WordPress Maintenance

A post scheduled to publish at a specific time doesn’t go live when expected. A plugin’s recurring email notification never arrives. This tends to happen on low-traffic sites, and there’s a specific reason for it. Note: WP-Cron is WordPress’s built-in scheduling system. It sounds like the OS-level cron daemon, but the underlying mechanism is quite different. WordPress’s WP-Cron doesn’t work like a real OS cron daemon. On every page load, WordPress checks whether any scheduled task is past its due time and, if so, runs it. This is what’s known as “pseudo-cron” — and its weakness is that nothing runs without a page visit. Schedule a post to publish at …

A forgotten password, a security plugin that blocked your own IP by mistake, a plugin bug that turns the admin screen white — the causes vary, but the result is the same: you can’t log in to wp-admin. Note: WP-CLI is a command-line tool for managing WordPress, invoked as wp. It operates directly on the server, without going through a browser. This is exactly the situation where WP-CLI is useful. It works here because it never touches wp-login.php — it reads and writes the WordPress database and filesystem directly, so a broken login screen doesn’t affect it at all. Why WP-CLI keeps working when wp-admin doesn’t A normal login follows …

After a domain migration or HTTPS switch, “all plugin settings are gone” or “Elementor layouts are broken” is a common outcome. The cause, in most cases, is running a string replacement against the WordPress database without accounting for PHP serialized data. WordPress stores plugin configurations, custom field values, and widget settings in PHP’s serialized format. Standard SQL replacements — phpMyAdmin’s find-and-replace, raw UPDATE statements, sed on a .sql dump — rewrite the string value without updating the length metadata that serialization embeds alongside it. The result is a database that appears intact but returns false on every read of the affected values. wp search-replace handles this correctly. Understanding why makes …

Verifying a WordPress major upgrade — a 7-step post-upgrade checklist You followed the step-by-step WP-CLI procedure from W4, the terminal printed “Success: Core updated successfully,” and the session is over. Stopping there is the most common place for post-upgrade problems to slip through undetected. WP-CLI’s “success” means the core files were replaced. It doesn’t mean the site is working. Whether the database migration completed cleanly, whether plugins are compatible with the new core, whether forms submit, whether carts process — these require human verification after the command finishes. This checklist pairs with the pre-upgrade checklist from W1. Where W4 covers what to run, this covers what to check when the …

Getting ready for WordPress 7.0 — three things to check now: PHP requirements, FSE migration, and editor extensions Five failure patterns from past WordPress major upgrades ended with the observation that “the same structures will recur in some form in the next major (7.0 or 8.0).” This post applies that pattern knowledge to WordPress 7.0 specifically — not as a list of things that will happen, but as a preparatory checklist for what you can verify now. This sits alongside the seven-item pre-flight checklist from W1 rather than replacing it. Think of it as the 7.0-specific supplement. Item 1 — PHP minimum requirement increase (W3 pattern 3 again) W3’s pattern …

The W series has covered what to check before a major upgrade, when to apply it, and what can go wrong. This fourth part covers the remaining question: how to actually run it. Once the preparation is in place and the timing is right, this is the command sequence to follow — one stage at a time, with a confirmation step at each boundary. Why not use the admin dashboard Update button The WordPress admin screen has an “Update All” button that runs core, plugin, and theme updates in a single operation. This is the approach to avoid for major upgrades. The reason is loss of isolation. When core plus …

If you run WordPress maintenance for clients on Xserver, sooner or later you hit this: SSH was working fine this morning, and now your connection dies the instant it touches the host. No key change on your side, no obvious server-side incident. Just Connection closed by …, and the silence deepens every time you retry. A recent escalation to Xserver support gave us an official answer about what’s actually going on. Worth writing down what an operator needs to know. What the symptom looks like In our observation, the symptom moves through two stages. Lighter: Connection closed by [Xserver IP] — connection killed at the sshd layer before it’s established …

With the pre-upgrade checklist of seven items and the calibration framework for when to apply, we’ve covered preparation and timing for WordPress major upgrades. The third installment is “what can go wrong” — the failures that actually happened in past majors, organized into five patterns. The examples are tied to specific releases (5.0 / 5.6 / 6.0), but the point is that the same structural patterns repeat in new majors. Carrying these as types in your head pays off when 7.0 or 8.0 lands and you need to triage fast. Pattern 1 — “Editor-adjacent UI extensions” disappear en masse (5.0 Gutenberg) The most operationally impactful incident when WordPress 5.0 standardized …

The companion to the seven things to check before a WordPress major upgrade is the question that comes right after: when do you actually apply it? A new WordPress major drops today. Do you ship it to production tonight? Tomorrow? In a week? Hold for the next scheduled monthly maintenance? This call tends to live in tribal knowledge, but a few clear axes combined together give you a calibration framework you can apply every time without re-deciding from scratch. Here are five axes worth using. Premise — majors are not security patches The first thing to anchor: a major upgrade is not a security patch. WordPress ships security fixes via …

WordPress major version upgrades (5.x → 6.x, and eventually 6.x → 7.x) are a different animal from minor releases. Minor releases (like 6.4.1 → 6.4.2) are mostly bug fixes with low compatibility risk. Majors land API deprecations, raised PHP minimum requirements, and core block replacements all at once — and those things hit operations hard. The “just hit Update in the admin and patch whatever breaks” workflow can survive on a single personal site, but it tends to fall apart under multi-site maintenance — simultaneous failures across sites overwhelm root-cause triage. This post collects the things worth verifying before you run a major upgrade, as a seven-item checklist. 1. Has …