The WordPress Performance Profiling Toolkit We Actually Use
Not a plugin roundup. Four tools that actually found something on a real WordPress VIP network, what each one is blind to, and which symptom sends you to which one.
wordpress
What ‘VIP-Style Multisite’ Actually Means for a Performance Bug
Every fix in this series landed at a different layer — application code, shared plugin, edge config, vendor dashboard. The scoping decision matters more than the fix itself, and it’s rarely obvious from the bug report.
Automating Index-Existence Guards So a Deploy Can’t Race Its Own Migration
The runtime existence check that kept one index rewrite safe to deploy in either order was a one-off. Here’s the same pattern turned into a reusable pre-deploy CI gate for a whole network.
The 465-Line Diff That Was Actually a 10-Line Fix
A one-line exception guard turned into a 465-line diff because a formatter had rewritten the whole file first. The fix wasn’t the guard — it was separating the reformat from the change before anyone had to review it.
Turning a Multi-Step Dependency Bump Into an Autonomous Agent Loop
A shared plugin version bump, a branch-validation step, a version-skew incident, five index migrations across a network, and a documented PR — run as one supervised agent loop instead of six separate manual steps.
Sizing a Covering Index on Shared Multisite MySQL
An index that fixes one site’s slow query has a write cost paid by every site sharing that database tier. A checklist for deciding whether a covering index actually pays for itself, before adding it.
Why Your Full-Page Cache Needs an Opinion About Query Strings
Two separate incidents on the same network turned out to be the same root cause wearing different clothes: a cache key that let the request decide what it means, instead of the other way around.
Shipping a Database Index Without an Outage on WordPress VIP
A shared plugin update needed five new indexes across a multisite network. The bug that almost shipped wasn’t in the indexes — it was in assuming a diff between two versions was the same thing as the full version.
Profiling What Googlebot Actually Sees: A BigQuery Log Deep Dive
Search Console said one site’s average crawl response time was roughly double a near-identical sibling’s. The access logs disagreed — until they were split by bot type, and a cache-busting tracking parameter fell out.
Turning a Debugging Script Into a WP-CLI Profiler
The SAVEQUERIES mu-plugin from the last post left you with a raw log file and a promise to wrap WP-CLI commands around it. Here’s the tool, not just the promise.