Recently a web agency asked if I could remove a list of WordPress accounts, if found, from all of their websites. They gave me a list of 15 old email account of which they wanted removed from their 42 sites. I told them, “sure thing!“. This is how I accomplished that. SSH and WP-CLI…
I’m a big fan of Laravel’s Valet for local WordPress development. However after wasting a day attempting to fix a bug with Valet I decided to give Local by Flywheel a try. Spending my day attempting to resolve an obscure bug with Valet is not a good use of my time. I rather be…
Paid plugins often rely on license keys for automatic updates and support requests. However it’s the wild west when it comes to how their licensing systems work. Seems like every plugin author ends up implementing their own licensing system. I discovered this as I was recently creating bash scripts to automate deploying various paid…
Site monitors are a good way to detect major issues with websites. Over the years I’ve begun to notice a few common reasons why websites go offline. You might be shocked to know that most times it has nothing to do with the web host. Instead it comes down to a few scenarios which…
WordPress websites need to managed by someone who can keep after things 24/7 if you wish sleep well at night. That’s why for hosting WordPress websites I rely on managed WordPress hosts like Kinsta. Kinsta has the staff and sysadmins to do just that. If something goes offline in the middle of the night,…
I have a confession: I really don’t like using my phone for business. If you are a customer of Anchor Hosting, I do my best to hide this fact. Don’t get me wrong, there are situations where a simple phone call is far more efficient at solving technical problems than emailing back and forth.…
Generally finding and replacing old URLs can easily be accomplished using WP-CLI’s search-replace command. However that only makes changes to the database. Hard-coded file references may still exist. This can be handled with a few commands over SSH, however if done improperly you can easily break everything. In order to perform these replacements safely…
I’m a big fan of Fathom Analytics. It’s the perfect alternative to Google Analytics and something I’ve been using since early 2018. One thing Fathom lacks is an official API which lead me to do some pretty crazy monkey patching in order to extract data from my self-hosted Fathom instance. Rather than wait for…
My preferred way to backup a WordPress site is directly on the web server using SSH. The database backup part is performed with WP-CLI like so: This will output a .sql file which can easily be imported. I’ve been using this method for nightly database backups for the last few years. However, I recently…
This year I spoke at WordCamp Lancaster, the annual one day WordPress conference here in my home town. I gave a talk in the beginner track titled The Lean Mean Maintenance Machine. It was an overview of why maintenance is necessary for WordPress, tips for keeping maintenance work lean and some thoughts about the…