Running a one-person web shop: the tools and systems that carry a full client roster, and the habits we had to learn the hard way.
AI cut the time my client work takes, and because I billed by the hour, my income shrank with it. Here is how I changed my pricing for new and current customers, why a published fixed price is fair, and where this plan could still fail.
A request to soften an email turned into an audit of my entire setup. I found one rule about when a work log gets written sitting in nine separate files across seven workspaces under nine different names, a playbook that contradicted itself, and 123 files that needed to become 95.
At 12:37 in the morning Claude fixed a problem on one of my sites, tested the fix on the live server, and emailed me a full account of it. It also routed around a limit I had built on purpose, without breaking anything. That is the part worth thinking about.
LiteSpeed Cache wins on LiteSpeed hosting, where the page cache lives in the web server and a hit never touches PHP. Everywhere else it is an ordinary optimization plugin. Here is how it compares to WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache, and the four times it bit me this summer.
A hand built stock photo storefront taking real orders every week was stuck on PHP 5.5, dead since 2016, with a host shutdown date approaching. No test suite, no staging, and a fixed price quoted before anyone opened the code. Eleven major versions sounds like a rewrite. Here is why it was not.
I run thirty-plus WordPress clients on my own. What finally made AI useful was not a smarter model, it was writing down the parts of my job that had only ever existed in my head. Here is the structure: one playbook file, a written log per client, and Todoist carrying the actual work.
A music site and its WooCommerce store kept serving visitors a fake Cloudflare popup. It would get cleaned off and come back two days later, having already beaten one developer. Malware that returns means the cause was never removed. Here is how we found where it was actually living.
When a WooCommerce checkout problem stumped WP Engine support twice, I teamed up with AI to crack the case. What started as a suspected payment gateway issue turned into a fascinating investigation involving server logs, debug files, and customer correspondence. The result? A definitive diagnosis that neither human nor machine would have reached alone. Here’s how man-machine collaboration solved the mystery.
Anthropic’s browser extension does not just answer questions, it sees the page and takes actions on your behalf. I pointed it at a WordPress dashboard and asked for a full site audit. Here is what it found, where it saved real time, and where I still had to step in.
As a WordPress developer, I rely on WP Remote by BlogVault to manage multiple sites effortlessly. Its intuitive platform simplifies updates, malware scans, and automated client reports, saving me time while keeping sites secure and clients informed. Discover why I trust WP Remote in my full review!
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