How I Traced a Data Leak Between Two WordPress Sites to a Redis Cache Key Collision
· 9 min read
Multiple WordPress sites sharing one Redis instance can silently leak data between each other. Here's how I diagnosed and fixed it.
Blog
Technical deep-dives from real client work. How I diagnosed, fixed, and prevented WordPress issues.
How Replacing WP-Cron Fixed a WooCommerce Store's Missing Emails, Failed Renewals, and 4,200 Stuck Scheduled Actions
· 9 min read
A WooCommerce store had delayed order emails, failed subscription renewals, and thousands of stuck Action Scheduler jobs. The fix: replacing WP-Cron with a system cron.
Why WooCommerce Emails Stopped Sending — Diagnosing Silent WP-Cron Failures
· 8 min read
How I traced missing WooCommerce order emails and failed subscription renewals to a silently broken WP-Cron, and replaced it with a reliable system cron.
How I Reclaimed 14GB of Database Space from a Bloated Action Scheduler
· 10 min read
A WooCommerce store's database had grown to 18GB thanks to 26 million rows in the Action Scheduler tables. Here's how I cleaned it up and prevented it from happening again.
How 12MB of Autoloaded Options Were Adding 3 Seconds to Every Page Load
· 8 min read
A WordPress site was loading 12MB of abandoned plugin data on every request. Here's how I found the bloat in wp_options and cut page load times in half.
How a 12-Million-Row Action Scheduler Table Brought a WooCommerce Store to Its Knees
· 9 min read
Diagnosing and fixing WooCommerce Action Scheduler table bloat that grew to 12 million rows, causing 30-second page loads and checkout timeouts.
How a WooCommerce HPOS Migration Silently Broke Order Tracking and Customer Data
· 14 min read
Diagnosing silent data loss after migrating a WooCommerce store to HPOS — broken tracking plugins, corrupted customer lookup table, and the fixes that restored it all.
How I Migrated a 40,000-Order WooCommerce Store to HPOS Without Losing a Single Order
· 10 min read
Step-by-step HPOS migration for a large WooCommerce store — finding incompatible plugins, fixing custom code, and verifying data integrity with WP-CLI.
WordPress security updates broke thousands of sites — here's what happened and how to protect yours
· 6 min read
WordPress 6.9.2 security patch caused white screens across thousands of sites. Why it happened and how maintenance plans prevent the damage.
The WordPress white screen of death — what it is, how to fix it, and how to stop it happening
· 8 min read
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing the WordPress white screen of death, from a developer who deals with it regularly.
Why 83 PayPal Subscriptions Silently Failed — A WooCommerce PPCP Vaulting Investigation
· 5 min read
Investigating why 83 PayPal subscription renewals were failing in WooCommerce. The root cause: the PPCP plugin never successfully stored vault tokens for any subscription.
WooCommerce Database Meltdown — From 376-Second Queries to Under 1 Second
· 6 min read
How I diagnosed and fixed a WooCommerce database crisis where MariaDB was consuming 1479% CPU with queries running for 376 seconds. The root cause was a transient race condition.
How I Cleaned a Cryptominer with 14 Persistence Mechanisms
· 5 min read
Discovering and removing a sophisticated cryptominer from a Linux server that used 14 different persistence mechanisms including systemd services, cron jobs, and immutable file attributes.
PHP-FPM Worker Exhaustion — When a DDoS Kills Your Database
· 6 min read
How too many PHP-FPM workers caused MariaDB to be killed by the OOM killer. The math behind pm.max_children and a formula for getting it right.
Bulk Updating Alt Text for 2,846 Images with WP-CLI
· 9 min read
How I used WP-CLI to automatically generate and apply meaningful alt text to 2,846 images on a WooCommerce site, handling edge cases like size suffixes and generic filenames.
CloudPanel Server Hack — How an Attacker Created an Admin Account
· 7 min read
Investigating a CloudPanel server compromise where an attacker created an admin user via clpctl. Tracing the attack through auth.log, checking for backdoors, and hardening the server.
WordPress Shipping Rate Calculation in Background Jobs — The Missing Session Problem
· 12 min read
Solving the challenge of calculating WooCommerce shipping rates programmatically in Action Scheduler background jobs where WC()->session doesn't exist.
LiteSpeed Guest Optimization vs Splash Screens — Fixing FOUC
· 6 min read
How LiteSpeed's Guest Optimization CSS handling caused a flash of unstyled content on sites with splash screens, and the settings adjustments that fixed it.
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