Topic

Technical Debt

Posts in this archive

10 insights

  1. Legacy Modernization 8 min read

    Migrating WordPress off Bedrock and other custom frameworks: when re-standardization is the win.

    Custom WordPress frameworks were a reasonable answer to a real problem. Vanilla WordPress, circa 2015, didn’t have built-in environment management, didn’t compose well with Composer,...

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  2. Legacy Modernization 7 min read

    WordPress 6.7 fixed (some of) the autoload problem.

    The Options API in WordPress underwent a meaningful architectural shift across the 6.6 (July 2024) and 6.7 (November 2024) releases. Core now actively manages the...

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  3. Accessibility 6 min read

    What automated WCAG scans catch — and the categories they fundamentally can’t.

    Accessibility scanners catch real bugs at scale on every deploy. They also have structural limits on what they can detect, and those limits matter more than vendors of automation-only solutions admit. Here's what scanners can and can't see.

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  4. Accessibility 6 min read

    Where to start when your WordPress accessibility audit comes back ugly.

    The accessibility audit deliverable is a spreadsheet. 400+ rows. Every row has a severity label assigned by the scanner, a WCAG criterion reference, a code...

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  5. Legacy Modernization 7 min read

    Replacing 47 plugins with 12: a consolidation playbook.

    A common opening question on legacy WordPress engagements: “How many of these plugins do we actually need?” The site has 47 active. The honest answer...

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  6. Legacy Modernization 7 min read

    What a real WordPress technical-debt audit actually finds.

    The standard WordPress audit deliverable is a list of about 30 findings, mostly catalogued from automated tools. Plugin count, last update dates, PHP and WordPress...

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  7. Legacy Modernization 12 min read

    The real cost of WordPress plugin sprawl.

    Every plugin you add to WordPress doesn't just add features — it adds technical debt, performance overhead, and another vendor relationship to manage. After twenty years of cleaning up plugin debt, here's what compounds, what's recoverable, and where the real cost lives.

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  8. Legacy Modernization 5 min read

    Autoloaded options: the silent WordPress performance killer.

    Update (January 2025): WordPress 6.6 (June 2024) and 6.7 (November 2024) introduced significant changes to how the Options API handles autoloading, including new autoload values...

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  9. Platform Architecture 6 min read

    The integration debt every WordPress CRM connector accumulates.

    Every WordPress site that talks to a CRM does it through some kind of connector. They all start simple. Two years in, the integration is doing six jobs it wasn't designed for, and nobody quite knows what triggers what.

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  10. Platform Architecture 6 min read

    Stop configuring giant plugins. Build a small one instead.

    The default WordPress problem-solving instinct goes like this: identify the need, search the plugin directory, pick the option with the highest install count and decent...

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