Modern website maintenance has evolved into a structured, ongoing process requiring thoughtful planning, consistent updates, and continuous improvement—often as resource-intensive as building the site itself. Maintenance goes far beyond simple updates. It encompasses security, performance, bug fixes, quality assurance, and iterative enhancements.
However, by integrating automation into these workflows, teams can streamline routine tasks, freeing time to focus on improvements that elevate the user experience. This blend of automated maintenance with human-centered support allows development teams to provide responsive solutions while enhancing efficiency.
Automation is essential for efficient maintenance
Web technology constantly evolves, and staying current is critical to ensure security, compatibility, and optimal user experience. Hands-on maintenance for routine tasks can be time-consuming. Those same resources could be focused on strategic work, like refining user journeys, improving accessibility, or addressing critical support needs.
Automation frees up much of this time so development teams can focus on the most impactful tasks. Tools like Dependabot, Violinist.io, and Renovate automate dependency management, and testing frameworks such as Behat, Cypress, NightwatchJS, and Playwright support continuous quality assurance.
Automation reduces the time burden of updates
Every website is built on a foundation of dependencies. Modules, libraries, plugins, and more. When left outdated, these can lead to security vulnerabilities, compatibility issues, and degraded performance. For a typical Drupal site, which may use 50 contributed modules alongside several NodeJS packages, it’s common to see ten or more updates each month.
Without automation, each update can take a developer up to an hour to complete. This process typically involves stopping current development tasks, resetting their local development environment, performing the update, testing for issues, creating a pull request, and getting it reviewed by another team member. That’s roughly 10 hours each month just on updates, or 120 hours a year.
Using tools like Renovate, these updates can often be completed in minutes. The tool handles update notifications, pulls in the necessary changes, and can even automate basic testing to check for compatibility issues. Our own support team used to spend hours on security updates. Now, it takes minutes. This savings compounds over time, especially across multiple projects, allowing us to reclaim hundreds of hours each year to spend on unique client needs instead of rote, routine tasks.
Automated testing improves quality while saving time
Automated testing frameworks like Behat, Cypress, and Playwright support a variety of tests, from visual regression checks to end-to-end user flow validation, ensuring that updates or new features won’t disrupt the user experience.
End-to-end testing, in particular, simulates real user interactions, such as logging in and adding or updating existing content. Imagine testing a complex form across multiple browsers and devices. These tasks would take hours if you did it manually. Playwright can run the same tasks in a fraction of the time. Integrating automated tests into your workflow can save up to 70% of the time spent on manual quality assurance for each release cycle. Over the course of a year, this could mean hundreds of hours saved.
A real-world impact
These time savings are not hypothetical. During a major site redesign, we worked with NYU Langone Health to automate dependency updates and implement a continuous testing suite, which reduced the time spent on maintenance by nearly half.
“Automating these tasks not only saved us time but enabled us to redirect our efforts toward refining the user experience,” a Langone Health team member noted. This efficiency allowed the team to deliver new user-centered features more rapidly, meeting critical project milestones.
The human side of maintenance
Let machines do what machines do best: flagging errors, initiating tests, and checking basic code quality standards. A machine cannot, however, thoughtfully address complex UX issues or consider new ways to enhance the editorial experience. You need a human touch. Let the machines do their thing so humans have more time available to do their thing. Many benefits come from this exchange.
Faster bug resolution and issue management
When routine tasks like security updates and dependency management are automated, support teams have more capacity to tackle unique or complex bugs. A persistent UX bug that throws an error on specific forms can receive dedicated attention without competing for time with routine maintenance. Support can focus on what matters more to the business itself and not just the website.
Improving editorial and admin experiences
Content-heavy sites rely on a smooth editorial experience. Without automation, developers might not have the capacity to optimize author workflows or refine content management interfaces so they are more user-friendly. Automating core maintenance frees up time to work on these internal improvements.
Delivering incremental features that keep your websites competitive
When business goals change, a feature initially set aside might suddenly become essential. Support teams, freed up by automation, can respond to these evolving needs faster. This flexibility has helped us introduce new functionality and enhancements for clients like configuring new modules, integrating with 3rd party services, improving accessibility scores, and minor redesigns.
Conclusion
Embrace automation. Streamline your maintenance processes. Reduce the time required to keep your sites up-to-date and secure. The efficiency you gain enables investment in website support that actually requires human expertise, like addressing complex bugs, improving user experience, and developing new features aligned with business goals.
Automation isn’t about replacing people; it’s about empowering them to focus on work that creates a genuine impact.