The problem
Art Artworks is an English-language online magazine about art, artists and artworks, with a twin site for children at kids.artartworks.com. It has years of content behind it: its 2012 sitemap already listed 1,382 URLs, and today the media library weighs 611 MB. The site had to stay on current WordPress and PHP, but the server limits were set for a small blog: 32 MB of PHP memory and 5 MB uploads, far too little for an image-heavy magazine, and theme updates were not going through.
What I built
I took over both WordPress installs and made them safe to run and to update.
- Two sites, one host: the magazine on the Themify Corporate theme with Themify Portfolio Post, and the kids site on Twenty Twenty-One, each with its own database.
- Server limits fixed everywhere they are set: in .htaccess, .user.ini and wp-config.php, memory from 32 MB to 256 MB, uploads from 5 MB to 64 MB, input variables from 1,000 to 5,000 and execution time from 30 to 120 seconds. I also removed a duplicate debug setting.
- Backup before every structural change: a timestamped database export through WP-CLI, and a copy of each config file before editing it.
- Theme update diagnosis: I checked the Themify updater and read WordPress’s update data through WP-CLI to see why the package was not downloading.
- Reading and speed: an interactive 3D flipbook for publications, WP-Optimize for database and cache cleanup, Yoast SEO for search.
- Documented clean-up: leftovers from old plugins, such as a 74 MB NextGEN gallery folder and 12 MB of Wordfence logs, are listed for safe removal.
Built with
WordPress 7.1.2 on PHP 8.3, Themify Corporate, Themify Portfolio Post, Interactive 3D Flipbook, WP-Optimize, Yoast SEO, WP-CLI, SSH and Bash scripts on cPanel hosting.
Why it was done this way
The local folder is an old copy, while the live magazine holds years of articles and 611 MB of images. Uploading files from the PC would have overwritten that work. So the media stays on the server, WordPress core is updated there with WP-CLI, and only single changed files are sent up, after a backup.
