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Having your website send emails successfully is more difficult than it should be. Earlier this year WP Engine moved all of my dedicated servers over to Google’s infrastructure. Google’s has some pretty strict rules with emails which help keep their infrastructure spam free. While this does present a bit of annoyance, there are workarounds.…

In March I gave my first WordCamp talk at WordCamp Lancaster called “Staying Sane While Maintaining Hundreds of WordPress Sites”. It was a great experience and I will plan on a future talk. I was hesitant due to the fact that it was my first time and is therefore a little rough. Even so,…

I commonly want WordPress to run code, like a bash script, directly on the command line. In PHP there is a set of functions which is commonly disabled for security purposes. That includes exec which is PHP’s command to do just that. Rather then running the bash script directly on the web server, an alternative…

If you’re using WP Offload S3 to free up local storage then you’ll also need to backup your Amazon S3 uploads. Rather than running two separate backups, one for the website and one for Amazon S3, the following is how I do handle using a single backup bash script. Rclone can incrementally sync S3 and…

Have you ever connected to a web server over SFTP? If so then it’s likely you’ll see one of these errors at some point: remote host identification has changed , host keys changed, offending key for IP or something similar. This is somewhat common due to how SFTP operates Your computer tracks SFTP and SSH connections in…

WordPress makes it easy to run PHP code from Javascript. This is extremely useful for running custom code without reloading the page. The following part I’m using to send backup snapshot emails. This will run the PHP function snapshot_email_action_callback. This works great when using jQuery, however recently I was wondering if it’s possible to trigger…

I host most of my WordPress websites with WP Engine. I’m currently managing 681 WordPress installations spread across 4 dedicated WP Engine servers, and as of one month ago I had 7 dedicated WP Engine servers. The following is some more depth look at why I ended up upgrading and merging my WP servers.…

If you have an active multisite network, chances are you have orphaned content left over from deleted subsites. To clean up the database, there is a fantastic plugin Cleanup Multisite DB Tables which adds a few wp-cli commands to locate and remove any orphaned database tables. To cleanup files, I wasn’t able to find an automated…

So typically when migrating or launching WordPress sites, I’ll modify my HOSTS file in order to preview the site at its final destination before going public. That’s a great way to catch problems before updating DNS however I’ve often wanted to see both websites at the same time for a more detailed comparison. With…