I tried rebuilding a website using a new child theme on Wordpress Studio (it seems logical to work locally and only upload changes when they're made).

I'm trying to export an XML file from Studio, import that from wp-admin on the live site, and then reconcile the missing images afterwards (which I still haven't solved, as any newly singly uploaded images will have different URLs and it can't see SFTP'd images at all). This seemed to work. Better Search Replace found only two references to localhost, both in posts, so I replaced those.

This doesn't transfer my child theme, and when I do, my website starts trying to access my local computer. I removed one reference to localhost from the theme.json, and now nothing in any file on there has a reference to it. It's still trying. I'm not sure what to do at this point.

Every other plugin or upload option fails. Cloudways' own migration plugin can't do Studio. The database editor fails because, while it says it supports the collation, it won't recognize it when I try to upload. Updraft's migration wanted access to the local computer (so I think still had failed URL replacement) and broke some (not all?) images. Duplicator is looking for a function that I think hasn't existed for years from what I see on Google (mysqli_real_escape_string) and failing me because it requires it. WPvivid gives a blank screen if I try to restore using it. (I haven't tried paid versions of plugins, because at this point I think I may need a Wordpress alternative).

It works locally. Talking to a friend who's been doing this successfully for years, it should be as easy as export, import, let Wordpress sort out the URLs itself, maybe toss in a theme, upload and replace images manually. I'd expect SFTP to solve most of my updating needs anyway. What am I missing?

Hello! Anyone who uses Woocommerce, have you experienced the Square plugin for payment methods randomly disconnecting?

It’s becoming a problem for our small business. We have a web company that is supposed to maintain the site but our customers end up being the ones to alert us and catch when our website checkout page doesn’t have any payment methods. I then have to go in manually to reconnect Square. There seems to be zero timing consistency, the web company told us that it might be a 90 day issue when plugins update or it could be a reset on the 2nd of each month?

If anyone has found a fix for this, I’d love to let them know so that we can have a functioning website 24/7. It’s hard to tell if they are just pulling us along and giving excuses or if this is really a bug within Wordpress that others are experiencing too. Thank you!

Not a "WordPress is dead" post. It served me well for a long time. My sites are small, mostly for reading, and updated once or twice a month, and at some point WP became more babysitting than publishing for them.

What pushed me was a shared server that kept going down. What had been nagging me for longer was the steady drip of Wordfence emails about login attempts, and updating plugins by hand after automatic updates burned me once. I moved everything to pre-built static pages on Cloudflare.

What I don't miss: plugin update anxiety, and fighting the theme with !important.

What I do miss, or at least respect more now: the plugin ecosystem. Someone else builds, maintains and patches every feature for you. Without it, every dynamic thing I add (comments, forms) is code I own. And the owners of the smaller sites I moved can't edit them themselves anymore, so I'm effectively their CMS now.

For a shop, memberships or a team of editors who don't use git, I'd still pick WordPress. Curious where others here draw that line.

Longer write-up, including the trade-offs: https://diego.horse/cloudflare-built-emdash-i-built-neighdash/

I’m using a Salient theme and WPBakery for my website. I’ve made buttons for people to download different PDF’s with text next to the buttons. When I’m in “editing mode” everything looks normal (image 1). When I save it and view it all my text shifts to the next row (Image 2).

I have my button in one column and my text in a second column.

Any help appreciated.

Supposedly YouTube defaults to not show closed captions automatically when a user watches an embedded video if they're not logged in to YouTube. I haven't found this to be the case. Is there a query string or something to append to the end of the embed URL to have it default to 'off' when a user is not logged in?

I run an audio drama website. On the site, the different shows are playlists made in the Wordpress Audio Player.
I'm looking for a way to track plays for the different shows in GA4.
I know I'll have to create an event, but do I need a separate one for each show, and what's the easiest way to set up the event(s)?
Please be kind, I'm pretty new to all this stuff.
Thank you in advance.

Hey everyone, I am looking for a (preferrably free) plugin to set up small-scale academic workshops users can apply for directly through the portal. We used to use Google Forms for this purpose but are trying to move away from Google. Any suggestions?

Hi everyone, hoping someone can help.

My Dad passed away yesterday, and through his life he ran a fairly popular blog on Wordpress with music reviews.
My family and I would like to keep it active for as long as possible to allow ourselves and others to read it and keep his voice going.

Just wondering if anyone was able to offer some advice on if that’s possible or is there any steps we should take to make it so?

Appreciate any help.

Hey everyone, I am new to Reddit so no idea how all this works lol. I have been working with WordPress for about a year, so I’m still figuring out how people handle this on larger projects. The custom code approach makes sense, but how do you keep track of why those changes were made? I’ve been thinking about keeping that documentation in Git so it stays close to the code instead of becoming something only one person remembers. I read it here on Reddit about Mintlify while looking into this since the docs can stay in Git and it can flag pages that might need updating. Do people actually use a setup like that with WordPress, or am I overthinking it for most projects?

Hey r/Wordpress 👋

If you build client sites with Bricks Builder, this might save you some hours. (Heads-up: it's Bricks-only, not for Elementor/Gutenberg.)

BricksSnap is a free tool I've been working on. You pick:

• a style direction (clean, warm, bold, soft, editorial)
• your brand color, fonts, radius and spacing
• an industry: vehicle registration, trades, medical practice, restaurant, agency, business. Sample copy in English or German.

…and you get a live preview of the whole page. Then export it as native Bricks JSON: real elements, no custom HTML blocks, no inline-style soup.

What makes it different from template packs:

• Styling lives in global classes (bs-hero__title etc.), using CSS variables with fallbacks. Change the brand color once in Bricks and the whole page follows.
• It ships a design system: color palette plus global variables you can install into Bricks.
• 40 section layouts and 12 ready-made designs, including a dark one.
• Quality checks before export: contrast, heading order, alt texts.
• The designs also show up in Bricks' remote template library. Add one URL and insert them directly in the editor.

There's also an AI generator if you prefer to describe a page in words. It works with your own API key, your ChatGPT account (locally), or Claude via MCP. The Studio itself needs no AI and no account.

Free and source-available on GitHub. Use it for your own and your clients' sites, commercial work included. The only thing the license doesn't allow is hosting it as a paid service yourself.

🔗 Try it: https://bricks-snap.vercel.app
💻 Source: https://github.com/Hamido212/BricksSnap

Would love to hear what's missing: which industries, sections or styles would you actually use? Honest feedback welcome, including "this layout looks off" 😄

(Not affiliated with Bricks.)

I'm looking at revamping a website. I've done a bit of work with Google ai studio for creating apps and it's great but I don't want to go down that route (or maybe I do) with this website revamp. We've lots of plugins on the site at the moment and I'd like to reduce the number down. Currently we use Astra & Spectra for the site. It's fine but can be really fiddly for the non techy to update with containers in containers and it's just a game of memory when you don't update something for a while. I've explored different themes and builders, I hate the big bloated builders. I don't mind spending a bit of time on this and just wondering what is the go to these days. I've seen a really nice website I like, it's super slick but a shopfiy site so no theme I can use to try and create something similar. What's your go to combo these days or do you use something like twenty twenty four and go from there?

Hi i just got internship placement and the company ask me to do a rebrand for their old school website. Before this i always ai like antigravity and cursor for making a website for my academic project and just learning about domain,server to host it. My company is zero knowledge about IT and when i show my project basically an ai the feel amazed and right now they dont want to use wordpress cause it cost them a lot. But when i do some research wordpress is suitable with high security with a server. What should i do any advise for beginner using wp? i dont have any knowledge about it btw

Wordpress site, Jetpack builds the sitemap, but Google only recognizes sitemap 1-9, not 10-19. So strange. I've tried every method I can think of to get Google to notice them.

Live URL fetch on 10-19 is successful. But if I manually submit each as an individual sitemap, I get "couldn't fetch." It's been weeks! Please help.