A page cache that wasn’t caching, a plugin silently adding 30 seconds to every admin operation, a PHP feature that crashed the server with a 4-gigabyte ghost allocation — and the methodical profiling work that found each one.
Read Details
A nonprofit’s WordPress site moves from a shared server with 34 other sites to a dedicated VPS. Along the way: a server stack built from scratch, a two-major-version PHP jump with zero fatal errors, and the painstaking work of proving a staging environment is actually safe before trusting it with production.
Read Details
A plugin audit uncovers 395 MB of database bloat, 88 plugins, orphaned integrations dating back three years, and a shared server at 95% capacity. Here’s what a thorough pre-migration assessment actually looks like.
Read Details
A routine WordPress audit uncovered full-site backups publicly downloadable for six months, a contact form routing submissions to a stranger, phantom login entries, and email authentication that looked fine until it wasn’t.
Read Details
A nonprofit’s donation form became a testing ground for stolen credit cards. What looked like a sophisticated bot attack turned out to be one person running scripts after dinner. Here’s how I shut them down.
Read Details
A wedding photographer’s contact form was drowning in spam despite captcha protection. The investigation revealed something more sophisticated: paid human solvers and residential proxy networks that make spam look legitimate. Here’s how we stopped it.
Read Details
A nonprofit’s emails began failing authentication, triggering warnings of a possible compromise. The investigation revealed a long-standing SPF omission and a well-intentioned workaround that caused DMARC failures.
Read Details