Find and Replace Hardcoded File References

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…

Fathom’s Internal API

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…

WP-CLI Database Backups with Emojis

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…

WordCamp Lancaster 2019

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…

Getting Started with WooCommerce Subscriptions for Hosting Services

There are many ways to collect recurring subscription fees from customers. Today I’m going to cover how I use WooCommerce Subscriptions here at Anchor Hosting and why I think it’s a solid platform to build on. Why WooCommerce? First off I make money by providing WordPress hosting services to my customers. For me using…

Overriding Recovery Emails in WordPress 5.2

WordPress 5.2 introduced recovery mode which allows site owners to access their WordPress backend in situations which previously crashed the website and required a developer. This is an amazing new feature. 👏 This works by hunting for PHP fatal errors and sending email notification to the WordPress admin email when found. The first week…

The Lean Mean Maintenance Machine 💪

One thing every WordPress site has in common is the need for maintenance. You, as WordPress site owners, are responsible for some level of maintenance unless you’ve already delegated that responsibility to another company or individual. If your an Anchor Hosting customer, that responsibility is ours. That said, if you’re interested to do your…

Make Reselling WordPress Hosting Awesome 🌟

I don’t know about you but the idea of reselling web hosting is generally negative 👎. And for good reason. There are plenty of bad examples of companies that resell web hosting with very little value add built upon old technologies. I suppose people think web hosting is an easy way to make money.…

Early Recommendations for Block Library Plugins

With WordPress 5.0 comes the new block editor 🧱. This opens up an entirely new ecosystem of plugins all around adding blocks to the WordPress editor. One trend that’s catching on are WordPress plugins that add an entire library of custom blocks. Do a search for blocks on the plugin directory and you’ll see…