WordPress site health
Practical guides for site owners who care about what’s running under the hood
Plain-English articles on database health, plugin management, SEO protection, and keeping your WordPress site running cleanly.
All posts · Database · Plugins · SEO & 404s · For DIY owners · For developers · For businesses
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I Found Three Vulnerabilities in My Own Plugin Before Shipping It
Every AJAX handler in my plugin had a nonce check. Every one of them also verified manage_options. I’d been deliberate about that from the start, and when I sat down…
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You Got Approved. Now Learn Subversion.
You wrote the plugin. You submitted it. After some back-and-forth on the name and a rejection or two, you got the approval email with your repository URL — and then…
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Six Rejections: What It Actually Takes to Get a Plugin Into the WordPress.org Directory
I built a plugin to solve a problem I kept hitting on client sites. It detects database errors, plugin mass-deactivations, 404 floods, and PHP errors, and it reports them in…
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Shipping a Freemius Plugin on WordPress.org Without Getting Rejected
If you landed here from a rejection email that says plugin_updater_detected, skip to the second section. You don’t need to gut your SDK and you don’t need to build a…
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Your Site Is Returning 200 OK and It Is Completely Broken
Traditional uptime monitoring answers one narrow question: Did the server respond? Most basic uptime checks request a URL—often the homepage—at regular intervals. If the server returns a successful HTTP status…
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WordPress Plugin Keeps Deactivating After an Update? Check the Database
WordPress Plugins Keep Deactivating at 3 AM? Check the Database There is a specific kind of WordPress problem that can waste an entire afternoon. A plugin deactivates after an update.…
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Debug Log
Quick answer: The WordPress debug log records PHP errors, warnings and notices to a file. Turning it on takes three lines in wp-config.php. Reading it usefully means knowing which severity…
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Plugin Conflicts
Quick answer: A WordPress plugin conflict happens when two plugins (or a plugin and your theme) interfere with each other — usually after an update. The symptoms range from broken…
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MyISAM tables in an InnoDB world
Quick answer: WordPress database table errors — including overhead accumulation, collation mismatches, and table corruption — build up silently and slow your site before causing visible failures. Most site owners…