WordPress Governance & Automation for Very Small Teams

How to keep shipping fast with only 1–3 people without burning out.

Executive Summary

Discipline = choosing what NOT to build yet. A lightweight 5‑pillar frame preserves speed and control.

1. Code & Assets

• Single repo for theme + scripts
• Semantic versioning (disciplined CHANGELOG)
• Small commits → small deploy blast radius
• Fonts, key images, and CSS self-hosted (limit random CDNs)

2. Content

• Idempotent API publishing (bilingual posts/pages)
• Versioned Markdown sources → reproducibility
• Stable slugs; avoid renames
• Audit: script can hash + compare content

3. Delivery & CI

• Pipeline: build -> validations -> deploy
• Health checks: blog listing markers
• Packaged releases (.zip + .sha256)
• Scheduled Lighthouse run

4. Lightweight Observability

• Retain deploy logs
• Minimum metric: response time home/blog
• CRON health check (HTTP 200 + posts_found marker)
• Alerts only for critical failures

5. Risk & Change

• Rule: “1 functional risk per release” under uncertainty
• Simple feature flags (WP options + theme conditionals)
• Verified daily backups
• Rollback: re-install prior verified zip

Proposed Daily Flow

1. Short branch (feature/blog-categories)

2. Adjust + add markdown content

3. Run publish script (idempotent)

4. Check health + Lighthouse

5. Merge + tag

6. Auto deploy

Initial Health Metrics

| Metric | Target | Frequency |

|——–|——–|———–|

| TTFB | < 600ms | Daily |

| Lighthouse mobile | ≥ 90 | Weekly |

| Health check failures | 0 | Continuous |

| Failed releases | 0 | Per release |

Key Anti-Pattern

“Manual FTP tweaks” → not auditable, not reversible, not scalable.

Next Increments

• Lightweight visual regression (screenshot diff)
• Object cache (Redis) when complexity grows
• Synthetic form monitor

—

Governance isn’t bureaucracy: it’s reducing future friction by capturing minimal present decisions.