aCstudent

Does your hosting control panel give you the option to select your PHP version? If so upgrade it to PHP 5.6, backup your site if you don’t have a recent backup, then upgrade to PHP 7.3. If your WP, plugins, and themes are up to date nothing should break, but ya never know, so click around your site to check. If you don’t have the option to select your PHP version, contact your host for help. Once done, enjoy the the speed and security if having up-to-date PHP.

I don’t think Edge is the problem, AR. Edge works fine for me when creating new user accounts.

Your login page appears to be here https://www.minejewellery.me/wordpress/wp-login.php

Can you get to your hosting control panel?

It could also be a false positive. I get the same message and my sites auto-update just fine.

All the guides I’ve seen say to run wp-cron or server cron, that is to turn the other one off – but I’m not sure why. I see value on my low-traffic sites to run both, and I haven’t noticed any problems or conflicts between the two.

Something must have happened two weeks ago. Any idea what it was?
“speed decreases to 0” – literally? What exactly happens?
Have you tried the usual troubleshooting steps – e.g. switch to a 20-something theme, disable all plugins, run Health Check?
I don’t use Autooptimize but my understanding is Cloudflare can do much of the same stuff – minimize css, javascript, and html for example – and doing it twice can break things.
Have you tried a Cloudflare cache-everything page rule as an alternative – or addition – to WPFC?
For what it’s worth, your site seems quick to me but webpagetest.org disagrees. TTFB seems to be the main culprit – from my limited understanding that’s a usually a hosting issue.

Is there a WP user group in your area? If so, they are likely to be very kind, helpful people. Also … There is no better teacher than experience. Dive in! Install, develop, create, publish. Make mistakes – learn from them.

I would try reinstalling. If I used an automated install I would try manual and vice versa. The CloudFlare plugin is kinda useless in my experience – I would ditch it. Re. ‘scheduled event’, I would set up a cPanel cron job as a backup to – not a replacement for – WP cron. Google will find detailed instructions.

Good advice MarkRH. I only allow user logins on one site – family members only. But on all my sites I get swarms of malicious admin login attempts. I already use very strong passwords, limit login attempts, recaptcha, and javascript challenge. I would like to also immediately block the IP like Wordfence allows. I really hates malicious login attempts.

Prompt reply very much appreciated, shru21. Your advice is excellent, and I already use a very similar plugin. What I am looking for is a way to immediately block the IP of users who try to sign in as ‘admin’ and other obviously malicious login names.

Your reply is very much appreciated, Marius. I do have the loopback warning so I’m guessing that is what is causing the issue.

Is this it? https://www.rghoa.net/home-2/

The experts here are the experts here for very good reasons, and I hesitate to disagree with them, but … I absolutely refuse to accept that my website being constantly attacked by malicious login requests is somehow normal. So … WPS Hide Login to obfuscate my login page, Edit Author Slug to hide my username, and CloudFlare page rules and/or firewall rules to keep malicious login attempts completely off my site/server. Yes, a determined hacker could still find and use my username, but I am much more concerned with bad bots. That said – strong password is essential – 2fa is good idea.

Replies very much appreciated and very helpful.