Title. When something like the php notice came out Oct 2026- I had next to no idea what the risk was, how to protect my site, etc. I'm scrolling through the sub and seeing people talking about have to use plug-ins to scan their database and files to check for malware being injected- I don't even understand how malware gets injected or how to protect my site from it. I've read about spam issues from contact forms and needing XYZ layered protection- I couldn't understand if these were plugins or something else. I've tried to do some research but it's essentially like trying to read a foreign language which takes understanding three other foreign languages to even begin.

I literally know nothing; I'm just a person who got a domain, a host, hopped onto wordpress and started designing. I haven't gone plug-in crazy, pretty picky about that because I'm already paranoid, but the point still stands that I've done nothing special except for start building. It's aiming to be a research archive.

It concerns me whether it's safe or responsible for me/anyone like me to be making a website.

TIA

On my some posts in my stupid blog I justify an image to the right of text. This allows text to automatically wrap around and under the image, like a newspaper. However, text gets squished to the side in portrait mode on a tablet or small mobile.

If i separate image and text into columns, they stack before the text smooshing can occur. This is good. However, text doesn't wrap in landscape mode so there's a long blank area below the image.

What do I want? On wide views I like the text-wraparound feature. As the view narrows toward portrait, I want image and text to stack like columns before text gets smooshed on the side. Can WordPress do this combination?

I already tried combining a justified image/text group with columns, yet it breaks the layout in weird ways.

Hello, i'm using a ten year old e commerce template that the developers no longer offer updates for. Is it okay to keep using it?

For reference, we use a number of different hosts and most of them update WP Core within 6 hours. We've been noticing that WP Engine always seems late and have been running them manually.

I opened a ticket today to talk to support about the timeframe for v7.4.1 updates, and they told me that automatic updates for the release will occur weeks from today to allow for testing. I pressed them a bit on the RCE fix (no published CVE or POC) and the eMudhra certificate revocation after they claimed this not to be a critical update, but no real answers. They have escalated the ticket though.

For my blog (www.moppermijmer.eu) I have a specific image set as icon. But when I look in the jetpack reader, the only image is the default placeholder. The image also doesn't show up when I post a link in social media. Where can I set an image to be the default representation of my blog? (Putting an image in each post is going to put a lot of pressure on my already fragile workflow.).

Forms, SEO, backups, security, page builders, caching. Which one would be the first to go if a solid free alternative existed, and what does it cost you a year?

I need help to build a online client evaluation form.

The basic function is when client input the necessary information and submit the form, it will automatically give a result based on the information given.

Anyone knows what plugin could achieve this function? Paid one is fine.

Thank you.

Hey,

I am looking to get into web design and development but am coming from a design only background. I'm a professional graphic designer and know all the design side of UX/UI and web but don't have much knowledge on the technical aspect of building a site from my designs.

I have tried looking at all sorts of video tutorials but nearly all of them seem to be paid ads now or require a subscription to properly use the tools like Elementor. Does anyone have any decent tutorials or courses to learn wordpress without needing a paid subscription to various products?

Hello, I must've changed something from the stock Astra (Sierra Industry) theme, and now the header doesn't seem to continue showing the top part of the image. My main page is fine though, but not all of the other pages. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Much appreciated!

The 'Details' block consists of two parts, a "header" line of text which is displayed regardless of whether the block is collapsed or not, and a space where you can insert a hidden block within it. What I want to know is if it's possible to format the text in the header line so that it's aligned to center.

First a question. What is the most effective way to restrict a page to logged in users or users with a particular role?Do I have to use a plug-in or is the good code out there that I can find and use to do the job? Which is most efficient?

Next let me say thank you to the members of this sub for invaluable tips and information provided in the past. Though I have used WP since it's early b2 fork days I have not kept up with all the changes to the infrastructure so I appreciate being able to ask questions here to upgrade my knowledge.
Thanks

I use XAMPP every day, and its control panel kept costing me time: MySQL dying with “shutdown unexpectedly” and corrupted tables because Stop kills the process, no way to change PHP versions, and editing httpd-vhosts.conf and the hosts file by hand for every project.

So I built a replacement that keeps the same layout:

• Stops MySQL/MariaDB with a clean shutdown instead of killing it
• Installs and switches between several PHP and MariaDB versions (rolls back if something breaks)
• Sets up local sites like https://myproject.test with a trusted certificate in one click
• Edits php.ini settings and extensions from one window
• Tells you why Apache won’t start (runs httpd -t first) and who holds port 80
• Tray icon, light and dark theme

It’s a single signed exe, MIT licensed, built with .NET 10 and Avalonia. Unofficial, not affiliated with Apache Friends.

https://github.com/ClearanceClarence-Software/Modern-XAMPP-Control-Panel

Feedback and bug reports welcome, especially from people with older XAMPP installs.

I have a website that has content (images, pdfs, videos) available for anyone to download and reuse. Is there a way that a viewer can download a video directly from our site? We are currently uploading to our site using a plugin, but we've maxed out on our hosting storage. I know vimeo allows you to download videos, but you have to click to open the vimeo url to get to a download option. Is there a way to embed the download button from vimeo into our site?

I’ve been running my own crawler over the homepages of ~14.8M domains from Google’s Chrome UX Report list, and 34.4% of sites are self-hosted WordPress. I measured TTFB (from a European probe) and matched each site to its real-user Core Web Vitals data from CrUX.

A few insights:

1. Caching matters more than the theme. I compared the 10 most-used themes. Cached, they all respond in 267 to 355ms. Uncached, they range from 964ms (GeneratePress) to 1.9s (Woodmart).

Theme differences mostly only show up when there’s no cache. Meanwhile, 38.3% of WordPress sites have no caching I could detect.

2. Cache plugins depend on the server they were built for. On LiteSpeed servers, LiteSpeed Cache is among the best performers, but on non litespeed servers it’s worse than no cache at all. Similar results with Siteground’s SG optimiser plugin.

3. Page builders, by LCP pass rate (share of sites with a “good” Largest Contentful Paint):
ACF-based sites: 72%
Classic Editor: 68.8% (inferred from no block or builder markup)
Oxygen: 67.4%, Bricks: 66.2%
Gutenberg: 64.7%
WPBakery: 49.1%
Elementor: 44.5% (26% of WordPress sites)

4. CDN caching works best. When a CDN serves the page from its cache, 99.5% of WordPress sites respond in under 800ms. With a caching plugin it’s 77.9%, and with no caching at all it’s 36.6%.

Full WordPress report section, including the per-server cache plugin charts: https://theweb.report/#wordpress

If you run one of these setups and your experience doesn’t match, I’d love to hear it.

Site also has a free audit tool which baselines your site against the whole 14 million site corpus, hope it’s useful!

This security release features fixes for multiple issues.

I have a premium plugin on the WooCommerce Marketplace. Where do you find testers for it? Do you give them just the plugin ZIP, or a ready environment such as a staging site ?

I’d also like to know how you collect useful feedback. Thanks!

I’ve been working with WordPress for a while, and 2026 has felt like a turning point. Between the plugin supply-chain attacks in April (the Essential Plugin backdoor and the Smart Slider 3 Pro incident), the ongoing governance drama, and the usual update anxiety, I’m curious how people in the trenches see it.

If you had to pick the 3 worst pillars damaging WordPress today, what would they be?

Some candidates to get the conversation going, but feel free to ignore them:

• Plugin security and supply chain trust (ownership transfers, no code signing)
• Plugin fatigue and fear of updating
• Performance and legacy architecture
• Governance and community trust
• Slow innovation compared to newer platforms
• Something else entirely

Not looking for a “WordPress is dead” debate. I still think it’s a great platform. I’m just interested in what’s actually costing you time, money, or clients.

What would your top 3 be, and why?

#wordpress #today #problems

Hi! Ive gotten a bit acquainted with Wordpress, but its UX still leaves room to be desired. I am not sure if its a bug, but can you change toe width and height metrics to anything other than px? I want my image to scale according to view width. Thanks!

Hey everyone,

I recently received an email from a company called COPYTRACK claiming to represent YayImages regarding an allegedly unauthorized image used on our travel website.

They're claiming that the image was used without a valid license for Germany and are offering two options:

Pay €481.50 for a one-year image license.

Pay €350 as compensation for past usage and remove the image.

They've also given us a deadline to respond (November 2, 2026) and mentioned potential legal action if we don't comply.

I'm trying to figure out whether this is a legitimate copyright claim or some kind of scam. I understand that COPYTRACK is an actual company, but I'm unsure how seriously to take this specific email.

Has anyone received similar emails from COPYTRACK or YayImages? Did you respond, ignore it, dispute it, or negotiate the amount? What happened afterward?

Any advice or personal experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I've made a WP-Pods-website for historical data collection as a replacement for a handcrafted PHP-system. The data is entered by volunteers who are pretty old and don't like modern technique. They are used to all having the same really simple password which would be breached in a split second with brute force. For Wordpress I would like to use strong passwords + 2FA ofcourse.

But since the volunteers are all in the same room at the same time every week I thought couldn't we use some kind of application which grants access for all connected computers with one log in?

Does anyone know a solution what makes this possible?