WP Includes Initiative & Experiments #088

Yes. You are, indeed, spotting a new and improved design of my Inside WordPress newsletter. My friend Ronald Huereca created a wonderful official logo for the newsletter for me. And that prompted me to change my template up a bit with some other things. A little bit tighter, but hopefully still easy to scan. Do let me know what you think!

Lot’s of news to cover this week. Hope you’re ready! Oh, btw, I’m going to reference a lot of friends in this Inside WordPress edition, but I promise you it’s not just name dropping. I just have a lot friends, m’kay?! 😅

Hope you enjoy it!

Want to get in front of 925+ dedicated WordPress friends? Check out my sponsoring options and reach out to me if you think we can be a good fit!

🗞️ Inside WordPress News

Here’s what I saw happening this past week:

My buddy Silvan did a weird experiment. He installed the 108 most popular WordPress plugins just to see what would happen.

WP Mayor did a great writeup on what you can do with Dollie for your WordPress as a Service solution.

Bowe, my long time WordPress friend who switched the Dutch WordPress Community for the German (well, Berlin) WordPress Community years ago and seemed very pleased with it.

The official 2023 Annual WordPress Survey is out. Last year it gathered just 3,400 submissions. For 43% of the web, passiveness means that a handful of people set the direction for the leading CMS. It just needs your 5 minutes to change that!

Seth Rubenstein published a great thread on X about how and why Gutenberg (read that as the Block Editor and the Full Site Editor) is a game changer and force multiplier for your team.

We need more of these! If you’re still stuck on the (flawed) launch of project Gutenberg, it’s time to wake up and start playing with it!

Btw, did you know there’s a URL where you can keep track of everything happening with Gutenberg?

Ian Svoboda, also of Within WordPress Podcast fame (truly!!) shared his article on how to build custom blocks in your WordPress theme.

My friend Joost just published a sweet little plugin that I will install on at least three client sites right after I’ve published this newsletter!

🚀 Performance

CSS Wizardry wrote a good reminder on why you want to optimize your Core Web Vitals for Search Engine Optimization. Never not good to refresh what you think you know on this topic.

And if you’re not exactly sure what the Core Web Vitals mean, we’ve written an overview of what they are and how to fix them over on the ScanFully blog.

My friend over at Admin Columns (which is a wonderful making-my-WordPress-life-better kinda tool, btw) published an overview of updating their plugin to work with WooCommerce’s HPOS.

I’ve mentioned this before, but HPOS is a huge improvement in Woo’s performance that I urge you to get familiar with sooner rather than later.

Caching never is your solution to a faster WordPress site. Let me say that again. Caching is never your solution to a faster WordPress site. Will caching make your site render faster in the browser? Sure thing. But these two things are not the same. Ask me how I know. Anyway, here’s all the arguments why your Cache Headers could probably be more aggressive.

My favorite performance optimizing tools in WordPress:

🔆 Inside WordPress Highlight

A couple of weeks ago, my friends Siobhan McKeown and Francesca Marano launched a mentorship scheme to increase the representation of women in WordPress companies’ leadership groups. It’s called WP Includes. They are putting together the first cohort, which will start in October. So if you are a woman leader in the WordPress business ecosystem, then mentoring others to increase the number of women leaders is a wonderful way to give back. Don’t let imposter syndrome get in the way – they will support you on your mentor journey. Apply here!

Some of my favorite WordPress tools:

The most versatile and accessible form solution for WordPress
LocalWP, the easiest to use local dev solution

💡 Interesting Finds

Modern CSS did a very nice article on how custom property values (CSS variables) are computed.

I’ve been using them for ages, but I learned a couple of new things!

Katie Keith shared the results of some A/B testing she did. Lots of valuable information in the post on X as well as in the comments

Katie had a lot of interesting bits of information to share in one of the Within WordPress podcasts I did with her recently.

📖 What I am reading

Lots of Cloudflare documentation! I’ll explain more about this in next week’s edition.

🎁 Bonus

My bonus for this week is going to be postponed for next week. I simply didn’t have enough time to publish a new podcast and none of the things I collected this week felt like a bonus. Not suggesting everyone agrees with me that my podcasts are a bonus, but hey… here we are 🤗