Make WordPress Make Sense

Do you feel like you’re going to break your website every time you make a change?

Understand what’s going on under the hood so you can control your site with confidence.

Take my course WordPress Troubleshooting Demystified to learn general problem-solving skills and how to apply them to WordPress, hone in on the source of an error, communicate better with tech support and find answers more easily online – all from a place of calm instead of anxiety.

Coming soon: join a monthly group coaching call to bring up your WordPress problems and get both expert help and the wisdom of the crowd! Send me a note to get your first month free.

Security Plugins

• Solid Security Pro
• Wordfence

Security Tools

• Have I Been Pwned – look if your email addresses or passwords were compromised in a data breach
• Patchstack – Open Source Vulnerability Database – find known vulnerabilities in WordPress core, themes, and plugins
• Patchstack – 2025 State of WordPress Security White Paper – an interesting read

Backup Plugins

• All-in-One WP Migration and Backup
• Solid Backup
• Duplicator
• UpdraftPlus

Page Speed Tests

• Google PageSpeed
• GTmetrix
• Pingdom

Optimization & Minification

• Autoptimize
• Fast Velocity Minify

Caching

• Litespeed Cache – check if your server uses Litespeed
• Solid Performance
• W3 Total Cache (free) or Pro

I only recommend specific tools that I personally would use. If you buy through some of these links, I may earn an affiliate commission.