A wise mechanic once said ‘The more you modify something, the more things can go wrong.’ And after installing all sorts of upgrades here at Drive Another Day, well…things went a bit pear shaped soon enough…
The email version of a check engine light
A special shout out to WordPress plugin Jetpack that’s been monitoring this place for a very long time. When things end up bum over breasts and the place crashes, Jetpack will send me an email quick smart both when it falls over and when it magically resurrects itself.
It’s fair to say that over the last few days, Jetpack has really gone all out with the emails because this place has crashed more than a rookie Haas driver on their race debut. What’s been causing it? Your guess is as good as mine. But it has kept me busy looking (and jettisoning) various plug ins and code and wondering why the speed rating of this site is up there with a wheezy 78 Honda Civic (and in this high speed search engine world, you want your speed to be up there with the Hypercars of the net). And nothing I’ve investigated so far has pointed the finger to anything in particular, hence the big decision to do a rebuild from the ground up.
Again.
Stripping things back to basics
The magazine format is gone, the swanky menus are gone, the pictures all over the place: Gone. And before I ran the test that told me the place was firing on roughly half a cylinder again, I dove in and threw out all the extra bits and pizzas that came with the last theme. And wouldn’t you know it? Suddenly this lightened framework has put up some serious numbers.
First time I checked, I scored a stunning three. Out of 100. Which in automotive terms would be a cooked block and just about everything else covered in oil and grime. This time around stripping things back? Well suddenly our fresh block had twin snails bolted on for a laugh:
Whooska. I do like a lot of green lights across the board!
So thanks for your paitence
There’s still a bit to fix/tidy up/check/spruce up but hopefully this is it for the random down times until another unknown plugin goes balls up when I least expect it. The good news is all the original content is still here (and isn’t going anywhere) so if you came here for some info or for a laugh, the site remains the same. I just figured I better explain what’s been going on in case you keep jumping on board and things keep changing around you..
Websites, gotta love em hey?
-Almigo
Technical details
Now in case you too run a WordPress blog and don’t want to be penalised by a slow loading website (which I didn’t realise was a thing but Google’s big on this – load quick or drop in the rankings which is bad for everything really) then you might be keen on knowing which theme I was using and which this site is now.
I was using General News 1.0.1 by AF Themes and had quite a few plugins that the theme apparently needed to run at its optimum. One of these was Elementor which recently had a big update which I was going to get to, once I sorted out this little hiccup that WordPress itself warned me about.
Howdy!
WordPress has a built-in feature that detects when a plugin or theme causes a fatal error on your site, and notifies you with this automated email.
In this case, WordPress caught an error with one of your plugins, Elementor.
When seeking help with this issue, you may be asked for some of the following information:
WordPress version 6.2
Active theme: General News (version 1.0.1)
Current plugin: Elementor (version 3.11.5)
PHP version 7.4.33
Deactivating Elementor however didn’t stop the website falling over issues though so I figured it might be something else in the theme build causing dramas. So the new theme is the super lightweight free version of Generatepress which is one of the fastest around loading wise. It’s basic framework, doesn’t need a whole heap of other additions to run as is and as show above, loads lightning quick.
Fancy is one thing but sometimes you want something that just works. Here’s to this switch keeping the site active for a long time to come!