Blog - Page 24 of 43 - Kind of Lost

WooCommerce Caching, Checkout, and Cart Fixes That Actually Work

Update, September 2026: the store this post was tuning is gone. When I finally pulled the order data, about a third of the orders that reached checkout had died at the payment step, and I hadn’t noticed for months. I closed the store in August. Here’s why, with the numbers. The caching notes below are unchanged.

WooCommerce adds a layer of complexity to WordPress caching and performance that trips up a lot of site owners. The problem is that WooCommerce pages — cart, checkout, account — are dynamic by nature. They show different content to different users. Cache them aggressively and you get customers seeing each other’s cart items. Don’t cache at all and your site crawls. Getting the balance right requires specific configuration at every layer of your stack.

Now We’re Working on SEO — Here’s What That Actually Looks Like

If you’ve been following the WordPress optimization series on this blog, you already know this site has been through some changes lately. We fixed security holes, set up Cloudflare properly, got caching working, cleaned up WooCommerce — the whole thing. That series documented every step of turning a quietly broken site into something that actually works the way it should.

This post isn’t part of that series. Think of it as what came after. Continue reading “Now We’re Working on SEO — Here’s What That Actually Looks Like”

How to Speed Up a WordPress and WooCommerce Site on Shared Hosting

Site speed matters more than most small site owners realize. Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal, which means a slow site is actively hurting your search visibility — not just annoying your visitors. For a WooCommerce site, it’s even more direct: a sluggish checkout experience costs real sales.

Continue reading “How to Speed Up a WordPress and WooCommerce Site on Shared Hosting”

The Best Time to Convert a 401(k) to a Roth IRA

If you’re asking what the best time to convert a 401(k) to a Roth IRA is, here’s the short answer: it’s not a date on the calendar, it’s a low-income year. A conversion is taxed at your marginal rate the year you do it, so the entire game is converting when that rate is as low as it will ever be. Get the timing right and you move money to the tax-free side cheaply; get it wrong and you hand the IRS more than you needed to.

In-Plan Roth Conversion: Convert Inside Your 401(k)

An in-plan Roth conversion lets you move pre-tax money in your workplace retirement account into the Roth side of that same account, without rolling it out to an IRA. You’ll also see it called a “Roth in-plan conversion” or, in IRS language, an in-plan Roth rollover. Whatever the name, the idea is the same: take traditional 401(k), 403(b), governmental 457(b), or TSP dollars, pay the tax now, and let them grow tax-free from here.