WordPress has some rough edges and requires routine maintenance in order to run smoothly. This is very comparable to your car 🚗 requiring regular oil changes. It has sparked an entire economy of businesses attempting to solve WordPress maintenance. From hosted maintenance tools like ManageWP, to 365/24/7 total maintenance plans like WP Buffs, to…
Performance issues on a WordPress multisite installation can be a challenge to solve. Over the last few weeks I’ve been making various performance improvements on a rather large multisite network. The following is a recap of those optimizations using SSH and WP-CLI. Remove expired transients across network On a regular site a simple WP-CLI…
I spent most of the summer away from home traveling with my family. I wouldn’t call it a vacation, however it did include a few days off from work. This was something I planned to do a year in advance. As long as I have internet access, I can work from anywhere. This was…
WP Offload Media from Delicious Brains is a fantastic product. It allows you to offload WordPress’ media library to Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces, or Google Cloud Storage. Recently I removed WP Offload Media from a legacy WordPress multisite. This is a recap of the steps I took. Extra complexity for an already complex site.…
There are 2 types of businesses: those that are open and those that are closed. Specifically, this is about how much a business shares knowledge vs keeps to themselves. I choose to be open. That why I blog. That’s why I put my code on GitHub. That’s why my story is on IndieHackers. Knowledge…
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,…