16 replies

1. Zach Leatherman 8 min later

   how often are wordpress sites needing recovery though

   1. David O'Brien 18 min later

      Never, IME.

      Been, what , 12 or 13 years now.

      @zachleat

   2. cthos 🐱 1 hr later

      @zachleat "Yes"

   3. Alan 1 hr later

      @zachleat I feel like they mean restore from regular backups but since it's marketing speak it has to sound more dramatic for non-tech people.

      I don't use WP.com but I've never had to recover a site either. I've had to restore several from backups but that's fairly common.

   4. Max Fenton 2 hr later

      @zachleat uh…. Recovering wordpress sites of people I admire has definitely been a good way for me to make friends with people I admire.

   5. Max Fenton 2 hr later

      @zachleat Wordpress is a fancy phpMyAdmin with mildly harder login at a guessable URL

   6. jadonn 3 hr later

      @zachleat I wonder if they've fallen prey to their own experience of running WordPress as a hosting provider. I used to work in technical support for a WordPress-focused web host, and restoring hacked or messed up sites was a very common thing we had to do. However, I would expect each individual user maybe only had to do a full site restore once or twice in the lifetime of their WordPress websites.

      From the host's perspective, WordPress site recovery is essential because you see all the sites getting hacked all the time, and this becomes a really attractive feature.

      I would always try to remind myself (even still today in customer service settings as a customer) that I am the only person the folks on the other end of the line might talk to today, even though I might have talked to 40-50 people in a given day, and so the experience of the interaction is very different for them than for me

      1. Zach Leatherman 17 hr later

         @jadonn yeah, this seems fair to me! the last time I needed a wordpress site recovery though, I replatformed to another tool 😅

   7. kaiserkiwi 7 hr later

      @zachleat I have multiple WordPress sites from back in 2008 and not a single one needed it (yet).

2. Andrew Douglass 52 min later

   @zachleat letting non-technical people install 3rd party plugins is cool and also was the bane of my existence for a time in my life.

   1. Zach Leatherman 57 min later

      @ardouglass somewhere, Google Tag Manager’s ears are tingling

      1. Andrew Douglass 59 min later

         @zachleat oof, yeah, but there’s less damage you can do client side.

         1. Zach Leatherman 1 hr later

            @ardouglass I would push back on that! Sometimes a site being down is better than a site leaking sensitive info, as a counterexample 😅

3. Josh “Yoshi” Vickerson 2 hr later

   @zachleat A client of mine had his Wordpress site hacked because of plugins. Hackers published a lot of… unsavory content to his site.

   Made pitching moving to Eleventy very easy 🤷‍♂️

4. Gaya 8 hr later

   @zachleat I read someone write about not maintaining your site (wordpress) will make it grow weeds just like a garden. I haven’t touched my html and css site in years and it’s still fresh

   1. Zach Leatherman 17 hr later

      @Gaya some tech stacks are like a maintenance sword of damocles 😅