Things I've learned fixing, rebuilding and maintaining WordPress sites for eleven years — written for the person who has to live with the site, not for other developers.
The new design looks better and loads worse — and it's almost never the design's fault. A walk through the five things that usually change during a rebuild and quietly cost you two seconds: uncompressed hero images, a second page builder left installed, render-blocking fonts, an unbounded query on the homepage, and caching that was never turned back on.
Read the articleWhat LCP, CLS and INP actually measure, why your score moves when you didn't change anything, and which of the three is worth your money first.
ReadNeither is the right default. Here's the actual decision tree — who edits the site, how many templates you need, and what you're willing to pay for later.
ReadNot because they're bad, but because they're doing a job WordPress already does — and each one is another thing that can break on update day.
ReadEvery extra field is a chance to leave. Which ones WooCommerce shows by default that most stores don't need, and how to remove them without breaking tax or shipping.
ReadThe redirect map is the whole job. How to build one before you migrate, what to check in the first fortnight, and the traffic dip that's normal versus the one that isn't.
ReadA site you need the developer for every time you add a page isn't finished — it's a dependency. What a real handover includes, and why it's cheaper for everyone.
ReadNaming is the part everyone rushes and everyone regrets. A small convention that makes a three-year-old build readable when you come back to it cold.
ReadUploading a 4MB photo and letting the theme resize it is the single most common cause of a slow site. What to do at upload, at render, and at the edge.
ReadSpecialising is unfashionable advice. It's also why I can quote a rescue job in an hour instead of a week — and why the second time you see a problem is nothing like the first.
ReadNo articles match that.
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