This Week in WordPress #150

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] It's time for this week in WordPress, we've reached the milestone of 150 episodes. And this one is called prices only go up. They never go down. I'm joined this week by Paul Lacey as always, but also by Christina Hawkin and Bernard Gronau so that we can chat about the WordPress news for this week. It was recorded on Monday the 15th of February, 2021.
As always autonomous happened. WordPress has surpassed 40% of the CMS market for the top X number of websites. That's a significant milestone go. Daddy has got a new product called the hub, which enables you to maintain your WordPress websites. Element or have increased their prices. Does this affect you?
It may well do. And it may well mean that you've got to find some more money, but you'll get better support WP feedback as a WordPress plugin, it's going away. And it's now being replaced by a SAS alternative called atta rim. We have a great article which ties together all the resources you could possibly need about full site editing, which is coming in the block editor, Beaver builder hub.
Updated their marketing game and they're producing lots of new content. And we talk briefly about that. I show you WP rocket's new website, which is super lightning, fast it's based upon Gutenberg and also burn. It tells us what's coming in pods 2.8, which is just around the corner. It's all coming up next on this weekend, WordPress, this weekend, WordPress is brought to you this week by AB split test.
Do you want to set up your AB split tests in record time? Like in a couple of minutes, use your existing pages and test anything against anything else. Buttons, images, headers, rows, anything. And the best part is it works with element or Beaver builder and the WordPress block editor. Check it out and get a free [email protected].
Hello? Hello, welcome week one small episode. I believe it's 150. Let's say it as always joined. Fresh faced. And a lot of people we were just commenting how else that trash faced. We all believe we look, but but here we are over Paul. Lacey's got a, an interesting look. He's got his glasses positioned on it, or it looked
Paul Lacey: [00:02:26] like some kind of.
World war two fighter pilot. I think we'll have cars going forward today.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:02:32] Bagels. That was the look. That's it. Okay.
Paul Lacey: [00:02:34] Baseball, baseball, playing fighter pilot. Okay. From that night. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:02:39] I liked your thing. Yeah, it's good. Thank you. Whoever you are in the comments for saying congratulations for getting through episode 150.
I appreciate that whoever you are. Let's do the introductions first though, properly. So over on my that side is Paul Lacey. How are you doing Paul?
Paul Lacey: [00:02:57] Doing good. Thank you. Doing good. And I'm looking forward to today. We've got some really good discussion points today. I think. Yeah. Lots of stuff around change.
Yeah. And in the whole environment we all work in. So some good stuff. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:10] Okay. And we're also joined by Christina Hawkins. How are you
Christina Hawkins: [00:03:14] doing Christina? I'm good. It's I'm in Houston and it's snowing. So we're all freaking out about it. I
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:21] actually saw that. That was so significant. A thing that it was in my news feed on the BBC.
Christina Hawkins: [00:03:28] Oh, wait. It's an inch of snow outside my window. The last time it snowed was 15 years ago. The dust. Okay let the schools down. There's like that much snow. We shut the schools.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:39] Yeah. Stay inside, stay warm. And let's talk about WordPress. And then finally over there we have Bernard Grano. How are you doing
Bernhard Gronau: [00:03:48] fine.
Fine.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:50] Very good. Most not here. No
Bernhard Gronau: [00:03:53] Austria. Yeah, no, but in the, of Austria or East, not South. We had a little bit of snow, but it smelled and it now it's cold again, but cold. So just a tiny little bit, but if you go to this house of Austria Corinthia or other areas or Tyrol, and you have lots of snow.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:15] Okay. We have snow. I had a lovely, large snowball fight with my children yesterday and I got absolutely schooled in how to do snowballing. Yeah. Couple of things just before we begin head over to these pages, I presume you are either on one of these pages or certainly somewhere else. WP Builds.com forward slash live.
You can comment over there. Yeah. Using YouTube comments. So you need to be logged in with a Google account, but WP Builds.com forward slash life enables you to do that. And then if you want to. Comments and you're logged into Facebook and you're in our Facebook group, go to WP builds.com forward slash Facebook.
And that will take you to our group and you can comment there and we always appreciate it when people do. We'll try to put as many of those on as we can, but we are going to be talking about the news in the WordPress space for the last week, which commenced on the 8th of February, 2020. I'll share my screen so that you can see exactly what's going on.
Didn't mean to show that one first, let's go for this one. Yeah, we got snuck in the pod screen. First. This is a, this is our website where WP builds.com over here. We produce a letter of WordPress content each week. Primarily what you're listening to now, which is this weekend. WordPress, we produced this.
We do it live on a Monday. And so obviously if you're watching that you knew that already, but if you're listening to the replay that goes out on a Tuesday, we'd make it into an audio podcast episode, but we also put the video on YouTube. So you can watch it at your leisure. We produce a podcast, a normal podcast with interviews, and so on that comes out on a Thursday at 1:00 PM UK time.
And you can find all of that by going to our archives section here, archives menu item. We've got a subscribe page. If you want to keep in touch with what we do. Go to this page, WP Builds.com forward slash subscribe. You can find different email lists to sign up to for different kinds of things, but also RSS feeds off the podcast players and links to our Facebook group and so on and so forth.
And then finally, I always mentioned this week, cause it gets a lot of use and I think it's actually quite useful for people. WP Builds.com forward slash deals. We've got a ton of permanently then none of these have ever been taken down deals in the WordPress space. So if you're looking for something this week, Go and check it out.
WP Builds.com forward slash deals. Okay, we'll get stuck into it properly this week. And we're going to start with a, quite a nice piece of news or at least I think it's quite a nice piece of news. This is over on WP Tavern. Sarah Gooding writes an article entitled WordPress pass passes. 40% market share.
Of Alexa top 10 million website. Good grief. I remember when this was 20 something. I think when I joined WordPress, we were in the, like the late twenties. Now we're up to 40%. The growth doesn't seem to be slowing down. I don't know if COVID has anything to do with the rapid increase because it went from, I think it was 30.
or something like that at the start of the year. Okay. We go right at the top of the article 35.4% this time, last year, basically. So seen roughly a 5% increase. And what's really interesting is obviously there's that top line number, which is based upon the top 10 million websites and they in the article that go to describe why that.
Why they've used that mechanism just because there are millions of websites, which are just junk, they literally are there for domain squatting and nonsense. And if you included those, it would obviously skew the figures slightly, but this is the bit that fascinates me among the top 1000 websites.
So trim that list by a factor of a hundred, sorry, a thousand. And it's closer to 52%, which is just not and it captures 66% for new sites. So basically if there's a, if there's a site redesign going on in the top thousand, there's a two in three chance that they'll decide to go and use WordPress.
They'll migrate over to WordPress, which is absolutely mind bending now. Constantly hearing chatter about Squarespace and Wix and all of these kinds of platforms, but articles like this, just give me real confidence that I'm in the right place at the right time. Anybody want to take this one on?
Christina Hawkins: [00:08:12] I just look at it like everyone's always scared when with referring Swifts and Squarespace and some of these other tools Oh my God if we start pumping up these other tools, no one's going to want to use WordPress or, I'm like, that is not a problem at all.
It's just. In fact, just last week I had somebody coming in you know what, it'd be probably better if you went over to Squarespace and build something yourself. And when you're done a couple of years later, come on over, we'll get you work out. Because they just don't have a budget.
And I'm like this go to some of these other places, whip it up yourself, go to wordpress.com and do it too as well. But I just, I think it just dispels that notion that. That WordPress isn't the right tool or it's going away or I'm like, no, it's actually quite the opposite.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:08:58] The main, the positive ladies Facebook group, when we are going to stop using WordPress.
I just answered now, not now until I stopped. You never know what's happened. Maybe there comes a content or maybe that comes a different solution. I think it's. Fairly easy to get started with WordPress and people know about it. So they ask about it. So it's like a little bit of self inducing.
Let's see how long that will last. But it's fairly easy, to get started. And meanwhile, we have great tools Kuechenberg even if I don't like it, but for somebody just starting out, it's maybe easier than ever to get it leased. Okay. Looking content sites with Gutenberg.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:40] The thing that I'm showing on the screen is. I think something of interest though, because it's always good. Not to be too. What's the word resting on your laurels because here we can see, it says in January Squarespace, overtook, Drupal and Wix, I come from Drupal and when I moved away from Drupal, it wasn't because it didn't offer me things.
It was just because I wanted a change and I wanted something which was a little bit more widely adopted, but at the time it wasn't stagnating. But now if you look at it We've now got, it's been Drupal has been eclipsed and has dropped into, I believe it's probably fourth place. With only 2.5% I believe it is market share, which is, if you're in that community, things must feel a little bit more, a little bit different to how they feel
Bernhard Gronau: [00:10:22] well.
But think about it 4.2% of 10 million sites. Yes. Still a lot and still a huge user base. So don't underestimate it
Christina Hawkins: [00:10:33] well, and I, I run the Houston WordPress meet up here and I must have get, I'm not scared about two or three a week of new members. We're and it just shows me that the community just keeps growing because I think they'd see the support as well.
So there's know over 300. I have 2,500. I haven't checked in a while, they see that number of people and they feel if I go down the WordPress path, I know I'll have somebody to help me. That it's not hard. You'll trip over somebody. And it's just easier to find somebody rather than Drupal and Joomla, which I too, I did do a couple of Drupal sites, but the problem for me was I couldn't find developer that I could, if that person couldn't do it, I come over here to another group.
So not the case with WordPress. So I think people this building community and it's free, and there's an entire meetup group of WordPress users and they just joined, Hey, I can't figure this out. How do I do this thing? And there's always somebody, it just jumping into health via. So I think that's just part of that growth that you
Bernhard Gronau: [00:11:29] see.
Yeah. Yeah, but again, I am, you get fella cheap support with blood principal, because there are so many people it's like kind of an advantage and disadvantage of that. You get so many peoples at very low price points, doing some stuff sometimes unbelievable. How people work or what tools they are using to get a client, which I don't know all they did software Aboriginal and stuff like that.
So it's. Not only a good thing sometimes. Oh, I
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:00] see. Yeah. Yes. Paul, any thoughts on that? Or do you want to segue us into the next piece? We've got lined up?
Paul Lacey: [00:12:06] Yeah. What's interesting as well as the stats, the 40% is of all websites that they monitor and that basically something like 30% of those don't have a content management system that they track.
So you might have a content management system, it might be a custom made one or something like that. If you actually look at the market share of all of those websites that WordPress has. And only include websites that are powered by a content management system of some kind WordPress is up there at 64.3% at the moment, which is absolutely.
Insane numbers. Going back to the 40%, looking at some of the other systems as well, you got WordPress at 40% has got a steady growth curve. Shopify has got a pretty steep group growth curve at 3.3%, still a huge amount of people. Then you've got Joomla, which has been on a steady downwards trend over the last few years.
Squarespace has been more or less flat lining. It's not really growing that much. Not really. Although I guess it's growing in a way that there were more websites but it's market share isn't necessarily growing. Wix is growing a little bit. Drupal is going down. And then some of the ones that have got very steep growth curves at the moment, but are right down in the note 0.3 percentages are the kind of semi SAS offerings, big commerce and web flow.
So you can see that if you take the open source systems, some of the old classics, Drupal and Joomla definitely on the down, some of the SAS offerings are on a steady rise. Shopify seems to be. One of the biggest competitors to, to work with at the moment. So I guess that's where commerce versus Shopify in a way.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:53] Yeah, WooCommerce all by itself accounts for a massive proportion compared to any other CMS. It's a bit ridiculous. Really you've got commerce can be counted separately and still is in basically second place to WordPress, which is just bonkers. Yeah it just makes me feel really like I'm in the right place almost to the point where, in the UK we don't call them vacuum cleaners.
We call them Hoovers. Because it's just called a Hoover because I guess at some point that manufacturer was, yeah. Yeah,
Bernhard Gronau: [00:14:25] exactly. Yeah. It's like in, in Austria tape something's called ticks off because it was the first huge friend. And everybody just tells it that way.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:14:34] We think that we have a local sort of, we haven't done it for over 18 months because of COVID, but we have a local meetup.
Where people who I don't know into, in, in businesses, in technology, in the local area meetup. And it's always surprising to me, how many times people call it my WordPress and I call it my website. They just call it my WordPress and who was thought? That was quite interesting, but it's on the, it's on the increase, I guess at some point it's got to flat line.
You can't have a hundred percent, but we are heading towards it.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:15:04] Wonder if they count classic press as word, press. Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:15:09] Ooh, that's a good point. Yeah, I
Christina Hawkins: [00:15:11] think it's good. I think I like to know, I like to say when you do get some folks that come back and say, I don't know, I don't know if I should do this on WordPress because they think of them as smaller sites.
I think now we can start showing sites that, like Vogue and some of these very larger sites that use WordPress, like it can handle. Anything like people, I think still have this idea that it's a blogging page builder kind of thing. No, you can build some pretty incredible things with WordPress and just it, that old mentality of what it used to be.
I think it's just, it's still there, but I think it's because we're at 60% or not 60%, but 50% now it's just. Pretty crazy. So just being able to show these other sites that the capability of it would be great.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:15:53] The Cameron Jones in the comment making the point that yeah, exactly. The one that burned had made that potentially classic process is 50% of all of the sites that we're talking about.
So it's still WordPress. But let's move on because we've got more stories to talk about. Let's go Paul Lacey is going to take on this one, which is from GoDaddy.
Paul Lacey: [00:16:12] Yeah, we've got an article on WordPress Tavern from just in Tatlock and the articles entitled GoDaddy launches the hub, a new site project, and a client management experience for web professionals.
So back in. 2016 or 25th, 2015. I think it was a go daddy bought out one of the most popular web WordPress panel systems, which was managed WP, which is the one I use still at the moment, to be honest. And so to put this in context, if anyone doesn't know this kind of panel, that GoDaddy as launched or relaunched.
Is a system whereby let's say you manage a number of websites. You can use the system to manage all your plan updates check the uptime do backups duplicate sites, do things like staging stuff, that kind of thing and manage all that in one central place. So a lot of people who run agencies or freelancers, who've got multiple sites under their wing.
Use a system like this. I use managed WP, so they've relaunched it now. It's called the hub by GoDaddy. And it's just got a new, fresh design. You can still use the old one if you were using their old hub. And what's interesting in the article, is that just in say's that he was very much expecting to see call to actions all over the place for every single kind of product that GoDaddy's selling right now.
But he said he was quite pleased that he could not find within the system any upsells. Whatsoever to try and get you to start buying domains, or, but by hosting all these kinds of things, it was a very clean experience. And if you look at, if you can see the design on the screen, if you're watching this at the moment, you'll probably notice that it looks like it's taking influence from the whole Gutenberg block editor, white style, same icons, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, it's an interesting launch. A lot of people as usual, we've go, daddy will always remember the bad old days. And I think GoDaddy's company is clearly trying to do things to do better stuff in the community and improve its reputation. But it's a massive company. So massive company with massive.
Customers. So it only takes one person on social media to have a bad experience, how the millions of customers have got, and they're. Bad news story about GoDaddy support will always keep getting reinforced, but they've launched this new product, apparently it's totally free, but I think there is some premium aspects in there.
So let's say you get some, a free backup per month for free maps. For instance, you can probably change that to a daily backup or a by the minute backup, but it's worth taking a look if you're not already using something. I think that this is more of a thing for existing GoDaddy users to be using, to be quite honest.
Yeah,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:18:56] it's not it's not like a brand new product as it were, we've seen this kind of thing all over the place. Lots of different, like
Paul Lacey: [00:19:02] a new skin on their own yeah. Existing product.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:19:05] Yeah. You made about about their legacy is a tough one. I've got no point where I've consumed go daddy things particularly.
So I don't have a negative experience, but it would appear that a lot of people going back into the past have got. Things that they want to air his grievances. Adam Warner, who was being interviewed for this post, he joined GoDaddy to lead their sort of WordPress initiative in 2018. He doesn't have anything to answer for in fact, Lucky enough to meet Adam at WordPress WordCamp in Europe and just really thoroughly decent guys seems to be taking the ship in the right direction.
And this just seems like a sensible tool to have. If you're a hosting company of that magnitude in the WordPress space, and you want to push the pro initiative that they've got, you need a tool like this. And so now it exists looks, looks, looks like a decent offering. If you've bundled a whole load of GoDaddy products already.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:20:01] Yeah, they've got
Paul Lacey: [00:20:02] managed posting stuff now, haven't they? I think so. All of those things if the ecosystem works for you, then it's great. It's doing what you need. It's whether or not you've got any problems. And I'm sure that out of the millions of users. Does millions that don't have any problems with go daddy?
Sorry, Christina, I interrupted you that you covered up with Beth. Yeah,
Christina Hawkins: [00:20:24] no, it's all good. Yeah. I'm I used managed WP for years. I didn't really have any problems when they switched over. My only concern with it and it still is I'm I it's, it looks like it's just. The new skin, but I'm just waiting.
It's like they halted production onto to improve anything. Like it's the same manage WP that it was three years ago. And I just, I don't am I, and I don't see any enhancements on what we've been using. So that's only my, that's my issue at this point. It's I don't use. I don't use the the performance tool because that doesn't do me any good.
I don't use the uptime
Paul Lacey: [00:21:01] pretty bad schools. Doesn't it totally managed WP
Christina Hawkins: [00:21:04] sites information. Yeah. That's nothing that I can use. And it scares my clients because they're like, Oh my God, I got enough. I'm like, just stop. Look at the scores. I don't even use it. I took it off. I take it off the report and then there's the uptime.
I don't use that one. There's just certain features on there. I just don't use because it just doesn't do anything. For me as a developer and I manage 135 websites now and they're all on managed LBP. And so I just don't see enhancement. The skinning is great, but the issues I have are way bigger and more in depth, especially when it came to, I noticed that all of my client information.
Whether they hook, none of them host with GoDaddy at this point, none of them are GoDaddy hosts, but they now have all of their name, their emails, all of their information is in that one system. So that kind of concerned me when we, when I saw that in lots of upsells, this just looks to me like a skin.
It's just, they just. They're putting lipstick on a pig at this point, and I'm just worried like, Hey look what we did. It's all shiny and new now, but I'm waiting. Like I need the functionality. People are leaving from what I'm seeing in some of the Facebook groups is people are like, I've had it, the backups aren't working for me.
And I get errors that we try and clone sites. And so when we clone them, it's Hey, it's cloned. And I don't see anything nothing's happened. We clone it again. Nothing's happening. And so it's. Yeah, but then all of a sudden, an hour later, There it is. Oh yeah. What
Nathan Wrigley: [00:22:29] happened? And that's the upsell. If you want an instant loan, you have to a delayed
Christina Hawkins: [00:22:35] clone, but then you'd go back to tech support.
There's no chat, right? It's all through an email ticketing system, which is fine. I understand that. But at the same time, it takes them an hour or two hours to get back. Of course, an hour later, the site's up like Singapore,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:22:50] this I think is the problem that they face is. For every, because they've got so many customers and they've been in business for so long and they had really quirky approach to marketing a while back.
The, for every comment thread that you read about GoDaddy, there's always somebody ready to hop in. And and offer the alternative. So I feel it's a really difficult one. It's actually interesting. I didn't know this, but Beth, who was in the comments she writes, I am a GoDaddy pro ambassador and the reputation thing is always hard, but it is, she says an excellent product.
And then we've got Facebook use. I should have said at the beginning. Apologies. I didn't, if you wish to be anonymous, that's fine. But in Facebook, if you wish us to know who you are, you have to actually go in and click the stream yard link, which is in the main thread, the. Copy for the post itself, go and click the stream, yellow Lincoln.
Then you can authorize us to know who you are, but they,
Paul Lacey: [00:23:44] Alex Kelly
Nathan Wrigley: [00:23:44] enough. Hi, Alex. Hello. Thanks for joining. He's currently using blood fault and he's been happy with that, but he also says go daddy showcase. They will commerce hosting products that will London meetup, which was really impressive and on for an onboarding tool for new users.
It's by far the best in the industry at the moment. There you go.
Paul Lacey: [00:24:04] And that was Ronald from youth who set that. So Ronald knows a lot about We're commerce because he works for youth beams and yeah, I think GoDaddy, I've got a a bit of a sweet deal from what I understand. There's Aloxi sorted out.
I think GoDaddy have some kind of. I remember we covered it months ago that they had this hosting package at GoDaddy where they'd made a deal with automatic, and you've got a bunch of their premium products like memberships and subscriptions, and some of the other plugins that would quite costly for free as part of this deal.
And people were a bit upset because. It was not really fair that they, a huge company makes a deal with another huge company. And there you go, you've got a bit of a monopoly or a kind of a price wall around some of these products. But I know that I imagine that deal for automatic was probably interesting because you've got something like Shopify, which is onboarding.
Experience is pretty good. And then you got WooCommerce, which is frightening. If you've not done it before and GoDaddy have managed to partner with automatic, make an onboarding product that feels like you're almost buying something like Shopify and it all works. It's just, I've got no experience with GoDaddy as well in terms of products, but just my constant hearing of the bad news stories, which.
It's just hard for them to shake. Isn't it? I think when these companies grow so big, it's difficult to to keep in touch with the community. Even if you've got someone like Andrew Warner who is doing an amazing job, always at all the events, always at all the online events happy to speak to someone one-to-one anyone he'll make time for people.
It's still like a huge company that. It's just constantly growing and that growth is just so hard to manage your reputation at that point. Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:25:48] That. That is a good segue by the way. I feel because the next piece, I'm sorry, if anybody had anything to say about that, but I'm going to move on because it felt like the perfect moment is this one.
I think probably this is an article that is going to interest a lot of people. I'm sure you've heard about this. This is, we've got two pieces today. We've got the, we've got the piece directly from element or themselves, and then maybe it will be a point of discussion. We have Sarah Goodings take over on WP Tavern as well, but.
Let's start with the GoDaddy piece itself. You may or may not have heard this week, that GoDaddy, sorry, GoDaddy, that elemental have decided they're going to adjust their pricing. As with all these things, prices very rarely go down. They tend to go up and obviously now Elementor or a huge.
Force in the WordPress space. They've got probably more support tickets than almost any company in the WordPress space, perhaps aside from wordpress.com. And so they've revealed some new pricing. They say that they're in control of currently about 7 million websites, which Whoa just such a staggering number.
And so on the screen at the moment I'm presenting. For you so that you can see what their new pricing plans are. I'll go through them because it might be interesting for you to know that you've got, they've got possibly some new names attached to them as well, but basically one website is going to be $49 per year.
Nothing really much to see there. That's I think pretty much as it's always been three websites for $99 a year. And here's where the changes begin like of significance. I feel the previous price point of one, nine, nine for a thousand websites has now been changed to one nine, nine for 25 websites.
So at this point I can hear the collective intake of breath as people think hang on a minute. That's 975 less. Hang on, wait a minute, because you can also get a different deal. It's a hundred websites for four 99, so that plans completely new. And then they've got what that they're flagship products.
If you like the agency is called, is going in at basically a thousand dollars, 999 for a 1000 websites. Now. The thing to sweeten this deal is that they're offering additional support. That seems to be where they're pitching this. Obviously that the number of sites has changed, but the key takeaway that I want to drive home is they've got this thing called VIP support, where you get 24 seven live chat.
And reading through some of the article, some of the things that Ben Pines was saying over on the WP Tavern article, cause they interviewed him. They were trying to make the point that, this support is supposed to be really a premium offering. You are, if you write them an email and you're on the professional cost, the plans that I've just described, you're going to get a response within an hour or less.
That seems to be what they're saying. I think I read 30 minutes. Maybe somebody can. Just tell me that was nonsense or not, that's pretty amazing if they can pull that off, if you can write a support ticket and. Basically by the time, you've made a cup of coffee and come back to your computer, you should have an answer.
Let's see how that goes. But can you imagine what the reaction of the community has been? Obviously you've had some people who say, look, it's a business. They've got to make money. This is important for their growth. We want the product to be updated. It's got a whole ton of things which need to be worked on improvements as well.
As well as, fixes for bugs lots of development work that needs to be done. So that's good. Cause we'll get all that investment now. And then you can imagine the other side, the flip side to this is what w what, that's five times as much money as I'm currently paying now. Go on. Let me let, I'll just finish this a little bit and then you can all jump in.
They they're, you've got until the 9th of March, if you wish to if you wish to hop in on the current pricing, they're giving you more or less a full month to hop in, but it, the complication arises that. That it's not entirely clear how long that will last. In other words, if you buy in before the 9th of March, will the subsequent renewals of that be at the price that you paid before the 9th of March and.
Ben Pines in the comments is careful to say, look, we cannot promise that for obvious reasons, you don't want to, I want to shoot your business in the foot and type something that somebody in a year's time can say, no, but you said this that's not the case. So it's a really interesting stories. A lot of people worked up and go
Bernhard Gronau: [00:30:28] well. To be honest, who is effected by that anyway, Many users for sure. On the smaller plans, because come on above, okay. Maybe expert users, but I don't know a thousand sites that must be huge agency using that. They don't care, if, I don't know, there are for sure people that are affected, but I don't think it's that big of a deal for many of them.
I don't know because our groups, their support, I'm all for it. I'm not an elementary user. We have just to deal with elementary users coming, asking pots questions especially for everybody using potted elementary. Yes. They have made it back with the latest update, just hold back and wait for them to fix it.
So that staff that heavens anytime over there, so they need more money to deal with support and product quality. Let's you vote a ride goes.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:31:23] Yeah, the it's interesting actually some comments in our conversation here. So Alex is making the point that they haven't changed their pricing in what?
Probably since they launched. Yeah. I think the only pricing variation was when they went from unlimited to a thousand sites at the one nine nine model, because I think some licenses were just getting hammered. Because it was literally unlimited. I think there was, sites, keys were just being posted online and you could find it somewhere and it was totally legitimate to use it.
So that wasn't really a pricing change. The only difference in pricing, I think is they had a launch deal, didn't they? At the very start where, or I think it was $49 for on limited for a small amount of time. But that was just like a, a very early deal. So I think Alex is right.
The pricing hasn't changed. And of course the The other thing, which gets mentioned all the time, if you're managing a thousand websites and you can't afford it. Yeah. Yeah. The wrong business. It's interesting there, because this always gets said that way. Doesn't it. But if you've gone, let's say you're in the position that you've got a hon let's put the pricing back up.
Cause then I'll be able to do this properly. If you are in the position where you have four sites, it, that could be quite a big leap, but still it's not a lot of money. I don't really have a problem with the money here. I think the problem in this article is communicating to your user base. Many of whom may be, it might be difficult to meet these new costs, but buy it before it before it goes, the deal goes, it,
Bernhard Gronau: [00:32:48] the change starts at the expert level.
Everything be below that there is no change. Yep. Yep.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:32:55] Cause that's
Christina Hawkins: [00:32:55] the regular users. That's just the everyday. Yeah.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:32:58] Yeah. Maybe not, maybe they need support of, they can wait. It's an offering for people who work in professionally with it. And so 500 bucks a year for up to a hundred websites isn't cheap.
And it depends on your value living because it's for American. Maybe it's okay if you're from somewhere else, maybe it's very expensive. But you get the whip support, you get all their other additional staff. I think they starting with studio or expert. You are listed on their sites as partner. So you get a little bit of it in return.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:33:38] Can we get a bit of a backlink there? That's right. Yeah.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:33:40] Yeah. I always wonder why they just don't offer sometimes license without any support. It's a funny thing, which I almost never received WordPress. And I don't know if it would work or not, but to be honest, I don't need support most of the times.
And if I needed for most of the plugins, it's crappy anyway, because. The questions are really to be answered. And most of the time backs or stuff like they have to fix, and that's not important anymore. For me, that is keeping your product working or back free. Don't know if there's a documentation.
I don't need somebody to explain all you need to go with. They are activated there because that stuff you can figure out yourself.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:21] Yeah, it's interesting actually, in a way it'd be quite nice to have the essential or the advanced, which is one site in three sites. Be nice to be able to pay, to get their VIP support, because it strikes me that potentially the inexperienced users or the people that are really going to need to get the answer.
And it's going to be really frustrating to have to figure that out yourself off, join us. A Facebook community or whatever to figure that out. That, yeah that's quite an interesting pitch, but you are paying for seats as well. So if you're on the one, nine, nine plan, you now get a premium support, which means an email you've got a day response time.
If you're on the $500 plan for nine nine, which is called studio, you get five seats at their VIP support, which is chat, live chat within five minutes, sorry, five people. And then if you're on the agency, one them nine, nine, nine, you get. Up to 10 people. You can see this fitting really nicely with ancient.
Christina Hawkins: [00:35:13] And I look at it too. So I, like I mentioned, I have a 130 websites that we manage. I don't use Elementor. So I'm looking at this Holy crap. I'd have to upgrade to the thousand dollars a year to get this to work for me. Now, on the flip side, though, I run a business. I do the same thing to my clients.
I raised my rates. I raised my care plan rates based on what increased costs that I have. And I just say, Hey, I've had a massive increase in costs. I gotta raise my rates and you just have to pass on that cost. And the clients just usually they understand, I might lose one or two, but usually now on the flip side, if they are not on a care plan for me, then I tell them, listen, you're going to be responsible for all these licenses, because right now I pay for all the licenses and all the websites.
And I added it up one time. It was almost 650. It could be $700 now per year for all of these websites. And so when I, and when I share my client, I'm like, listen, all the neat stuff that we do with your site that makes it easier for you to maintain and update w we use BeaverBuilder. We just say, and work in a year's time.
You're going to be responsible for this. And here's how much it's going to cost and then they go, Oh, I'll go on a care plan.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:17] Yeah. Actually this works very well. Doesn't it? We could yeah, you could split it. Yeah.
Christina Hawkins: [00:36:21] If you explain it well, and you're just transparent about this is what I, this is my cost.
Yeah. If you explain that to your clients and they're usually pretty okay with it now, Switch on over to Beaver builder. Now Beaver better than I do this. I don't know. I'm
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:36] a little the other way,
Bernhard Gronau: [00:36:42] because that there's an uptick in going back from one of the founders. Just, she had recently where he explains why he doesn't believe in a limited whatever parents, websites and Indiana. If you're having sites in that amount, you can easily just don't add the license key and copy paste the blocking files.
That's not rocket science is as long as they don't lock features until you enter the key. But most of the time, most of the workers plugins copy paste. Thank you. So it's always a balance.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:16] Yeah. Rick in the comments it says in there in the email they received in which they announced this, they stated if you're on an existing, active subscription, nothing changes for you.
If I read that correctly. Yeah. There were a few people that they were concerned that there was no. And again, let me just put the article on the page. If you go to the go to this one, which is the element or article written by Sarah Gooding on WP Tavern there was concern that. It doesn't mention what will happen in the future.
And I'm struggling to find the paragraph elements or evangelists. Ben Pines headed the company's web creator program. And I'm quoting, this has left the question regarding renewals open. He's saying he cannot see into the future. Customers were left wondering whether the lack of clarity on the future of renewals is a foreshadowing of prices going up after the current.
Billing year. And he been said, no one can predict the future. And offering lifetime price guarantee is a responsible for any future facing company. But they go out of their way to make it, make the point that they've built up a lot of trust with their users over the years. And
Bernhard Gronau: [00:38:18] but on this side to yourself, is there is written by, by elementary that if you get the bigger plans now, Agency plan, you get a 50% discount, which will stay on.

Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:30] Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah, this is just a difficult messaging. It's just difficult to put this messaging out in the market, imagine if you're, Oh, I don't know your heating bill went up by. 50 or a hundred percent or something like that, you'd just be freaking out whether it was justified or not.
And that's the problem. They've just got a difficult job trying to trying to make it, make everybody happy. Some people concerned more about the price than others. Maybe you're at the inflection point where you're going from one license to another. And Christina said, it's just like suddenly ouch, And it may be that your business isn't tremendously profitable at the moment in which case every penny counts.
So yeah.
Christina Hawkins: [00:39:07] Goes back to what I'm saying. You have to look at your own business and your own cost structure. The re I don't believe that these guys do this because they're just greedy. I don't think that they raise prices just because they're like, Hey, Whoa, let's make some more money. I believe they probably looked at it and like, all right, one to do this thing, we got to do this.
Yeah. And so I try to give them the benefit of the doubt. They don't just throw money and just decide, let's just make it this much money. I think there's probably some decisions in that. They looked at their cost structure. They looked at the support that they were having to do for their product.
And we gotta to make a tough decision here guys. And they know they're probably lose some users, but they'll probably gain some because they'll look at. That they'll look at the structure, the look at the support and I go, that's what
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:46] I need the support. They've doubled their support team over the last year.
And they're planning to double it again in the coming year. That's expensive. And I think currently last time I checked, I think they had 130.
Paul Lacey: [00:40:01] But on the flip side,
Christina Hawkins: [00:40:03] I'm like Bernard, I don't use BeaverBuilder support. I rarely ever reach out to them for anything. So on the flip side, I'm thinking
Bernhard Gronau: [00:40:13] how much support you can't compare the quality of the product with Google builder, it's a completely different way of developing.
They have more and faster releases. They have sometimes more fancy stuff. Yeah. They target more than the single user or the experienced user or more kind of designer type with all the prospects FaceTime, allotment means more issues. They happen frequently and that's not only because of the bigger user base it's because of the way they work.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:40:51] Okay. So from one company that's growing to another one let's leave elemental behind for this week and a I'd say what
Paul Lacey: [00:40:59] else? I was going to say, okay, let's see. Just there's there's a lot confusing about this whole story because there's so many different opinions and angles to come at yet.
My own opinion is. They have to put the prices up. No doubt about it like that. And Ben Pines in that statement where he said, I can't comment on future price changes or renewal discounts is a highly responsible thing to say at this point, because it's absolutely true. In Matt, his latest podcast. He pulled out a few figures, elemental onboard something like 30,000 new users.
Every day. I think it was something absolutely insane, but that's probably a mix of premium people or maybe it's new websites or something. It's an absolutely ridiculous. Maybe it's a month. I can't remember either. The number was shocking in terms of when you see how much, how many new people are under there, something to do with element or as customers or free users one way or another.
And that. They had to double their support team and doubling them support team from say 40 to 80 or 50 to a hundred. It's still nowhere near enough to cope with that many people that are onboarding to that product every day. And a lot of people in the community have said, Oh the, so I got $15 million venture capital, et cetera.
Honestly, I've worked in the.com boom, where much more money was passed around them. 15 million for web, for. Things are pretty one up too much. And that 15 million that'll get eaten up. If you took away the money they're making from the sales, that money won't go very far. We have a company with the kind of people they've got to employ and the product that they've got and the level of support and the growth.
I know that elemental or all about reducing friction for their users, right? They are obviously venture capital backed and they do need to make a lot of money and. Gosh, they should make a lot of money because they've changed the game in a lot of situations, but they are committed to try and reducing friction for the customers.
They've not always got it. If you think how quickly they've grown and think back to GoDaddy a company that grew super quick and now has a life long reputation problem. The last thing I'll say on this is really is that this could be a key moment for element or to do something. Of some kind of loyalty bonus to their existing fanatical user base.
Even if those customers part ways and go to oxygen or go to BeaverBuilder that they part as friends, that's the most important thing to elementals reputation right now that they don't have a bunch of people who were shouting from the rafters about how great this product was doing the exact opposite for the rest of time.
On AppSumo all the time a deal comes to up a $49, blah, blah, blah. And then the mud piles in and says, we don't like the deal. We want a better deal. Ben Pines. And Elementor at the moment again. You've got a discount on the new VIP support and everyone's I feel like we're getting downgraded on our support.
They're probably not. They're probably not. They've got, what's called premium support and there's a level before that. And then there's a level above what the people who don't decide to pay anymore. They've got good. The VIP with the chat, this chat level support is new. That didn't exist before. Why should everyone get up for free?
Why should they introduce something like that? And people don't have to pay for it. They do have a trust issue going forward. If they don't do something to address this, the community here is commenting on their blog. Does not think that there's enough has been done by elemental to address this. They could make a big impact if they did something, some kind of gesture at this point, before they end up being worth 150 million or 200 million or whatever, just to keep that reputation friendly.
That's what I would say. It's very difficult to figure it all out though, but they've got to do it. This is the
Nathan Wrigley: [00:44:56] point isn't it. It's obviously contentious, 339 responses to a blog post it's quite it's quite, just like it just goes on them on and on. And people's concerns, they built their business on it. They want to know what the future is. And yeah, interesting
Paul Lacey: [00:45:10] responses. That's right. Half of those are from Ben Pines. So you probably got about 150 people there. If they're onboarding 30,000 a day or a month even, or wherever it is, that amount of people angry is a drop in the ocean to the people.
When they're looking at the spreadsheet and the numbers, it's a drop in the ocean, but those people are vocal. Yeah. And that's it
Nathan Wrigley: [00:45:32] for life. Yeah. They are the people that will drop in the comments as we were describing about GoDaddy earlier, two years from now. Yeah. Interesting. Thanks Bernard.
For sharing that piece, we actually. Paul. And I, before we had this conversation on the live we did actually mention this about how Pippin had taken Pippin, Williamson from Sandhills development, the EDD, and so on. He'd taken a decision to really radically change his pricing model in order to make it more cost-effective for their business, they literally doubled and in some cases more than.
Doubled, I think the price of their product, but had fewer customers, but had less support and the exact same revenue, if not more. So that was really interesting. Okay. Okay. Elemental, we're done for this week. Should we segue this is you again, Paul, we're going to be talking about WP feedback. It's not WP feedback anymore.
It's gone.
Paul Lacey: [00:46:29] Yup. So Adobe feedback product by veto Paluch, who's been on the show a number of times he's always booking back in isn't he after he comes on and good guy, Vito we've a lot of us have met Vito and he's got his product. There'll be feedback, which is. Like a user design feedback at all.
That's how it began. Anyway, although he's saying it's a lot more than that now, and at the beginning, what you could do is you can install this on your WordPress site and let's say you had some clients, you could use it to ask your clients to say what they liked or didn't like, or what was working or not working.
Or if you had a live website, you could use it together, support request, so that someone can point at the thing. That's not working for them on the website. Put a sticky note on that. And then the system communicates to you via email and within the system itself. So it's like a feedback so much like product project huddle, or envision, I think does a similar sort of thing.
Now this product started out as a pure WordPress plugin with a. SAS element that was largely invisible. So you did everything within the WordPress plugin side of things. Now in a recent interview on dopey tonic VTA was interviewed by Donna, Jonathan Denwood. And Vito is talking about that. Some of the customers on that they were supporting had websites.
We have over 200 plugins installed on them. And we're wondering, and thinking that, a problem with this. The problem with Adobe feedback was related to Durfee feedback. And Vito was talking about a lot of the growth problems with that, that they never expected. That actually was a thing.
It turned out it's quite a common thing in how badly some websites are made. So they started this journey over to a SAS product where they weren't reliant on the ever-changing WordPress. Ecosystem and the people in it that will pile on those products. They know now that if they're supporting someone, it's nothing to do with the plugins, it's a SAS level product, and it's doing very little within the WordPress products.
Now what's interesting is that this product has grown. They've grown a lot of users very quickly not to the level that elemental have, not to the level as GoDaddy have, cause they never will because it's much more niche product than that. But everyone who bought a lifetime deal or a deal with Derby feedbacks and what I understand.
Has got the same deal just with the SAS product now. So they've got to upgrade in a way. So if you're a lifetime product diner with the plugin, you're a lifetime Deere loner with WP feedback, and it's easier for us to say, Oh, look at that. Elemental, you should do the same.
You should make sure that everyone's grandfathered in and got the best of the best and stuff like that. But it's a different level of growth but good luck to VTA with the new SAS product at our IM, which apparently in Hebrew means websites. Yeah. And apparently there's a lot more functionality that this does than that then their original product does and moving this to SAS.
It means that they can do all the things that they wanted to do in the future. If be interested to see if the pricing changes for them in a year's time. But for now everyone who was in, I think is the same. It strikes
Nathan Wrigley: [00:49:30] me as don't see a downside to putting this into SAS at all. The heavy lifting that this plugin needed to do to make it useful.
It feels like this is a bit of a, a no-brainer for their customers. And as you said, Paul, if he's just grandfathered everybody in, that's really nice. If you're on the screen, you can see the sort of dashboard that you'll get now. Beth, who I presume is a user of. What was WP feedback and is now at a rim?
I'm sorry. Christina, your face has been covered over by baths temporarily. It says veto wants the product to be the central communication and workflow app for WordPress site map to wireframes to design feed. But yeah, he's going for the full Monte. It just looks really nice. It looks really nice.
And I am sure that it will have him on at some point to explain how it all works and how it's put together. But yeah. Nice to know that they're taking all that.
Christina Hawkins: [00:50:19] It wouldn't be great if they became a bit of a competitor to manage WP. I don't, and not so much as like the full Monte everything that they do, but it for me is from a work.
Process standpoint to have one place where clients can leave comments, even on a live site, they'd log into their back end and they go live. They can see and leave comments for us. If we have to make updates and changes on a live site, cause right now for us, I don't know if anyone else says it's all, I use project huddle, but it's on a separate site and clients, before we go live, they can leave their comments.
Like this, but it would be really great if on a live site I just plug in, but then I have something like this where it's tied in with my ticketing system somehow. So when they leave a comment, Hey, I need to change this here. It creates a ticket on my end, but at the same time, if I could have a tool on here where I'm backing it up, maybe like I said, not the full managed WP, but a backup tool from here.
So before the developer goes in and makes it. A change or something, it backs up, it looks over some comments. We can delete comments while we're in there. I dunno, just something that would be really great on a live site. From my client's perspective, I would look like a hero if they could just come into something and just make changes on a live site.
Sorry, I keep that.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:51:31] Yeah. Yeah, no, that's really interesting. And the fact that it was, it had a particular name, WP feedback really locks it into two different things. Hey, it's WordPress WP, but it was also it's feedback and there's quite a lot of comments. Coming in about, exactly what you've just said, Christina, it could go anywhere now that he's got a SAS app, which is just called a website in Hebrew, it could connect, it could do all of those managed WP related tasks and it limited only by the team's imagination.
So a lot of people using it in the comments. Yeah. Sorry.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:52:05] Not really. I was just thinking about how many tools now want to have your site in their system linked with it? I don't know, magic P or I don't know, Salesforce version of main BP or WebEx using updating new security stats and this one and that and their, how I feel about it.
I understand the move because. You're more Walnut, more or less finding the customer to you. But then the other hand especially Europe evolved as data privacy laws. Many customers might not be really well. Everybody can look into the side, the connections from their service.
So you move it to a single point of failure. If they have an HEC, every site can be affected. So it's I'm not quite sure about. Feel about all those moves to those centralized systems and giving away some part of the control while she the benefits. But that's one of the reasons I stuck with project title, which I can sell fast or thinking about moving to Maine with Pete, because they can sell first.
It, yes, it's more effort. But on the other hand, you have a little bit more control over some parts of it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:53:17] Yeah. I feel though, people that say like George in the comments, you're saying that he got the lifetime deal. When it was on offer back in the day as did Rick here, it, it you've done quite well.
There haven't you guys, cause this is definitely that they're really upping their game. And you guys are all grandfathered in. You've got this, whether you're going to use it or not. It's interesting because it has to be views. Alfie's has gone to project title, but then further down, he actually says, actually I liked the look of this product.
So it's going, SAS might have might have turned a few heads. And Sean saying does a tare means something in Hebrew names? Console would be my guess, but anybody else want to chip in on that? Paul?
Paul Lacey: [00:54:03] I think You've mentioned the word grandfathered. This is one of those ongoing themes of, the commercial side of WordPress is changing so quickly and the core side of WordPress has changed so, so quickly.
And from what I understand, Vito has grandfathered in those customers. So they do move smoothly over to the SAS product. If we were to have new things like managed WP type functionality in there, would that still be something that the lifetime deal people would get, you would hope to think so, because compared to what the scale of growth could be, if they did add some of these extra tools, you think that those couple of people would be worth keeping as loyal advocates of your product.
But yeah. Just to talk about an alternative another tool, not an alternative to another tool called opt-in monster which is like a pop-up tool. Yeah. So they've also done a similar thing recently where they've moved over to a SAS based model and it used to be a WordPress product and they've moved to a SAS model.
And they also had some lifetime deal owners as well. And if you check on Twitter or speak to a couple of people who had those deals, you'll see that they're very unhappy, probably even more unhappy than your element or he is at the moment. Cause you elemental users are just worried about what might happen in the future.
And they're worried that they don't have this VIP support yet. They were the top tier before and they've got to pay more for that. Whereas the opt-in monster original kind of. People who you would say, are those people that help put money into the company at the start to get it, to do what it needed to do to actually get it off the ground.
Those lifetime deal users have not been grandfathered into the SAS product. They've been offered a discount. On the SAS product, but essentially their lifetime deal for the product is over. And I know that a couple of people, I know there's someone who's watching today who was one of these people actually contacted them, queried this concept of, lifetime.
I paid this money. It said lifetime. Oh no, it's moved to assess thing. So it's a different product. And here's what the response was. It's in the terms and conditions on their website as well. At some point opt-in monsters terms and conditions changed to say that at any point, if you use our product, you are agreeing with our current terms and we can change the pricing at any point within the next 30 days.
Notice now, That's pretty, pretty sketchy, I think is the best way. It has upset a lot of those founder members who will not be using any more of those company's products anymore. And I think this is the thing that we've all got to be careful of, whether it's utterly IM, sorry. I said that wrong. L element or even BeaverBuilder or any commercial product and WordPress or webs or SAS or anything like that, is that the environment that we're all working in and the financial, the economy, everything is changing so much that we cannot assume that these companies can keep things the same as they are.
And we cannot assume that morally they will see it from the same side that we do. Yeah, Ben Pines is saying we might not, we might change things in the future. And like I said, that's the responsible thing to do because they might have to just like opt in months to half. But I think up to monster, they should have wanted those couple of grandfather's customers.
I can't imagine it's that many. It's really
Nathan Wrigley: [00:57:22] interesting as well though. Yeah, just by
Paul Lacey: [00:57:25] music every day.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:57:26] Yeah, just by using the tool, you are agreeing to the new term and we've all been there, right? You log into, I don't know, Google or something. And it says you've got to, you've got to acknowledge that the new terms and conditions, and there is literally no way you're going to read that.
Cause it's a waste of half of the morning, so you're just going to click. Okay. Unaccept but yeah, that's tough. If you
Paul Lacey: [00:57:47] bought some, you just got to be really careful with the reverse stack. Let's go back a year or two, maybe, the last couple of years up until maybe a year ago, it was very exciting to keep adding tools, Oh, this thing's coming out, it's this much money.
And I can add that. I can make some money off that, and this is coming out and this is coming out. I think now we've all got to realize that. A bit of a economic bubble burst in WordPress in an EC, a WordPress economy where everything was priced too low for starters. So moving forward, I think just anyone who's making, got an agency or freelancer, just be careful what you're buying.
Don't have too much dependency on those companies because they can change their terms and you might not be happy with it, but you'll just have to suck it up.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:58:31] Yep.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:58:32] Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Be careful. Be careful. Wild West is my term. Yeah, that's it copyright burn at Greeno 2000. Yeah, they, the next piece though, is we're not really gonna dwell on this.
I don't think are we, Paul? This is big. It was on the show a couple of weeks ago, and she's heavily involved with the core team and making full site, editing something big and interesting and new for a store get into, Salivate about, and we've got a piece here that you just want to highlight, I think really more than anything else, is that right?
Paul Lacey: [00:59:06] Yeah. Look at that. Isn't that a happy picture there? Yeah Sean Neil says after I had the carefully choose your commercial products, he says, ah, so good and Berg then, which segues nicely onto this article. Thank you there, Sean. So the Gutenberg project, as much as it looks quite frankly, a bit of a mess at the moment, especially with full site editing, I've looked at it myself.
They've got a long way to go. I think they know it. But it's always going to be free. There's never going to be a license. And you could technically do. You could technically, if you wanted to replace a lot of commercial tools that you pay for at the moment, my understanding of this project changes my opinion on this project changes week by week.
And it's really useful to get to talk to different people. One minute, I'm having a rant about how ridiculous it is, and it's never going to work the next minute. I'm like, this is our AB one Kenobi. This is our only hope against the other commercial products that can change their terms and conditions every single day.
The problem is if you think elementary, I've got problems with communication. The core team behind this really have got problems with communication. Because if you want to talk to the people involved in this product, you've got to go into maybe a Slack group or something like that. You've got to be there omnipresent because those comments will just keep popping up the page and you'll only get whatever's at the bottom there.
But. Wouldn't it be awesome if this works and we really actually get, it might be a year. It might be two years, might be three years. What if we get a really awesome way of building websites out in WordPress that makes our websites fast. We're not reliant on lots and lots of different commercial plugins accessible and it works.
That'd be awesome. So it's a good time to start looking at this project, the full site editing the Goodman project. And if you can. Put some positive energy into it, help the people doing it, give them constructive feedback and Like I said, the problem is nobody knows really what's going on big.
It here has done a great job of summarizing a lot of complicated and intertwined conversations and trying to summarize where they're at this current point. So I go and check it out on the.com. It's a huge article, but if you want to know what's going on and you want it digested, this is a small, as it boils down to.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:01:26] Yeah, but it's just the fact that it's. Yeah, like you said, Paul, it's all over the place and disparate and difficult to know. And obviously somebody like beer has made it a mission to be involved in this community. And, she produces a weekly podcast about Gutenberg and about the way it's moving.
And so this article just struck me as well worth surfacing, just because it's everything in one post. If you want to know what's coming down the pipe, Go and look up this article. In fact just going to share it with everybody in WordPress, because we all need to know what's coming.
And although it's a fairly lengthy read, most, a lot of it is links to other stuff, but if it peaks your interest make sure to give me a, get a thumbs up. Can I just. Say something, which is a little bit weird. And I wasn't planning to say I'm actually doing a podcast interview with Joe Cepher Josepha, Haden chum posi on Thursday.
Now she's the director of she's the executive director of WordPress, the WordPress project. And so what she thinks and what she says matters. If anybody's got any questions that you want me to ask her, particularly around the subject of full site editing. Let me know either put them in the, I don't know, I th I put a thread in the WP belt, Facebook group earlier today.
So go there and search. It will be fairly near the top. It's the most recent one I wrote, but won't be speaking to a particularly frequently, so it's a bit of a one shot deal. I'd like to ask her the right questions that people are interested about, especially. Around Gutenberg, the communication of Gutenberg, how it's launching, especially with full site editing, mooted to come and what a minimal viable minimal viable product for that looks like.
So let me know, and I'll try to do my best to get as many of those questions to her as possible. Bernard, Christina, anything on that? Or should we move on?
Bernhard Gronau: [01:03:12] It's the wild West, and it's a good thing. And I hope they will find a way. I'm very sure they will be always ad-ons improving on whatever.
Is there ever exist in core because there's so many use cases where bad press is used nowadays, it, there is always a playing field.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:03:36] Christina anything.
Christina Hawkins: [01:03:37] Just I think just from my end, it's always trying to communicate to my clients about what's happening. Cause sometimes I hop on there, I'm like, what? What's this now? Like, where is that? And so if I can't find it, that's one of the things I have to just educate my clients.
So I'm, I didn't know about this site, so I'm going to check out the site a little bit more and but w. With my clients, I have to do like quick videos for them. This is how you do the thing that you were asking for. But yeah. I just, I, yeah, I'm curious to see what their idea with front end, what that's gonna look like in next year, two years, it goes back to our conversation with Emma Elementor and all these price increases.
If Gutenberg is going to be free, how is how, and I think we've talked about this way before Gutenberg came out was, Are we going to need BeaverBuilder and Elementor and all these, front end kind of tools. And so I'm just curious what Gutenberg will do. And so how much money, we'll we need it.
Do we need to spend a thousand dollars a year for elementary at some point? Yeah. Or
Nathan Wrigley: [01:04:35] any of the plugins? The nice thing about an article like this is, it's just somebody who's totally immersed in that as she's probably really busy being immersed in all of that, but she's taking the trouble to then write it up so that people like you, and I can just find this one author source of how it is, how it stands at the moment.
I don't know if she's going to update this if things change, but anyway, it's a nice piece. Actually, we were supposed to do a different piece next. But I'm going to change because it just fits better. I think Paul, hopefully that's all right with you. I'm going to go to the WP rocket article, a man alive.
If there was a company that had to have a fast loading website, it had to be WP rocket. You know what I mean? There's just, no excuses is the I'm just going to say. Go to the article that I'm leading to is an explanation of how they built their new website of which is a blog post, but just go to the new WP rocket website, just go now open up a new cloud and go to U P hyphen rocket.me. I am more or less guaranteeing that you've never seen a website load as quickly as that. And then just click around a bit. And Whoa. Yeah. Whoa, who is right. It's literally instant. So firstly props to them. I know this can be done, put enough time and effort in and figure it all out. But still I've, I have never seen a site load as quickly as that. I've maybe seen ones that equally the likes of Google, that is. Fast. So this is a piece explaining why they chose to use Gutenberg to do it, how they made that decision, why they toss up.
It was a toss up between developing something based upon the ACF blocks or going with Gutenberg. It seems like quite a cost. Cost-intensive process because they had to develop 24 of their own unique blocks to satisfy what they wanted. I'm presuming most of that was presentational. They wanted things to be in a certain way and look this way and not that way.
And obviously they had real constraints around it being as performant as possible. So this is an article which just explains. How they did it, why they did it, what was involved? It's a big read. There's an awful lot in here explaining how they built the custom blocks and all of that sort of stuff. But the reason I wanted to surface this right now, is it.
If companies like WP, rocket are taking the initiative to flip to Gothenburg and they, with their extensive experience with their budget for this, if they can pull something off like this with the block editor, it's not the most revolutionary design you've ever seen, but still pretty impressive.
I really like it. I actually don't use WP rocket, but I'm, I was blown away with how quickly this this site loaded
Bernhard Gronau: [01:07:19] biocide using. WP rocket is, feels just as fast as this. Not once you're going to the login or if you're checking out product. Yeah, that's caching, but it's yeah. Potent at the backend details when the broking on this fast, and that's a great example where the future is that, but yeah, just stuff that can be done in different ways, but it's great.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:07:46] Yeah, it's fast, but also just fascinating to me, that accompany of this magnitude, everybody's heard of these guys, they would decide to go to Gothenburg and build in that way. Quite interesting. Sean, are they sharing their blocks? I don't know. That would be a nice gesture. Wouldn't it?
If those 24 blocks were available to all of us, I don't know. Time will tell, but it's it's quick, man. It's quick and it's built on Gothenburg. So anybody want to comment on that? Yeah,
Christina Hawkins: [01:08:10] I use WP rocket at the lifetime license. I use it for all of our sites. I do have a little bit of problems when it's trying to connect.
When it's working with CloudFlare, they tend to, have some issues working together, but I love it. I think it's a great tool. I use it all the time. But my site, I get under a second on my site. I use Beaver builder. But again, it goes back to the concept of. Block editors and where they're going, at some point do we even need some of these page builders that we're using right now?
But yeah, it's lovely. Even now I'm looking at GT metrics on it and that sucker, even the first paint, there's one white block, but then it's boom. It's completely filled in. So it's yeah,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:08:48] Yeah, it is. Yeah. That's it. That's it right. It's just a total masterclass in pulling this stuff off.
Sorry, Paul.
Paul Lacey: [01:08:56] Yeah, one of the things I want when it says that one of the ways they've got this website super fast is not just the tool they're using, whether it's Gothenburg or something like that, it's actually the. The design methodology that they're using. So they're very aware of what goes into the speed tests, the actual performance and that kind of thing.
And they're doing everything right. They're using SVGs everywhere. They're not using big images unless they absolutely have to say they've, they're ticking all the boxes from all sorts of different angles. I'm a dopey rocket user. I'd love to repeat rocket spin the most stable. Caching solution that I've used, especially, I can't remember what the most recent version was, but they added this JavaScript hack in there to some extent, I don't know if you probably all know use it.
And that really helped on this page speed scores. I actually was pretty inspired by this article and did a lot of work this weekend to try and see if I could recreate similar kind of scores and speeds with a Beaver builder. Some Beaver pages because one of the things that I'm doing as part of my new thing is not just building those websites anymore.
I'm trying to look into helping people and companies make better websites. So I've been reeducating myself on this. This article is really interesting. And while I'm not onboard with, the Gutenberg block editor for creating client type websites and agencies, I don't think by and large can. Can get on board of that as well.
I wanted to see if BeaverBuilder was capable of producing such a results. It turns out it is. But goes back to my point of, you need to think about how you're designing things. In fact, Alex calling off here is in the comments today, backwards and forwards all through the weekend, talking about this with elemental and BeaverBuilder and the block editor and everything.
But you do have to design in a way. That you were aware of what the page speed scores are looking for. You're aware of what you're putting in that first block of content for the first paint and everything. And I did manage to get a Beaver builder page using Derby rocket on a run cloud server with I think it was a Volta high-frequency server loading in 200 milliseconds and scoring 94 on mobile and 99 on desktop.
But I had to do some things with the images and stuff like that to to achieve that. I also bought Perth matters, which is another performance plugin Perth matters. I think it's something to do with it's Brian,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:11:22] Brian. Yeah. Brian from .
Paul Lacey: [01:11:26] And that plugin was pretty awesome as well in terms of doing some other things that caching plugins don't tend to do.
And my aim was to make sure I was getting a stable site. And a fast site scoring well as well. Yeah, it was possible. If you can use the block editor though, you will not have to make, I surround with those stability issues that you will, if you're using a page builder like beef builder or Elementor, or you want those nineties top scores on Google page speed, you've got to do some pretty hardcore cashing and combining files.
Whereas the Gutenberg editor by itself pushes out a lot less code, a lot less files. So yeah. Don't be Rocky. I've done that too. The right thing to choose this as their way to build a website, it makes absolute sense if they were using something else, it would not make any sense to me, but it is possible to do it with those other tools, but you've got to work a lot harder.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:12:20] I can send Bernard Scott, something controversial.
Bernhard Gronau: [01:12:23] This is cashed up on page scores. Always surprises me because in the end, it's about how fast the side is to interact with for the user. And if you take a look how bad Amazon ranks on all those testing tools, now they want sell it back. If it comes down to this metrics it's an indicator.
Yes, but it's not the only thing. And it's. Suddenly nothing. Everybody should just scream all screen 100%. No, you don't need it. And you don't need a CDN for every page. If your customers are local and you don't need all that fancy stuff. If your site loads below two seconds and you're not Amazon or a huge whatever store.
I don't care about it. It's about how fast you can interact what you want them to do. And that's important. Not that the last little bit of green on those testing tools.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:13:18] Clients, sorry. Paul is
Bernhard Gronau: [01:13:22] educate them
Nathan Wrigley: [01:13:24] as poles sharing his tremor. So memorable URL on the screen shop. Yeah,
Paul Lacey: [01:13:33] I just was inspired to try. Actually, I was always, I always page speed scores are the hardest to get a green lights on. And I was determined to see, funny enough, Bernard, you mentioned CDN. I I got lower scores with a CDN, but clearly a CDN is a more responsible way to do things. So those scores are meaningless to the most part, but I turned off the CDN and I would gain like seven more percent.
It was ridiculous.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:14:02] We got to press on because we've got four minutes to cover two articles, which we're not going to college. So we'll move quickly on anyway. Nice article WP, rocket. We'll go to the Beaver builder one. This is Paul's domain.
Paul Lacey: [01:14:15] Yeah, super quick on this one to give Bernard a couple of minutes on pods.
This is just a, an article just flagging up that the quality of articles on the BeaverBuilder blog for their user base has vastly improved in the last couple of months. So if you are a BeaverBuilder user and you want long form tutorials about how to do some pretty complicated things with BeaverBuilder go and check it out and you can find out some Some really good content on there because the BeaverBuilder blog was definitely falling behind on things like the elemental blog, in terms of elemental, showing you how you could build a full e-commerce website with elemental.
Now BeaverBuilder seems to have a notice, that kind of thing. And they're pushing out some amazing content by this one's by a guy called Morris who actually happens to, I think, be quite local to where I am. And I guess he's writing these articles will the builder when he's not designing wallpaper.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:15:05] Oh, I feel there was a joke in there that I've missed. Oh, William Morris. Okay. Okay. Is that what you meant
Paul Lacey: [01:15:14] when you know, you got a reaction like that? Yeah. It's a good joke.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:15:18] I'm so sorry. Yeah. William Morris, of course. Yes. Yeah. I've got to cut it. I think you're right. I've seen a slew of that.
In fact, I think it was only a couple of weeks ago. We mentioned the fact that they were on a bit of hiring spree. Weren't they? And maybe this blog content is one of them. I think they're
Paul Lacey: [01:15:32] still hiring. I think they're hiring for a video creator, creative writers video, a video. Yeah. Video creator.
If that's what you call it, a YouTube channel tutorials, those kinds of things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So go check out their job section if they still got some open ends there.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:15:49] Okay. And last, but by no means least this week, we're going to unleash Bernard to tell us all about Paul, the power of pods.
Bernhard Gronau: [01:15:58] Yeah, of course we have released a better version of 2.8, so go and check it out. Links. I think Nathan has added there's a lot of stuff in it. It's I think that stuff which has been talked about the last years and have been postponed. For various reasons, people who follow it maybe aware of it a quick lead to say it adds a new admin interface, like editing your pot settings, get vastly improved and based on react we get the full support for Goodman Proac.
You can put plugs for everything you'll get like for like you have with ACF and. And a way to build up blocks without using any JavaScript or deal with all the messy stuff around it. Just a few lines of PHP to come from co configure it. So that's very interesting for developers maybe that lays the groundwork for sooner to come 2.9 release where we can then iterate on Luke fields.
Like you can use similar stuff. Like now we call relationship fields, but then we have loofahs with a short, just in one field or just, can we be repeated on the same, I think without linking out. So round it all up a Scottish, working on the pods progression where you can give back to parts and get his work for a very reduced amount of money.
So if you donate $60 a year to two parts, Yeah, the friends, you get a discount from his pro offerings. So like you'll get one user license for $50 a year. So it's just to give people an incentive to support Pottsville difference. I dunno, call it feature set or whatever. And then you get add ons He's working on an integration for Elementor because the current degration done by the elementary team is always broken.
We have so many issues and so many support questions. The sadly the Agra responsive because they have so many customers to deal with.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:17:57] We spoke about that earlier
Bernhard Gronau: [01:17:59] so I can understand it.
Paul Lacey: [01:18:02] 40,000, every 10 seconds. I think it was
Bernhard Gronau: [01:18:07] the metric. Okay. Just go check it out. Give us feedback because the battery is still not stable and don't use it on your life system. Please just don't do it. It's a better, and it's a real better. It's not like a release candidate. Play around before it report back what you're missing or whatever.
You can do it via GitHub or just join our Slack channels. Just the classical ways. I think that's it in a very brief and short answer. Yeah, we can finish
Nathan Wrigley: [01:18:36] on time. I will. Put the show notes. What we're looking at is it's over on training dot I themes.com. It's a one hour. And I think he's one of our four minutes or something like that.
Webinar with Scott, which explains what's going on. We've given you the three minute version, but if you want the one hour full version with all the bells and whistles, click on the link in the show notes, and you will be able to find it. And from the horse's mouth, as they say Oh, you have no segue from horses to anything else I wanted to say.
I just want to say thank you very much to Paul Lacey. You're supposed to go now at this point or something, I'm
Paul Lacey: [01:19:13] trying to think of a joke, but I've given my daily quota of amazing jokes. I'd say you've used it. I've got no more left.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:19:20] I said you've used that 20, 20 ones assignment of quality gags.
Paul Lacey: [01:19:25] You'll be surprised. You'd be
Nathan Wrigley: [01:19:27] surprised.
Christina Hawkins: [01:19:29] Nathan. There's just one plug there. I wrote a blog post on the w simulation. Website WP elevation.com on off-boarding. The importance of onboarding, but even more important when you off-board somebody. So
Nathan Wrigley: [01:19:42] if you want to drop that in our little private chat on stream yard, I'll put it into the show notes so that people can read it.
WP elevation. You said, so find the WP elevation link. It will be right at the end of the other links cause we try to keep them in order, but yeah. Thank you. Thanks for mentioning that. That's good. Paul Lacey, we'll see you next week, Christina and Bernard. Thank you both for coming on. Are you, I'm sure I'll be sending you a link if you want to come on a game, but yeah, we'll be back on Thursday for a podcast episode.
We do this every Monday and then we'll put it out every Tuesday. So we'll see you at some point very soon. Now we have the awkward bit of waving and saying, hi, white.