WordPress Case Studies & Practical Application 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A client's WooCommerce store is experiencing slow checkout pages. After investigation, you find that 12 payment gateway plugins are active but only 2 are used. What is the best first step?
- Upgrade to a dedicated server
- Deactivate unused payment gateway plugins (Correct answer)
- Enable full-page caching for the checkout page
- Switch to a lightweight theme
Correct answer: Deactivate unused payment gateway plugins
Deactivating unused plugins reduces PHP execution overhead and database queries on every page load.
Question 2: A membership site built on WordPress shows that logged-in users see cached pages meant for guests, exposing private content. What is the root cause?
- The SSL certificate is misconfigured
- The caching plugin is not excluding logged-in users from the cache (Correct answer)
- WordPress nonces are expired
- The theme's session handling is broken
Correct answer: The caching plugin is not excluding logged-in users from the cache
Most caching plugins must be configured to bypass cache for authenticated users to prevent serving wrong content.
Question 3: You are migrating a WordPress site from HTTP to HTTPS. After updating the Site URL and Home URL, internal images still load over HTTP. What tool best fixes this in bulk?
- Manually edit every post in the database
- Use the Better Search Replace plugin to update URLs in the database (Correct answer)
- Reinstall WordPress core files
- Update the .htaccess file only
Correct answer: Use the Better Search Replace plugin to update URLs in the database
Better Search Replace performs a serialization-safe find-and-replace across all database tables to update HTTP references to HTTPS.
Question 4: A WordPress multisite network's sub-site suddenly returns a 404 for all pages after the main site was moved to a new domain. What is the most likely fix?
- Re-run the WordPress installer on the sub-site
- Update the domain mapping in the wp_blogs table and network settings (Correct answer)
- Delete and recreate the sub-site
- Flush DNS cache on the server
Correct answer: Update the domain mapping in the wp_blogs table and network settings
Multisite stores domain and path information in wp_blogs and wp_site tables that must reflect the new domain.
Question 5: A news site's WordPress editor complains that the Gutenberg block editor is too slow when editing long articles. Which approach has the least risk and most immediate impact?
- Roll back to WordPress 4.x
- Disable all third-party Gutenberg block plugins not needed for that post type (Correct answer)
- Switch the site to Classic Editor plugin
- Increase PHP memory_limit to 2048M
Correct answer: Disable all third-party Gutenberg block plugins not needed for that post type
Each additional block plugin registers scripts that load in the editor, so removing unused ones directly reduces editor load time.
Question 6: After a WordPress update, a custom plugin's admin menu disappears. The plugin is active and no PHP errors appear in the log. What should you check first?
- Whether the plugin's add_menu_page() hook uses the correct capability check (Correct answer)
- Whether the server's PHP version changed
- Whether WordPress auto-updates are disabled
- Whether the theme's functions.php overrides admin menus
Correct answer: Whether the plugin's add_menu_page() hook uses the correct capability check
A capability mismatch in add_menu_page() silently hides the menu for users who lack that capability.
Question 7: A client wants to allow guest authors to submit posts from the front end without giving them wp-admin access. Which approach is most appropriate?
- Create a Contributor role account and share the credentials
- Use a front-end submission plugin such as User Submitted Posts or Gravity Forms with a post-creation add-on (Correct answer)
- Give all guest authors Administrator access with restricted menus
- Use the WordPress REST API with no authentication
Correct answer: Use a front-end submission plugin such as User Submitted Posts or Gravity Forms with a post-creation add-on
Front-end submission plugins collect post data through a form and create draft posts without exposing the admin dashboard.
WordPress Case Studies & Practical Application 2
A client's WooCommerce store is experiencing slow checkout pages.
After investigation, you find that 12 payment gateway plugins are active but only 2 are used.
What is the best first step?