WordPress Incident Debugging

Workflow

1. Establish symptom, affected URLs/actions, timeline, recent changes and blast radius.
2. Identify the failing layer: CDN/proxy, web server, PHP-FPM, WordPress, database, plugin/theme, cache, filesystem or external dependency.
3. Correlate timestamps across logs before clearing caches or restarting services.
4. Reproduce the narrowest failing request and test one hypothesis at a time.
5. Use WP-CLI and runtime inspection instead of browser-only diagnosis.
6. Apply the smallest reversible fix and verify relevant frontend, admin, cron and checkout paths.

Conditional references

• Layer-by-layer triage → references/layer-triage.md.
• WP-CLI recovery and safe isolation → references/wp-cli-recovery.md.

Available scripts

• scripts/collect-wordpress-incident.sh — read-only WordPress/PHP/runtime collection.

Asset

Use assets/incident-report.md for timeline, root cause, fix and verification.