To Eliminate Out-of-Date WordPress and Drupal sites, Pantheon Extends Managed Updates to Companies of All Sizes

San Francisco, CA - Pantheon.io, the leading WebOps platform where marketers and developers reach billions globally, is announcing the expanded release of Managed Updates, to eliminate out-of-date WordPress and Drupal sites on the internet. Pantheon Managed Updates customers include The Home Depot, MGM Studios, and Ohio Northern University. With this broadened release, Pantheon's website portfolio management capabilities enable companies of all sizes, including those with dozens of websites or more, to confidently adopt open source, focus their technical resources on growth, and maintain a secure baseline with fully managed CMS updates.

According to the latest numbers from WordPress, only 12.4% of sites globally are running the latest version of WordPress, version 5.4, and 33.7% are running 5.3—combined, that’s less than half. With its expanded release of Managed Updates, Pantheon seeks to make out-of-date websites a thing of the past. Managed Updates implements advanced automation technology, visual regression testing, and Pantheon’s experienced team to detect, test, backup, and then deploy core and community contributed updates.

"If your website is carrying the same message as it did three months ago, you're way behind," said Pantheon cofounder Josh Koenig. "Modern digital marketing demands high-quality CMS functionality: the ability to publish in real-time, plus ownership over the design and user experience. That points to adopting leading tools like WordPress or Drupal, but as the saying goes, ‘open source is free as in puppies.’ That overhead is a real deterrent in the market. By taking Managed Updates to scale, we’re letting businesses everywhere confidently say yes to open source."

Managed Updates allows organizations to leverage the best of enterprise-grade open source including proven code, widely available talent, and a low total cost of ownership with full CMS update management. While a wide variety of plugins and themes make open source CMSs functional, with over 50,000 for WordPress, they also introduce both operation overhead and security risk. With Managed Updates, companies can confidently adopt open source with the knowledge that their CMS is fully maintained.

By deploying Managed Updates across site portfolios, companies can reallocate previously occupied technical resources to focus on levers of company growth including, product development and innovation. Using WebOps, web teams can collaborate on the development, iteration, and launch of features that drive stakeholder engagement and business growth.

With automated detection, robust visual regression testing, and full site backup, companies adopting Managed Updates can drastically reduce their attack surface and eliminate updates that break their site. Pantheon’s technology identifies and prioritizes critical CMS security patches and using visual regression testing fine-tuned for WordPress and Drupal ensures that updates never impact customer experience.

Pantheon is extending its Managed Updates product to companies of all sizes, including organizations and digital agencies that oversee large numbers of sites. Manage complexity at scale, reclaim significant resources for product development and innovation, and drive security across a portfolio of sites. 

Managed Updates Portfolio Upstreams, Managed Updates Lite, and Managed Updates Premium are available worldwide as add-on services enabling companies of all sizes to confidently adopt open source CMS, redeploy technical talent, and maintain a secure baseline at scale.