Writing
Notes, guides and tips
Things I've learned building and maintaining websites, fixing servers and chasing rankings. Written for business owners as much as for developers.
A technical SEO audit you can run yourself
Before paying anyone for an SEO audit, run these six checks. They take an afternoon, need no paid tools, and usually find the real problem.
Your SSL certificate broke: a 5-minute checklist
Browser shouting about your certificate? Work through these five checks in order — it's almost always one of them, and four take under a minute.
How to speed up a slow WordPress site (without breaking it)
Most slow WordPress sites share the same four causes. Here's how I diagnose them, in the order that finds the problem fastest.
How to move a website to a new host without downtime
A host migration goes wrong in the same three places every time. Do the steps in this order and visitors never see a broken site.
Your WordPress site got hacked: what to do first
Deleting the malware is the easy part — and the part that gets redone next week if you skip the rest. Here's the order that makes a cleanup stick.
Five Microsoft 365 mistakes small businesses make
Microsoft 365 works out of the box, which is exactly the problem. Five defaults that quietly cost small businesses money or data.