Weekly round-up: update WordPress today, and what Claude's small business push actually means for you

Two things this week that matter if you run a small business website, and one bit of my own news.

Update WordPress today, not this week

WordPress released version 7.1.2 on Tuesday to close a serious security hole, CVE-2026-87902, that lets an attacker run code on your server without even logging in. It went from disclosed to actively exploited in hours. If your site runs on WordPress and updates aren't set to happen automatically, log in to your dashboard today and check you're on 7.1.2. It takes two minutes. I wrote about what to do if your WordPress site gets hacked back on the 19th, and the honest truth is the easiest fix is always the one you do before it happens, not after. If you're not sure how to check your version or you want someone else to just handle it, that's exactly the sort of thing I sort for WordPress clients as a matter of course.

Claude for small business: is it actually useful

Anthropic put out a big update to Claude for Small Business this month, 43 ready-made workflows and 27 app integrations aimed at owners who don't have a developer on staff to wire tools together. I've been using Claude daily in my own work for the past year, and my honest view is that this update closes a real gap: most small business owners I talk to have tried ChatGPT for an email once and never gone back, not because the tool is bad but because nobody showed them how it fits into an actual Tuesday. Worth ten minutes if that's you. I go into more detail on how I actually build with it day to day, rather than the sales pitch version.

My own week

I published a piece on moving a WordPress site to a new host without downtime on Tuesday, off the back of doing exactly that for a client the week before, and what a website actually costs to run each year the Thursday before that. A piece on why I still call myself a WordPress developer in Hull, and specifically what that means day to day, goes up next Tuesday.

I've also spent a chunk of this week on a Nuxt project after the 4.5 release, which swaps the default build tool over to Vite 8. Not something most business owners need to know about, but if your site's ever felt slow to build or deploy and you've been told "that's just how it is," it usually isn't.

One thing to check this weekend

If nobody's told you when your WordPress site was last updated, that's worth five minutes this weekend. Dashboard, Updates, top of the page. If it says anything other than 7.1.2, update it, or send me a message and I'll take a look.

That's this week's lot. Questions about any of it, or want a proper look at your site, get in touch or book the free 30-minute surgery.