Oh Bluehost, how I hate you. I already 
blogged long ago how I got suckered, but distinguishing my hosting from my blog tech stack is important; they are two separate things!
Recently, my posts weren’t notifying subscribers due to the cron not running. So, I installed WP Control for observability into the system to see what was going on. All this did was confirm that my email notifications from MailPoet weren’t going out. But why? And how did you know this was a cron issue, Straker? Claude!
Going deeper with it, it taught me about my wp-config.php in my root folder that I would need to setup FTP access to (through a tool like FileZilla). It walked me through this, including the change I needed to make:
Easy enough; why blog about this? Because this is just the beginning; I tried to just edit an old post about WordPress with this information, and the edit kept getting denied.
Why? Well —thanks to Claude! 🤣 — I knew the reason was due to the code I wanted to paste looked like an attack and WordPress was blocking it. But I didn’t want it to block my own posts, and wanted to see if we could fix the issue. It led to the following:
- A complete audit of all of my plugins and conflicts across them (ex: both Jetpack and Bluehost were trying to optimize images, leading to conflict with image upload from the two of them)
- A complete audit of my caching strategy, improving site performance (which still sucks thanks to Bluehost but is better, at least)
- Migrating my domains, DNS records, CDN, and security policies to Cloudflare directly instead of letting Bluehost handle them. I did this migration with minimal downtime thanks to Claude’s instructions!
- Adjusting my robots.txt in Cloudflare to give me control over my Generative Engine Optimization (GEO, the new SEO). Turns out, a good chunk of my traffic comes from ChatGPT users asking about credit cards! 🤑
Doing all of this in a single session was powerful and made me thankful for the control I kept with WordPress.
For an example of how I used Claude to migrate my DNS records, I provided a screenshot of the following image to it with the included prompt:
Can you please look at every row and tell me if this is correct? And are there any missing records here compared to the Bluehost screenshot I already gave?
And thank gosh I did, as records were missing from CloudFlare’s automatic approach:
But after this migration, there was yet more caching to be managed (now in Cloudflare directly). But with Claude, solving this was easy!
It gave me the exact settings to configure in Cloudflare and even taught me to install the Cloudflare WordPress plugin to ensure I had this feature enabled so that caching didn’t prevent display of new posts or post edits:
I felt comfortable making these production changes so easily with Claude for two reasons:
- I always ensured rollback was easy, and
- Claude can test better than I can. For example:
But wait — there’s more! After fixing the cron, I realized I had two different subscription options to my site. My main one, through MailPoet, and an alternative option through Jetpack. The post notifications were different: different times with different content. Comically, the Jetpack emails had been broken longer than the MailPoet ones, so when I fixed the MailPoet ones, I fixed both (and I only detected this as I had my own WordPress subscribed to my site through Jetpack as well).
I asked Claude about the unexpected notification, and it was the one who pointed me to Jetpack, including steps on how to disable it and migrate those users to MailPoet.
In summary, in a single session, a lot was accomplished:
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