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JOURNAL — 014 · Development

# Our Staging-to-Production Deployment Process, Step by Step

MQ Mahnoor Qureshi, Head of Design · October 19, 2025 · 4 min read

No cowboy FTP, no Friday deploys, no 'it worked on staging.' The repeatable pipeline that gets client changes live without drama.

Most small-agency deploys are a heroic act. Ours is a formality — which is exactly the point. A deployment you can't roll back is not a deployment, it's a gamble. This pipeline exists so launches are boring.

## Performance is architecture, not decoration

Speed work fails when it's scheduled as polish at the end — by then the decisions that mattered are entrenched: a builder emitting four wrappers per element, a slider library loaded for one page, fonts subset for nobody.

We budget performance like features: a 100-point Lighthouse target has an implementation plan from the wireframe. Image pipelines, script governance and font discipline are agreed before visual design polishes anything.

Teams that treat speed as a launch-week task end up shipping apology notes. Teams that budget it ship numbers.

## Signs your rebuild is overdue

1. Every change request returns with a bigger estimate than the last one
2. Two plugins conflict and the fix is a third plugin
3. Mobile LCP is over 4 seconds and nobody remembers why
4. The last person who understood the theme left a year ago
5. Marketing has a private doc of 'things the website can't do'

## The build-vs-plugin line

Every plugin is a dependency with its own author, roadmap and security record. Our line: if a requirement is core to the business and stable, build it natively; if it's peripheral and moving, rent it.

Custom code is not automatically better — badly written custom code is worse than a mature plugin. The calculus is control over the parts that make you money versus maintenance on the parts that don't.

A healthy WordPress or Shopify build in 2026 is quietly boring: few dependencies, all understood, everything load-bearing owned.

> A plugin is a promise made by a stranger. Choose few, choose well.Internal review, 2025

## Integration is where builds actually live

Nobody's website is an island — it syncs stock, posts leads to a CRM, fires events to analytics, and triggers email. These seams are where projects overrun and where launches leak data.

We map every integration with its failure mode: what happens when the CRM is down, when the rate limit hits, when the API token expires on a Saturday. Every mapping gets a queue, a retry, or a human alert.

## Maintenance is a product

Sites don't decay because of hackers and core updates; they decay because nobody's job is 'keep it excellent.' Updates run until something breaks, then maintenance gets funded retroactively with interest.

The retainer structure that works is small and relentless: weekly updates in staging, monthly regression checks, quarterly performance and uptime reviews, and a human who knows the site answering within hours.

The cost comparison that convinces finance: one emergency weekend versus twelve months of quiet Tuesdays.

> The best code on a client site is the code nobody has to think about for five years.ALIFY engineering notes

## Where to start this week

If you do nothing else: put the theme in git, and make production read-only for everyone except the deploy. Two rules, 80% of the discipline.

Then keep it honest with a short list:

- Backups verified by an actual restore, not a green dashboard icon
- Rollback plan rehearsed: one command back to last-known-good
- Error monitoring on production with an owner assigned
- Put the date on the calendar — playbooks without Fridays are just reading

And when the scope outgrows the spreadsheet, that's precisely what our team is for.

## Straight answers

### Do you work with our existing theme or start over?

Both. We audit first: if the theme's bones and editor experience are sound, we harden and extend. Most inherited builders fail that audit on performance grounds, which is when a lean custom theme becomes the cheaper option over three years.

### Can you maintain a site another agency built?

Yes — it starts with a two-week stabilisation pass: backups, update hygiene, security baseline and a written map of what we found. After that it's a standard care plan with full transparency on findings.

### What does post-launch support look like?

A named engineer, a queue with response times, monthly reports on updates, uptime and performance — and quarterly advice on what we'd fix next. No ticket black holes.

Development ALIFY Journal 4 min read
MQ
Mahnoor Qureshi
Head of Design · ALIFY

Leads brand and product design at ALIFY. Believes taste is a process, not a gift — and conversion is a design metric.

Keep reading

## More from the journal.

Development July 18, 2026 6 min read Why Your WordPress Site Is Slow (and How We Fix It in 14 Days) Your site isn't slow because WordPress is slow. It's slow because of five fixable decisions — here's the exact two-week playbook we run on every performance rescue. Read article Development December 4, 2025 4 min read Block Themes vs Classic PHP: What We Actually Build in 2026 Gutenberg won the argument but not every project. An honest engineering answer to which WordPress architecture fits which client — with the maintenance bills to prove it. Read article Development December 13, 2025 4 min read INP Is the Metric Everyone's Failing: A Field Guide to Fixing It Interaction to Next Paint replaced FID and quietly became the hardest Core Web Vitals threshold. Here's what actually moves it — measured on real client builds, not lab demos. Read article
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