A PHP security alert and a long-overdue WordPress fix

A PHP security alert and a long-overdue WordPress fix I’ve been blogging since 2004. Over that time, my WordPress site has accumulated around 2,500 posts, covering everything from technology and work to cycling, photography and whatever else happened to interest me at the time. But WordPress had become increasingly unreliable. Intermittent HTTP 503 errors were a recurring frustration, and attempts to upgrade PHP seemed to make matters worse. It was one of the reasons I decided to start afresh with Hugo, a static site generator, at the beginning of 2026. My new blog uses Hugo, but the old WordPress installation remains online as an archive. Eventually, I’d like to convert those posts to static HTML too, removing the need to maintain WordPress altogether. That’s a project for another day, though. In the meantime, the old blog still needs to be kept secure. And in October, a PHP security alert gave me a reason to revisit the reliability problems I’d previously worked around rather than…

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