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.

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.

​

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!

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?

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?

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

Agencies/freelancers who maintain and develop woocommerce shops and websites: Have you been getting requests from your customers (the actual business owners) to give AI access to add content/products, manage orders themselves, or even (god forbid!) develop small features?

Maybe from the more technical people on their staff?

Is this a thing?

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.

As a total newbie with WP (and web development except for some drag and drop site builders), I am trying to rebuild my small business website in WP (I am coming from Weebly->Articulation which if I understand correctly is Laravel/PHP so it can't be imported directly into WP).

The layout I am looking for is two columns, where one column might be a picture and the column next to it might be a text paragraph with a button. When the website is visualized in mobile, these two columns should be visualized on top of each other, so it is readable.

I believe this layout is pretty standard.

I am trying to do this using Gutenberg blocks but when I add a 2 column block in Gutenberg, the width is pretty tight and the layout doesn't look nice on a wide desktop screen (the picture is too small and the text too cramped). I can't figure out how to make the two columns wider (more pixels). I have found that one could do this with a single container block (set at wide) with the two columns nested inside it but then on mobile it stays locked with the two columns next to each other.

I have also found a pattern in the twenty twenty five template that achieves the look I am after and renders correctly on mobile. But I don't want to be so dependent on a particular pattern of a particular template, so I am wondering if there is a more standard way to get the layout wider?

Sorry for the newbie question.

Been thinking about this lately. I use AI tools for some parts of client work, drafting copy, generating images, sometimes boilerplate code. I always review and edit everything, but I don't explicitly tell clients which parts had AI help. Honestly the stuff I make with AI looks so real that no one has figured it out so far. Part of me feels like as long as the final quality is good it doesn't matter, part of me feels like they should know what they're paying for. What do you guys do? Tell them upfront, or is it just part of the process now?

Hello everybody

I Have an issue in uploading a zip file as a theme in Word Press

every time I try to upload in Word Press It says " Following link has expired " I googled an it says it my be a problem in the limit of PHP

I use PLESK and in the setting of PHP I have default settings and I am not able to change them

I don't understand what I have to do to upload this Word Press theme

I need help Please

Thanks you !

I have to use WordPress for school and my internship. WordPress looks like a maze to me. I need a video, tutorial, or other resource that explains the basics of WordPress for posting blogs. I need to be told like a toddler. I have the free version.

I recently had a post where I asked for requested tutorials and couple of them where solving a hacked WordPress website.

Mu guys tried to reproduce the situation from the last hack we fixed and did all on our own server.

In the video I will show step-by-step for this specific hack how I debug it and why. 

There is also a checklist available for FREE that we always use to start with for a hacked website. It covers most of the things.

Here is the video:

https://youtu.be/lPTEmeQBHWM

For best understanding follow the whole video and hope it will help you fix your clients hacked website or your own!

Have fun with it, and other requested video’s are all listed and will try to make them all one by one but it will take some time.

Appreciate you all!

#WPML

Hi everyone,

I'd be interested in your opinion concerning the evolution of WPML v5.

****** This post was not to open a debate about translation plugins, so thanks in advance to do not start a debate to compare WPML with other solutions. ******

WPML Marketing Strategy:
I'm really upset that with the BIG update, they have put Automatic Translation with PTC by default, even on website that had never been translated with ATE, or even the Classic Translation Editor. I manage many websites, and I'll have to reconfigure WPML settoings on all of them and explain my client that this had to be done because of WPML, which they don't even know what it's about !

UX:
I understand that this is a first version, but hey, how come WPML made all those settings in TABS instead toggles or accordions ? Is feels like back in 2000.

Support:
Robots seems to be your support. I guess that if the robot fails to help, it will go to a human, but after how many chats ? I don't know yet !
That said, from what I tried, there robots seem not that bad, but I haven't had very difficult case for now. Did you ?

"Community":
Before, when you needed support, you could go in the "support section", type what your problem was, and before everything, it was showing you a forum with real cases with real people. It was not made to be a community, but there was something human.
All is gone ! No more forums !

So, I was asking myself if I was the only one feeling that way with WPML, which I've been using for more that 13 years.

And as the only thing I found was a Reddit group for WPML with 2 users and not active for 2 years, I thought I'd have more feedback here ! ;-)

So, what's your experience / opinion ?

Shopify and WooCommerce aren't competing for the same part of the web any more. Shopify has taken the top of it and WooCommerce has everything below, so both of them can fairly call themselves the biggest platform.

I think that explains why the figures that people publish never agree with each other. Elementor, Hostinger and WPBeginner quote numbers 4x apart, because each of them measured a different slice of the internet and none of them said which.

WooCommerce has also started falling. It lost three years of growth in the last 12 months while Shopify hit an all-time high - on the current trajectory, Shopify will overtake outright around the end of 2027.

I've written everything up, including the data, at: https://barn2.com/blog/shopify-vs-woocommerce-market-share/

So I’ve been building a WordPress plugin called Fluentor for a while now, mostly because I got sick of multilingual plugins that handle regular post text fine but choke on Elementor pages.

Back in early 2025 I was tasked at work with translating a website (about 20 pages and 80 posts) into English, which isn’t my native language. A few colleagues helped. We used AI to translate the content, but we duplicated the pages and replaced the content by hand. I thought there had to be a better way.

I’ve been playing with Elementor since 2021 or so, and I know it stores everything as JSON, so a lot of content never gets translated, and text inside HTML widgets is basically a lost cause. Since AI can now process JSON, I figured there had to be a way. So I built one: Fluentor translates the whole Elementor page, including the HTML widget stuff, and handles multilingual URLs, slugs and hreflang too.

I thought I was done, but I have a problem my colleagues (and even AI) scold me for: I don’t ship the MVP. I keep adding stuff because I feel the product must be of value before it reaches the public. My wife had a Woo project of her own that needed translating. I told her to just download Loco, but then I thought: why not implement whatever Loco offers, or at least most of it, and combine it with Fluentor? So I did. It now has a PO/MO editor for theme and plugin strings, and AI translation is built in.

It comes in a Free and a Pro version.

Free already available on WP org: https://wordpress.org/plugins/fluentor/

Free covers the core stuff:

Elementor: translates widget content directly (titles, text, accordions, links), with a language switcher widget and shortcode

Multilingual: directory or subdomain URLs, slug translation, language assignment for posts, terms and CPTs, setup wizard, one-click Polylang import

AI: one-click Translate (duplicate and translate) with DeepL using your own key, no caps. Results are drafts. Manual duplicate also works with the layout intact.

SEO: hreflang, localized canonicals (Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO), lang and dir attributes

PO/MO editor: Loco-style editing for core, theme and plugin strings, with compile, POT, backups and restore

Fields and media: ACF and Pods support, media translation

(DeepL has a free API tier with 500k characters per month, which is usually enough for small to medium sites. “No caps” means the plugin doesn’t limit you, so you can add another key if you exhaust the first one.)

Pro adds:

13 extra AI providers on top of DeepL (OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter, DeepSeek, Groq, Mistral, Together AI, Fireworks AI, Cerebras, xAI, NVIDIA NIM, SambaNova, Anthropic). I’ve only tested Gemini and OpenAI so far, so the rest need testing.

Batch translation, including bulk translate from the list tables, with diff preview

AI auto-translate of PO/MO strings in the file editor

Elementor Theme Builder template swapping and condition translation

Separate-domain URL mode (a different domain per language)

ACF options pages and taxonomy-term translation

The free version is already working, but I’d like real people on real sites to try it and tell me what’s broken or annoying before I push it further. I’m especially after bug reports and honest “this sucks because X” feedback. Staging sites are totally fine.

I’d love a mix of setups: different languages, with or without WooCommerce, coming from Polylang, WPML or whatever else. If you’re up for testing, comment or DM me and I’ll send the details.

Happy to answer anything in the comments. And yes, it’s my own plugin, just so that’s clear.

Hey guys, first time posting here. I'm redoing my site and for some reason now the cart has this horrible page populating issue where giant black boxes appear while the page is loading. Sometimes they go away in about .5 seconds or so, but a lot of times, you have to refresh the page to make them disappear. The overlay boxes are different every time. I'm attaching a few photos for reference. They always seem to frame a subsection, image or text. I'm wondering if anyone's had the same issue or knows a fix for this.

For what it's worth, my site is built with Wordpress , and hosted on Hostinger. Payment processing, licensing and products are handled by Woo. I've added a lot of customizations and Woo overrides to the cart because the stock Woo cart is heinous to look at. Any help is appreciated, thanks :)

Hi friends. These metrics started fluctuating after the latest WP update. I’m wondering what is causing such massive spikes and drops. I’ve also included a list of plugins to make the answer clearer. Thanks for any insights.

I got this from Wordfence: Wordfence Argus Discovers Critical Vulnerability in Ghostscript

I see I have 10.05.1 even with latest docker image. Does anyone know when this fix will get put into the docker image (or where to find out)?