Technical tips

  • Onboarding WordPress VIP Go

    I recently helped migrate a client into WordPress.com VIP Go enterprise hosting. This hosting is for larger sites with hosting budgets starting around $25,000 per year. It’s an opinionated platform that applies perhaps the greatest degree of WordPress management available. Here’s notes I took on the process: For more details on WordPress VIP, see their […]

  • Local WordPress development via Homebrew

    Here’s a follow-up to my March 2022 article on LocalWP power usage. LocalWP has gotten too slow and eats-up loads of precious storage space. Some sites won’t shut down. The ones that do shut down take time to save backups each time. Starting up sites takes much longer than it used to. It’s become a […]

  • Avoid WooCommerce staging environments

    Over the years I’ve faced lots of problems with staging environments. A cure-all for me has been deleting them and using LocalWP for local sandbox environments. Plus it adds so many useful features! I’m inspired to write this post because to this day I hear technical support representatives ask to try something on staging, or […]

  • Database Cleanup 2023

    I’m presenting again on WooCommerce and WordPress database cleanup. This time my presentation is for our WooCommerce and WordPress Meetup group event. I’ve previously covered this topic in my WordCamp Los Angeles 2020 presentation and I posted on it in my blog post Cleaning up your WooCommerce database. This is a popular topic with evolving […]

  • Testing Custom Order Tables / HPOS

    Have you heard? 2023 is the year that High Performance Order Storage (HPOS) also-known-as Custom Order Tables (COT) becomes standard in WooCommerce. HPOS is opt-in based, but the core team has announced: “Orders will stop being synchronized to posts and postmeta tables in WooCommerce 8.0 in August 2023”. That sounds to me like our timeline for […]

  • Discontinuing products in your store

    Products come and go while search engine caches remain. It’s a popular practice to switch a product’s status to draft (un-publish it) or delete a product when it has an undetermined status or has become permanently discontinued. Search engine caches, bookmarks, and overall “juice” for the product page can be be damaged when URLs get […]

  • Emailing secure messages

    How many times have you received a text with a password, an encrypted spreadsheet file and a separate email containing the password (sitting in the same mailbox!), or an unprotected Google Sheet? There’s better solutions! Here’s some worth taking a look at: For heavier security have a look at asymmetric cryptography (like PGP) Apps or […]

  • You’re running PHP 8 by now, right?

    WooCommerce had a little blip in this week’s release of version 7.1.0 where the PHP requirement was bumped to PHP 7.4 prematurely. They’ve fixed it, supporting PHP 7.2+ at the moment, but took the opportunity to issue a warning that PHP 7.4 is losing security support in just two weeks time. See PHP supported versions. […]

  • WooCommerce Technical Growth Strategies

    Over time customers, order histories, and overall data will grow. Business conditions continually shift. Marketing experiments revolve and typically require new technical implementation to support, past ones to remove. How does one manage a growing website and keep it performing well, besides continually buying a bigger server? Following are some strategies to manage the growth […]

  • Defining plugin classes

    During my plugin triage work I group plugins into different classes before digging deeper into the pros and cons of each. Whether a plugin is good or bad for a particular site depends on how necessary it is, how deeply it’s being utilized, whether there’s any preferred alternative, and how difficult it would be to […]

Share this:

Blog categories

Partners

Partner directory