WP Engine has a built-in staging site which is awesome, however sometimes troubleshooting requires more direct access. For those times, I like to take a WP Engine backup snapshot and restore locally on my Macbook Pro. For local development I manually configure my stack (apache, mysql, php, etc) following this blog post by Grav. One…
There are many benefits in converting your MySQL storage engine from MyISAM to InnoDB. Kinsta has a great write up on the topic: While you can do this manually per table, it’s not very practical if you have lots of tables to convert. The following commands will batch convert all MyISAM tables to InnoDB…
It’s recommend that you use a CDN with Kinsta. This is due to the fact that they charge overage fees on data transferred. Currently Kinsta doesn’t have a built-in CDN option however they have stated that they are working on a solution. Until then I recommend using KeyCDN with Kinsta. Setting up KeyCDN with Kinsta…
Moving WordPress sites between host providers is a fairly straightforward process. You generate a backup, import the backup, and reconfigure DNS to the new provider. With that said, doing it manually can take up a lot of time as there are lots of small steps in-between. The following is a collection of my own…
I use both WP Engine and Kinsta for hosting WordPress websites. Both companies provide excellent managed WordPress hosting. Now that I’ve been using Kinsta regularly for over 8 months I thought it would be a good time to do a comparison to WP Engine with whom I’ve been using for over 3 years. WP Engine…
There are a few difference ways to configure WordPress with unlimited storage. The process is typically the same. First you create a new Amazon S3 bucket to store your files and then you configure WordPress to sync and serve your uploads directly from S3. While I don’t recommend doing this as a standard practice, I have found…
Most paid plugins require a key to run. Some popular plugins also allow you to preload their key from the wp-config.php file. The following is an example of preloading keys for Akismet, Gravity Forms and WP Smush Pro. Unfortunately Advanced Custom Fields Pro doesn’t preload keys Worse yet, ACF Pro seems to drop its key every time you…
The built-in XML import and export is often overlooked, and for good reasons. It’s not meant to migrate an entire website. It won’t migrate anything from the customizer, menus or widgets. What it does handle is migrating page and post content. It works well in situations where you want to pull in an existing blog into…
One part of keeping your WordPress website healthy is using an uptime monitor. I use a free one called Jetpack Monitor. Jetpack Monitor is very basic. It checks your website every 5 minutes and sends an email notice if something is wrong. Lots of things can go wrong There are many reasons for a website…
I use git locally whenever I’m doing development. If you’re using WP Engine, you can simply push directly to their repo and they’ll auto update your web server. Recently I was working with Kinsta on my own website. While Kinsta has git installed on their web servers, they don’t have an auto-deployment process. They do…