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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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…
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WP-Cron
Quick answer: WP-Cron isn’t a real cron job. It only runs when someone visits your site, which means scheduled tasks on a low-traffic site can be hours late — or…
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404 Floods
Quick answer: A 404 flood — hundreds or thousands of 404 errors generated in a short period — wastes your crawl budget, dilutes your site’s authority signals, and can cause…
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Every Plugin on the Site Deactivated Itself, Every Night, Between 3 and 6 AM
A client site started turning itself off. Not the site — the plugins. All of them. Every morning I’d get a report that something was broken, log in, and find…