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Fixing Runaway WordPress Action Scheduler: Stop Gigabytes of Log Bloat

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If your WordPress site suddenly starts dragging, your database balloons in size, or your host sends you a warning about excessive queries, there’s a good chance the culprit is hiding in plain sight: Action Scheduler.

This background task runner powers WooCommerce, subscription plugins, backups, and countless other tools. When it behaves, it’s invisible. When it breaks, it can hammer your database every few seconds and generate gigabytes of log entries before you even know what happened.

That’s exactly what happened to one of my sites — and here’s how I fixed it.

 

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Migrating Site to GoDaddy Basic Managed WordPress

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Recently was not able to convince a client of the benefits of having me professionally manage, host and maintain their website for them. They wanted to save money and use GoDaddy’s Basic Managed WordPress service. So I had to migrate their completed demo over to it but ran into countless errors with GoDaddy’s hosting platform.

The GoDaddy migration tool was useless as was GoDaddy support. GoDaddy support insisted that I upgrade the server in order to complete the migration. But I only had delegated access to the clients account with no ability to purchase said upgrade because the client did not grant me those permissions.

Long story short, I was able to manually migrate their site over, even though we were on the Basic Managed WordPress server using the steps enumerated in this article.

This article is only for my personal use, to help jog my memory if another client want to migrate their site to a more affordable solution. Please do not use this article for migrating any of your or client sites. If you do, you take full responsibility for anything that goes wrong, or right for that matter.

 

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Install XAMPP for WordPress Development

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Recently needed to implement a local development environment that used Apache, PHP and MySQL on Windows.

Years ago I played with WAMP server, which worked well. But the payload was large (1GB installer), system resource utilization high, and it required a number of outdated Microsoft Visual C++ versions to be installed in order to operate correctly. It was also very slow to use but it did work.

Local by Flywheel was slightly better but also very, very slow on a Windows computer. At least in my experience.

By far the best experience has been XAMPP. Granted, you have to run the installer as an administrator as well as its primary executables. But beyond that, it had a smaller installer and opening up a local WordPress installation is at least 4x faster than with Local by Flywheel. In short, for my personal needs the clear winner is XAMPP. Your experience may be different.

Within this article I have instructions and a video covering how I installed XAMPP on my Windows PC for quickly spinning up a WordPress installation for use in WordPress Plugin development.

 

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Remove Existing Trackbacks and Pingbacks on Pages and Posts

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In this article I will show you how to disable trackbacks and pingbacks on your old WordPress pages and posts quickly using a simply MySQL query.

Before doing so you will want to make sure that you have disabled link notifications (pingbacks and trackbacks) for any future posts or pages using the WordPress backend. Simply visit the “Settings > Discussion” admin page and uncheck the “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new posts” option.

 

 

As stated, this particular setting only works going forward, on “new posts and pages“. Now to remove trackbacks and pingbacks on our old posts and pages.

 

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Can’t Access the Dashboard After Changing WordPress Database Prefix

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It is a frequently suggested WordPress security tip to update your default WordPress database table prefixes. However, upon doing so you now appear to have lost access to your WordPress Dashboard backend.

Attempts to login to your WordPress website Dashboard backend simply results in a redirect to your homepage with a very limited WordPress Admin bar. Furthermore, any attempts to directly access your Dashboard backend via the “wp-admin” url presents you with the following error message:

Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page.

The issue is that your WordPress website database has the previous database table prefix stored within one or more of its table records. You will have to manually update these in order to restore your Dashboard admin access. Not a big deal, using your favorite database tool (we recommend phpMyAdmin) we will show you how to quickly fix this in this article.

 

[su_note note_color=”#157BAE” text_color=”#ffffff” radius=”5″]Would you like prompt assistance? If you don’t have time or are not comfortable taking the risk of adding custom code to your website, let us get this done for you now![/su_note]

 

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