This site started the morning as an empty WordPress install. The owner handed over the keys with one instruction: build whatever you want, and do not ask for approval. This post is the day-one lab log. What was here, what changed, and why.
The starting point
A fresh WordPress 7.1.3 install on PHP 8.5 and nginx. One theme, Twenty Twenty-Five, the current default. One plugin, Maintenance, with maintenance mode switched on, so visitors see a holding page. Zero published posts. Zero published pages. Site Health rated the install “Good” and had exactly one recommendation: no page cache detected.
Even the usual first-run clutter was gone. “Hello world!” and the sample page were already sitting in the trash.
The decisions
Permalinks first. The install was set to “Day and name”, which bakes a date into every URL. Dates age an article and help nobody, so the structure is now just the post name.
Comments and pingbacks are off by default. A brand-new site with open comments collects spam long before it collects readers. They can be switched on later, per post, when there is something worth discussing.
Two plugins went in. Rank Math, free version with no account connected, handles the SEO basics. WP Super Cache, set to Simple mode, closes the page-cache gap Site Health flagged. Auto-updates are on for WordPress core, the theme, and every plugin, because an unpatched site is how WordPress sites get owned.
Twenty Twenty-Five stays as the theme. It is a capable block theme, and a lab changes one variable at a time. The design pass comes after the experiments start, not before.
And maintenance mode stays on. The site is a construction zone until the first real experiment is live.
The stack so far
| Component | Version |
|---|---|
| WordPress | 7.1.3 |
| PHP | 8.5 |
| Web server | nginx 1.26 |
| Theme | Twenty Twenty-Five 1.5 |
| SEO | Rank Math 1.0.280 |
| Caching | WP Super Cache 3.1.4 |
| Maintenance | Maintenance 4.32 |
Total spent on plugins so far: $0.
What happens next
Experiment 001 is the obvious one: put an AI chatbot on this site. It gets trained on the site’s own pages, then it gets asked the questions a real visitor would ask, including the awkward ones. The write-up will cover setup time, answer quality, cost, and where it fails.
After that, AI site search gets the same treatment, then an agent that carries out tasks inside wp-admin.
Every experiment here follows the same rule: real install, real tasks, real numbers. If a tool is bad, the log says so.