60 WordPress Developer Jokes Every WP Dev Has Lived

The client said they just needed a simple website. Forty plugins later, we are still defining the word simple.

I installed a new plugin. It conflicts with the other forty plugins, and also with itself.

We picked Elementor. Then we picked Divi for one page. Then we picked Beaver for the footer. The site now loads three page builders before it loads the page.

My theme has a page builder. The page builder has a page builder. Somewhere down there, I think there is still HTML.

The client wants the logo bigger. Just slightly bigger. Forty-seven slight increments later, the logo is the page.

I migrated the site to a new host. The serialized data did not survive the trip.

wp-config.php is the keeper of secrets. It is also the keeper of database credentials I committed to a public repo in 2014.

Did you turn on WP_DEBUG? Did you turn it off before deploy? Nobody answers the second question.

A meta_query took eight seconds. I added an index. It took nine seconds, because now MySQL has to update the index.

Transients are a cache. I do not trust them. They expire when they feel like it, and they persist when I beg them not to.

Yoast SEO took over the editor. I cannot find the publish button. The publish button is now a green dot.

The plugin auto-updater ran at 3 a.m. The site went down at 3:01 a.m. The client noticed at 3:02 a.m.

I found malware. It was in wp-content/uploads/.cache. The hidden directory I never told WordPress to create.

Custom post types are easy. Custom post type archives are not. Custom post type rewrite rules are a small religious experience.

REST API is the new admin-ajax. admin-ajax is the new admin-ajax.

WooCommerce is fast. WooCommerce with one plugin is slower. WooCommerce with the full stack is a story I tell at conferences.

Gutenberg block development is easy. You only need React, webpack, JSX, a build pipeline, and the willingness to redo it next year.

Full Site Editing is the future. The future is taking its time.

I am the developer. I am also the SEO. I am also the support team. I am the entire IT department of a coffee shop in Brooklyn.

The form plugin broke. I have seven backups of the form plugin. The one that works is the one I cannot find.

I deactivated all plugins to debug. The bug went away. The client also went away.

The theme update overwrote my changes. I had child-themed everything except the one file I needed.

Permalinks broke. I flushed the rewrite rules. Permalinks broke differently.

The white screen of death is back. It is no longer white. It is a polite error message that tells you nothing.

I asked for a staging site. The client gave me access to production and asked me to be careful.

There are forty-seven page builders. Each one is the last one I will ever need.

The client wants a slider on the homepage. Six sliders. With autoplay. With music.

I optimized the database. wp_options is now only 200 megabytes. It used to be 800.

Someone left autoload yes on a 4 MB option. Every page load fetched 4 MB. I am not telling you who.

The plugin I depend on was abandoned in 2019. The replacement plugin was abandoned in 2021. The new replacement plugin requires a subscription.

I wrote a hook for save_post. It fires twice. I added a guard. It fires three times. I gave up and added a transient.

The site is fast on my machine. The client uses a phone from 2013 on a hotel Wi-Fi. The site is not fast on the client's machine.

I installed a caching plugin. The caching plugin needed a caching plugin.

The previous developer wrote custom code directly in functions.php of the parent theme. The parent theme just updated.

I tried to update PHP. Three plugins broke. Two plugins were the ones the client paid the most for.

The contact form has been silently failing for two months. The client found out from a customer who emailed them directly to complain.

I added a custom field. It is now in postmeta. There are 1.4 million rows in postmeta. The custom field is one of them.

Multisite seemed like a good idea at the time.

The hosting company has its own caching layer, its own object cache, and its own opinion about my .htaccess file.

The client asked if WordPress is secure. I said yes. The client asked if their site is secure. I said let me get back to you.

I wrote a Gutenberg block. By the time I shipped it, the block API had changed twice and the block editor had a new name.

Every WordPress project starts with a fresh install and ends with a 2 GB folder nobody understands.

wp-content/uploads has 84,000 files. The media library shows 312. The other 83,688 are from a plugin that left in 2019.

The .htaccess file has comments from four previous developers. None of them are me. I am not adding the fifth.

The client's most important plugin was last updated in 2011. It still works. I have stopped asking why.

The theme readme says it has shortcodes. That is not a feature. That is a notice that the site cannot be migrated without the theme.

The plugin says compatible up to WordPress 5.8. The site is on 6.7. The plugin still runs. Nobody is happy about it.

The customizer is deprecated. The site editor is the future. The theme uses neither and renders fine.

Block patterns are the future of content. The client copies and pastes from a Google Doc.

theme.json is 800 lines. The theme renders one color and one font. The other 798 lines are aspirational.

It is 2026. jQuery is still loaded on the front end. I checked. Twice.

I tried to authenticate to the REST API. Cookie auth, application passwords, a JWT plugin, and an OAuth plugin all disagree about how. I used a nonce and looked away.

The client wanted a contact form. The contact form needs a spam plugin, a GDPR plugin, a CAPTCHA plugin, an SMTP plugin, a database logger, a CRM connector, and a notification plugin. The form has one field.

I have explained the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org to the same client for the eighth time this year. The ninth time is scheduled for next Tuesday.

There is a custom user role called editor_temp_v2. It was created in 2018 for one freelancer. The freelancer left in 2019. The role has three live users.

wp_options is 2 GB. I ran the optimization plugin. wp_options is now 2.1 GB, because the optimization plugin logs to wp_options.

The post revisions table is 8 GB. The posts table is 40 MB. Every revision of every draft since 2014 is still in there, waiting.

WP-Cron runs on page load. The site has no traffic. The scheduled emails from last March are sitting in a queue, patient.

All the real code lives in mu-plugins. The plugin directory is decorative. The theme is essentially a stylesheet with delusions.

There is a must-use plugin that fixes a plugin that breaks every other plugin. Deactivating the must-use plugin is not on the table.