Rank Math Pro version was apparently impacted by a supply chain attack affecting some users who had recently updated the plugin. Rank Math has a write up on their site that users may wish to review. WordFence provided the following summary:

Rank Math SEO PRO 3.0.123 - Unauthenticated Embedded Malicious Code (9.8, Critical)

Rank Math SEO PRO for WordPress is affected by a supply-chain compromise in a subset of version 3.0.123 packages downloaded or updated between October 15, 2026 at 20:02 UTC and October 16, 2026 at 07:12 UTC. Rank Math states that the affected plugin files contained malware that could compromise a website if the plugin was activated and directs sites that activated an affected package to treat the website as compromised. The malware may establish persistent access, communicate with rank1cdn[.]com, recreate hidden backdoors on page visits, and expose WordPress credentials, database credentials, API keys, and other secrets accessible to the web server. Rank Math identifies three malicious wp_options keys, hidden PHP backdoors, unauthorized administrator accounts, a fake WordPress core file, PHP-executable .cache files, and a system cron marker as incident indicators. Only packages obtained during the vendor-confirmed window are claimed as affected; version 3.0.123 alone is not sufficient to establish compromise. Rank Math removed the affected files and released version 3.0.124 as the clean replacement.

We clean up hacked WordPress sites for our clients and since July we've been fighting the same malware family over and over. It calls itself "SC" in its own files. If you've ever had a site get hacked again right after it was cleaned, some of this might sound familiar.

The weirdest one was a browser tab. We'd done a full cleanup, and then the malware plugin got uploaded again from a real admin's computer, logged in as that admin. We were about to tell the client their laptop was infected. It wasn't. That admin still had a tab open on the site from back when it was hacked, and the bad code in that tab was still running. Every minute it checked whether an admin was logged in, and as soon as one was, it uploaded itself again. They closed the tab and that was the end of it.

So now after every cleanup we tell everyone who uses wp-admin to close every tab on the site and restart their browser. Sounds silly. Cost us days.

The other big one was a saved password. This thing records every username and password typed into the login page. A site we cleaned in September got reinfected this week by someone who just logged in with a password it had saved back then. The owner never changed it. So everyone who logged in while the site was infected needs a new password, and 2FA on the admin accounts would have stopped that login cold.

Other stuff that tripped us up

• It makes admin accounts that don't show on the Users screen, so the user list looks totally normal
• It hides in files with normal WordPress names, so you won't spot it scrolling through the files
• Part of it lives in the database, so restoring files or reinstalling plugins leaves that bit behind and it comes back later
• Newer versions run a background process on the server that puts the files back within minutes, and restarting PHP doesn't kill it. If a host cleaned your site and it was back the same afternoon, that's one way it happens

Anyone else seen the browser tab thing? That was a first for us.

​

Hey everyone,

I'm setting up a fresh WordPress site with the Twenty Twenty-Five theme and I'm stuck on publishing a page. Hoping someone here has run into this before and can point me in the right direction.

The setup:

Fresh WordPress install, Twenty Twenty-Five theme

Creating a new page, selecting a pattern (following the official tutorial)

Clicking "Publish" gives me:

Publishing failed. Could not update post in the database.

Are you ready to publish? Double-check your settings before publishing.

In the browser console (F12 → Network), the actual culprit is an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error.

Affected URL (anonymized): https://my-site.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=XXX&action=edit

What I've already tried / ruled out:

Permalinks reset (Settings → Permalinks → "Post name" → save). No change.

All plugins disabled temporarily. Error persists – so it's not a plugin conflict.

Site Health: No critical issues, only 5 "recommended improvements" (inactive plugins/themes, missing opcode cache, no page cache detected, server response time OK). The REST API is not flagged as broken there.

It's a brand-new, empty page using a default pattern – no legacy content, nothing exotic.

My suspicion:

Since everything on the WordPress side looks clean, I'm leaning toward a server-side issue. The 500 hits exactly when the editor tries to write the page to the database via the REST API (/wp-json/...).

Questions for the hive mind:

Has anyone seen this behavior with Twenty Twenty-Five (or Block Editor + patterns in general)? What was the root cause?

Which server-side settings should I check first? I'm thinking:

PHP error log / debug.log

Firewall / ModSecurity / WAF blocking POST requests to /wp-json/

Cloudflare (if in front) – Bot Fight Mode / security rules

WP_MEMORY_LIMIT / max_execution_time

Database charset (collation) – utf8mb4 vs. utf8

Is there a way to export the Site Health report (e.g. as a file) to hand off to the host/admin? I've only found the dashboard view so far.

Any known workaround to publish the page in the meantime (e.g. Classic Editor as a stopgap)? I know that's just a band-aid, not a fix.

I've already reached out to the backend/server admin to check logs and the firewall. But if anyone here has hit this exact error, I'd love to hear what solved it.

Thanks in advance!

UPDATE: Blank page also fails with 500 – so it's not the pattern

Hey everyone, thanks for the quick replies – all three were genuinely helpful. Quick update since a few people asked for follow-up:

What I tested based on your suggestions:

    Blank-page test (u/CombinationParty7358 – the first reply): Tried publishing a completely empty page, no pattern, no content. Same 500 error. So it's not weird Unicode characters in the pattern – it's something more fundamental in the write path. Good call, that narrowed it down a lot.

    debug.log before ModSecurity (u/Jealous-Machine-5192  Took your advice and prioritized the PHP log over the ModSec rabbit hole. I've asked the server admin to pull wp-content/debug.log and the PHP error log around the timestamp of the failed publish. Will update once I have the output.

    DB charset (u/ – answer b): This is now my top suspect given the blank-page result. Asked the admin to verify:

        define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8mb4'); in wp-config.php

        tables actually on utf8mb4_general_ci / utf8mb4_unicode_ci (not just utf8)

        Will report back if that's the culprit – your "exact same thing last month" story is very much on my mind.

    Site Health export: Found it – Tools → Site Health → Info gives the raw dump to copy. No export button, as you said. Thanks for the pointer.

    Classic Editor workaround: Keeping it in my back pocket. If we need the page live short-term, I'll activate it as a stopgap – but I'd rather fix the real cause first.

Current status: Waiting on the server admin's log output. The blank-page result makes me lean even more toward a server-side write/permission/DB issue rather than anything content-related. Will post the final solution here once we've nailed it – so the next person with this error has a reference.

Thanks again, this sub is great.

So i've decided to build my own website for my business, since budget is short, and am doing this is Wordpress.

This is going to be a service based business, with both one-time paying customers, aswell as subscription based clients, this then entails that prices need to be shown different for both. And this goes for both my services and add-ons.

So i need a booking plugin that allows me to show different prices, depending on subscription type, and then also combine the available times, so i dont get double bookings.

Currently building with Astra and Elementor, with some help from a well-known friend (ChatGPT).

Any recommendations on plug-ins for; 1. Login, 2. Booking?

Any tips or tricks shared are more than appreciated :)

Hey r/Wordpress,

A couple of weeks ago I shared SlimPress here, and the feedback from this community was awesome. Today I’m back with another tool I built out of my own day-to-day frustration: Cron Monitor.

Every time a scheduled post missed its publish window, a backup silently failed, or a site slowed down because of background tasks, I ran into the same wall. Existing cron plugins are great at showing you what is scheduled to run, but unless you pay for a Pro tier or an external SaaS, you're mostly flying blind on what actually happened when the job executed.

I wanted full execution visibility without paywalls, so I built it myself. Just like my last plugin, it is 100% free. There is no pro tier, no locked features, no nag banners, and zero telemetry.

What it covers

• Execution History & Timing: See exactly when jobs ran, how long they took, and any recorded errors—including fatal crashes and timeouts.
• Instant Failure Alerts: Get notified via Email, Slack, or Discord when a background job crashes, runs late, or stops running altogether.
• Plugin & Theme Ownership: Automatically maps cryptic cron hooks back to the specific plugin or theme that owns them by inspecting their observed callbacks.
• Orphan & Duplicate Cleanup: Identifies duplicate events and leftover cron jobs from long-deleted plugins based on what actually happens when they run, with a safe preview before you remove anything.
• Full Job Management: Add, edit, run on-demand, pause, resume, or bulk-delete events and custom schedules straight from the admin.
• Cron Health & WooCommerce Support: Tracks cron jobs that are progressively getting slower, flags server config issues blocking wp-cron.php, and automatically logs failed Action Scheduler tasks (huge for debugging WooCommerce).
• Developer Tools: Includes native WP-CLI commands, CSV exports, and a REST API for connecting your own external monitoring tools.

How it behaves on your site

• Zero bloat or phoning home: All logs stay strictly inside your local WordPress database. The only outbound requests are the optional failure alerts if you explicitly configure an email address or Slack/Discord webhook.
• Works out of the box: Once activated, just head to Tools → Cron Monitor. Duplicate detection, ownership mapping, and health checks work immediately, and your execution history starts building as your background jobs run.
  

Quick transparency note on AI: All the core logic and architecture were written by hand - AI was only used to help with UI mockups, class scaffolding/boilerplate, testing, documentation, and a final code review pass.

👉 Cron Monitor on WordPress.org

I’d love to get some feedback from others maintaining WordPress sites—especially if there are specific edge cases, WP-CLI flags, or webhook payloads that would make debugging background tasks easier for your workflow!

I've had a blog on Wordpress for years and I just noticed today that I'm getting an error when I'm trying to reach the site. I can't even log into Wordpress or edit in any kind of recovery mode like I have in the past. I'm going to be honest - I'm panicking because I haven't been able to get backups to work on my site and I have no idea how to read the error log. It looks like my last email from my website was about 2 days ago, so I feel like it has to be a recent error. Would anyone have any guidance for me to go about recovering or fixing this issue?

Hi all, just wanted to get some traction, mainly for getting feedback for improvements, for a set of 8 LocalWP addons I created to make working with LocalWP better, especially on MacOS and/or with composer based websites. You can find it on my github;

• https://github.com/rmpel/rasql-database-manager - LocalWP oriented database manager (but supports ssh/other DB connections as well) with MCP support
• https://github.com/rmpel/Local-Site-Beam/ - LAN/WAN site transfer
• https://github.com/rmpel/Local-Auto-Start - Auto start on LocalWP launch
• https://github.com/rmpel/Local-Trust-SSL-MacOS - Fix SSL trusting on MacOS
• https://github.com/rmpel/Local-CLI-Bridge - Replacement for defunct local-cli with many improvements
• https://github.com/rmpel/Local-Composer - Fixes for working with composer bases sites
• https://github.com/rmpel/Local-Router-Doctor - Fix annoying router mishaps
• https://github.com/rmpel/Local-Apache-Modules - Allow selecting Apache modules
• https://github.com/rmpel/Local-MySQL-Fixes - Permissions fixing for external/older MySQL clients

Yes, these are ALL Claude co-authored, if you don't like AI software, that's fine, just don't use it.

It's all free of charge, and also at your own risk, if you have issues, comments, suggestions, praise, etc; for all projects the issues tracker is open.

I’ve been wondering about this lately.

When you visit a website that supports multiple languages, do you actually use the language switcher, or do you normally rely on browser translation?

For people managing multilingual sites, do you notice visitors manually changing languages often?

Curious whether traditional language switchers are still as important as they used to be.

Have you seen this? This happened yesterday. The owners of the LearnDash plugin did a digital town hall and announced a price increase of more than 100% on some their tiers, now including 3 other plugins from the same company aparantly. So for example from 199 to 399 for one site, and from 399 to 599 for 10 sites. If you had legacy licenses, just in April you would have gotten en Email saying "don't worry, we will honor your licenses".

Well no more honor at LearnDash, it seems.

This smells like a cash grab before collapse. People in their forum are mightily pissed, many saying their final goodbyes from the plugin. And I am betting basically every other plugin studio is panicking right now, too.

Just LearnDash alone had an a third party premium addon costing several hundreds a year, just for B2B functionality, and they claim several thousand users on their own. So thats a whole plugin ecosystem collapsing right now, at this very moment.

I use GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks on my WP website and I'm curious to hear what you think about the premium version. Do you like it? What are some downsides you think it has (if any)? What advantages does it have? Thanks to all answers in advance!

J'essaie de mettre à jour une de mes extensions sur wordpress. Cependant je me retrouve à tourner en boucle là dessus :

Et lorsque je sélectionne "remplacer l'extension..." je dois entrer mes codes. Ce que je fais mais une fois validé, ça revient sur cette page et je peux recommencer indéfiniment. J'ai bien sûr vérifié et sans surprise, l'extension n'est pas à jour.

Hello, WP commmunity. I'm looking for help on two fronts, one is design related and one is more technical.

One, I am looking to move a very old WP website from Vultr cloud hosting to Namecheap SharedHosting. The old website is running plugins, theme and WP versions from 2009-2014. (WP 4.0.38) Is there any easy way to move all of the WP files and linked image/media files without blowing this whole thing up? Yes, I do want to modernize it, but I wanted to move everything first. (I do have background FTP access, but do not have CPanel or management access on the Vultr anymore - long story.)

Two, disregarding all of the above, how can I build a new, up-to-date responsive WP site that looks and functions similar to the old school PrimePress theme with minimal coding or design knowledge? I want to basically recreate my old site layout, nav, rotating header, colours, etc. while also adding newer features and plug-ins.

Thanks, everyone, for kindly helping a noob like me.

I tried setting the query loop to "custom" instead of "default" and then changing these things that way, but that made all the posts show up in every category so I changed it back to "default." Pls help, TIA :)

Wordfence published a write-up today (15 October) of CVE-2026-93953 in Backuply, the backup plugin with more than 600,000 active installs on wordpress.org. CVSS 8.0. Any logged-in user, down to a subscriber, can plant text that turns into SQL when an administrator later restores a backup. Versions up to and including 1.5.8 are affected; the author shipped 1.5.9 on 1 October.

How it works, because the two-step part is what makes it odd. A subscriber puts a crafted string in the Biographical Info field of their own profile. WordPress stores it as plain text in wp_usermeta, and when Backuply makes a database backup it writes that bio into the dump as a correctly quoted value. Nothing is wrong yet. The flaw is in the restore: after running each statement from the dump, Backuply runs an unanchored regular expression over the same statement to find the old table prefix. That pattern is not limited to a real CREATE TABLE line and does not skip quoted values, so it also matches text inside the bio. If the statement also contains the string backuply_version, the captured text is pasted straight into an UPDATE query as if it were the prefix.

So the bio can carry a whole UPDATE statement of the attacker's choosing, ended with a comment marker so the plugin's own trailing SQL is thrown away. Wordfence's example sets default_role to administrator and users_can_register to 1 in wp_options. After the restore, the registration form is open and every new account is an administrator. The attacker registers one and owns the site.

Some calibration on the 8.0. It needs an account on the site, so a site with open registration or a membership or shop setup is the exposed kind. It needs an administrator to restore a backup made after the bio was planted, and nothing runs until that restore happens. Restoring is the whole point of the plugin, so that is a routine action, but a site that only makes backups and never restores is not hit by it. Wordfence says nothing about exploitation in the wild in the write-up. The injection returns nothing to the attacker, so it can only change records, not read them, which is why the privilege escalation goes through those two options.

Timeline from Wordfence: reported 17 September, firewall rule for Premium, Care and Response users on 24 September, vendor told 28 September, patch 1 October, and free Wordfence users get the same rule on 24 October. The plugin's changelog for 1.5.9 says only "fixed a security issue in the restoration process", so the details are in the Wordfence post.

What I would do this week: update Backuply to 1.5.9 on every site that has it, including the ones you forgot about. If you restored a backup in the last few weeks on a site that lets people register, look at Settings, General, and check that "Anyone can register" and the New User Default Role are what you set. Check Users for administrators you did not create. And if you have not updated yet, hold off on restoring any backup that was made while subscribers could edit their profiles.

When you do restore on a site with user accounts, do you check anything first, or do you just trust your own backups?

​

Hey everyone,

​I'm running a tour and safari booking website using WordPress and the Traveler theme.

​The Problem:

Previously, when a customer selected a tour, chose their dates, and number of guests, then clicked "Check Availability" or "Checkout", a large WhatsApp button would appear on the screen. Clicking it would redirect them directly to our company's WhatsApp with a pre-filled message containing all their selected booking details.

​What happens now:

The WhatsApp step is completely gone. Now, when they click checkout, it redirects them to the standard WooCommerce checkout page (asking for billing info, email, payment methods, etc.), which I don't want. I just want the WhatsApp flow back.

​What I've checked:

​I checked my plugins, and there is no specific "WooCommerce to WhatsApp" plugin installed. I only have "Chaty", which just adds a floating widget, not the booking flow.

​I dug into the Traveler Theme Options > Booking Options and WooCommerce Options, but I couldn't find any specific setting to route the checkout to WhatsApp.

​I checked the individual tour settings, but changing them to "Instant Booking" or "Enquire Booking" doesn't bring back that specific WhatsApp pop-up with the variables.

​Did I accidentally disable a built-in feature in the Traveler theme? Or was this likely a custom code snippet in functions.php that got deleted? How can I restore the flow that sends the checkout variables to WhatsApp?

​Any help would be hugely appreciated!

So Liquid Web bought the Events Calendar. And now for more money, they are combining it with 3 other plugins that I neither want nor can use and will automatically bill my credit card and modify my WordPress dashboard. I do host vis Liquid Web, but may be moving because of this BS.

hi i’ve been trying to develop a custom wordpress theme for maybe the past couple weeks or so and i think im like 80% done since even though it technically works i have to actually optimize and clean up everything now. anyways my theme is a classic one and its like 90mb is that average or should i look into making this be a little hybrid

edit: i did mistype that before i slept it was actually like 60kb

edit edit: i also was half asleep typing that edit it was 561 KB man how did i get it that right

How are you using AI to design your stores? For example, for a static website, you can use Claude or OpenCode along with a template to create a landing page really quickly, but for sites that actually require WordPress and WooCommerce, how are you doing that?

I just went to my Wordpress hosted site and tried to reply to a post.
The Reply windows comes up but shows (see attached image).

Anyone know what is going on and how to fix it??

I am using the Big Brother theme

I added query loop block in 'home' page. Home is also set as homepage in reading settings.

The posts are visible in editor but not on page when seen in browser.

This site exists on Local.

Thanks!

I have a categories list on my homepage, but for some reason all of my posts are showing up in all of the categories. There is only supposed to be one post in the "Other Posts" category. I only checked one category for each and idk what is happening. Pls help, TIA. 🙏

I've been using WP Rocket to improve my WordPress site's performance, but I'm constantly running into the same frustrating error:

"IP blocked by Firewall or Cloudflare."

The issue keeps coming back, and it's becoming difficult to justify paying for a premium caching plugin when these errors interfere with its functionality.

The whole point of WP Rocket is to make websites faster, not to spend time troubleshooting recurring issues.

I'm now seriously considering switching to another caching and optimization plugin.

A few questions for the community:

• Has anyone else experienced this persistent issue with WP Rocket?
• Did you manage to fix it permanently?
• What caching plugin would you recommend as a reliable alternative?
• Has anyone switched from WP Rocket to FlyingPress, LiteSpeed Cache, or another solution and noticed better performance?

I'm particularly interested in real-world performance, stability, compatibility with Cloudflare, and Core Web Vitals.

I'd appreciate hearing your experiences and recommendations before making the switch.