FeaturedWordPress
How to Change a WordPress Password
Four reliable ways to change a WordPress password: admin dashboard, WP-CLI, directly in the database with the correct phpass or bcrypt hash, and the lost-password email reset.
More in WordPress
How to Remove gsyndication.com Malware from WordPress (Complete Guide 2025)
Learn how to detect and remove the dangerous gsyndication.com malware from your WordPress site. Step-by-step guide for cleaning malicious code and preventing reinfection in 2025.
The Fake Cloudflare Verification Attack on WordPress (ClickFix): What It Is and How to Remove It
Visitors to your WordPress site see a fake 'Cloudflare verification' page telling them to paste a command into Windows Run or Terminal. That's ClickFix, the social-engineering campaign that first appeared in early 2024 and exploded across compromised WordPress sites by autumn. What it does, where the injection lives in your site, and how to clean it without missing the persistence.
How to Optimize WooCommerce: Why It's Slow and How to Fix It
A WooCommerce store slows down for specific, structural reasons. Here is the layered fix: hosting, page caching, object caching, the database, search, and the front end, and why one layer alone is never enough.
Do I Need ElasticPress? An Honest Decision Checklist
ElasticPress is powerful and, for most WordPress sites, unnecessary. Here is a straight checklist: the signals that mean you genuinely need it, the hidden costs, and the cheaper options to try first.
ElasticPress vs MySQL FULLTEXT: Which WordPress Search to Use
MySQL FULLTEXT search is built in and free of moving parts. ElasticPress adds a real search engine. Here is a practitioner comparison: relevance, typo tolerance, faceting, scale, and the cost each one carries.
Elasticsearch vs OpenSearch for ElasticPress: Which to Run
ElasticPress officially supports Elasticsearch, not OpenSearch. OpenSearch can be coaxed into basic functionality, but 10up does not recommend it for production. Here is the real status and what to run.
Off-Server WordPress Backups (3-2-1) With Verified Restores
The backup plugin running inside WordPress is the same WordPress the attacker just compromised. A 3-2-1 backup strategy with restic or borg, stored outside the trust boundary, and verified by monthly test restores. Configuration, retention, and the exact restore sequence after a compromise.
How to Use ElasticPress with WP_Query
Wire ElasticPress to WP_Query so WordPress queries hit Elasticsearch instead of MySQL. Covers installation, indexable post types, ep_integrate, the wp-cli index command, faceted search with aggregations, and when ES actually beats MySQL FULLTEXT.
WordPress File Integrity Monitoring That Can't Be Disabled from Inside the Server
Wordfence, Sucuri, and every in-WordPress security plugin can be disabled by malware running with the same privileges. The fix is monitoring at a layer the attacker can't touch: AIDE, maldet, or a custom cron-driven script running as root. With working configurations for each.
Why Wordfence (or Any Security Plugin) Keeps Getting Silently Disabled
WordPress security plugins running inside WordPress can be disabled by anything that runs inside WordPress, including the malware they're supposed to catch. The four mechanisms attackers use to silently turn off Wordfence, Sucuri, Jetpack, WP Activity Log, and similar tools, plus the server-side monitoring layer that doesn't depend on WordPress being trustworthy.
A Hardened wp-config.php Template (with Comments on Every Choice)
wp-config.php is the first PHP file WordPress loads. The defaults from the stock installation are minimal; the hardened defaults take five minutes to apply and close most of the attack surface that lives below the plugin layer. A complete annotated template covering disabled file editing, forced HTTPS, secure salt rotation, debug behavior, and the file permissions that matter.
How to Find the Original Entry Point in a WordPress Compromise (Access-Log Forensics)
A cleanup that doesn't identify the entry point is temporary. The methodical access-log analysis that finds exactly which plugin CVE, credential vector, or upload path got the attacker in, with the grep one-liners, the timestamp correlation against file modification times, and the cases where the entry is in a log other than the access log.
How to Detect and Remove Fake WordPress Admin Users (Hidden Backdoor Accounts)
Fake administrator accounts that appear in wp_users without anyone creating them are one of the most common signs of a WordPress compromise. The detection SQL, the SQL that finds the mechanism that's creating them, and the cleanup that has to happen at both the user level and the persistence level for the account creation to stop.
Why WordPress Malware Keeps Coming Back: A Field Guide to Persistence Mechanisms
WordPress malware that survives cleanups isn't stronger malware; it's malware with persistence. A complete catalog of where attackers hide the re-infection logic, wp_options autoload, WP-Cron, server crontab, .htaccess auto_prepend, mu-plugins, drop-ins, custom REST endpoints, and modified wp-config, with detection scripts for each.
Cross-Site Contamination on Shared WordPress Hosting (Why Cleaning One Site Isn't Enough)
If one site in a shared hosting account gets compromised, every other site under the same Linux user is at risk. Cleaning a single site without addressing the shared file system leaves the door open for reinfection from any sibling site. The structural problem and the realistic fixes, open_basedir, suEXEC, isolated users, and when to move hosts.
WordPress: Sending HTML Formatted Emails Using the wp_mail() Function
How to send HTML emails from WordPress with wp_mail and the wp_mail_content_type filter. Covers SMTP setup, deliverability with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and modern transactional providers like SendGrid, Postmark, and Resend.
WordPress: Moderate Comments Using Regular Expressions
Use the built-in WordPress comment-moderation regex fields and the pre_comment_approved filter to approve, hold, spam, or trash comments based on PCRE patterns.
How to Remove WordPress Malware: The Practitioner's Playbook
A step-by-step methodology for finding and removing malware from a compromised WordPress site, written by a Security+ certified engineer who's been cleaning sites since the early WordPress 2.x era. Covers every attack vector: file backdoors, database injections, .htaccess hijacks, wp-config tampering, and recurring reinfection. Originally written in 2016, updated regularly as new patterns emerge.
WordPress AMP: Enable Automattic's AMP Plugin for Custom Post Types (CPT)
How to add AMP support to WordPress custom post types using the official Automattic AMP plugin, with a 2026 reality check on whether AMP is still worth the engineering investment.
wp_insert_post Consuming Large Amounts of Memory: How I Actually Fix It
Fix wp_insert_post OOMs during bulk imports: chunk in batches, flush the object cache, defer term/comment counting, suspend cache invalidation, disable revisions, and (where appropriate) bypass the WordPress API with direct $wpdb writes.
Fix 'Call to undefined function get_option()' in WordPress
How to fix the 'Call to undefined function get_option()' fatal error in WordPress. Covers premature WP function calls, the wp-load.php bootstrap, the modern WP-CLI alternative, and the plugin-developer checklist.