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The engineering reality of running WordPress at scale: locking down security, debugging plugin conflicts, and configuring caching to pass Core Web Vitals.
25 articles
This page names no winner, and the reason is that the choice matters far less than the category's marketing implies. The major WordPress SEO plugins do the same six things. They have converged, they will continue to converge, and the difference between them is interface preference and a small number of features most sites never […]
Login attacks against WordPress are constant, automated and indiscriminate. Every public WordPress site receives them, regardless of size or traffic, because the cost of trying is near zero. They are also the least successful route into a WordPress site. Vulnerable plugins account for more compromises than password guessing, which is worth holding onto — login […]
WordPress sends email in a way that fails modern authentication by default, and it reports success while doing it. That combination is why this problem is so persistent. The site is not broken. Nothing is logged. wp_mail() returns true, the order is placed, the form says thank you — and the message never reaches an […]
A backup you have never restored is a hypothesis. That is the whole article in a sentence, and it is where most backup strategies fail — not at taking backups, which is easy and automated, but at the assumption that what was taken can be turned back into a working site. Four other things go […]
"Error establishing a database connection" means WordPress could not reach or could not use its database, and there are four causes: wrong credentials, a database server that is down, corrupted tables, or a compromised site. Work them in that order. Not because the first is most likely, but because checking it costs thirty seconds and […]
There are five ways back into a WordPress site you cannot log into, and they carry very different risks. Work them in this order: the password reset email, cookies and browser, the database, WP-CLI, and only then a temporary file on the server. The reason for that order is not difficulty. It is that the […]
The standard advice — deactivate every plugin, then reactivate one at a time — works and it takes your live site down while you do it. On a busy site that is an outage, and on an ecommerce site it is lost orders. There are two better options, and most people have never been told […]
A large share of missing WooCommerce emails were never sent, because the event that triggers them never happened. That is worth establishing before touching any mail configuration, because the two failures look identical to a customer and completely different to fix. A message that was never generated cannot be a deliverability problem, and hours get […]
The most common mistake is restoring from backup immediately. It reverts the visible damage and reinstalls the vulnerability that let them in, so the site is compromised again within days — often before anyone notices the first fix did not hold. Restoring is part of the answer. It is never the first step and never […]
This page names no hosts and ranks nothing. Host performance changes with plans, data centres and ownership, so any ranking published today is wrong within a year — and the reader who needs it most cannot verify it anyway. What does not change is what to check. Eight requirements, one number that tells you whether […]
Every post you publish generates archive pages you did not write. Its category archive, one archive per tag, the author archive, the date archives, and a place in the paginated blog index. On a site with 50 posts and 200 tags, WordPress has published around 250 pages of your content rearranged into lists. Most of […]
A completely blank white page means WordPress's fatal error handler did not run — and that narrows the cause before you touch anything. Since WordPress 5.2, an ordinary fatal error produces "There has been a critical error on this website" plus a recovery email. A blank page means something prevented even that. Three things cause […]