WordPress questions

Yes. WordPress runs well on Traxio hosting and installs in a couple of minutes through the Softaculous installer in DirectAdmin. You get the PHP versions, MySQL database and free SSL that WordPress needs.

Open Extra Features › then Softaculous Auto Installer in DirectAdmin, pick WordPress and run the installer. Choose https:// and your domain with no directory, set a real admin username rather than admin, and use a long password.

Go to yourdomain.com/wp-admin and sign in with the username and password you set when installing. If you’ve forgotten the password, the “Lost your password?” link emails a reset to the admin address.

The WordPress software is free and open source. What you pay for is hosting to run it on and a domain name — plus any premium theme or plugin you choose. A WordPress site on Traxio costs £0.99 a month plus your domain.

Measure first, then change one thing at a time. The three changes that help most sites are a caching plugin (LSCache works well here), properly compressed images, and removing plugins you don’t use.

Reset the password using the “Lost your password?” link first. If the reset email never arrives, change the password directly in the database through phpMyAdmin, which always works.

By default WordPress sends mail through PHP, which most providers now distrust, so the messages disappear silently. Install an SMTP plugin and configure it to send through a real mailbox on your domain — password resets and contact forms start arriving.

Copy the files and export the database from the old host, import both into Traxio, update wp-config.php with the new database details, and check the site before switching DNS. A migration plugin can do most of it for you.

Turn on WordPress debug mode or read the PHP error log; a white screen is almost always a fatal PHP error being hidden. The usual causes are a plugin conflict, a theme error or exhausted memory.

In wp-admin go to Appearance → Themes, add a new one and activate it. Use the live preview before activating, because a theme change alters your whole layout and some content placed by the old theme may not carry over.

Install a form plugin from Plugins → Add New, build the form and place it on a page with its block or shortcode. Then set up SMTP, or the form will appear to work while the emails silently never arrive.

Take a backup, then update plugins and themes first and WordPress core last, checking the site after each step. Updates are the main defence against being hacked, so putting them off is riskier than doing them.

You need both the files and the database — either one alone is not a usable backup. A backup plugin does both and can send the result off-site, or you can take a full account backup in DirectAdmin and download it.

For a simple change, edit the WordPress Address and Site Address in Settings → General. If you are moving to a different domain, the URL also appears throughout your content and has to be replaced in the database with a search-and-replace tool.

The admin area is not cached the way the public site is, so it shows the true cost of your plugins. A slow dashboard usually means too many plugins running admin code, or a bloated database from years of revisions and expired transients.

Delete the .maintenance file in your WordPress folder. WordPress creates it during an update and removes it afterwards; if an update is interrupted the file is left behind and the site stays stuck.

Far fewer than most sites have. A caching plugin, an SMTP plugin so email works, a backup plugin and something for SEO cover nearly every site. Every extra plugin is more code to run and more to keep updated.

Yes — it is the single biggest speed improvement available to a WordPress site. Without one, every visit rebuilds the page from the database; with one, most visitors get a ready-made copy. LSCache works well on Traxio.

Keep core, themes and plugins updated, use a long unique admin password, remove anything you are not using, and keep backups you control. Outdated plugins are how the overwhelming majority of WordPress sites get compromised.

Permalinks are the URL structure of your posts and pages. Set them once under Settings → Permalinks, early — changing them later alters every URL on the site and needs redirects to avoid breaking existing links.

WP-Cron is WordPress’s own scheduler, and it only runs when somebody visits the site. On a quiet site nothing triggers it, so scheduled posts and backups are late or never run.

The file you tried to upload is larger than PHP allows, and WordPress reports it with that misleading message. Raise upload_max_filesize and post_max_size, or upload the file over FTP instead.

A previous update was interrupted and WordPress still holds the lock it sets while updating. It clears itself after about fifteen minutes; if you cannot wait, delete the core_updater.lock row from the wp_options table in phpMyAdmin.

WordPress only accepts a fixed list of file types in the media library, and yours is not on it. For fonts, archives or unusual formats, upload the file over FTP or the File Manager and link to it directly rather than going through the media library.

WordPress.com is a hosted service with its own plans and restrictions. Self-hosted WordPress — the free software from WordPress.org — is what you install on your own hosting, where you control the plugins, the theme and the data. Traxio runs the self-hosted kind.