One of the best ways to ensure that a WordPress site–well any site really–stays performant and not broken is by leveraging caching. WordPress by default doesn’t do much caching other than some in-memory caching of objects, and the odd database caching via the Transients API. This site currently has three layers of caching: PHP OPcache […]
Something that I do often at work is to check HTTP headers for random things such as redirects, cache headers, proxies, ssl, etc. A common way this is done is by using the -I (–header) switch: The downside to this is that it uses an HTTP HEAD request, which can sometimes return different headers or […]
The WordPress WP-Cron system is a decently okay faux cron system, but it has its problems, such as running on frontend requests and not running if no requests are coming through. WP-Cron works by: on every page load, a list of scheduled tasks is checked to see what needs to be run. Any tasks scheduled […]
I know that auto-updates are a bit of a (#wpdrama) touchy subject, but I believe in them. In an mu-plugin I enable all auto-updates like so:
By default, WordPress does not cache WP_Query queries. Doing so can greatly improve performance. The way I do this is via the Advanced Post Cache plugin: By running this plugin (hopefully as an mu-plugin) with a persistent object cache, WP_Query calls, along with get_post() calls (only if suppress_filters is false) will be cached. Bonus! Now […]
One of the most important things to do when working on new themes, plugins, or debugging issues in WordPress is to turn on WP_DEBUG. According to the Codex: WP_DEBUG is a PHP constant (a permanent global variable) that can be used to trigger the “debug” mode throughout WordPress. It is assumed to be false by […]
One of the tasks that I have to do often at work is copying data to and from an SFTP directory. Previously I had a constant domain and port that I was able to connect to, an I could save this in a WinSCP profile for ease of use. Due to some recent architectural changes […]
One of the great things about Gutenberg is the ability to compartmentalize different types of content within blocks. One of the blocks that I’ve been using a lot of recently is the code block. This block by default will render something like this: While this is acceptable, it’s not very pretty. I used to use […]
I’ve written before about disabling plugin deactivation in WordPress, but I’ve finally used that knowledge in practice–on this site. The Problem Let’s say you’re going along your day, developing things, and fixing things, and making the world a better place when all of a sudden you get a call from a client that their website […]
At WordPress.com VIP one of the features we have on our platform is automated concatenation of Javascript and CSS files when registered through the core WordPress wp_enqueue__*() functions. We do this using the nginx-http-concat plugin: This plugin was written to work with nginx, but the server running derrick.blog is Apache. I’ve worked around this and […]