I’ve written numerous tutorials explaining how to troubleshoot WordPress, plugins, email, and more. When investigating issues, diagnosing problems, and hunting bugs, troubleshooting is a critical core skill for any web developer. To help readers level up their tool belt, here’s a quick round-up of free plugins to help troubleshoot any of your WordPress projects.

A common question for new WordPress users is, “what’s the difference between categories and tags?” Like everyone knows what a “category” is, but the idea of “tags” can seem very similar. And then you throw in related WordPress concepts like “taxonomy”, and things can get confusing very quickly. But no worries, it’s really not that complicated. Let’s break it down..

I work from home so can afford to leave tabs open for each of my WordPress sites. That way I can jump on anytime and update or add new content very quickly. The problem I kept running into is that WordPress automatically logs out users after 48 hours. Which means I have to log back in every day even when it’s not necessary. So I needed a way to stay logged in to WordPress indefinitely. Fortunately WordPress is very flexible and easy to customize, and the login duration can be changed via several different methods.

Quick tip: how to disable embeds for any URL(s). The other day I was adding URLs to a draft post in WordPress. Some of the URLs were for Twitter tweets. Checking a preview of the post on the front end, I was surprised that WordPress had automatically embedded the actual tweet in place of the URL. After a few minutes searching for a way to disable the automatic embedded tweet, I remembered about WordPress oEmbed (now referred to as Embeds), which I’ve actually written about in several tutorials. Turns out the solution is dead simple.

I just finished up my latest book, Wizard’s SQL Recipes for WordPress. And it’s packed with over 300 time-saving code snippets for managing and optimizing your WordPress database. For example, one of the recipes from the book shows how to delete unwanted user-agent data from the WP comments table. This is an easy optimization step that can help to free up some precious disk space.

By default the Gutenberg Block Editor loads its default CSS/stylesheet on the front-end of your WordPress site. This is fine for most cases, but there may be situations where you want to disable the Gutenberg styles for whatever reason. For example, my free WordPress plugin, Disable Gutenberg, enables users to disable the Gutenberg Block Editor and restore the Classic Editor. Included in the plugin settings is an option called “Enable Frontend” that lets users enable or disable the Gutenberg CSS/styles as desired. This quick DigWP tutorial explains programmatically how to disable Gutenberg styles on the front-end.

Quick post that explains how to fix the error, “The authorization header is missing”. This error may be found under “recommended improvements” in the WordPress Site Health tool (located under the WP menu ▸ Tools ▸ Site Health).

When running a Site Health check, the “authorization header” warning happens when you’ve upgraded WordPress (to version 5.6 or better) and have Permalinks enabled, but the site’s .htaccess rules have not been updated with the latest. This DigWP tutorial explains what’s happening and shows how to fix the error easily with a few clicks.

Easily hands down the most common thing that I find myself explaining to WordPress users is how to troubleshoot WordPress in order to find the cause of some issue. And it makes sense if you think about it. WordPress and all of its plugins and themes are made of code. And code is a complex thing. The more code you add to a site, the more likely it is for bugs and issues to happen. And when they do, it can be confusing and frustrating to the average user.

Something I did not know about when working with Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies. Normally when checking if a regular WP Post belongs to a specific category, we can use the WordPress function in_category(). But that does not work with Custom Post Types. To check if a CPT belongs to a specific term in a Custom Taxonomy, use has_term() instead.

People often ask me whether it is safe to run plugins that are not tested with the latest version of WordPress. And it’s a good question, because software in general is something that you want to keep current and updated with all the latest. For WordPress plugins however, there are many plugins that simply don’t need to be updated with each new version of WordPress.

For a long time, premium WordPress plugins and themes were sold as a one-time payment. So for example, if you wanted to buy a new WordPress theme, you would make a single purchase and own the theme indefinitely, with no future payments due. Then somewhere along the way, a recurring pricing model became popular. These days, it is very common for themes and plugins to be sold via recurring payment scheme. So for example, if you want to use some awesome pro plugin or theme, you pay an annual or in some cases monthly fee.

WordPress plugins that clean up after themselves are pure awesome sauce. If you are developing a plugin that adds any sort of data to the WordPress database, it is important that the plugin removes any unwanted or unused data if and when the plugin ever is uninstalled. This complete guide explains useful techniques for doing this using the powerful and handy uninstall.php file.

There are numerous ways to add custom content to your WordPress feeds. If you’re not using a plugin, it’s possible to just add a code snippet to your theme’s functions.php file. For most cases, I think probably going the plugin route is the easiest way to add custom content to your WordPress RSS/feeds. Just install, activate, add your content and done. But for WordPress developers and designers who want more fine-grained control, this article explains how to add custom feed content programmatically using the WP API. So whether you need to add copyright text, advertisements, hyperlinks, or virtually anything at all, this post explains how to make it happen.

If you are a WordPress developer, you may have used the WordPress hook wp_print_scripts to add any necessary inline JavaScript. Alternately, you may have used the function wp_localize_script() to add your inline scripts. But did you know that not too long ago, WordPress added a new function for adding inline JavaScript? Yep, as of WordPress version 4.5 and better, we can use the superior function wp_add_inline_script() to do the job.

One of the nice things about this newer function is that you can associate it with any registered script AND include more than just JavaScript variables. This DigWP article explains how wp_add_inline_script() works, why it’s better than either of the alternate inline methods, and how to support older (pre-4.5) versions of WordPress. Along the way, we’ll look at some example code that you can customize and use in your own WordPress projects.