Practical WordPress guidance drawn from the sites we actually run: core updates, plugin choices, hosting, performance, and the fixes that hold up over time.
My Hall of Fame sports site, SportsHallz, sends me a nightly email report. After August 16 those emails stopped showing up, though the site itself was fine. Here’s what was wrong in plain English, how Claude and I fixed it, and the three other problems we found along the way.
More than 1 in 4 American adults has a disability, and some of them can’t use your website the way you can. Here’s what I found auditing four sites this summer, why the newer rules matter, and the simple checks I’d try on my own site first.
The Short Version One row was 65 percent of it. A single expired transient held 1,284 KB of a 1,966 KB payload. I turned nine orphans off instead of...
When a security problem turns up in software that half a developer’s clients are running, somebody is always at the bottom of the list. I built a system that removes the list. One fix now reaches all forty sites I look after within minutes.
A plugin fatal error ran every five minutes for nineteen days on my own site. WordPress emailed me the entire time and I deleted every notice unread. Nothing visible broke, one monthly subscription quietly failed to collect, and uptime monitoring would never have caught any of it.
The FTC ordered accessiBe to pay $1 million in 2025 over the claim that an overlay delivers compliance. A free scanner passed a page for Language while the language that page declared was flat wrong. I found eleven confirmed issues, and three of my own findings turned out to be false positives.
Once you have decided that snippets beat a child theme, you still have to pick the manager. I run all three across a portfolio of client sites. What actually separates them is where the code is stored, how you get it back out again, and which one hands out role based access.
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.
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.
Every WordPress site needs one SEO plugin, and that choice quietly follows you around for years. Both do the same core job, so I judged them on pricing across multiple sites, how much of the interface is selling you something, and how honest their AI features really are.
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