security Archives - Kind-of-Lost

WordPress Optimization Results: Before, After, and What’s Still Left

This is the final post in a six-part series documenting a full technical overhaul of this site — kindoflost.com — using Claude, an AI assistant by Anthropic. If you’ve followed along from Post 1, you’ve seen every fix in detail. This post is the recap: what the site looked like before, what it looks like now, what we’d do differently, and what’s still on the to-do list.

WooCommerce Caching, Checkout, and Cart Fixes That Actually Work

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.

WordPress Security Hardening Without Touching Code

When Claude audited kindoflost.com, the security findings weren’t dramatic. There was no sign of an active breach, no malware, no obvious damage. But there were several open doors that bots probe automatically every day on every WordPress site on the internet — and all of them were unlocked. This post covers exactly what we found and what we did about it, none of which required editing a theme file or writing PHP.

How to Set Up Cloudflare Correctly for a WordPress Site

Cloudflare is one of the best free tools available for a small WordPress site. It sits between your visitors and your hosting server, handling caching, security, and DNS — all at once. But having Cloudflare installed is not the same as having it configured correctly. When I used Claude to audit kindoflost.com, we found that Cloudflare was active but had several misconfigurations that were silently causing problems — a duplicate DNS record, services being proxied that shouldn’t be, SSL running in a weaker mode than necessary, and no real caching rules in place.

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