Can Cats Eat Catnip is one of those late night panic search queries almost every cat parent has typed at least once. You turn your back for five minutes, and suddenly your cat is face deep in an entire bulk bag you ordered after seeing that viral TikTok, and you have no idea if this is dangerous.
Almost every top search result will just tell you catnip is non-toxic and leave it at that, but that ignores all the real safety boundaries no one talks about. Catnip isn’t just a silly meme toy, it’s an active herbal compound with dosage limits, age restrictions, and entire groups of cats that should never consume it at all.
Last Tuesday at 1:17am I was staring at 17 open browser tabs. One client’s WooCommerce checkout had broken. Another’s blog comment spam was blowing up their server. And my cat was passed out on the power strip, high off half a bag of catnip she’d stolen off the kitchen counter.
Source: ctfassets.net
That 10 minute window is the most honest picture of running multiple websites that exists. No guru on LinkedIn will ever post that screenshot. No course sales page will show you the half-empty energy drink, the cat covered in herbs, the quiet panic that hits when you realise you can’t even remember which email you used to log into that one old domain.
Everyone acts like this is clean work. Like it’s all colour coded calendars and satisfying automation workflows that run without a hiccup. It’s not. And if you’re here trying to stop feeling like you’re constantly one missed alert away from disaster? You’re not doing it wrong. Everyone else is just lying.
No one tells you the boring hell first
When you run one website, problems are personal. You notice when something breaks within 10 minutes. You care. You fix it right away.
When you run four? Seven? Twelve? Problems become background noise. You forget to renew an SSL cert on the tiny site you built for your cousin three years ago. A plugin update takes down three sites at once while you’re at the grocery store. You wake up to 42 alert emails and immediately close the tab instead of reading them.
This is the part no one warns you about. You don’t just scale traffic or revenue when you add more sites. You scale tiny stupid problems. You scale the administrative busywork that doesn’t make you money, doesn’t feel like progress, and will eat every free hour you have if you let it.
Stop automating the wrong things first
I wasted 6 months automating stuff that didn’t matter
I built fancy Zapier sequences. I set up auto-generated alt text. I had bots that cross posted every new article to four social media platforms at exactly 9:17am. None of this stopped the 2am panic alerts. None of this stopped me forgetting domain renewals.
What actually fixed things? Automating the most boring, unimpressive tasks first. The stuff that never looks good on a Twitter thread.
- Auto scan every single site for SSL expiry 14 days out. Not one. Fourteen. You will be busy the day before it expires. You will miss the alert.
- One single alert channel. No Slack. No email. No text messages. Just one push notification that only fires if something is actually down. No “info” alerts. Ever. Delete anything that says “minor warning”.
- Auto purge unapproved comment spam every 12 hours. Don’t build a fancy moderation bot. Just delete anything older than 7 days that no one clicked approve on. No one cares.
- Run one single weekly backup that sends you a 1 line email only if it failed. If you don’t get the email? Everything is fine. Stop checking.
And yeah, this sounds obvious. But everyone skips this. Everyone chases the cool automation first. They want the thing that makes them look organised for other people. They don’t want the boring automation that just makes you not wake up sweating at 3am.
You will never have it all under control. That’s the win.
Last week one of my smaller sites was down for 4 hours. I didn’t notice. No one emailed me. No one complained. Most of the time, the world does not end when one of your sites has a bad afternoon.
That’s the secret no guru will ever sell you. You do not need 99.99% uptime across every single site you run. You just need to catch the problems that actually matter before anyone gets mad.
Stop trying to build the perfect system. I’ve watched people spend three entire weeks building a custom dashboard that tracks every metric for every site. They never actually update any of the sites after that. They just stare at the dashboard.
That’s not management. That’s procrastination.
Right now my cat is curled up next to my monitor again. She still steals catnip. She throws up on my mousepad sometimes. She doesn’t have a system. She doesn’t run audits. She just does cat things.
That’s the part I missed for years. Managing multiple sites isn’t about building some flawless machine. It’s about building just enough guardrails that you can stop checking your phone every 10 minutes. Enough guardrails that you can go for a walk. Enough guardrails that even when something breaks, you don’t panic.
You don’t need to be perfect. You just need to be one step ahead of the worst problems. Most days? That’s more than enough.
Catnip can be a fun, harmless enrichment tool when used correctly, but it deserves more respect than most owners give it. Stick to the weekly dosage limit, skip it entirely for kittens, sick or pregnant cats, and never panic induce vomiting if your cat overeats. Remember that not all cats will react to it, and that’s perfectly normal—you don’t have a broken cat, just one that won the genetic lottery for not getting silly over mint. Next time you pull out the catnip bag, take 30 seconds to run through the quick safety check first, and you and your cat can both enjoy it without the late night panic.
