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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GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User: Why One AI Company Sends Several Bots
Quick answer: Major AI companies now run separate bots for separate jobs: one to gather training data, one to build a search index, and one to fetch pages when a…
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Why Bots Exist: What Every Crawler Is Getting Out of Your Site
Quick answer: Every bot that visits your site is run by someone who expects to get something from it: a search index, training data, an answer for a user, competitive…
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Who’s Visiting Your WordPress Site at 3 A.M.? A Field Guide to Bots
Quick answer: Most overnight traffic on a typical WordPress site isn’t people. It’s search crawlers, AI crawlers, uptime monitors, SEO tools, link-preview fetchers, and scanners probing for weak spots. Most…
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PHP Hoisted My Function, and My Plugin Silently Did Nothing
I was assembling a new plugin — six classes, a loader, the usual structure. It installed. It activated. No errors, no warnings, nothing in the log. It also did absolutely…
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Why I Chose HMAC Signing Over Application Passwords for Site-to-Hub Reporting
I’m building an agency dashboard for my monitoring plugin. The shape is simple to describe: the free plugin runs on however many client sites, and each of those sites pushes…
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The Math That Says Don’t Buy Ads for a $34.99 Plugin
I priced my plugin’s Pro tier at $34.99 a year. That felt right — it’s in line with what comparable WordPress plugins charge, it’s low enough not to require a…
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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…