When I was giving what little advice I have about WordPress Hosting, I gently said:
ISN’T IT FRIGGIN CRAZY THAT NONE OF THEM WANT TO HELP YOU WITH DEPLOYMENT?
I wasn’t entirely correct there, some hosts are helping. Even my beloved Local will happily push a local site to production. I just don’t love that because it’s not Git-based.
I’ve long been at the point where I’m not going to work on a web project without there being an automated deployment process. This can take various forms, but typically it’s Git-based. Merge to main, site deploys. This became a defining characteristic of the Jamstack movement and is now clearly such good DX that it’s obnoxious not to have it.
I know Jamstack is a fading term, but it’s still evocative of a certain type of hosting. “Static with benefits,” as it were, typified by Netlify, but common to Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, Render, and the like. These all “run your builds”, which is a nice feature in that it keeps your built files out of the repo, which people generally agree is a good thing. Heck, even GitHub Pages will run your Jekyll build, and was one of the first sites to work in that way. I also like to credit Heroku for being the first host that I know of that was like “we should build the tooling that helps our customers deploy to us”.
But WordPress isn’t Jamstack.
I would think most WordPress deployments don’t run a build at all, they just move new files into place, so a fairly easy task all things considered. SFTP with a brain for diffs.
It feels like a cruel oddity that the type of website that is easier to deploy is more difficult to do so.
I’m able and willing to put in some footwork to have Git-based deployment. It’s nice to get it “for free”, but it’s so nice that it’s worth some work.
Years ago, I would use Beanstalk for this. Beanstalk itself would be the Git repo home, you’d push to that, and it would deploy anywhere you configured it to by giving it SFTP credentials. Beanstalk is still here and still doing that and it’s a fine tool, it’s just… not GitHub. It feels a little weird to use a non-major Git provider and not benefit from the feature set that comes with that.
Speaking of non-major Git providers, WP Engine offers to handle Git-based deployment this way. They host the repo. Weird. I’d rather not give up on all the nice stuff on GitHub like PRs, inviting people in with specific access, issue trackers, etc.
I want to click a few buttons and point at a repo on a major Git provider and say “there, deploy from that.” That’s how SpinupWP handles it and that looks nice to me. Same with Cloudways, if slightly less elegant.
These days, I use Buddy for the same task I used to use Beanstalk for. I find Buddy a pretty nice tool, and the pricing is within the same ballpark. Buddy considers itself more of a full-on CI/CD tool in the vein of CircleCI or Travis CI. Except Buddy is way friendlier because it’s not like YAML configuration; it’s a UI. Hey good name I guess. I like how I can easily tack on other tasks like “Clear the Cloudflare Cache”, “Find/Replace to help cache-busting”, and “Send a Slack notification.” by clicking some buttons. I’ve never used DeployHQ but it looks like it has similar vibes.
If you don’t mind (or like) configuring your CI/CD process with YAML, and you like the idea of using GitHub, you’re in luck! That’s what GitHub Actions literally is. You can configure it to do… pretty much anything a computer can do. It also should be mentioned that GitLab had CI/CD way before GitHub and does well at it.
For WordPress deployment via GitHub Actions, you pretty much it to do one job: move files over SFTP. This looks like the main plugin to help with that, although there are options, like this one from the same maker if you require SSH. My own host Flywheel recommends that approach. Want Git-based deployment? Do it yourself with GitHub Actions and one of these generic actions. Even WordPress.com suggests this approach if you have one of their plans that offers SFTP access. Eh — I’d like better. Debugging GitHub Actions is nobody’s favorite thing to do, and you just know it’s not going to go perfectly.
Some web hosts take the GitHub Actions route by, offering their own GitHub Action… action. Not a WordPress host, but that’s how Begin rolls. I know I picked on WP Engine above for having that weird “we host Git for you” thing, but they do have a GitHub Action also, which surely is much easier to use. I’d probably like to have at least that if I was going to go down this road.
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