can y’all stop loading your wordpress sites with a million and one plugins

I’ve been having to migrate a lot of WordPress instances to new FQDNs lately.

In theory, WordPress supports this reasonably enough; change WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL to the new place, and whiz bang. You’ll have a few old links here and there but nothing breaking. In theory. In practice, this works with very, very few WordPress instances; plugins have a nasty habit of hardcoding URLs with the WP_HOME values in a million places, not always consistently. My understanding is that newer WordPress versions have some sort of placeholder you can use for WP_HOME instead of directly inserting it, but this is so unused and not acknowledged that it doesn’t even appear in results for DDG or Google.

Instead, if I’m lucky, what I have to do when I migrate a WordPress instance is run a find and replace for the old URL and the new URL. If I’m less lucky, like I usually am, I have to request billing access or reach out to another contact in company to get a new API key, or change the URL on the license portal, or… and I have to do this multiple times with completely different plugins, half of which provide worse functionality than an equivalent FOSS plugin (or sometimes worse functionality than vanilla, but preferred because it looks more like hacker wizard nonsense).

I’m not saying “only ever run vanilla wordpress”; that would make me a hypocrite with this very site (OAuth plugin and third party theme being the two standouts). Hell, half the time I have to install yet another plugin on top of the big pile of plugins just to do the find and replace in the database.

Just please, dear goddess. Taste vanilla before you cover the damn thing in sprinkles, and try not to load your sites down with more bloat than the average late 00s Compaq computer.