This Week: Plugin Madness 2021, Advanced Custom Fields, boosting WordPress, customers in the time of the pandemic, and more…
Guest Editor:
CTO at Buddy with 10 years of experience in CI/CD and over 15 in software development. Began by programming GIS tools for satellite and aerial imagery analysis for government agencies. Co-creator of Springloops. Co-founder of Buddy and leader of the company’s developer teams. Loves sharing insight on process automation, containerization, and the challenges of application scaling.
Over 10 years ago Google officially announced that page loading speed will have a direct and substantial impact on search engine positioning.
In 2018 it was also revealed that this change will also affect search results on mobile devices
By 2021 it is common knowledge, yet still a significant number of websites fail to recognize this factor when trying to optimize their search engine positioning. Companies waste away their entire SEO budgets on actions (Google Ads, content marketing, link building) that bring mediocre results simply because the overall website performance is subpar.
According to Google Ads, one-second delay in page loading time can cripple your conversion rates by up to 20%.
How can you prevent this? Begin by checking how well is your website doing using the tools like Lighthouse or PageSpeed Insights.
Those platforms will show you your overall website performance and provide you with some useful tips on how to improve. Adhering to the suggestion’s once is not enough, you still have to continuously monitor those attributes and react to any changes that might impede your score.
Here’s an example how to audit your website every time you deploy a new version:
When it comes to WordPress, we can see a trend of converting to static sites. Static sites are usually faster, more flexible and secure than dynamic ones. You can read more about it here:
Another easy to implement method of improving your website’s performance is using a CDN that will cache your website in various geographic locations. In this article you can see how you can host a static site on a CDN using AWS S3 and CloudFront
Matt Medeiros’s last guest was Lisa Sabin-Wilson, the COO of WebDevStudios. She talked about her role in the company and how to deal with customers and employees in times of a pandemic.
Iain Poulson of Delicious Brains has summarized his knowledge of Advanced Custom Fields.
Ben from LayerWP has reviewed the Formality plugin. Not only is it an impressive plugin for creating forms, but it also aptly uses Gutenberg to create them.
LearnDash is taking cutting-edge e-learning methodology and infusing it into WordPress. Trusted to power the learning programs for major universities, small to mid-size companies, startups, entrepreneurs, and bloggers worldwide.
Sergey Biryukov shares many helpful tips on how to start contributing to the WordPress.
Most of us at least once came across a client who wanted “it all” on their website. With such people in mind, Andrei from Pixelgrade shows why it is sometimes worth giving something up.
In the latest WP Briefing episode by Josepha Haden Chomphosy, she talks about the new WordPress versions’ release stages. Listen to what’s happening with version 5.7.
Matt Watson from Wholesome Code showed how to use Gutenberg components with Customizer.
Here’s a comprehensive set of tips on how to speed up WordPress.
Michelle Frechette and Allie Nimmons have launched a vlog on the Underrepresented In Tech website. I strongly recommend following it as it is an exciting initiative.
Lesley Sim has found four simple and free themes that are a perfect base for newsletters.
Another edition of Plugin Madness has started. We can vote for our favorite plugins again. We keep our fingers crossed for Advanced Custom Fields and Timber.
Stackable reminds you why it’s worth using Gutenberg.
Max Denysenko presents how to create your own coding standard in PHP_CodeSniffer.
Leonardo Losoviz shows that creating a GraphQL API plugin is not a cakewalk.
SpinupWP compared Varnish to Nginx FastCGI Cache for WordPress. If you are looking for a solution to speed up WP by server optimization, I do recommend it.
Here’s an interesting analysis regarding the differences between the subscription-based model and the community.
Upcoming events:
Atarim Web Agency Summit will take place on March 23. Marieke Van De Rakt, Miriam Schwab, and Chris Lemaare among the speakers.
On March 25, an English-language Zagreb WordPress Meetup (virtual) will take place. The speaker will be Maciek Palmowski, who will talk about fast and secure websites based on WordPress.
On April 27-28, GoDaddyPro is organizing Expand 2021, aimed at website designers and developers.
March 31, Czech WordPress community is doing WP Beer online #2 – main topics are static sites and podcasts.
April 16-18 – WordCamp Greece 2021 Online.