Seasoned developer here, new to Wordpress. While there is lots to like with Wordpress, and the FSE environment, some of the architectural decisions baffle me.

1. While I understand the need for backward compatibility, mangling the "wp-posts" database table to contain everything under the sun, many of which are not "posts" at all, is clumsy at best.

2. Storing pages/scripts/stylesheets/etc in the database (yes the "posts" table), means a developer cannot reasonably use a source code control system like git to manage source code - an absolute requirement when bugs are introduced and things need to be backed out.

3. On top of these issues, every version of every page/script/stylesheet is stored in the database. Not in a way that you can easily revert back to a known/tagged version, but in a way that just bloats the database in a way that you are only using a small fraction of it at runtime, the rest is just dead baggage.

This was driving me nuts. I'm new to WP. I didn't even know the thing was called a sidebar till a few days ago lol (My sidebar had " About Me/Newsletter and Recent Post") . I want to customize my pg. as much as I can but the sidebar was popping up on every page & I wanted it gone. I know how to delete blocks but for some reason the sidebar was showing only when I went to "VIEW SITE" and not "desktop view" or "mobile view" .

I looked it up and a lot of the info on google is outdated. Glory be to God, I have the solution without reaching out to customer service or downloading a plugin. You can do it on a free WP account.

Step by step: Go to "Appearance" , "Editor" (You'll end up in "Design") , go to "Templates" ( here is where I saw the sidebar in all of the templates) Go to each template & delete the sidebar block from each template (which is what I did) . After I did this, Sidebar gone! I noticed that the blocks I can't delete in " Editor" I'm able to delete in "Templates" .

you can definitely track your progress on " View Site" as you're deleting. If for some reason you want to restore the sidebar on a certain page, go to that template , go to the 3 dots & click "reset". I pray this will help. Have an Awesome day!

Hello,

I’m struggling to understand the distinction between terms like "developer," "web designer," and others.

Personally, I build websites using WordPress, so I don’t write code. I might use shortcodes provided by certain plugins, or perhaps add some custom CSS for instance, within Elementor. I don’t start with pre-made templates, I build the pages myself using Elementor or Gutenberg when a theme only matches with it. I also use plugins to integrate specific features required for each site (such as e-commerce, rental systems, etc.).

Given this, would I be considered a "web designer"? How should I describe my role? And what is a web master ?

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I’m researching how agencies, freelancers, and businesses manage WordPress websites and Shopify stores.

I’m working on a platform intended to help with:

• monitoring website health
• performance and security reviews
• managing multiple websites
• AI-assisted improvement recommendations
• reviewing and approving changes before publication

Before developing further, I’d like to understand the real problems people face today.

What is the most frustrating part of managing websites or online stores?

What tools do you currently use?

What would you most like to automate or improve?

Please share your honest opinion in the comments. Critical feedback is especially welcome.

This is for product research only, not a sales pitch. Thank you for your time!

When uploading photos. JPG / sRGB; the image looks great. But gallery thumbnails of medium size previews looks over saturated. Is it changing the color tag?

https://imgur.com/a/HW9dpv8

This only started happening since the last month or so.

Anybody know what it could be?

If your site doesn’t auto-update, check now. During a full-package core update, older versions unpacked the new files (including setup-config.php) into a predictable folder under wp-content/upgrade/. Attackers poll for that window. Wordfence logged 18,500+ requests in the first 21 hours, and it’s in CISA’s KEV list since Nov 3.

Fixed: 7.1.4, 7.0.8, 6.9.11, 6.8.12 and backports down to 4.7.

Extra hardening, in your site-root .htaccess:

RewriteRule ^wp-content/upgrade/ - [F,L] 

Then check that /wp-content/upgrade/ returns 403.

Hello Everyone!

How do you deal with the plugins, which are updated regularly, but the compatibility with your WordPress version has not been tested - according to the authors.

For example, I am just checking again a plugin, which was updated a few days ago, but the compatibility with WordPress 7.1.4 has not been tested and if you look at the details, the compatibility with WordPress 7.0.8 is assured.

Thanks and wishing you a nice day and a great weekend ahead!

If your site doesn’t auto-update, check now. During a full-package core update, older versions unpacked the new files (including setup-config.php) into a predictable folder under wp-content/upgrade/. Attackers poll for that window. Wordfence logged 18,500+ requests in the first 21 hours, and it’s in CISA’s KEV list since Nov 3.

Fixed: 7.1.4, 7.0.8, 6.9.11, 6.8.12 and backports down to 4.7.

Extra hardening, in your site-root .htaccess:

RewriteRule ^wp-content/upgrade/ - [F,L] 

Then check that /wp-content/upgrade/ returns 403.

Hello.

My wife is a website designer using word press. She charges 300$ for full website creation and management afterwards for 6 months. If anyone wants a website built or is interested in getting help contact +220 871 0252

Thank you & Have a great day.

Hi everyone,

I'm stuck with a WooCommerce digital product issue.

I sell virtual/downloadable products (pdf/zip). I integrated a custom payment gateway. Checkout works fine - customer pays, order goes to Completed, I get the money, and the download link even shows up on the Thank You page and My Account page.

But when I click the link, it just says Invalid Download Link. File never downloads.

What I've already tried:

• Product is marked as Virtual + Downloadable • Tried both local files uploaded to WooCommerce and Google Drive direct links (uc?export=download&id=)

• WooCommerce > Settings > Products > Downloadable Products: Method set to Redirect,

• Manually granted permissions from Order > Downloadable product permissions • Tools > Regenerated download permissions

• Tested file names without spaces

• No cache on checkout / my-account pages (LiteSpeed + Cloudflare bypassed)

Is there a hook or fix I need to add to make it grant download access?

Hello, I have recently become webmaster for a publisher with a website that has averaged about 110,000 visits and 35 GB of monthly bandwith since May. I currently have the site on a LiteSpeed server, with LSCache and Quic cloud all tuned to the best performance I can muster on this shared hosting account (yes, I KNOW). Google PageSpeed shows:

• 1.1s FCP
• 1.5s LCP
• 86ms INP
• 0.04 CLS
• 0.6 TTFB
• 2.9s Speed Index

I am looking for ways to speed up the site with the limited access I have to a shared hosting environment, especially the backend. We have about 2,800 subscribers that receive a twice-weekly newsletter delivered via WordPress plugin. Sometimes it takes all day to send out the emails. I would be interested in learning how I might de-couple the backend functions of the site so that composing and sending the newsletter is faster.

A few pre-emptive answers:

• Cloudflare - yes, it is my primary DNS and the site content is delivered via Quic cloud proxy.
• No, I am not using a Page Builder plugin on the frontend - I hate them.
• No, we won't switch to Mailchimp or other hosted solution because of the investments already made in the email template and its integration with our membership database.

I have found mixed results when tinkering with heartbeat timing - backend doesn't speed up with a slower heartbeat. What else should I be looking at?

Thanks in advance for all your kind and helpful responses. 😄

Hi everyone,

I'm stuck with a WooCommerce digital product issue.

I sell virtual/downloadable products (pdf/zip). I integrated a custom payment gateway. Checkout works fine - customer pays, order goes to Completed, I get the money, and the download link even shows up on the Thank You page and My Account page.

But when I click the link, it just says Invalid Download Link. File never downloads.

What I've already tried:

• Product is marked as Virtual + Downloadable • Tried both local files uploaded to WooCommerce and Google Drive direct links (uc?export=download&id=)

• WooCommerce > Settings > Products > Downloadable Products: Method set to Redirect,

• Manually granted permissions from Order > Downloadable product permissions • Tools > Regenerated download permissions

• Tested file names without spaces

• No cache on checkout / my-account pages (LiteSpeed + Cloudflare bypassed)

Is there a hook or fix I need to add to make it grant download access?

does anyone know what is causing this issue and how to fix

does anyone know what is causing this issue and how to fix

2026 has been a year of change for those of us who build and manage websites; I have a feeling that many of you are on the move, migrating websites from one CMS to another or building without it. AI is enabling rapid changes on all fronts. Broad market-share numbers tell us very little about your experiences building and managing websites with different tools; that is why I hope that we, as a community, can close this information gap with our own open-source State of CMS survey.

stateofcms.com

Since 2016, the developer community has been conducting annual surveys on frameworks and programming languages. Many of you have probably participated in State of JS, HTML and CSS. But what about those of us working with CMSs? No equivalent survey exists for our community.

The anonymised results will be freely available on GitHub. I will also create and publish an interactive report, but I am especially excited to see what the community does with the data.

Hi everyone,

One of the biggest headaches when handing off WordPress and WooCommerce sites to clients is dashboard bloat. As soon as a few key plugins are installed, the admin sidebar turns into a wall of menus, settings pages, and upsell tabs that overwhelm clients and generate unnecessary support tickets.

To solve this cleanly without adding bulky third-party dependencies, I built Precise Expressions Admin Menu Reorganizer Lite.

Lite features:

• Create up to two effective custom menu rules.
• Move Comments under Posts (built in).
• Add the WooCommerce Catalog Hub with links to common product and store screens.
• Rename moved menu items and retain their capabilities.
• Preserve saved historical rules beyond the Lite two-rule entitlement, so upgrading, downgrading, or a Pro license change never deletes those rules.

The Lite version is 100% free and open-source on the official WordPress repository:

WordPress.org: https://wordpress.org/plugins/precise-expressions-admin-menu-reorganizer/

Would love candid feedback from fellow agency owners and freelancers on the setup workflow and edge-case compatibility with complex admin setups.

I’ve been building a WordPress monitoring tool lately, so disclosure: I have a product in this space.

One design decision became pretty obvious once I started working through failure cases: the site can’t be the only source telling you whether the site is healthy.

A plugin can report useful things from inside WordPress — installed plugins, core version, heartbeat, update state, and so on.

But there are also situations where that signal is exactly what you can’t rely on.

If PHP dies with a critical error, the site is unavailable, or the monitoring plugin itself stops running, an internal check may simply stop reporting.

So I ended up treating internal and external monitoring as two separate signals.

The WordPress agent reports what it can see from inside the site.

Separately, an external worker checks the site over HTTP and looks at the actual response, including WordPress-specific failure signals such as critical-error pages.

That separation has been useful because the disagreement between the two signals can be more interesting than either one alone.

For example:

• Agent is reporting normally, but the external check is failing.
• External site is responding, but the Agent has gone silent.
• Both fail around the same time.

Those are three very different situations.

It sounds obvious when you compare it to traditional infrastructure monitoring, but I’ve noticed a lot of WordPress health tooling still depends heavily on the site reporting its own condition.

For people managing client sites, how are you handling this today?

Do you run external uptime monitoring alongside a WordPress management tool, or do you rely mostly on the WordPress-side agent?

I'm trying to move a WordPress site from LocalWP to my live hosting account using a 478 MB backup file. Every time I try importing it, the progress bar freezes at exactly 66.53%. I've tried three times with the same result. I've already increased PHP memory and upload limits, checked cPanel error logs (nothing useful), and confirmed there's enough room to upload the file. The weird part is that the live website and WordPress dashboard still work perfectly fine, even while the import is frozen.

I'm wondering if it's a server timeout, temporary storage issue, or something else I'm overlooking.

Has anyone experienced something similar? Any suggestions for troubleshooting a large WordPress migration? I've reached out to my hosting provider too but figured I'd ask here while I wait.

Thanks in advance.