Image Optimization for Web Servers
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…
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Moving 500+ sites to Kinsta
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…
ACF Custom Fields Stored in Custom Table
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.…
Extracting Stats from a Fathom Instance
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…
WordPress as an Experimental Rclone HTTP Remote
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…
Bulk Processing WP Engine Usage Stats
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…
Removing Timthumb from a Custom Theme
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 That said it’s outdated and has performance issues when used with a modern web host like Kinsta.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…
WP Engine to Pantheon Migration
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…
Reset WordPress to Default
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…
Website Screenshots with Gowitness
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…