Architecture

Stack at a glance

Layer	Technology
CMS	WordPress (custom theme + plugins)
PHP	8.2, OPcache enabled
Web server	Nginx + FastCGI
Database	MySQL 8
Object cache	Redis (wp-redis)
Page cache	Nginx FastCGI cache
CDN	Cloudflare
Media	Cloudflare R2 (offloaded via WP Offload Media)
Hosting	SiteGround (production)

Request flow

User → Cloudflare CDN
  → Nginx FastCGI cache (hit: serve immediately)
  → PHP-FPM + WordPress
    → Redis object cache (wp_cache_get/set)
    → MySQL (only on cache miss)

WordPress setup

• Theme: custom child theme of ENV_NAME-theme
• Must-use plugins: loaded from wp-content/mu-plugins/, version-controlled
• Regular plugins: managed via Composer (composer.json at repo root)
• wp-config.php: not in version control — use wp-config-sample.php as a base

Environment variables

Sensitive config (DB credentials, API keys, salts) lives in a .env file loaded by the vlucas/phpdotenv package. Never commit .env.

DB_NAME=
DB_USER=
DB_PASSWORD=
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1

WP_ENV=development   # development | staging | production
WP_HOME=http://ENV_NAME.test
WP_SITEURL=${WP_HOME}/wp

Database

Production uses a managed MySQL 8 instance. Schema changes are handled manually — there is no migration runner. Always take a dump before making structural changes.

# Dump production DB
wp db export --add-drop-table backup.sql

# Import locally
wp db import backup.sql