WordPress · Website building · Web development
Your site broke.
Here’s the fix.
Practical guides for the problems that actually stop a WordPress site: white screens, broken updates, themes that fight back. Written against a current install, tested before publishing.
Examples of WordPress theme layouts: a journal, a storefront and a studio site.
Topics
-
WordPress Tutorials
Step-by-step guides for getting things done in WordPress.
-
Troubleshooting
Fixes for the errors that take a WordPress site down.
-
Themes
Choosing, customising and replacing WordPress themes.
-
Plugins
Plugins worth installing, and the ones worth removing.
-
Website Building
Everything around the site itself: planning, launching, maintaining.
-
Website Tools
Reviews and comparisons of the tools site owners actually use.
Latest guides
-
WordPress Database Optimization: What Actually Slows Queries
A slow WordPress database is almost never slow because of overhead in its tables. It is slow because of autoloaded options, runaway transients, bloated meta and missing object caching — measure, then fix those in order.
-
How to Exclude a Page from Cache in WordPress (Every Layer)
Excluding a page from the plugin cache is half the job. The host cache and the CDN keep their own copies, so a page you excluded once can still be served stale from two other places.
-
WP Rocket Settings: A Safe Configuration, Tab by Tab
Turn on what cannot break anything, then the risky options one at a time, testing between each. A tab-by-tab starting configuration with the settings that need exclusions.
-
Reduce Unused JavaScript and CSS in WordPress, and the Other PageSpeed Warnings
The PageSpeed warnings about unused JavaScript, unused CSS, cache policy and script execution each have a WordPress-specific cause, a code fix, a plugin fix and a way to break the site.
-
Reduce Initial Server Response Time (TTFB) in WordPress
A high TTFB is either a cache that is not being hit or a PHP request that does too much work. Measure which one you have before changing anything, because the fixes do not overlap.
-
WordPress Core Web Vitals: Fixing LCP First
A failed Core Web Vitals assessment on WordPress is usually an LCP problem. Read the field report, split LCP into its four parts, and fix the part that is actually slow.