Step-by-Step Guides to Building and Growing Your Website
Website Maintenance covers the ongoing work that keeps a site running after launch — updates, backups, uptime monitoring, and a staging site to test changes safely.
It also covers troubleshooting when something breaks — database errors, the white screen of death, login lockouts, plugin conflicts. Most sites that run into real trouble weren’t attacked or badly configured, they were just left unattended too long.
PHP 8.2 loses security support on December 31, 2026, and PHP 8.1 is already fully end-of-life. What that actually means for a WordPress site still running an older version, and how to check and upgrade safely.
WordPress 7.1 broke WP Rocket sites within hours of release, some locked out of wp-admin entirely. What actually caused it, and a practical checklist for surviving any major WordPress update without becoming the next fire.
Uptime monitoring turns downtime from a customer complaint into a five-minute fix. Here’s how to set it up properly, real pricing across the two most common tools, and a licensing detail worth checking before you rely on the free tier for a business site.
A backup schedule nobody has tested is a false sense of security. How often to back up, where to store copies, and the one mechanism most backup plugins never mention: what they actually skip.
Every unused plugin and theme sitting in your WordPress install is a security risk and a performance drag. Here’s how to find them, decide what to keep, and safely remove the rest.
Why WordPress’s built-in fatal-error recovery mode can’t catch a database connection error, and the three real causes — credentials, server availability, table corruption — in order of likelihood.
How to turn on WordPress’s built-in debug log, read it without living in FTP using Query Monitor or Debug Log Viewer, and catch problems while they’re still a one-line fix.
Instead of blindly deactivating plugins one at a time to find the slow one, Query Monitor’s “Queries by Component” breakdown names the actual culprit directly — genuinely faster than the usual trial-and-error method.
WordPress 6.8 switched password hashing from phpass to bcrypt: the classic “set an MD5 hash in phpMyAdmin” recovery trick is outdated practice now, and here is the current recommended way to reset a password directly in the database.
Learn how to identify and fix WordPress plugin conflicts using a step-by-step deactivation method, FTP access, and WordPress debug mode — no developer skills required.