wordpress.org, but the gist is running a single command to generate your environment files.
wp scaffold plugin-tests bbioon-custom-plugin --ci=githubWriting tests that actually catch bugs
Once you have the files, the real work begins. You don’t need to test every single line of code. That’s a waste of time. You need to test the logic that matters. For instance, if you’re registering a Custom Post Type (CPT), you want to ensure it’s actually there and public. If it’s not public, your SEO drops. Not good.
Here’s how a senior dev looks at a test class. We extend the WP_UnitTestCase because it gives us access to the “factory”—a tool that lets us create posts, users, and terms in a clean, sandboxed database. It’s way better than trying to mock everything manually.
<?php
/**
* Testing the Bbioon Booking Engine
*/
class Test_Bbioon_Booking_CPT extends WP_UnitTestCase {
public function setUp(): void {
parent::setUp();
// Ensure our CPT is loaded for every test
bbioon_register_booking_cpt();
}
public function bbioon_test_booking_registration() {
$post_type_obj = get_post_type_object( 'bbioon_booking' );
$this->assertNotNull( $post_type_obj, 'Post type must be registered' );
$this->assertTrue( $post_type_obj->public, 'Post type must be public' );
}
public function bbioon_test_can_save_metadata() {
$post_id = self::factory()->post->create( array(
'post_type' => 'bbioon_booking',
'post_title' => 'Client Consultation'
) );
update_post_meta( $post_id, '_bbioon_status', 'confirmed' );
$this->assertEquals( 'confirmed', get_post_meta( $post_id, '_bbioon_status', true ) );
}
}So, what’s the point?
The point is regression prevention. When you add a new feature six months from now, you’ll run composer test and know within seconds if you broke the booking logic. No more guessing. No more 2:00 AM phone calls. It’s about professionalism. If you’re charging clients for custom work, you owe them a stable product.
Look, this stuff gets complicated fast, especially when you start dealing with WooCommerce dependencies or complex database queries. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.
Building automated unit tests isn’t just about code; it’s about peace of mind. Start small. Test your core functions first. You’ll thank yourself later.
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