Give your WordPress website some TLC this Valentine’s

Tech heart circuit board

Every WordPress website needs tender loving care, to keep up with the latest versions of software, new browsers & devices and the latest security patches. To give your users the best experience possible, make sure your website gets the TLC it deserves with our checklist below: The Silicon Dales WordPress TLC Checklist Backup your website. Update to …

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Big WordPress Problem – Slow WP Admin / Uncached Pageloads Slow

Some problems are first world problems. Other problems are big WordPress problems. Slow WordPress Admin? Slow uncached pageloads? We deal with some big WordPress customers, and often their sites can become slow. There’s sometimes a myth floating around that “WordPress doesn’t scale” or, more specifically, that “WooCommerce doesn’t scale” but there’s a reason I call …

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Find out Apache, MySQL, PHP (etc) versions via Plesk

Are you running Plesk on your dedicated server or VPS? Do you want or need to know what version of MySQL, PHP, Apache – or anything else – your box is running, to relate to a client or stakeholder? If you would like to find your Apache version and you do not have Plesk, click …

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AWS EC2 Instance Won’t Stop

If you use a lot – or even just one – EC2 instance on Amazon Web Services (AWS), from time-to-time, you might find that an instance becomes unresponsive, you can’t get in via SSH, and, when in the AWS console, the instance just won’t stop! When this happens, you select “Stop” in the console, and …

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How to Make WordPress Auto-Thumbnails Work

If you’re recently installed WordPress onto a new server (we do this a lot on Amazon EC2 instances of varying sizes) and you notice that your image uploads aren’t auto-thumbnailing (when WordPress “crunches” your images into “thumbnail” “medium” and “large” sizes for use throughout your website) then chances are your server doesn’t have the GD …

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Installing APC on Amazon EC2 Instance

Some time ago, I wrote a short blog post explaining how to go about installing XCache on an Amazon EC2 instance to help with opcode caching. More recently, we’ve begun using APC for similar reasons, with excellent results, including on Amazon EC2 Micro instances, which can be used under their free usage tier to run …

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How to Restart MySQL After Editing innodb Log Size

Sometimes, either because we’ve got a puny amount of RAM available, or because we’ve recently boosted available RAM, we want to allow MySQL a different amount of memory for it’s innodb logs. However, when we change this, restarting MySQLd can cause a hiccup or two. Namely, the MySQL service won’t restart. If this happens, what …

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MySQL Innodb Tables Crashing on AWS EC2 Instance? Is Your Disk Full?

We’ve been asked to troubleshoot Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS EC2) instances for a number of reasons. Recently, we took a look at an Amazon EC2 instance which was being used as a MySQL server and the task was to see why several MySQL innodb tables were crashing. The situation had got so …

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WordPress – Using MySQL to Update Specific Custom Fields

Some time ago, we told you how to Find & Replace Data using MySQL – today I am going to explain how to use this query to update specific custom fields in WordPress databases, in bulk, on-the-fly, without having to login, open, and edit every single WordPress post you’ve got! Remember, before doing anything to …

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