If you’ve been a CriticalWP client for a while, you know we live in the WordPress world — maintenance, performance, security, migrations. That’s our lane and we’re staying in it. But we get asked all the time by service businesses — plumbers, HVAC companies, landscapers, contractors — whether WordPress is the right fit for them. […]
ServeBuilt: Our AI Website Recommendation for Service Businesses Read More »
Not every misbehaving WordPress plugin is faulty. Some are misconfigured. Some are conflicting with something else. Some are working exactly as designed — just not the way you expected. But some plugins are genuinely broken: abandoned by their developers, incompatible with current WordPress versions, or actively introducing security vulnerabilities into your site. Knowing the difference
Faulty WordPress Plugins: How to Identify, Audit, and Remove Them Read More »
Your WordPress plugin stopped working. Nothing changed — or maybe something did — and now it just isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do. Before you start randomly deactivating things, here’s a systematic way to diagnose and fix a WordPress plugin that’s not working, without breaking anything else in the process. Start Here: What “Not
WordPress Plugin Not Working? How to Diagnose and Fix It Read More »
Website Taken Down After Non-Payment: Restoration, Backups & Hosting Policy Case Study Case Study: Website Suspension, Backup Delivery & Restoration Refusal When hosting services are discontinued due to non-payment, operational decisions must be structured, documented, and professionally enforced. This case study outlines how a WordPress site was removed from production infrastructure, a verified backup was
Restoration, Backups & Hosting Policy Case Study Read More »
ACF Performance Issues: When Custom Fields Slow Down WordPress Advanced Custom Fields is powerful — but poorly structured field architecture can significantly degrade WordPress performance. If your site feels slower after adding custom fields, repeaters, or relationship queries, the issue is rarely “ACF being heavy.” It’s almost always implementation, query load, or process governance. Why
ACF Performance Issues: When Custom Fields Slow Down WordPress Read More »
ACF + Elementor After a WordPress Update: Why Layouts Break If your layouts broke immediately after a WordPress update, the problem is rarely “Elementor being unstable.” It’s usually a dependency conflict introduced during deployment. Advanced Custom Fields, Elementor, WordPress core, PHP, and sometimes your theme all operate in a dependency chain. When one layer updates
ACF + Elementor After a WordPress Update: Why Layouts Break Read More »
Why ACF Fields Don’t Show in Elementor (Even When Configured Correctly) If Advanced Custom Fields are configured correctly but fail to appear inside Elementor, the issue is rarely a “bug.” In most cases, it’s a configuration mismatch, template condition conflict, caching layer interference, or a version dependency issue. When ACF dynamic fields don’t display, you’re
Why ACF Fields Don’t Show in Elementor Read More »
Many teams adopt ACF Flexible Content, and you must balance its powerful flexibility for editors with the risk of accumulating hard-to-maintain technical debt as complexity grows. Key Takeaways: Flexible Content excels for editorial-driven pages that require many reusable, visually distinct blocks, letting editors assemble layouts without developer intervention. Flexible Content increases template complexity and testing
ACF Flexible Content – When It Helps – and When It Creates Technical Debt Read More »
Many sites unintentionally expose ACF fields via REST and AJAX, so you should audit endpoints, disable public field keys, require authentication, and sanitize responses to prevent sensitive data exposure. Key Takeaways: Restrict ACF field exposure in the REST API by disabling show_in_rest for sensitive fields and filtering responses (use rest_prepare_* or rest_post_dispatch hooks) to strip
Hardening ACF for Security – Preventing Data Exposure in REST and AJAX Read More »
There’s a chance ACF fields vanish from the API, causing broken front-ends and data mismatches; you can restore access by registering fields for REST or WPGraphQL and exporting field JSON to fix sync issues, ensuring consistent API responses. Key Takeaways: ACF fields are not exposed to headless front ends by default; expose them using the
ACF in Headless WordPress Architectures – What Breaks and How to Fix It Read More »
