When it comes to image optimization, my go to WordPress plugin is WP Smush Pro. That said there are times I want to do more than what a plugin can handle. I recently had a customer who had over 50GBs of images. That’s even after WP Smush Pro reduced image usage by over 5GBs.…
Over the past 6 months I’ve worked with Kinsta to move over 500+ sites from WP Engine. This will be my official review and recap of that massive switchover. I’ll just begin with a spoiler and say I couldn’t be happier with the whole process and consider this upgrade a huge success. 🎉 WP…
Within CaptainCore, my WordPress management toolkit, I have a custom post type named captcore_website which stores site details via many ACF custom fields. The number of necessary custom fields seems to be never ending as I continue to expand functionality. Currently there are over 50 custom fields and my newest endeavor would require an…
Back in October of 2018 Fathom, the open source web analytics project, added support to track multiple websites per instance. Since then I’ve been collecting site stats for all of my WordPress customers with intent to reduce my reliance on Jetpack Stats. Rather than wait for an official Fathom API I decided to see…
Whenever I migrate WordPress sites I prefer that to be handled by a command line script. Well that’s not always possible often due to limited access on the source WordPress site. Many times I’m only giving WordPress admin access and work with that. My go-to has been to use a backup plugin. But still,…
WP Engine provides a downloadable CSV usage stats per site. This is great for seeing individual site activity however it’s not very useful for comparing sites. With a dedicated WP Engine server it would be extremely helpful to see all sites organized by their usage stats. This would help identify top sites which might…
Timthumb was a very popular php script for dynamically generating thumbnail images. That said it’s outdated and has performance issues when used with a modern web host like Kinsta. The following is a walkthrough showing the steps I took to remove Timthumb from a custom theme for one of my customers. Search for Timthumb…
Recently I helped a customer move their site from WP Engine to Pantheon. Pantheon’s platform is quite different then WP Engine. During the process I wrote a script to automate the deployment process which allowed me to quickly resync the sites from a WP Engine backup to Pantheon. Prepare sftp with Rclone and Terminus…
A common customer request I get is to reset a WordPress staging site back to its default state. I’ve done this manually quite a few times and decided I should just script it. The following bash script will drop all database tables, install a fresh copy of WordPress and remove all themes, plugins and…
There are many reasons why you might want to automate website screenshots. I’ve previously attempted to do this with development tools like PhantomJS and Selenium however was left unimpressed. Selenium is hard to setup and PhantomJS had difficulty getting accurate website screenshots. While searching for a better tool I discovered gowitness a command line…