Why a green Lighthouse score can still hide a slow site
A client’s desktop PageSpeed score was 98 while his conversions fell. Why lab tests miss what real visitors feel, and how to time a WooCommerce cart action with the User Timing API.
Category: Bug Fixing
Managing high-resolution image assets without killing performance
A client’s wallpaper gallery took down its own dashboard hours after launch. Pruning the image sizes WordPress generates and offloading originals to object storage cut upload processing by about 70%.
Why XPath still beats CSS selectors in messy scrapers
A legacy vendor portal with no IDs, no classes and no API broke every CSS selector we threw at it. One XPath expression replaced fifty lines of them, and it has not broken since.
How I manage multiple client sites without the Friday night panic
A Friday night emergency on a site I had not touched in six months cost me two hours of MAMP wrangling. WordPress Studio blueprints and selective sync are what I use now to keep client environments consistent.
WooCommerce 10.4.3 fixes a Store API leak and HPOS sync loops
WooCommerce 10.4.3 patches guest order data exposure in the Store API, throttles HPOS sync-on-read during heavy jobs, and restores the cart undo link that 10.4.2 broke.
WooCommerce 10.4.2 fixes a fatal error in old orders
A deleted product used to take down order history with a fatal error. WooCommerce 10.4.2 adds the null check, along with PHP 8.4 transient validation and support for the renamed WordPress 6.9 Abilities API hooks.
The WooCommerce Store API security patch, and who needs it
A client’s customer opened their account dashboard and saw a stranger’s guest order. It was not the cache. GHSL-2025-129 affects WooCommerce 8.1 through 10.4.2, and Automattic backported the fix across 23 releases.
WordPress 6.9 regressions, hotfix plugins and 7.0 plans
The 6.9 update turned a client’s custom blocks into ghosts and I nearly wrote a core override for it. The December dev chat notes had the answer already: hotfix plugins now, official maintenance release in January 2026.
Adding automated unit tests to a WordPress plugin
How automated unit tests fit into WordPress plugin work: scaffolding a suite with WP-CLI, choosing what to assert about a custom post type, and the regressions that manual click-through testing keeps missing.
What WooCommerce 10.3.6 fixes, and why PHP 8.4 users care
A store was throwing random 500 errors at checkout because a deleted flash-sale product was still sitting in customer carts. WooCommerce 10.3.6 fixes that class of crash, along with a PHP 8.4 failure in the Helper updater.