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I host over 1000 WordPress sites with Kinsta and am a huge fan of their hosting services. Performance related issues with Kinsta are almost always plugin and theme related. Kinsta support can enable New Relic’s tracking which is a great way to track down bottleneck coding issues. Dealing with coding related performance issues can…

Keeping WordPress running smoothly requires some routine maintenance. Most of the time that’s easily handled by regularly installing routine updates. However in rare cases routine maintenance can be a battle. Here are top 5 common WordPress maintenance woes and how to overcome them. #1 Infrequently applying updates. You should not rely on manually installing…

Many web hosts disable a handful of built-in PHP functions like exec for security sake. And for good reason. If your website would ever run harmful PHP code, having access to exec would be quite dangerous. As a developer, being able to use exec would open up many possibilities. I mean literally any command…

Most themes utilize the WordPress Customizer in order to config and setup the website. Unfortunately, many of these settings are specific to whichever theme you are using. That means if you activate a new theme, you have to start over with fresh settings. There is no good import/export functionality. There is one exception where…

Video conferencing usage is increasing exponentially. Google Hangouts has been my preferred tool however Google’s plans to phase it out in favor of their paid product Google Meet. Meanwhile Zoom is quickly becoming a household name. I don’t mind paying for a good solution, but neither Google or Zoom have a great reputation for…

The WordPress.org plugin repository is filled with coming soon and maintenance mode plugins. My go-to plugin is the one created by SeedProd. However, I often don’t need all of those fancy features and prefer to just do it manually with custom code. Today I’m sharing a few DYI maintenance mode options for web developers.…

I spent a week revamping this website, anchor.host. That involved installing a new WordPress theme, pulling over a bit of custom code from the old theme and remaking a few pages using new blocks extensions. The backend of Anchor Hosting is highly dynamic. WooCommerce Subscriptions handles hosting customer renewals. There isn’t a good workflow…

One of my favorite SSH commands with Kinsta is screen. I use it quite frequently to handle long running scripts like site migrations and image optimizations. I’ve often wondered if it would be possible to put screen inside of a shell script instead of manually running it from the command line. Today that’s just…

So you just finished writing this super awesome shell script, now the question is “How do I run it?”. There are many ways you can run a shell script. You can run a script locally, run a local script on a remote server via ssh, or you can copy and run it directly on…

When building WordPress websites for customers, I feel the best approach is to do a custom designed and developed theme using something like Underscores as a starter theme combined with Advanced Custom Fields. There is just nothing like building up a website from scratch with just the features that the customer needs. No bloat…