About SiteRepairManual

What this is

SiteRepairManual is a directory of WordPress repair guides: plugins, hosting, migrations, and performance. Each guide covers one named break and one fix that was run against it.

How a fix is checked

Before a guide is written, the break is reproduced in a disposable WordPress install: the site is broken on purpose, the symptom is recorded, the fix is run, and the site is checked again. The guide shows the commands and the real output, including the HTTP status before and after. A fix that cannot be reproduced does not get published as verified.

The current test install runs WordPress 7.1.4 on PHP 8.3.6 with MariaDB 10.11.14, served by the PHP built-in server, managed with WP-CLI. Each guide names the versions it was checked against.

What a guide does not do

A guide does not guess at a fix from the error message alone, and it does not present a fix that was only read about. Where a step behaves differently from what the documentation suggests, the guide says what actually happened — including when the obvious command fails and the fallback is what works.

Voice

Plain, technical, humble. Here is what broke, here is the command, here is the output. The work speaks; adjectives do not.