The Day Your Website Died: Optimizing for AI Search
The Day Your Website Died is the record of what happened when an AI engine started sending Richard Lowe paying clients before he had done anything deliberate
Category: WordPress
Practical guidance on using WordPress for website management, including themes, plugins, performance optimization, and the content management strategies that keep a professional site running smoothly.
SEOCore Web Vitals: The Three Numbers That Measure How Your Website Feels
Google's Core Web Vitals are three numbers that measure how your website feels: the wait at the door, the ignored question, and the moving shelf. What each one means, how to diagnose them with Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, and GTmetrix,…
CybersecurityWordPress Security Is a Posture, Not a Plugin
Every article in this series was secretly about security. The capstone: why the green checkmark is a component and not a defense, what a working posture looks like in practice, and the five questions no product can answer.
CybersecurityThe Supply Chain Is the Attack Surface
The attack that reached my site did not come at it. It came through it, riding a trusted update channel. Why supply chain attacks scale, why they extend to hardware, and how to manage a chain you cannot eliminate.
WordPressThe Single Maintainer Problem: Who Keeps Your Software Alive?
Before installing any software, ask how many people keep it alive. The number is public, takes five minutes to find, and predicts more grief than any feature list. The story of an excellent theme with a bus factor of one.
WordPressThe Plugin Diet: Trimming WordPress Without Losing Muscle
Plugins are generally in better shape than themes, but they grow sideways: the tool you installed for one job quietly becomes a platform doing fifteen. An afternoon audit puts the stack back on a diet.
WordPressDivorcing Your Page Builder: What It Cost Me to Leave
I have left two page builders: one because it was hurting my site, one while genuinely admiring it. Both exits cost the same, because the price was never about quality. It was about depth of embedding.
WordPressWhy So Many WordPress Themes Are Frankenstein Monsters
I opened up the theme running my website and found dead code, three settings systems, and an animation for an element that never existed. Here is why commercial themes end up this way and what you can actually do about…
CybersecurityThe Morning I Found a Plugin I Never Installed
A plugin folder appeared on my site that I never installed. It was caught before it did damage, and the investigation changed how I run every part of my WordPress stack.
Book MarketingVanity Metrics vs. Conversion Metrics for Authors
Elise announced 50,000 views on her book trailer, and three months later texted her Amazon dashboard: twelve copies sold. Those views were digital applause, lovely to hear, impossible to bank. Authors fall for vanity metrics every time. The number that…
SEE » The Elephant in the Room: Marketing Your Books and Services series
Digital TransformationWordPress Reality: What Nobody Tells You About Building a Website with WordPress and Elementor
You installed WordPress and Elementor expecting simple, and walked straight into an advanced engineering course. Every tutorial promised easy; none mentioned the plugin conflicts, the mobile layouts that explode, the update that takes the site down. WordPress is a house…
SEORobots.txt: The Most Dangerous File on Your Website and How to Configure It Without Destroying Your Search Rankings
One wrong line in robots.txt and I told every search engine on Earth to ignore my entire site, which promptly vanished from Google. I caught it fast; unmonitored, it could have stayed gone for weeks. It is the most powerful,…