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 its health reports to a central hub — a separate premium plugin the agency installs on a WordPress site of their own. Which means N … Read more

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 purchase decision, and it’s a number I’d pay without thinking about it. Then I sat down to plan customer acquisition and worked out what it … Read more

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. You reactivate it. Everything looks fine. Then it deactivates again. There may be no fatal error on screen. The site still loads normally for visitors. … Read more

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 only discover them when something breaks. Almost every other WordPress problem announces itself. A broken plugin throws a white screen. A bad theme update mangles … Read more

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 search engines to de-prioritise your healthy pages. The most common causes are bot sweeps, deleted pages with inbound links, and broken redirects. Let’s start with … Read more

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 the plugins list completely deactivated. Turn them back on, everything works, site’s fine all day. Next morning, off again. Somewhere between 3 and 6 AM, … Read more