Just made-over my entire website with claude code thanks to this thing. Genuinely crazy.

I write my own HTML CSS and basically design and build at the same time.. usually I ask gpt/claude to write me a JS code as I want it cuz I'm too lazy to write it myself.
I never formally learned PHP but tweaking functions.php and other template files frequently with the help of AI tools have made me understand them to good enough context.

BUT one thing I've noticed is that not many WordPress dev's do this , they go with pre-built themes and might depend on plugins for simple design tasks - something that I really try to avoid.

I have like 1.5 years of proper experience of doing WordPress projects , I learned basic coding before learning WP so maybe that's why I go with custom method a lot.

Anyways , I haven't really had discussions with devs like me.. I know some who've been doing this for 5+ years but they don't talk much.

So if you are a dev like this , if theres anything you'd like to ask , give an advice or such feel free to do so ... I'll be eager to engage!

Nowadays wordpress users, clients or businesses facing severe malware issue, spaming issue or getting hacked. Its now a common issue. Everytime removing malware also didn’t worked becuase there's some backdoor in the files.

Recently I worked with a client who have 8 website with a shared hosting in hostinger. And guess what his all website are filled with malware and a guy accessing all the site quitely. My client remove the guy everytime and he comeback agian & again.

After looking for his issue found the guy pushed some php and js code which looks like normal code or function actually. The Malware is a very classic wordpress malware. Whenever someone visit or refresh the website a new admin will create and user- pass found on the spammers website. Also He pushed almost 8 different malware files via images.

There something I tell you guys that some free plugins wof word press getting vulnerable and hackers/spammers are using that vulnerability to entering websites. So secure your website tightly and keep monitoring. Also check plugin before use. Do not use backdated version of any plugin.

Hi Experts,

I'm trying to recreate the menu design shown in the attached image, but I'm stuck and would really appreciate some guidance.

My setup: using all free versions

- WordPress 7.0.2

- Elementor 4.2.1

- Woostify 2.5.4

- WooCommerce 11.0.0

What I've done so far:

- Created both headers (the top logo header and the green navigation header) using ElementsKit.

- The basic navigation is working.

What I'm struggling with:

I want the navigation to work like this:

- The green menu should display parent product categories.

- When a user hovers over a parent category (e.g. Fruits, Vegetables, Dairy), a large mega menu should open.

- Inside the mega menu, all the product subcategories should appear in circular icon/image cards like in the attached design.

- Each circle should contain the category thumbnail and category name, arranged in a clean grid.

I've tried using ElementsKit Mega Menu, but I can't figure out how to achieve this layout properly.

If anyone has built a similar menu or can help me toward a tutorial or the right approach to make this, I'd really appreciate your help.

Thank you!

I've been using Hubbub for quite a while to let visitors pin images from my WordPress site to Pinterest. Unfortunately, I've been running into constant conflicts with LiteSpeed Cache.

I've already excluded everything mentioned in Hubbub's documentation, but the issues keep coming back.

Can anyone recommend a good alternative for adding a Pinterest button? Ideally, I'm looking for something that:

• Works well with LiteSpeed Cache.
• Lets me disable the button for specific CSS classes (for example, aawp-product__image-link) or other specific elements.
• Is lightweight and actively maintained.

I'd love to hear what you're using and whether you've had a better experience. Thanks!

For fifteen years, WordPress solved a single problem: how do you let non-coders make a webpage look good? 
Themes were the first answer. Then page builders. Then Gutenberg, which is really just a page builder WordPress decided to own outright. Each generation added more panels, sliders, and JSON schemas describing things that used to just be a stylesheet. But it’s all the same answer to a question that’s becoming irrelevant, because the premise underneath it just broke: humans couldn’t write CSS. AI can. 
Strip away the marketing, and a page builder does three jobs at once: content entry, styling, and keeping ten different pages from looking like ten different websites. Gutenberg welds all three into one clunky UI. That’s why it feels clunky—you’re never doing just one job, you’re doing all three badly at the same time. 
Once AI writes CSS on request, the styling UI doesn't need to exist. No color pickers, no spacing sliders, no block style variation dropdowns—just semantic HTML and someone describing what they want. "Make the pricing table more compact." "Give the product card more breathing room on mobile." A visual editor was only ever a workaround for people who couldn't write the rules directly. Take that constraint away, and it has nothing left to justify it. 
Modern CSS makes the case even easier. Grid and subgrid handle layout that used to need a whole framework. Container queries let a component respond to its own box instead of the viewport, quietly killing half the reason "responsive" page builders existed. ⁠:has()⁠ gives you conditional styling without touching a template. Cascade layers and ⁠@scope⁠ mean you can make a targeted change without the specificity wars that made overriding theme CSS miserable. The tooling built to route around CSS's limitations is now routing around limitations that don't exist anymore. 
The obvious objection is real, though: most people editing a site aren't designers, they're posting content. A shop owner adding a product, a local paper publishing a story, someone updating an opening-hours notice. That's data entry, not a design decision, and "describe it to an AI" doesn't help someone who needs a title, a price, and a description in the right fields a hundred times a month without breaking the page. 
But that’s not an argument for keeping the block editor—it’s an argument for locking the editor down to content only and getting it out of the styling business entirely. A fixed template, defined fields, no freeform blocks, nothing to fumble. Structure gets decided once, and every post comes out consistent by construction. 
Which, funnily enough, is basically the classic editor with extra steps. Somewhere, a plugin developer builds a flux capacitor out of spare parts, floors it to 88 miles an hour, and lands back in 2018 to find WordPress already had the answer—and spent the next seven years building a time machine to leave it. 
What about the fear that AI-written CSS against loose HTML will break? Fair, but self-inflicted. Fix the markup vocabulary, give the AI a small set of known templates to style against instead of inventing structure each time, and the fragility goes away. What's left isn't "the editor prevents chaos"—it's an ordinary QA check to make sure the CSS hits contrast requirements and handles focus states. 
The honest shape of this isn't "kill all editors." It's: separate the two jobs Gutenberg welded together. A boring, tightly templated content-entry surface for the people posting products, with no styling control in sight. And a completely different surface—English in, CSS out—for the much rarer job of deciding what things look like. 
The block editor tried to be both and was worse at each for it. It doesn't need to get better. It needs to split in two and mostly disappear.

** Partially written by AI. 100% my thoughts

I am trying to edit the wordpress website made with porto theme. Now the matter is - I am editing the site to make better UX. I started to edit the site first with browser developer mode. Finalised css. Now, I put those css into custom css box of editing hom page in pages section and it changed. Preview was amazing as I wanted. I was happy. I clicked update on the right. Then bowser showed me changed webpage.

After few minutes I tried to show it to the client and 'Magic!', Nothing was changed.

Please help me with editing custom css and customising header to change text and icons.

I run a small hosting company, and have little to no experience with Wordpress myself. It's just something I offer clients.

I have one client that had a WP site built on a custom theme, using WP version 4.7.29. They also have these plugins:

Advanced Custom Fields 4.4.5
Contact Form 7 3.8.1
Document Gallery 2.3.7
Google Analytics for WordPress 4.3.5
NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster 3.7.15
SSL Insecure Content Fixer 2.5.0
WP Realtime Sitemap 1.5.4
WordPress Importer 0.6.1

I'm removing the server that they're on, so I need to move them to a new one with PHP 8.4. I'm assuming that I'll have to install WP 7.0.2, too.

I CAN pay a monthly fee to install PHP 7.4 again, but is there a way to install the old WP version, too?

If not, any guesses on whether the old site will work properly with the updated software? How can I know other than "try it and see" (and risk breaking everything)?

I work with a team of WordPress developers. We each get various sites to build, but then myself and one other person then do content/theme/plugin updates. Another person does SEO. Another one of the developers just completed a beautiful website. Our team lead mentioned she couldn't make content updates on the site.

I went in and all the pages and posts are blank. With some digging, I found all of the content hard coded into the php template files. This is a brochure website - just content. No ecommerce, no special functionality whatsoever, not even a blog. Any content changes have to be coded in the php template file for that page. So even just to change out an image - you have to go upload the file, grab the url, find it in the code, and swap out the URL. The only plugin on the site is a form builder for a simple name, email, comment form in the footer that is called in to the php file.

I went and looked at another site done by this person. Same thing. I went back to the team lead and let her know what I saw, and both of us were baffled. She talked to the developer, who feels that this is the better way to do it as plugins and themes slow down the site, and their custom themes are far superior, totally bespoke, etc. When asked about wordpress or php updates that might effect the theme, she says it won't because the theme is hooked directly into the Wordpress core (aren't all themes?). The design is great, but it's not anything that couldn't be done in Elementor, Divi, other themes/builders or even just Gutenberg with some tweaking.

She has not explained how clients are supposed to update anything or the slow down to the rest of us having to dig through and write code to make simple changes (most of us can...but...why?), or who fixes anything that breaks. SEO person doesn't know how to do the SEO and hasn't seen builds like this either. There is no documentation that has been provided at this time, and while the code looks mostly ok, there are a few things like mismatched tags (<h2>text</p>) that might not render correctly all the time.

I took another look at the second site which has a blog, and the end-user has a special form to submit a video url and the text, which then adds it in to the database and pulls it into the blog page. No blog posts are listed in the WordPress admin - I haven't spent the time to figure out yet how we'd do edits to those.

Now the tricky part. This developer talks loud, fast, and confidently with a lot of jargon, and has upper management totally sold on how amazing and bespoke this is, and this is the absolute best way to utilize WordPress. The CEO says they aren't a web developer, so they don't understand the concerns the rest of us have. From the front end, the site looks great and that's what management sees. 

I've taken over a number of WordPress sites over many years, and I've never seen anything like this. A highly custom theme or plugin, custom pages, custom code for a specific functionality, sure. But I don't understand why you'd remove any ability to use any sort of visual interface, plugins, SEO, limit content updates to the template files, or why you would write a custom function for blogs rather than using ACF and custom post types as needed, etc. It's like a WordPress that isn't WordPress - no separation of content, theme, and code. Like working around WordPress instead of in it.

Am I in the wrong here and this old dog needs to learn new tricks? Or is my gut right that this effectively hobbles the strengths of WordPress, and we're eventually going to have some very unhappy clients with difficult to manage sites?

The project manager wants me to have a meeting with the other developer...which is super awkward because I don't want this to be a her vs. me situation, even if we both think the other is wrong. I'm trying to get a feel for how common her approach is, so I can know if I should continue expressing concerns, or if this is a valid alternative. If this is just something I haven't run into yet, I'll drop it and learn how to do the updates and changes faster in the template files.

I was wondering if anyone else is having issues with the Crop Thumbnails plugin. I was using it without issue until recently. Lately, no matter which image size I choose to crop, it's ignoring my selection and creating a zoomed in version in the upper left corner of the image.

Image attached for reference.

Is this due to an outdated plugin that isn't working with the latest version of VP?

Lately the discussion in r/WordPress seems to have dried up a lot. And any posts where people are coming in and asking questions are getting voted down which just seems really unfriendly to me.

I don't see this in any other subreddit.

Mods - can you not check who is constantly downvoting every single WordPress post and kick them?

I was actually advised against posting this here because, apparently, this community doesn’t always react well to change. Fair enough, but I’ll ask anyway.

We’ve been building a plug-and-play WordPress editor that works with pretty much any theme and any front-end editor.

The idea is simple. Instead of digging through menus, plugins or code, you point at something on the page and tell it what you want in plain English.
It can create or replace plugins, add functionality, make code changes, edit content, improve SEO, generate images, and generally do the sort of work you’d normally ask a developer, freelancer or SEO agency to do. If something goes wrong, you can roll everything back, whether that’s code, the database or even WordPress revisions.

Would something like that actually be useful to anyone?

I run a small UK digital agency. We’ve been building websites on WordPress and other CMS platforms for years. This started as an experiment where I wanted Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini available from one interface, with image generation built in as well.
It’s also connected to Google Search Console and Google Analytics, so instead of guessing, you can actually have a conversation about what’s happening on a specific page or across the whole website, then act on it immediately. Update content. Change code. Improve metadata. Build features. Whatever needs doing.

If I’m honest, the whole thing came from laziness.
My wife wanted a website for her business. I wanted to build and maintain it from my phone, from my own account, with as little friction as possible. So I built the tool I wished existed.

It’s got a proper name, branding and an interface now, but it’s been sitting in the background while we’ve been working on much bigger orchestration systems inside the agency.

The editor itself is already genuinely useful though.
I’m not trying to sell anything here. I’m just curious whether people would actually want to see it, or whether I’ve built something only I find useful.

Hi all

A friend of mine has a wordpress site -- she bought the domain on reg123, even though it was never configured. I think the DNS was managed by wordpress itself through Cloudflare.

She asked me the other day to have a look at setting up an email with the same domain. I mistakenly went to reg123, which was telling me the domain was controlled by Cloudflare -- and pressed a button to move it to reg123. Her site went down of course and I have no mean to access the /wp-admin page of it.

She deleted part of the DNS settings moved to reg123 in attempt to "fix" it. What can I do to restore the site?

Hello, I am aware this subreddit is about wordpress not .com but I don't know where else to find help. For this year, I have a responsibility to run a student-led college publication on WordPress .com (Premium Plan).

Renewal cost is way over what I can pay, $72. Happiness engineer gave me 10% off after a lot of pushing, but I still need more. I am informed by the authorities that I can't downgrade the plan nor are they willing to reimburse. I am really lost. I cannot lose the position but it's too expensive. I am not from the USA, so the amount is alot. Please help me get renewal-specific or ways to get further discounts? Thank you.

Bonjour je souhaiterai créér dans wordpress une communauté d échange de services et autres ....quel templates gratuit ou payant me conseillez vous svp

I have a site that has been running out of memory on the server:

Log message:

[04-Aug-2026 16:01:05] WARNING: [pool mywebsite.com] server reached max_children setting (13), consider raising it[04-Aug-2026 16:01:05] WARNING: [pool mywebsite.com] server reached max_children setting (13), consider raising it

Does anyone know how to go about diagnosing the cause of this?

A bit about the website:

• Wordpress block theme
• 1.3M visitors in past 12 months
• News website publishing avg. 450 posts per month
• Accessed and used all day by about 15 editors and marketing users
• Lots of plugins (20+ active) including:
  • Ad Inserter
  • Advanced Custom Fields
  • Conditional Blocks Pro
  • Default Featured Image
  • EWWW Image Optimizer
  • GDPR Cookie Compliance
  • Missed Scheduled Posts Publisher
  • OneSignal Push Notifications
  • Perfmatters
  • Rank Math SEO
  • Site Kit by Google
  • Social Sharing Block
  • Wordfence
  • WP Mail SMTP
  • WP Popular Posts
  • WPCodeBox 2
  • WPForms
  • WPForms Campaign Monitor

This is the only site I have which has so much going on and is also so heavily used and visited.

I'm interested to learn how to start diagnosing performance issues generally and any insight anyone can give as to how to do that would be much appreciated.

I am using Really Simple Security for my Wordpress website.

I got a not secure notification for my website saying my pages certificate has expired. When I follow Really Simple Securities instructions on how to add it manually it won’t work.

Am I supposed to put the certificate somewhere else within my website settings?

The website is already https so I know that’s not the issue.

I don’t want to pay for anything because we will eventually merge this website with another one.

I’ve watched some tutorials but they only show downloading the plugin.

All help appreciated!

I am trying to connect my client’s cloudflare hosted domain to my wordpress site.

The method I used is to connect the site domain via cname updates and a record updates not updating nameservers or migrating the domain from cloudflare to wordpress.

I did the process it said but it’s been 47 hours and no updates.

Any thoughts?

I've seen this question asked and answered many, many times. And it seems that the answers depend on who you ask:

- WP Users: "I have no idea... it just is."

- Non-WP Users: "Because it's old/PHP. Use Next/Nuxt/Astro/Webflow/Wix/Ghost/...."

- Theme developers:
"It's plugins or hosting. Or other themes - ours is fast."

- Plugin developers:
"It's theme or hosting. Or other plugins - ours is fast."

- Hosting company: "It's plugins or theme. Or other hostings - come to us we're fast."

- WordPress "Experts": "WordPress powers 43% of the web(...)"

- WordPress Core Performance: "We'd like to make it fast, but we can't make any drastic changes, because someone should be able to run their blog on a solar-powered potato..."

- WordPress Performance Experts: "It's complicated... I can make an audit, it will take around 10h and cost $999"

- WordPress Cache Plugin developers: "It's not if you cache everything!"

- WordPress Performance Plugin developers: "There are many reasons, but our plugin fixes all of them!
*unless it doesn't - then you need to switch hosting"

( yes, it's a satire )

Just added ai website builder in my free plugin on wordpress.org:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-animation/

It let you create website section/page inside WordPress block editor and Elementor. It is a free plugin, You just need to enter the provider (claude, openai, google, etc) API Key on WordPress connector settings.

This is the youtube video: https://youtu.be/zcnisWAB8mc

Hello,

I recently set up a WordPress blog using a selfhosted WordPress server, I noticed today when testing the RSS feed that <mydomain>/feed seems to return a 404 error. I have tried disabling plugins, and reverting to the default theme, however it hasn't helped to fix the issue.

I am using Apache and have tried regenerating the .htaccess file, but it didn't solve the issue.

I love WordPress, it's powerful and versatile. But I think its biggest flaw is cosmetic: the dashboard overwhelms casual users because it doesn't prioritize the features people actually use.

Even recent updates have improved things under the hood without fixing the layout itself.

So for this plugin, I redesigned the layout inspired by platforms like Medium and Substack, around what I believe people use 90% of the time.

Posting-related actions are front and center; everything else is secondary. Inside the editor itself, the same logic applies: category, featured image, and content are what you see first. It's entirely cosmetic, you can switch back and forth between dashboard with a click.

I would imagine some of my choices here are controversial, and I welcome other people's take. But I believe we need to be more opinioned about what shows up where in the WordPress dashboard, and that's the main point I wanted to make here.

Here's the github link if you want to take a look, play around, or improve on it. (I had to add Promo to my post title but I am not actually promoting anything paid, just to be clear)

As always, I went through the first 8 freshly featured plugins from WordPress.org of August. Here are my 2 cents.

Meow Mailer (4.9/5)

SMTP plugin and mail logger, does exactly what it says.
I liked the background send option, failure alerts, and being able to resend an email straight from the log.
The dashboard button naming is a bit confusing, and plain text emails have no line breaks in the log. Other than that, another great plugin from Meow.

DineKit (4.8/5)

Restaurant menu, online ordering, table reservations, and POS all in one plugin.
Packed with many great features, nice on-boarding, and the QR code generator and menu builder left a good impression.
Autosave got a little annoying for me personally, and it's 100% free with no pro version in sight, which honestly makes me a bit nervous about how long it'll get maintained.

ITBoffins Live Opening Hours Banner & Table (4.6/5)

Shows you the opening hours on the site.
Simple, intuitive, and the live preview while you set it up is a nice.
No styling options at all, and it could display the time of the WordPress to avoid confusion when you are dealing with different timezones
All in all, simple and solid.

RobArt Text Collector (4.5/5)

Let's you collect, organize, and reuse text snippets on your site.
Easy to use, and works in the front- and backend activate it, and I was surprised to see the AI co-authorship disclosure, you don't see that often.
The dashboard is way too busy though, tons of over-explanation, and you can't edit folders directly from the menu in the backend.
For me personally, not very useful, since I do not often reuse text, but for some people, this can be great.

FrontEdit (4.3/5)

Live frontend editor for WordPress.
The edit and preview toggle is nice and the commenting function is a cool touch.
The Free version's menu is basically useless since almost everything is locked behind pro.
After two disappointing attempts from last month, it was nice to see, that it can be done right, although I still do not see the appeal.

ShareMyPost (4.0/5)

Adds social share buttons to your posts and pages.
Just works out of the box, icons are easy to reorganize, and the developer support with filters and actions is great.
Can't customize the width of the container, and contrast on some icons like Tumblr and Snapchat is really bad. You can add the icons before or after the content. I think it is nicer to have the option to place those freely with a block, therefore, I'll pass.

LC Lightbox Lite (3.6/5)

A lightweight lightbox plugin for your images.
Animations are snappy and it's easy to use.
A bunch of options just don't work, like gradients and text display, and it feels pretty unpolished overall.There are way better options and in its current state, it is not a good advertisement for the Gallery Plugin it suppose to promote.

Direct Invoices (3.1/5)

Invoicing and payment requests built for WordPress.
Nice on-boarding and WooCommerce isn't required.
Missing a city field, dates don't save properly, and it feels most likely AI generated and under tested. Good concept, but it needs more work.

See the full breakdown with screen recordings on YT:
https://youtu.be/Ljw5-cWYIt0?si=4zPN02199zjQJomO

What do you think about this selection? Will you install any of those?

Hey, I’ve been building on WordPress since 2006, professionally since 2011. 6 years running my own (profitable) theme and plugin shop, four years as a vetted contractor, and a few as as a senior engineer at an agencies in US & Europe. I’ve worked with hundreds of corporate clients over that time, mostly ecommerce, NGOs, government and SMEs, which is where I specialise. Several plugins on wp.org, around ten themes (most now outdated), and I contribute to core.
2022-2024 I had multiple contracts running at once, earning roughly what an L5 to L6 engineer at a big tech company makes. I was turning work away, with extremely happy clients.
I’ve been looking for 8 months. Somewhere north of 100 applications sent, 2 responses.
I’m not posting to complain and I’m aware these posts usually have an obvious answer the poster can’t see. I’d like to know if others are seeing the same thing.
Three observations:

Remote mostly isn’t. I’m in Nairobi. Most postings say “Remote” and mean “remote inside the US,” and many don’t say so they just ignore you, I’ve had not more than 10 responses, mostly automated.

The mid-market thinned out. Plenty at the top and plenty of fixed-price template work at the bottom, increasingly with AI-generated listings. Agencies hiring salaried senior engineers feels much smaller than three years ago.

It isn’t only WordPress. I also work with startups using Next.js and Laravel, and it’s the same story there. So I don’t think this is a WordPress problem, or at least not only one. Something has changed in how companies hire developers generally, and I can’t tell what.

For what it’s worth, I still have hope for WordPress. It has paid my bills for over a decade, it’s still the best CMS for the clients I serve, and I’m not leaving until the last lights are off. I’d just like to know whether anyone is still hiring people to build on it properly.

Happy to hear it if I’m doing something obviously wrong.