Documentation

Product Overview

Product Overview

CanaryWP organizes WordPress testing, maintenance, and operational tools into a single workspace.

Dashboard

The Dashboard provides a high-level view of your workspace.

Use it to understand:

  • Instance status
  • Recent operations
  • Workspace activity
  • Important alerts
  • Available product areas

For detailed work, open the relevant page rather than treating the Dashboard as the source of every operational detail.

Import Site

Use Import Site when you want to create a CanaryWP environment from an existing WordPress backup.

The import workflow handles the creation of the isolated destination and restoration of the WordPress site.

Try demo

Use Try demo when you want to evaluate CanaryWP without uploading one of your own sites.

The resulting environment behaves like a normal testing instance and can be used to explore testing and maintenance workflows.

Instances

Instances is the primary fleet view for CanaryWP environments.

From here you can:

  • Find instances.
  • Review lifecycle state.
  • Open an instance.
  • Use tags and filters.
  • Start or stop environments where supported.
  • Access instance-specific tools.

Connected Sites

Connected Sites represents WordPress source sites that are paired with CanaryWP plugin.

A source profile can provide CanaryWP with information such as:

  • WordPress version
  • PHP version
  • Installed plugins
  • Installed themes
  • Approved custom assets
  • Other site inventory information

This information can be used to improve testing and maintenance decisions.

Site Testing

Site Testing runs checks against a selected CanaryWP environment.

Depending on the test, CanaryWP can examine:

  • Site availability
  • Fatal errors
  • Public pages
  • WP Admin
  • Navigation
  • Forms
  • Assets
  • Screenshots
  • Visual differences
  • Other selected functionality

Testing History

Testing History is the permanent review surface for previous test runs.

Use it when you need to answer questions such as:

  • What failed?
  • When did it fail?
  • Was it already failing before the update?
  • How long did the test take?
  • What did the screenshots look like?
  • Was a visual difference detected?

Scheduler

Scheduler turns repeatable maintenance and testing work into recurring jobs.

Scheduled workflows can include supported actions such as backups, testing, scripts, updates, or reports.

Canary Wizard

Canary Wizard provides a guided workflow around change verification.

A typical Wizard workflow can include:

Baseline → Change → Retest → Compare → Review confidence

Use it when you want a repeatable process rather than manually coordinating each step.

Fleet maintenance

CanaryWP also provides workspace-wide views for technologies shared across instances, including WordPress, PHP, plugins, and themes.

Fleet views are useful for finding:

  • Outdated software
  • Version differences
  • Available maintenance work
  • Compatibility concerns
  • Instances requiring attention

Instance-level operations

Opening an individual instance gives you access to tools such as:

  • Overview
  • Metrics
  • Details
  • Site Testing
  • Canary Wizard
  • Backup
  • Plugins
  • Themes
  • Media
  • Activity
  • Metrics
  • Logs

Workspace operations

Workspace-level functionality includes:

  • Activity
  • Notifications
  • Billing
  • Usage
  • Plans
  • Members
  • Roles
  • Workspace settings
  • Account settings
  • CanaryWing (Ask AI)

Recommended workflow

For maintenance work, follow this order whenever possible:

Inspect → Back up → Establish baseline → Make change → Retest → Investigate differences → Decide

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