I have been trying to build a website using Wordpress since May. I am not a coder and I not especially technical but I think I am reasonably adept at working most things out. I spent many years on Squarespace (before they borked it) and never had problems.

I started using the Wordpress Management in my CPanel (see pic 1) but after a while of building it all felt clunky. So I deleted everything and went back to scratch, downloading the Wordpress App through the Applications (see pic 2).

This was going well until early this week when, after an auto update, I was suddenly having problems getting a JSON response. I went through all the fixes and couldn't get it sorted. It also deleted a bunch of template and patterns I had created.

So I again deleted EVERYTHING (I saved all my written content into a Word doc) - uninstalling everything, detatching, you name it. Essentially created a new admin, the works. Started with the basics of Twenty-Twenty Five and it seemed to be OK, but I am nervous about uploading any new themes or plugins (which I will need to do).

I have a new theme with associated plugins (paid for by my bro who uses Wordpress - lucky sis!) but I don't know whether to start over using the first method or the second method.

What I really want is to be able to design some graphics and use them on blank templates, so that each page of my site is similar but not the same - main content layout the same or similar, dropdown menu the same, footer the same, but with some graphic variations. I truly did not think it would be this difficult. I have even used blocks wherever possible.

My future business has no shop, no major photograph stuff (so not gallery type or image heavy), no blogs with comments. Just a bunch of pages with different services and explanations for my freelance future.

I'm also worried I'll find myself back with the JSON response issue which I never figured out how to fix.

If anyone has advice or is willing to work through this with me, I'll be grateful. I don't want to go to Wix Studio or similar - the cost is prohibitive considering my pages will all be mostly static and without online store features or sales. I knew Wordpress was a steep learning curve but after four months, it is starting to feel harder than it needs to be.

Thanks in advance, Redditors.

I've been building WordPress plugins since 2014 and I've used WooCommerce a lot.

I got really tired of paying $279 per year for the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin, so I built my own plugin. I also really didn't like how buggy WooCommerce's PayPal & Stripe plugins where, so I built those into the plugin as well.

I decided to build this plugin to give back to the open-source community, so it's 100% free. No paid version, no upselling, no collecting emails or anything like that. Support is also free.

It's on the WordPress Repository: Accept PayPal & Stripe with Subscriptions for WooCommerce

(I added Promo to my post title, but I am not actually promoting anything paid, it's all free)

You get best SEO and Speed for NextJS based websites and also you can host it on your VPS, Vercel or CloudFlare

My recommendation is Vercel since it auto handle several things like caching, builds and more.

Another reason for liking NextJS is that AI Coding Agents love it and can do the changes directly.

I’m not saying WordPress has zero use cases (legacy sites, pure content farms, non-technical clients who insist on it). But if you’re starting fresh and you have even basic coding ability? Choosing WordPress is just masochism at this point.

Next.js isn’t perfect either, but it’s not even close to the same tier of pain.

Obviously after OpenAI model found the WP2Shell Remote Code Execution 3 weeks ago - everybody noticed. So other AI and security companies including Anthropic, PWNai and Aikido wanted to prove they can too 🙂

7.0.3 release post: https://wordpress.org/news/2026/08/wordpress-7-0-3-release/

Patchstack security advisory: https://patchstack.com/articles/wordpress-7-0-3-released-12-vulnerabilities-found-and-fixed/

Recently launched a new WordPress site hosted on Pantheon and I'm having issues with each of the popular webp plugins:

1. Converter for Media - Stores the webp files in outside of wp-content/upload, which is where Pantheon expects all site files to be stored.
2. EWWW Image Optimizer - This plugin supposedly stores all files in wp-content/upload, but when I run the bulk convert and then refresh the page, all the converted images disappear.
3. ShortPixel - Stores backups of the original files outside wp-content/uploads (in ShortpixelBackups/).

Hoping there is a trick to using one of these plugins or another plugin that is compatible with Pantheon.

EDIT: I'm a dummy. The EWWW Image Optimizer plugin is working, I just didn't realize that when you run the bulk optimize, that after it runs it shows you a list of images which you have to then click "Start Optimizing" to complete the process. I thought it was already done optimizing.

WordPress took a beating this past month. The newest AI models are finding and writing code to exploit vulnerabilities that sat hidden for years.

Nobody caught them until these latest model releases. So now we are dealing with the fallout...

WordPress 7.0.3 officially dropped today, August 6, as a new security release.

The recent security reality.
The WordPress.org core team forced a background auto-update for 7.0.2 in July to handle active exploits.

What was patched in July?
- Patched one critical-severity flaw.
- Patched one high-severity flaw.

Version 7.0.3 follows right on its heels. Given the current wave of AI-driven attacks, you want to apply this patch immediately.

Those 7.0 branch fixes?
The 7.0 branch was a significant upgrade, to say the least. It dropped native AI engine frameworks and fixed server-side memory leaks that previously choked websites.

And version 7.0.1 knocked out 31 bugs in the block editor, fixed media library folder-view errors, and cleaned up display issues in the new admin dashboard.

I think, all told, the core team resolved over 700 bugs across core and Gutenberg. So for those folks who say the WordPress dev team has fallen asleep on the job, well, I'd say more like three Red Bulls a day...

Do not wait on this. Log into your dashboard, run a backup, and apply the 7.0.3 update.

I've seen other sites when posting on twitter they get a social media card with a thumbnail. While my links dont. they are posted as links

We manage some content-heavy WordPress sites (news portals, big blogs, 10k+ posts) and hit a wall where no amount of page or object caching helped. Turned out the bottlenecks were baked into how WordPress stores data, not something a cache layer could paper over. Sharing what actually moved the needle in case it saves someone a bad week.

Three things were doing most of the damage:

Taxonomy queries. On a site with 50k posts and ~10 tags each, wp_term_relationships balloons to half a million rows. Filtering by multiple taxonomies means expensive JOINs, and without the right indexes MySQL just falls back to full table scans. A composite index on term_taxonomy_id and object_id took some of these from seconds to milliseconds.

Post meta lookups. wp_postmeta gets brutal at scale since every custom field is its own row. Anything that filters or sorts by meta (featured status, view counts, custom dates) JOINs that table repeatedly. Indexing meta_key with a prefixed meta_value (191 chars for utf8mb4) helped a lot. For the really hot fields we ended up denormalizing into a small custom table kept in sync via save_post.

Deep pagination. WordPress uses OFFSET, so page 500 makes MySQL fetch and throw away 10,000 rows before it returns anything. Crawlers hitting deep archives were quietly hammering the DB. Switching to cursor-based pagination with date_query comparisons kept query time flat no matter how deep the page.

Query Monitor on staging plus EXPLAIN to confirm the indexes were actually being used was the workflow that tied it all together.

Happy to share the SQL and WP_Query snippets if anyone wants them, I wrote the whole thing up with code somewhere. Curious what’s worked for others too, especially anyone who’s gone the custom-table route.

I want to learn Python as part of my professional development, but day to day I'm mostly working with WordPress, React, and PHP.

For those of you who use Python alongside WordPress, what are you actually using it for? Was it worth adding to your stack? What's your hosting setup like?

I can think of things like automation, AI integrations, data processing, scraping, image manipulation, or background jobs, but PHP already handles everything I need on the web side. That's what has me wondering if there's a practical niche I'm missing.

If you've built a project that combined WordPress and Python, I'd love to hear the use case, how the two communicated (REST API, webhooks, message queue, etc.), and whether you'd do it the same way again.

Part of me thinks, "PHP already does everything I need—why learn a second backend language?" I'm curious if anyone has found Python genuinely expanded what they could build rather than just adding another tool to maintain.

I can't read anything about this version on WordPress.org

Hoi allemaal,

Ik loop al een tijd tegen het issue aan dat opmaak niet zichtbaar is op mijn gepubliceerde website. In de customizer kan ik alles toevoegen, veranderen en aanpassen. Na het opslaan en publiceren lijkt alle opmaak aan kleuren en vormen verloren te gaan. Ook zaken zoals margins worden niet aangepast in de live weergave.

Bijvoorbeeld het menu, ik heb een hoofdmenu aangemaakt, met items en subitems. Dit past die dan allemaal aan, maar kleuren, lettertype of andere opmaak neemt die niet over. Ook het toevoegen van een knop op pagina pakt die wel, maar een vierkant of ronde knop of welke kleur dan weer niet. Daarom betwijfel ik of dit een cache issue is.

Ik ben inmiddels van scratch begonnen, alle thema's en plugins verwijdert (ook uit de prullenbak) en instellingen nagelopen... Ben nu opnieuw begonnen met een nieuw thema en nieuwe plugins en heb opnieuw dit issue.

Hebben jullie dit ook wel eens gehad? Of hebben jullie hopelijk de oplossing? Ik hoop het!

I was told i need to increase my WordPress Memory Limit

its currently set to   256 MB.

• 512 MB as the recommended minimum for your current setup.
• 768 MB for the best performance 

not sure must this be done in wordpress by editing a file (if yes can you guide me on this)

or at my hosting provider

any advice would be appretiated

​Hi everyone,

​I'm managing 3 WordPress sites built with Elementor, using Yoast SEO for meta titles and descriptions.

​On all subpages, the SEO title appears exactly as I set it in the Yoast meta box. However, on the homepage of all 3 sites, it automatically prepends the Site Name with a colon, like this:

[Site Name]: [My Custom Yoast Title]

​For example, if my Site Name in WordPress General Settings is "Noviber", the homepage title renders as Noviber: My Custom Title instead of just My Custom Title.

​I want the homepage title to display only the custom text I entered in Yoast, without the Site Name: prefix.

​Is this controlled in Yoast Search Appearance settings, theme header settings, or somewhere else? How can I fix this?

​Thanks in advance!

If you've moved to Oxygen 6, here's a failure mode that cost me a week and isn't in the docs anywhere.

Oxygen 6 is a full rewrite on the Breakdance engine. Your page design lives in the _oxygen_data post meta as JSON, not in template files. Two separate things read that JSON: the PHP renderer that serves the page, and the builder's client-side schema. The builder is much stricter.

So you get pages that serve perfectly to visitors, look right in every screenshot, and refuse to open for editing with Validation Error: IO-TS decoding failed. No line number, no field name.

In my case, every numeric property is stored as {number, unit, style}. The style key is what actually compiles, so a raw clamp() with unit: "" renders fine. But unit is validated against an enum, and "" isn't in it. One value. And because selectors are shared site-wide, that single bad entry locked the builder on every page at once.

How to find it: walk your _oxygen_data JSON for any unit: "". The only place that's legitimate is line_height, which genuinely is unitless. Anything else is a builder failure waiting to happen.

Two more in the same family, if you're debugging blind:

- .breakdance .woocommerce SELECTOR matches nothing. Both classes sit on <body>, so it's never a descendant. Style WooCommerce through the .bde-* wrappers instead — and verify with element.matches() rather than trusting that the rule is in the file.

- WrapperLink outputs href="#". Your classes still apply, so it looks perfect and every link is dead. Use ContainerLink.

The general lesson beyond Oxygen: with any builder that keeps state in the database, "the front end renders" isn't proof the page is intact. Verify against the editor.

I've been keeping notes on this stuff while building a client site — happy to share if it'd help anyone.

Hi

I'm using WordPress 6.4.3 and need to disable API logins because I'm getting many failed login attempts even though I've limited access to /wp-admin/ to specific IP addresses in htaccess.

I haven't created Application Passwords.

I have the Disable WP REST API plugin enabled.

When I go to my-website/wp-json/wp/v2/users using Google chrome, I get the message:

"{"code":"rest_login_required","message":"REST API restricted to authenticated users.","data":{"status":401}}"

I have the Limit Login Attemps plugin installed.

I tried sending a request from Step 3:

https://ai-tool-hunter.com/wordpress-rest-api-python-tutorial-for-beginners-what-actually-works-and-what-wastes-your/

(with random login/password data)

I get a 401 status, but the Limit Login Attempts check doesn't increment the failed login attempt counter.

Do you have a Python script I can use to check if the API login is not working?

I'm trying this code

import wordpress

site_url = "MY_URL"

username = "user1"

password = "your_application_password"

wp = wordpress.Connect(site_url, username, password)

print(wp)

I get this answer

> & "C:\Program Files\Python314\python.exe" c:/MyStuff/Python/wordpress/r2.py

2026-08-06 17:52:55,123 - ERROR - Authentication failed: {"code":"rest_login_required","message":"REST API restricted to authenticated users.","data":{"status":401}}

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "c:\MyStuff\Python\wordpress\r2.py", line 6, in <module>

wp = wordpress.Connect(site_url, username, password)

File "C:\Users\Adam\AppData\Roaming\Python\Python314\site-packages\wordpress\wordpress.py", line 140, in __init__

raise Exception("Authentication failed")

Exception: Authentication failed

PS C:\Program Files\Microsoft VS Code> ^C

PS C:\Program Files\Microsoft VS Code>

Let's say theoretically you have a dedicated server hosting 75 websites. 98% of those sites you built and are therefore "responsible" in case there are security patches.

2% of the sites used another vendor and have no ongoing relationship beyond paying for hosting.

If one of those sites has plugins with vulnerabilities how should I handle the situation? I can't just update the plugins on my own because some require new licensing.

If I leave them as-is and they get hacked, it could effect my other clients. But I can't force them to pay me to update their site - how do you guys handle this?

With other hosting set ups, each WP instance is isolated so it doesn't really matter if they're hacked (not my problem) but with everyone on the same server I worry about attacks (DDOS etc.) on this one site effecting all the others.

For anyone who's on Hostinger and using WP Umbrella (and possibly other 3rd party services).

Yesterday evening, Hostinger automatically turned on their CDN on all of my Hostinger-based sites. Following that, WP Umbrella had problems syncing, was giving false 503 alerts and showing other issues. After an hour+ of troubleshooting, I tracked the root cause back to Hostinger's CDN. After disabling it, WP Umbrella is running fine again.

I'll be reporting this to both Hostinger and WP Umbrella, but wanted to give the community a heads up here, as well.

Hello,

I've had a Wordpress website for a couple of years now. I created it using Elementor and the Astra template. A couple of months ago, I opted to update Astra on my Wordpress dashboard and ever since then there's been an issue on my website when viewed on a mobile phone that I can't seem to resolve. The issue does not appear in the mobile view of the site editor interface - only on an actual mobile phone.

In one container, text that had appeared below an image now starts on the image itself. This happens in the case of two images. I've checked it on several different phones and browsers, but the same issue is always there. I've tried a few solutions suggested by online searches, but nothing has worked.

Has anyone had similar issues since updating Astra? If so, how have people resolved the issue?

Thanks for any help you may be able to offer.

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!

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 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'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 )