My person running my local social dance community's website has expressed his desire to hand-off the domain, and the website itself is old and convoluted and cannot be transferred, so I'm building a new one on WordPress, and doing my best to replicate the important functions of the old website. My skilllevel with WordPress is mixed as I've built multiple websites using existing themes and plug-ins before but I'm not fluent in which tools are best for what purpose and it's been a minute since I last did it.

This is a little hard to articulate because I'm not sure what all of the functions are that I need or what the different ways to accomplish the same set of goals are. But on the old website, there was a frontend login and only specific people were given accounts. Once logged in, you could choose the category of event you wanted to post, you'd input time, date, venue etc, you'd get a text-editing window to put event details with basic formatting and a photo, and once published, the info about the event would post under the correct category of event. Most events were recurring so they'd stay visible until the creator or the website admin removed them, but special events would expire when the date had passed. The recurring events could be edited at any time by the users who posted them and some users edit them frequently. The "posting" ability was never used for news or updates, the way a blog post would typically be.

I found UsersWP for the front-end log-in and posting capability but there were a few things I was uncertain about:

1. Would this allow me to limit *who* could register as a user? It's very important that only known local event organizers specific to this community can use the site to post their events.

2. Is a "post" the closest equivalent out there for what i've described above for listing and editing the events? Or is there some kind of form submission that would allow the contents to be published without a human having to go add it to the page that could give me more control over what info had to be included (venue, time, date, etc)? Would a form submission still be editable by the users later on?

3. Can these posts or form submissions be automatically sorted into different categories (ex: dances, classes, special events) with existing filters or is that another plug-in? Similarly, is it possible to set some of the posts to "expire" or no longer be visible past a specified date?

If someone would be up for helping me pick apart the functions I need and which tools accomplish that, I'd really appreciate it!

So long story short I migrated my website form Shopify to Wordpress and then initially it was almost 75 for mobile and 90 for PC.
So naturally i optimized it and no it is 40-60 for mobile and 80 for PC.
Here is what I did:
(My product pages are most bad in this.)
1. I did changed the format of images to webp (using Webp optomizer ) and when I used elementor then it really went down.
2. When I use searched online I almost did all of the things.
3. Using JS and CSS minify only decrease the speed drastically.
4. Using lazy load my speed is also very bad.
5. I used custom php to exclude the hero and other first load images form the lazy load.
6.I did all the cahce setting in litespeed chache and still nothing.
7. My most bad thing is LCP and FCP.
8. I also disabled the fonts which were additional.
I also have a bit more then average CSS and a bit JS in my site.
Can you please hepl me in this regard.
here are some screenshots.
And using VPI and lazy load really cause it to slow.
can someone at least tell me some tool to diganost the problem

EDIT: When we run ads the it's almost a 10sec delay to website Soo also bad

Hello experts,

we have had an opencart store since 2012, 32k products and database is keep building.

We are thinking of migrating to WP but number of reasons

1 - setup a corporate website for lead generation

2 - setup shop on subdomain

What are your honest thoughts of this move?

​

Hey everyone,

I'm setting up a fresh WordPress site with the Twenty Twenty-Five theme and I'm stuck on publishing a page. Hoping someone here has run into this before and can point me in the right direction.

The setup:

Fresh WordPress install, Twenty Twenty-Five theme

Creating a new page, selecting a pattern (following the official tutorial)

Clicking "Publish" gives me:

Publishing failed. Could not update post in the database.

Are you ready to publish? Double-check your settings before publishing.

In the browser console (F12 → Network), the actual culprit is an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error.

Affected URL (anonymized): https://my-site.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=XXX&action=edit

What I've already tried / ruled out:

Permalinks reset (Settings → Permalinks → "Post name" → save). No change.

All plugins disabled temporarily. Error persists – so it's not a plugin conflict.

Site Health: No critical issues, only 5 "recommended improvements" (inactive plugins/themes, missing opcode cache, no page cache detected, server response time OK). The REST API is not flagged as broken there.

It's a brand-new, empty page using a default pattern – no legacy content, nothing exotic.

My suspicion:

Since everything on the WordPress side looks clean, I'm leaning toward a server-side issue. The 500 hits exactly when the editor tries to write the page to the database via the REST API (/wp-json/...).

Questions for the hive mind:

Has anyone seen this behavior with Twenty Twenty-Five (or Block Editor + patterns in general)? What was the root cause?

Which server-side settings should I check first? I'm thinking:

PHP error log / debug.log

Firewall / ModSecurity / WAF blocking POST requests to /wp-json/

Cloudflare (if in front) – Bot Fight Mode / security rules

WP_MEMORY_LIMIT / max_execution_time

Database charset (collation) – utf8mb4 vs. utf8

Is there a way to export the Site Health report (e.g. as a file) to hand off to the host/admin? I've only found the dashboard view so far.

Any known workaround to publish the page in the meantime (e.g. Classic Editor as a stopgap)? I know that's just a band-aid, not a fix.

I've already reached out to the backend/server admin to check logs and the firewall. But if anyone here has hit this exact error, I'd love to hear what solved it.

Thanks in advance!

UPDATE: Blank page also fails with 500 – so it's not the pattern

Hey everyone, thanks for the quick replies – all three were genuinely helpful. Quick update since a few people asked for follow-up:

What I tested based on your suggestions:

Blank-page test (u/CombinationParty7358 – the first reply): Tried publishing a completely empty page, no pattern, no content. Same 500 error. So it's not weird Unicode characters in the pattern – it's something more fundamental in the write path. Good call, that narrowed it down a lot.

debug.log before ModSecurity (u/Jealous-Machine-5192 Took your advice and prioritized the PHP log over the ModSec rabbit hole. I've asked the server admin to pull wp-content/debug.log and the PHP error log around the timestamp of the failed publish. Will update once I have the output.

DB charset (u/ – answer b): This is now my top suspect given the blank-page result. Asked the admin to verify:

define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8mb4'); in wp-config.php

tables actually on utf8mb4_general_ci / utf8mb4_unicode_ci (not just utf8)

Will report back if that's the culprit – your "exact same thing last month" story is very much on my mind.

Site Health export: Found it – Tools → Site Health → Info gives the raw dump to copy. No export button, as you said. Thanks for the pointer.

Classic Editor workaround: Keeping it in my back pocket. If we need the page live short-term, I'll activate it as a stopgap – but I'd rather fix the real cause first.

Current status: Waiting on the server admin's log output. The blank-page result makes me lean even more toward a server-side write/permission/DB issue rather than anything content-related. Will post the final solution here once we've nailed it – so the next person with this error has a reference.

Thanks again, this sub is great.

Update:title: [Update] My "500 on every publish" wasn't a DB-schema issue after all — it was a MySQL tmpdir problem on the server

A while back I posted here asking whether a DB-level fix (SQL) for a 500-on-every-publish error was legitimate, or whether I'd just be masking a deeper issue. Got some great input — here's the follow-up, because the answer turned out to be neither of the things I expected.

Original problem:

Fresh WP install, Twenty Twenty-Five theme

New page + pattern → "Publishing failed. Could not update post in the database."

Console: HTTP 500 on the REST API call

A completely blank page also failed ← the key data point

Permalinks reset, all plugins disabled → no change

The DB suspects (from this thread and others):

wp_posts.ID missing AUTO_INCREMENT

Charset mismatch (utf8 vs utf8mb4)

What it actually was: The server admin found this in the MySQL error log:

text Can't create/write to file '/var/tmp/mysql.QTwenq/MLut5EBo' (OS errno 2 - No such file or directory) MySQL couldn't create a temp file for the UPDATE query because the tmpdir path was missing / not writable. That's why every write failed — including a blank page. Neither AUTO_INCREMENT nor charset had anything to do with it.

The frustrating part: after the first tmpdir fix, the error became intermittent — sometimes publishing worked, sometimes it didn't. Still chasing that down (checking tmpdir persistence, cleanup processes, and PHP resources like memory_limit / max_execution_time).

The "-2" URLs (/345-2/, /123-2/) and the leftover drafts? Normal WordPress behavior — they actually prove writes were partially succeeding. The DB was never fully blocked, just flaky.

My takeaway for anyone hitting "500 on every write":

Check the server logs first (MySQL error log, PHP error log) — before touching DB schema or plugins. The tmpdir error was sitting there the whole time; I just didn't have access.

A DB-schema "fix" would have masked the real problem here, not solved it. So my original question was the right one to ask — but the answer was "neither: it's infrastructure."

If it's intermittent, think resource/timing issue (disk space, permissions, timeouts), not a structural defect.

Will post a final update once the intermittent failures are fully gone. Thanks again to everyone who pushed me toward the logs instead of guessing.

Greetings ☺️

Rank Math Pro version was apparently impacted by a supply chain attack affecting some users who had recently updated the plugin. Rank Math has a write up on their site that users may wish to review. WordFence provided the following summary:

Rank Math SEO PRO 3.0.123 - Unauthenticated Embedded Malicious Code (9.8, Critical)

Rank Math SEO PRO for WordPress is affected by a supply-chain compromise in a subset of version 3.0.123 packages downloaded or updated between October 15, 2026 at 20:02 UTC and October 16, 2026 at 07:12 UTC. Rank Math states that the affected plugin files contained malware that could compromise a website if the plugin was activated and directs sites that activated an affected package to treat the website as compromised. The malware may establish persistent access, communicate with rank1cdn[.]com, recreate hidden backdoors on page visits, and expose WordPress credentials, database credentials, API keys, and other secrets accessible to the web server. Rank Math identifies three malicious wp_options keys, hidden PHP backdoors, unauthorized administrator accounts, a fake WordPress core file, PHP-executable .cache files, and a system cron marker as incident indicators. Only packages obtained during the vendor-confirmed window are claimed as affected; version 3.0.123 alone is not sufficient to establish compromise. Rank Math removed the affected files and released version 3.0.124 as the clean replacement.

Anyone that has time can take a look at my site and find out what’s wrong with it?

MikeCunsolo.com

We clean up hacked WordPress sites for our clients and since July we've been fighting the same malware family over and over. It calls itself "SC" in its own files. If you've ever had a site get hacked again right after it was cleaned, some of this might sound familiar.

The weirdest one was a browser tab. We'd done a full cleanup, and then the malware plugin got uploaded again from a real admin's computer, logged in as that admin. We were about to tell the client their laptop was infected. It wasn't. That admin still had a tab open on the site from back when it was hacked, and the bad code in that tab was still running. Every minute it checked whether an admin was logged in, and as soon as one was, it uploaded itself again. They closed the tab and that was the end of it.

So now after every cleanup we tell everyone who uses wp-admin to close every tab on the site and restart their browser. Sounds silly. Cost us days.

The other big one was a saved password. This thing records every username and password typed into the login page. A site we cleaned in September got reinfected this week by someone who just logged in with a password it had saved back then. The owner never changed it. So everyone who logged in while the site was infected needs a new password, and 2FA on the admin accounts would have stopped that login cold.

Other stuff that tripped us up

• It makes admin accounts that don't show on the Users screen, so the user list looks totally normal
• It hides in files with normal WordPress names, so you won't spot it scrolling through the files
• Part of it lives in the database, so restoring files or reinstalling plugins leaves that bit behind and it comes back later
• Newer versions run a background process on the server that puts the files back within minutes, and restarting PHP doesn't kill it. If a host cleaned your site and it was back the same afternoon, that's one way it happens

Anyone else seen the browser tab thing? That was a first for us.

I currently manage around 20 sites, mostly for small businesses and nonprofits. I've been experimenting with MainWP, ManageWP, and more recently WPMU DEV, trying to find the best balance of reliability, backups, security, and ease of use. None seems to check all the boxes.

There has been a recent history of security vulnerabilities in the management plugins themselves. WPMU DEV recently had a pretty serious authentication vulnerability .... ManageWP and MainWP have had similar issues over the years. To WPMU DEV's credit, their response and patch turnaround seemed pretty quick.

I'm not necessarily looking for the cheapest solution. I'd rather pay a reasonable amount for something reliable that doesn't require constant babysitting.

A few things I'm particularly interested in:

• How reliable have the connections been between your dashboard and individual sites?
• What are you using for backups, and have you actually tested restores?
• Have you had any security concerns with the management plugins?
• How useful are the monitoring and reporting features?

I'm currently testing WPMU DEV on a couple of my own sites, and so far I'm fairly impressed. But I'm interested in hearing from people who have been using these platforms longer, especially those managing 15–30 sites or more.

What's working for you, and what drives you crazy?

So i've decided to build my own website for my business, since budget is short, and am doing this is Wordpress.

This is going to be a service based business, with both one-time paying customers, aswell as subscription based clients, this then entails that prices need to be shown different for both. And this goes for both my services and add-ons.

So i need a booking plugin that allows me to show different prices, depending on subscription type, and then also combine the available times, so i dont get double bookings.

Currently building with Astra and Elementor, with some help from a well-known friend (ChatGPT).

Any recommendations on plug-ins for; 1. Login, 2. Booking?

Any tips or tricks shared are more than appreciated :)

I've had a blog on Wordpress for years and I just noticed today that I'm getting an error when I'm trying to reach the site. I can't even log into Wordpress or edit in any kind of recovery mode like I have in the past. I'm going to be honest - I'm panicking because I haven't been able to get backups to work on my site and I have no idea how to read the error log. It looks like my last email from my website was about 2 days ago, so I feel like it has to be a recent error. Would anyone have any guidance for me to go about recovering or fixing this issue?

Hey r/Wordpress,

A couple of weeks ago I shared SlimPress here, and the feedback from this community was awesome. Today I’m back with another tool I built out of my own day-to-day frustration: Cron Monitor.

Every time a scheduled post missed its publish window, a backup silently failed, or a site slowed down because of background tasks, I ran into the same wall. Existing cron plugins are great at showing you what is scheduled to run, but unless you pay for a Pro tier or an external SaaS, you're mostly flying blind on what actually happened when the job executed.

I wanted full execution visibility without paywalls, so I built it myself. Just like my last plugin, it is 100% free. There is no pro tier, no locked features, no nag banners, and zero telemetry.

What it covers

• Execution History & Timing: See exactly when jobs ran, how long they took, and any recorded errors—including fatal crashes and timeouts.
• Instant Failure Alerts: Get notified via Email, Slack, or Discord when a background job crashes, runs late, or stops running altogether.
• Plugin & Theme Ownership: Automatically maps cryptic cron hooks back to the specific plugin or theme that owns them by inspecting their observed callbacks.
• Orphan & Duplicate Cleanup: Identifies duplicate events and leftover cron jobs from long-deleted plugins based on what actually happens when they run, with a safe preview before you remove anything.
• Full Job Management: Add, edit, run on-demand, pause, resume, or bulk-delete events and custom schedules straight from the admin.
• Cron Health & WooCommerce Support: Tracks cron jobs that are progressively getting slower, flags server config issues blocking wp-cron.php, and automatically logs failed Action Scheduler tasks (huge for debugging WooCommerce).
• Developer Tools: Includes native WP-CLI commands, CSV exports, and a REST API for connecting your own external monitoring tools.

How it behaves on your site

• Zero bloat or phoning home: All logs stay strictly inside your local WordPress database. The only outbound requests are the optional failure alerts if you explicitly configure an email address or Slack/Discord webhook.
• Works out of the box: Once activated, just head to Tools → Cron Monitor. Duplicate detection, ownership mapping, and health checks work immediately, and your execution history starts building as your background jobs run.
  

Quick transparency note on AI: All the core logic and architecture were written by hand - AI was only used to help with UI mockups, class scaffolding/boilerplate, testing, documentation, and a final code review pass.

👉 Cron Monitor on WordPress.org

I’d love to get some feedback from others maintaining WordPress sites—especially if there are specific edge cases, WP-CLI flags, or webhook payloads that would make debugging background tasks easier for your workflow!

Hi all, just wanted to get some traction, mainly for getting feedback for improvements, for a set of 8 LocalWP addons I created to make working with LocalWP better, especially on MacOS and/or with composer based websites. You can find it on my github;

• https://github.com/rmpel/rasql-database-manager - LocalWP oriented database manager (but supports ssh/other DB connections as well) with MCP support
• https://github.com/rmpel/Local-Site-Beam/ - LAN/WAN site transfer
• https://github.com/rmpel/Local-Auto-Start - Auto start on LocalWP launch
• https://github.com/rmpel/Local-Trust-SSL-MacOS - Fix SSL trusting on MacOS
• https://github.com/rmpel/Local-CLI-Bridge - Replacement for defunct local-cli with many improvements
• https://github.com/rmpel/Local-Composer - Fixes for working with composer bases sites
• https://github.com/rmpel/Local-Router-Doctor - Fix annoying router mishaps
• https://github.com/rmpel/Local-Apache-Modules - Allow selecting Apache modules
• https://github.com/rmpel/Local-MySQL-Fixes - Permissions fixing for external/older MySQL clients

Yes, these are ALL Claude co-authored, if you don't like AI software, that's fine, just don't use it.

It's all free of charge, and also at your own risk, if you have issues, comments, suggestions, praise, etc; for all projects the issues tracker is open.

J'essaie de mettre à jour une de mes extensions sur wordpress. Cependant je me retrouve à tourner en boucle là dessus :

https://preview.redd.it/27gamt3yrsvh1.png?width=1083&format=png&auto=webp&s=1ddadcc70a549dc76720435acd4f06640a80c868

Et lorsque je sélectionne "remplacer l'extension..." je dois entrer mes codes. Ce que je fais mais une fois validé, ça revient sur cette page et je peux recommencer indéfiniment. J'ai bien sûr vérifié et sans surprise, l'extension n'est pas à jour.

I use GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks on my WP website and I'm curious to hear what you think about the premium version. Do you like it? What are some downsides you think it has (if any)? What advantages does it have? Thanks to all answers in advance!

I’ve been wondering about this lately.

When you visit a website that supports multiple languages, do you actually use the language switcher, or do you normally rely on browser translation?

For people managing multilingual sites, do you notice visitors manually changing languages often?

Curious whether traditional language switchers are still as important as they used to be.

I tried setting the query loop to "custom" instead of "default" and then changing these things that way, but that made all the posts show up in every category so I changed it back to "default." Pls help, TIA :)

Hello, WP commmunity. I'm looking for help on two fronts, one is design related and one is more technical.

One, I am looking to move a very old WP website from Vultr cloud hosting to Namecheap SharedHosting. The old website is running plugins, theme and WP versions from 2009-2014. (WP 4.0.38) Is there any easy way to move all of the WP files and linked image/media files without blowing this whole thing up? Yes, I do want to modernize it, but I wanted to move everything first. (I do have background FTP access, but do not have CPanel or management access on the Vultr anymore - long story.)

Two, disregarding all of the above, how can I build a new, up-to-date responsive WP site that looks and functions similar to the old school PrimePress theme with minimal coding or design knowledge? I want to basically recreate my old site layout, nav, rotating header, colours, etc. while also adding newer features and plug-ins.

Thanks, everyone, for kindly helping a noob like me.

How are you using AI to design your stores? For example, for a static website, you can use Claude or OpenCode along with a template to create a landing page really quickly, but for sites that actually require WordPress and WooCommerce, how are you doing that?

​

Hey everyone,

​I'm running a tour and safari booking website using WordPress and the Traveler theme.

​The Problem:

Previously, when a customer selected a tour, chose their dates, and number of guests, then clicked "Check Availability" or "Checkout", a large WhatsApp button would appear on the screen. Clicking it would redirect them directly to our company's WhatsApp with a pre-filled message containing all their selected booking details.

​What happens now:

The WhatsApp step is completely gone. Now, when they click checkout, it redirects them to the standard WooCommerce checkout page (asking for billing info, email, payment methods, etc.), which I don't want. I just want the WhatsApp flow back.

​What I've checked:

​I checked my plugins, and there is no specific "WooCommerce to WhatsApp" plugin installed. I only have "Chaty", which just adds a floating widget, not the booking flow.

​I dug into the Traveler Theme Options > Booking Options and WooCommerce Options, but I couldn't find any specific setting to route the checkout to WhatsApp.

​I checked the individual tour settings, but changing them to "Instant Booking" or "Enquire Booking" doesn't bring back that specific WhatsApp pop-up with the variables.

​Did I accidentally disable a built-in feature in the Traveler theme? Or was this likely a custom code snippet in functions.php that got deleted? How can I restore the flow that sends the checkout variables to WhatsApp?

​Any help would be hugely appreciated!