I shipped my first open source WordPress plugin. Within hours, someone found 7 bugs.
Here’s what happened — and why I think that’s a good thing.
Every WordPress site I audit has the same silent SEO problem.
The same page, accessible at three different URLs:
/About-Us/
/about-us/
/about-us
Google treats these as three separate pages. Splits your backlink value. Wastes crawl budget. Picks a canonical — usually the wrong one. Nothing breaks. The site works fine. But your SEO is slowly leaking.
I’d been fixing this manually on every project for years. So I wrote a plugin instead. 40 lines of PHP. Lowercases every URL path, enforces trailing slashes, 301-redirects anything that doesn’t match. Dropped it on GitHub, posted about it on LinkedIn.
Within a few hours, someone left a detailed GitHub issue. 15 points. 4 critical.
Honestly? My first reaction was somewhere between embarrassed and defensive. I’d tested it. It worked on my sites. But he was right — I’d missed a www-stripping bug that could silently redirect users to the admin login page. I’d hardcoded HTTPS detection in a way that breaks behind Cloudflare. And a few other things I won’t pretend were intentional design decisions.
I fixed what mattered, pushed v1.6, and closed the issue.
Here’s what I took from it.
Shipping something small and real is worth more than perfecting something privately. The bug reports came because people actually looked at the code — because they were evaluating it for real projects. That’s the point.
The plugin does one thing: it normalizes WordPress URLs so Google stops seeing three versions of the same page. It’s not trying to handle every edge case. It’s a drop-in for the standard setup, and it works.
If you’re building or maintaining WordPress sites — it’s free and open source.