Blog

Writing about PHP, WordPress, technical SEO, performance, and the occasional deep dive.

A 30-day cache lifetime, and still the page cache kept shrinking overnight. Tracing every code path that purges W3 Total Cache turned up a purge policy that applies to far more than posts, a menu save that wipes the whole cache, and the reason priming right after purging does nothing. Then the purge log caught the real culprit: an SEO plugin wiping the entire cache every time someone opened wp-admin.

5 Jul 2026 / 6 min read / WordPress

What W3 Total Cache Is Really Storing on Disk (and a Plugin to Show You)

A large WordPress site was sitting on 2GB of page cache with far more files than live pages. Digging into W3 Total Cache's disk layout turned up _old files, orphaned directories and a surprising 30-second serve window - so I built a free plugin to make all of it visible.

18 Jun 2026 / 6 min read / WordPress

Fixing Elementor Pro Soft 404s (and a Fatal) on Non-Existent Tag and Category URLs

An Elementor Pro Archive template can stop WordPress from 404ing tag and category URLs that don't exist - returning a 200 soft 404, or a hard fatal if you use the Archive URL dynamic tag. Here's a drop-in mu-plugin fix and why it happens.

15 Jun 2026 / 12 min read / Servers and Hosting

Blocking Fake Googlebot (and Bingbot) Traffic With Nginx

Fake Googlebot traffic can quietly hammer your server. Here is how to verify crawlers against Google and Bing's official IP ranges in nginx and drop the impostors.

11 Jun 2026 / 4 min read / WordPress

Fixing the Elementor 4.1.3 Front-End Fatal: Call to undefined function is_plugin_active()

Elementor 4.1.3 can throw a fatal Call to undefined function is_plugin_active() on the front-end of lean installs. Here's the one-line cause, a drop-in mu-plugin fix, and why it only hits some sites.

5 Apr 2026 / 6 min read / WordPress

Fixing cURL DNS Failures on AWS EC2: Elementor Webhooks, WPML and bind9

If Elementor webhooks aren't sending or WPML can't connect to its servers on an AWS EC2 instance, the problem probably isn't WordPress - it's bind9 causing intermittent DNS failures.

25 Jan 2026 / 8 min read / General

Why I Built AI Data Stream: Chat With Your Analytics Without the AI Markup

Most AI analytics tools markup API costs by 300-1000%. I built AI Data Stream with a different approach: bring your own AI keys, pay zero markup, and get the context your AI needs to actually explain what’s happening in your data.

17 Oct 2025 / 3 min read / WordPress

Fixing Elementors CSS Regeneration Issues for Good

If you use Elementor with a caching plugin, then the odds are that you’ve seen pages of your site lose styling after updates. It has been brought up multiple times on GitHub and WordPress forums, but it doesn’t seem like Elementor developers feel it’s their responsibility to fix.

24 Apr 2025 / 2 min read / WordPress

Caching Contact Form 7 Schema Requests

If you've noticed performance issues on WordPress pages that contain a Contact Form 7 form, especially during traffic spikes, you might be experiencing an overlooked problem: uncached API requests.

18 Jan 2025 / 3 min read / WordPress

Track Elementor Form Submissions with TagManager and Google Analytics

There are several articles already out there on how to track Elementor form submissions with TagManager. Still, most seem to rely on an element visibility trigger, which is inefficient, or overly elaborate custom JavaScript.

26 Nov 2024 / 1 min read / WordPress

Remove Sitelinks Search Box Schema from Yoast Structured Data

On the 21st of November 2024, Google retired Sitelinks Search Box from SERPs. Although SearchAction is part of the schema.org standard, it was essentially a Google-specific enhancement.

24 Mar 2024 / 3 min read / General

Integrating AbuseIPDB With the Nginx Ultimate Bad Bot Blocker Script

The Nginx Bad Bot Blocker script is fantastic and a no-brainer to install on any Nginx server hosting publicly accessible websites. As great as it is though, I’ve recently noticed a significant increase in the number of attacks on the servers which I administer and websites in general. So I looked into into integrating the

10 Dec 2023 / 1 min read / WordPress

Elementor 3.18 Breaks Plugins Sending JSON Ajax Responses

If you find certain areas of your site not working after updating to Elementor 3.18, take this step to fix them.

23 Apr 2023 / 2 min read / General

Automatically Add Unique CSS Classes to Contact Form 7 Forms

When using certain CRMs and marketing automation tools, Contact Form 7 submissions can all look like they came from the same form. This is especially noticeable in HubSpot which uses the class on the form tag to identify each form. Unless you specifically add a class to the shortcode then it will look like any

23 Apr 2023 / 1 min read / General

Clear W3 Total Cache by URL From the Admin Bar or Dashboard

When recently working on a WordPress website that generated pages from an API that aren’t stored in the main site database, I discovered that the W3 Total Cache admin bar link to clear the current page’s cache didn’t work. The ‘Purge Current Page’ link in the Performance menu item works by passing the current post

23 Apr 2023 / 3 min read / General

Forcing W3 Total Cache to Clear Parent Term Listing Pages on Post Save

In the page caching settings of W3 Total Cache there is an option to flush the ‘Post Terms Pages’ when saving or updating a post. This clears the listing pages for any terms that the post has been added to, but it doesn’t clear the listing pages of any parent terms that aren’t checked, even

10 Jul 2022 / 2 min read / WordPress

Fixing Yoast Broken Organization and Logo Schema

Get your Logo and Organization schema back after a Yoast update.

31 Dec 2021 / 2 min read / General

Mapping a Synology NAS Drive in Windows 11

How to map a Synology NAS with Windows 11 that you previously had connected with Windows 10

2 May 2021 / 1 min read / General

Prevent PDF Caching With Invoice Ninja 5 (Apache, .htaccess)

If you find that PDF files aren’t updating after changes, it could be that they are cached by the browser or a CDN such as Cloudflare.

18 Apr 2021 / 1 min read / General

Customising the Client Portal Colour In Invoiceninja 5

Customizing the invoiceninja V5 client portal colour scheme.

24 Apr 2019 / 5 min read / WordPress

Extend Yoast Schema with a New Type

Yoast 11 introduced schema data added by default. If your site already has schema added through your theme then this may break.

17 Apr 2019 / 1 min read / WordPress

Remove Yoast HTML Comments in Version 11.0

If you were previously stripping Yoast HTML comments on your website then there is a good chance that updating to v11.0 will show the new schema data at the top of your website.

30 Mar 2019 / 1 min read / Joomla

Add Joomla’s Article Layout as a Body Class

If you are using Joomla’s alternative layouts for certain pages, you might want to target those pages with a css class. You could add a class directly into the layout file, but since the layout file is inserted into the main component area this only lets you target that specific area and not the page

30 Mar 2019 / 1 min read / Joomla

How to Stop Joomla 3 Loading Bootstrap 2 JavaScript

It used to be easy to remove core JavaScript files from Joomla’s output by unsetting the script at the top of your template’s index file. unset( $this->_scripts[ JURI::root( true ) . ‘/media/jui/js/bootstrap.min.js’ ] ); For whatever reason, this doesn’t work anymore with Joomla 3.9.

17 Mar 2019 / 3 min read / WordPress

Block WordPress Image Uploads by Filename Match

Are you continually telling people to optimise their image filenames before uploading them to a website? Do staff members keep assuring you that they will optimise their filenames in the future whilst having no intention of doing so? Have they said “I’ll go back and do it later” rather than taking 2 seconds to do

19 Jan 2019 / 2 min read / Servers and Hosting

Securing ISPConfig Admin Panel the Easy Way

The latest ISPConfig hosting panel includes support for Let’s Encrypt free SSL certificates. This makes it easy to secure all domains added to the panel, but it doesn’t have an option to generate a cert for the actual control panel login. Rather than manually installing and configuring a new cert through the command line, there

12 Aug 2018 / 3 min read / Mautic

Better Mautic Opt-In Campaigns

How to create a double opt-in campaign with Mautic that instantly sends the confirmation email rather than waiting for a campaign to trigger.

25 Apr 2018 / 2 min read / WordPress

Removing WooCommerce noindex Tags on Account Login Page

If you have a website using WooCommerce and have registered it with the new version of Google Search Console, it's likely that you will get an email notification about 'index coverage' issues for the /my-account/ page.

11 Sept 2017 / 4 min read / Mautic

How to Send Custom Attributes with the Official Mautic WordPress Plugin

Example code to update preferred locale with information from WPML using the 'wpmautic_tracking_attributes' filter of the official Mautic WordPress plugin.

2 Sept 2017 / 3 min read / WordPress

Tracking Known WordPress Users in Mautic with the Official Mautic Plugin

A new option was recently added to the official Mautic WordPress plugin (Version 2.1.0), but it won’t do anything out of the box. Here’s how to set it up to track extra information from your logged-in users.

2 Sept 2017 / 6 min read / Servers and Hosting

Using LetsEncrypt With Serverpilot

How to install Certbot on a server managed by Serverpilot for free SSL certificates and enable HTTP/2 for a faster website with automated cert renewal.

1 Sept 2017 / 2 min read / Mautic

Serverpilot Cron Jobs For Mautic

If you have used Serverpilot to set up your server intending to host Mautic then here is how to add the cron jobs to keep everything running.

28 Aug 2017 / 11 min read / Mautic

Creating a Mautic Email Theme Using Foundation for Emails

On first glance, the blank Mautic theme looks like the perfect starting point for a simple HTML email, you just drag and drop the elements that you need into the layouts, add your images and text, select some colours and it’s done. Unfortunately, after testing the resulting emails in different email clients and web apps

11 Aug 2017 / 5 min read / WordPress

Adding Woocomerce Bought Product Tags to Mautic Users

This is a follow-up to the original post about adding Mautic tags to users based on what they view on your site. In this post, I’m going to add (or remove) tags after check out, based on the products that the user bought.

13 Jul 2017 / 7 min read / Joomla

Using Joomla Custom Fields to Add Canonical URLs

In this article, we are going to add a new field to the article editor screen and use the content of the field to output a canonical link in the head of the page on the article view. At some point, Joomla’s automatically added canonical links were removed as they didn’t work correctly, so this

12 Jul 2017 / 5 min read / Symfony

Running Symfony 4 on Windows

How to get the Symfony 4 demo app running on Windows without errors. Fix errors related to using the ‘make’ command and get routing and cache clearing working.

30 Jun 2017 / 6 min read / Mautic

Mautic Installation Checklist

Usually, when I install Mautic, there is a bit of back and forth with the client to get the information required to get the job done. This is my list of information that needs to be provided to get Mautic installed and operational in one sitting.

18 Jun 2017 / 3 min read / WordPress

Tagging WordPress and Woocomerce Users in Mautic

The official WordPress plugin for Mauitc comes with a number of shortcodes, which makes it easy to add Mautic forms and content into posts and pages. One of the shortcodes adds the ability to tag (or un-tag) visitors in Mautic depending on the pages they view. This makes it easy to tag visitors dynamically by using the

16 Jun 2017 / 12 min read / Mautic

Using Geocoding API's to Add Address Information from a Zip to a CSV File

Today I was talking to a musician importing thousands of contacts into a newly setup Mautic install. The issue was that the CSV of contacts to import only contained Country Code and Zip columns.

12 Jun 2017 / 1 min read / Mautic

Fixing Invalid File Type text/x-pascal When Importing Contacts to Mautic

If you get the following error when trying to import contacts into Mautic, it’s likely that the issue is not with the file encoding, but with one of the fields within the file. Invalid file type “text/x-pascal”. Use a file that matches of of the following mime types: “text/csv”, “text/plain”.

6 Jun 2017 / 3 min read / General

Loading Disqus Comments On Demand Without jQuery or AJAX

Simple on demand Disqus comment loading without any library dependencies. Automatically loads when linked to directly and optionally for search engines.

3 Jun 2017 / 2 min read / Mautic

Cutting the Size of the Mautic JavaScript Tracking Script

Having used Mautic for a few clients, I decided to install it on my own site, partly for testing and partly to actually use it’s functionality. Unfortunately, having made an effort to keep my page sizes to a bare minimum, it was depressing to see that the tracking script increased the overall size of my pages

28 May 2017 / 2 min read / Mautic

Fixing Broken Email Template Images When Running Mautic in a Folder

I first ran into this issue after installing a local copy of Mautic to develop some custom Email templates. Everything looks fine until you open up the email builder and images added in the Email Twig template don’t show. The fix is pretty simple if a little counter intuitive.

27 May 2017 / 2 min read / Symfony

Using the Symfony Installer Command Line On Windows

If you are following the official documentation to use the symfony installer on Windows then it is very likely that you will run into the error: ‘symfony’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. Here’s how to fix it.

26 Oct 2016 / 3 min read / Joomla

Fixing JSON Data Errors After Updating to Joomla 3.6.3

How to fix fatal errors related to JSON decoding when updating you Joomla core version.

13 Jun 2016 / 1 min read / General

How to get your Windows 10 Key

I recently bought a new pc, and was a bit quick to install Windows, create a backup drive and remove the disk to install the larger ssd from my previous computer. The upshot of that was that, after installing the operating system on the new drive, it wouldn’t activate Windows as I didn’t fully activate

6 Apr 2016 / 1 min read / WordPress

Adding Custom Mime Types for WordPress Uploads

WordPress allows the upload of different filetypes to posts through custom fields, but it only understands certain file types by default.

6 Apr 2016 / 1 min read / Joomla

How to Find the Full Joomla Version in the Site Files

Sometimes, for whatever reason, I need to find out the exact version of Joomla a site is running without being able to access the administration area. Here’s where to find the version number in the file system.

6 Apr 2016 / 1 min read / General

Issues Assigning Nameservers to .de Domain Names

I recently ran into an issue whilst trying to change the nameservers for a German (.de) domain name. When I tried to point the domain to a whm/cpanel install I got the error ‘Failed to Modify Domain Nameservers: The domain DNS check has failed’. The reason for this is specific to .de domains.

6 Apr 2016 / 2 min read / WordPress

Selecting WordPress Posts That Contain a String in PhpMyAdmin

I was asked to find a list of posts in a WordPress install where the body text contained a certain string. Subsequently, I discovered how bad the search is in the post listing screen and decided it would be easier to find them in the database.

What Actually Clears W3 Total Cache's Page Cache (It's More Than You Think)