Hey everyone, bit of a panic post. I'm not a web person, I do marketing, but I recently ended up in charge of our company's WordPress site after the agency that built it left.

This morning the whole site was down with "this user has been suspended". Our host (Network Solutions) says it was excessive bandwidth, but support can't tell me where it came from and says to wait 24–48 hours for their specialists.

The weird part is we only get around 50 visitors a month.

Stuff I did in the last few days, in case it's my fault:

The site was still getting visits late that night, then went down overnight.

Could any of that have caused it, or is it more likely bots hitting the site? And what's the easiest way to stop this happening again? I've seen Wordfence and Cloudflare mentioned, but I'm scared of breaking our company email if I mess with DNS.

Any advice appreciated, I'm learning as I go 🙏Shared host suspended our site for "excessive bandwidth" with ~50 visitors/month. Screaming Frog, UpdraftPlus, or bots?Shared host suspended our site for "excessive bandwidth" with ~50 visitors/month. Screaming Frog, UpdraftPlus, or bots?

i'm building a site that will involve multiple users being able to login, upload information, and communicate with each other. in a more specific way, i want people to be able to create a product, add information about the product and a picture, and review other products. additionally i would like a community message board area. think ravelry or threadloop dot app.

i have been doing a ton of research and i think i have a general idea of which base theme to start with, but i was wondering if anyone could let me know which platforms you think are good for this type of thing.

i don't want to use buddypress because even trying to download their base platform is a nightmare of broken links, and errors on install (even the github release won't install correctly). i don't want to start out with an inferior product. so not including buddypress, what would be a good foundation theme for this type of project?

thank you in advance.

Hi all 👋 I'm in charge of updating products on my company's wordpress site and all of a sudden one of the product menus is busted and I can't edit stuff as normal. Any idea what causes this/how to fix it?

Thanks!

I've noticed that the usual anti-spam setup solves only part of the problem for community sites, particularly sites that use member plugins such as BuddyPress.

Registration can be protected with CAPTCHA, email verification and rate limiting, but once an account exists, private messaging becomes a separate attack surface.

I've seen patterns such as very new accounts contacting multiple members, sharing phone numbers or email addresses, moving people to WhatsApp/Telegram etc. and repeating essentially the same message across conversations. Often types like dating scams or crypto scams.

Out of sheer frustration with the lack of working solutions, I ended up building a small Better Messages-specific addon to deal with this message-level spam. The author of Better Messages has also looked at it and gave me some feedback on the implementation and I incorporated that feedback into the plugin.

The approach I choose was to apply new-account limits, detect contact details and external messenger links, detect repeated messages, show configurable safety warnings and notify admins. The checks can also be configured to log rather than block. My gut instinct to logging first turned out to be important, because security rules can have false positives and other nasty side effects. Being able to see what would have been blocked before actually blocking anything makes it much easier to tune the rules for actual situations, butnot bugging regular visitors while testing.

I'm not posting this because I think another generic anti-spam plugin is needed. The interesting part for me is whether message-level spam needs a different approach from registration spam.

If you run BuddyPress (or likewise) + Better Messages, I'd genuinely like to hear what you're seeing on your own sites. What types of spam are getting through your current setup? What are your biggest frustrations?

Hi everyone,

I haven’t been able to find a suitable solution, so I’m asking here. I’m using the Paid Memberships Pro plugin on a blog site, currently connected to Stripe for recurring online payments. I now need to switch to Mollie.

Is there a plugin or integration that supports Mollie with Paid Memberships Pro? I haven’t been able to find one, and I’m not very experienced with coding. I could try building a custom integration with AI, but since this is for a client and I’m short on time, I’d prefer to avoid that if possible.

Any suggestions or solutions would be greatly appreciated!

Hey r/Wordpress,

Like most of you, I found that every site I build ends up needing the exact same functions.php snippets: removing emoji scripts, killing XML-RPC, taming Heartbeat, dropping unnecessary image sizes, and hiding dashboard widgets.

I finally got tired of copying and pasting the same boilerplate, so I packaged it all into a single plugin called SlimPress.

It gives you 108 toggle switches across 13 categories. It is 100% free. There is no pro tier, no upsells, no admin nag banners, and zero telemetry.

What it covers

• Front-end: Emoji scripts, generator tags, RSD/shortlink/REST links in <head>, global styles, core block CSS, Dashicons, and jQuery Migrate for visitors.
• APIs & Core: XML-RPC, REST API for logged-out visitors (with a namespace allowlist), per-location Heartbeat control, WP-Cron on page load, oEmbed, and application passwords.
• Comments & Feeds: Granular comment control (site-wide or per post type), pingbacks, Gravatar, feeds, author/date/attachment pages, and search.
• Revisions & Media: Revision limits, autosave intervals, disabling the auto-generated 1536/2048px image copies, and managing custom image sizes.
• Admin: Dashboard widgets, admin bar items, block editor extras, admin emails, auto-updates, and file editing.
• WooCommerce (if active): Disables shop assets on non-shop pages, order attribution scripts, WC Analytics, the Marketing hub, marketplace suggestions, and controls Action Scheduler data retention.

Why I built this instead of using existing "disable bloat" plugins

Most optimization plugins overpromise or break things silently. I wanted a developer-first approach:

• Honest Impact Badges: Every switch tells you exactly what it does, and more importantly, what it might break. It will even warn you if an active plugin relies on the off. If a toggle is just for tidying up the codeand won't actually speed up the site, the badge honestly says "None – cleanup only."
• Built-in A/B Performance Testing: It loads your own pages with and without SlimPress's features in the same run. If the performance difference is too small to be meanins "within noise" instead of making up a fakescore. It also breaks down CSS/JS on each page by plugin, theme, and core to show exactly what can be removed.
• Safe Defaults & Presets: Activating the plugin changes absolutely nothing – every switch starts off. You can apply presets (Blog, Brochure, Headless, WooCommerce) ld change before applying them.
• Zero Footprint: It adds no CSS, JS, or markup to your public pages. Everything is done with runtime filters, so if you deactivate it, WordPress goes back to normal on g is permanently written to your core tables oroptions.

What it deliberately doesn't do

There is no caching, minification, "remove unuseiting. I also didn't include switches for thingsthat actively make sites slower or harder to cache (like removing ?ver= strings or disabling native lazy loading), even though other plugins sell those as "optimizations."

It requires WP 6.8+ and PHP 7.4+. WooCommerce is completely optional.

👉 SlimPress on the WordPress.org repo

I'd really appreciate some feedback from this coested in hearing if there are any switches youfeel are missing, or if you run into any edge cases where the "what might break" warning was inaccurate for your specific stack.

i’ve been messing around with using ChatGPT as a lightweight CRM / booking manager.

the set up I came up with: client data in Airtable, bookings to Google Calendar, Gmail for email. The nice part is obvious pretty quickly - instead of opening three tools aeparate apps and hunting around, I can just ask things like “who’s booked this week?”, “prepare a booking update”, “update their record”, “draft a follow-up”, “<client name> sent the deposit” etc.

But I didn’t really trust was the state of everything after a few changes. Say, a client reschedules over email, then I update the calendar event, then something gets updated in Airtable. at that point I want to know which system is actually right, whether all three match, and whether ChatGPT missed anything along the way.

once I started thinking about how to make that reliable, I ended up adding rules, checks, confirmations… which is basically the boring CRM stuff I was trying to avoid in the first place.

so TLDR: I wouldn’t use ChatGPT as the actual CRM. but as a lightweight CRM interface or booking manager sitting on top of the real systems, it actually makes a lot more sense to me.

wrote up the whole thing here if anyone’s interested: (apparently cant post it in the body, will try comments)

I’ve been looking into how smaller companies handle freight invoices, especially LTL.

Curious if this is actually a common headache or if I’m overestimating it.

Stuff like:invoice comes in higher than the quote

reclass / reweigh charges

liftgate or limited access fees

duplicate or unexpected accessorials

When this happens, does someone on your team actually go back through the quote/BOL/POD and dispute it with the carrier?

Or do most companies just pay it unless the amount is obviously wrong?Would be really interested to hear how people actually deal with this in practice.