Step-by-Step Guides to Building and Growing Your Website
Practical fixes for the WordPress problems that cost site owners time: posts that miss their schedule or need a safe update date, bloated databases (autoloaded data, wp_postmeta, WooCommerce sessions and orders), and knowing when a PHP upgrade is due.
The category also covers the email side of running a site: setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, finding a DKIM selector, adding an IP to an SPF record, staying under the ten-lookup limit, and reading a DMARC rejection so contact-form and order emails stop bouncing.
A line by line decode of the Microsoft 365 SPF record, what sits behind the include, why it costs one lookup, and how 38 real organisations extend it.
Add an ip4 term before the all, keep one SPF record, and read the slash correctly. Includes how 40 real domains write theirs and how to check the change worked.
A DMARC rejection means neither SPF nor DKIM aligned with your From domain. Here is how to read the bounce, find the sender, fix it, and what 40 real domains publish.
Google Workspace gives you a 410-character DKIM record that many DNS panels reject. Here is the setup order, what 27 real domains publish, and how to check your signature lines up.
Microsoft 365 will not publish your SPF, DKIM or DMARC records for you. Here is the order to set them up in, the exact records, and why your website contact form is what usually breaks it.
A DKIM selector is the label that tells receivers which public key to fetch from your DNS. Here is how to read yours from an email header, what real selectors look like, and why guessing fails.
Subdomains do not inherit your SPF record, and a record with more than ten DNS lookups fails for every sender. Here is how to count yours, what common providers really cost, and how to clean it up.
Find your WordPress PHP version in under a minute with Site Health, your hosting panel, or WP-CLI, then see which versions are still supported in 2026 and how to upgrade without breaking the site.
A WooCommerce store carries database weight that general WordPress cleanup guides miss. Here is how to trim the sessions table without emptying live carts, clean Action Scheduler safely, and check where order data lives before anyone edits it.
A huge wp_postmeta table is not always waste. Here is how to rank what is in it by key, delete only orphaned and uninstalled-plugin rows, keep an undo copy, and check WooCommerce HPOS before touching order data.