This Week in WordPress #156

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 156 entitled. It's all going wrong. It was recorded on Monday the 29th of March, 2021, as always. I'm joined by my co-host Paul Lacey. And this week I'm also joined by Sabrina's Zeidan from speed guard and Maya Longcar from GoDaddy pro. We talk about whether or not we will ever get back to live events.
And the fact that GoDaddy pro have an event called expand 2021 and word camp EU is coming back in June. This year. We talk about a new podcast by yours, truly over on WP Tavern. It's called jukebox. And the first episode is with the executive director of the WordPress project, Josepha Holden Chomposy.
You can find out more about that. Extend defy. The plugin has acquired editor. Plus they've been doing a lot of hoovering up of WordPress products and people in the recent past. And they're trying to make it easier for you to interact with Guttenberg caldera forms is. Going away. If you're a Ninja forms lover, you won't be too disappointed.
But see what caldera forms are doing to try and make that transition easier. 10 op have created a new plugin and to make it easier to go from the old classic press install to Gothenburg. If you're using that this might be of use and Google's or web vitals. Sabrina gives us the expert lowdown on how it all works.
It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress this week in WordPress.
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Oh wait, we've lost Sabrina. This is a great start. Let's add her back in. Hello, Sabrina, Oregon. Hello, that was an unexpected start. You are watching if you are.
In fact watching this live, you're watching WP builds this week in WordPress as always each week. We're going to natter on about the WordPress news that's happened during the last seven days or so. I'm always joined by Paul Lacey and he can introduce himself in just a second. And then he's going to introduce our two guests today.
So over to you, Paul.
Paul Lacey: [00:03:10] Technically I'm not always there cause I wasn't here last week. I
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:15] know it was a disaster last week without you really?
Paul Lacey: [00:03:19] The ratings bombed. It was just a nightmare. Yeah, we can start rebuilding now
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:22] though. So it was like I had a missing leg or something. Yeah, I
Paul Lacey: [00:03:26] can see Cameron.
Thank you, Cameron. Yet. I've got my priorities sorted this week. I'm here this week, so yeah. Thank you, Nathan. I'm looking forward to today. We've got a lot of articles, lots of community stuff about some events and those sorts of things. Some stuff about plugins and not too much about Gutenberg and nothing about full site editing this week.
So if anyone's bored of listening to us, talking about that, Don't worry. We're not talking about foresight edits in this week, but we've got two guests. We've got Sabrina's a down who is the founder at speed guard. And Sabrina is fond of performance optimization, scaling WordPress, building WordPress multi-site projects and swimming.
And she specializes in speeding up WordPress sites without affecting the looks and functionalities, and also loves to talk and write about all things related to site speed. And also for the first time this week, we've got Maya long car from GoDaddy and Maya is a marketer, entrepreneur and world traveler, mostly spending time on developing business concepts and meeting and interviewing creative and innovative WordPress people.
And she's also the E M E a field marketing manager for GoDaddy pro.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:35] That was well done. Paul, you're getting really good at this.
Paul Lacey: [00:04:38] I just read it. I just read it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:41] I have to say that your your background is looking exceedingly good this way. Paul's got himself a whole bunch of new equipment. In fact, I even venture to say that's an entirely new wall.
Paul Lacey: [00:04:51] It's a new wall. Yep. It's a temporary one because I'm not the reason I wasn't here last week. I'd moved house and I'm in the new house now, but I'm still not in my new office yet. So I just found a wall and put the lighting there and it looks great. Full ground looks terrible. This box is everywhere, but the background looks skills
Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:10] minds, nobody minds.
Anyway. Absolute pleasure to have you on for the first time. Maya, thank you for joining us and Sabrina who's returning after. I think she's probably been on half a dozen times or more. It's very nice to have you on the show as well.
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:05:24] Thanks. We're happy to be here and we're happy to see why in person for the first time.
We were retweeting and DRI messaging for one time, but never met in person. If you can call these in person. Yes. Yes.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:40] We will get to a piece about something about in-person events in just a moment before we do that, just a couple of things to throw in. We are going to be live. If you're watching this live, you're probably doing that in one of two places.
It could be WP Bell's dot com forward slash live. You've got to be logged into Google because it's Facebook. Sorry. It's a YouTube comments over there. And there's obviously the Facebook group, WP belts.com forward slash Facebook. If you want to just say hi, something in the comments, if you're over on the Facebook side of things, you'll need to accept the little stream yard link.
There's a link in the thread, click that, and then we'll know who you are. You could of course want to anonymize yourself. That's absolutely fine. In which case don't click that link and do it just come across as Facebook user. We are going to be talking about the WordPress news for the last week. That's the week commencing the 22nd of March.
And just a couple of things before we begin, I'm going to do the usual stuff, which I do better self promotion at the beginning of the first one is say, WP builds.com. This is our website. We've got a load of stuff that we produce each week. Paul said that we don't have anything about Guttenberg this week.
He was completely wrong because we have an entire podcast episode about it. David Wamsley, and I droning on and on about WordPress me. Yay, David boo. So it goes that was this week's episode. If you want to subscribe to the stuff that we produce, this is the page WP builds.com forward slash subscribe links on there to our podcast, feed Facebook group and all that good stuff.
And then finally, if you enjoy listening to this, but you never managed to get on the live show. If you had to this link, you have to go to the archives link. And then this week in WordPress video, we do store them all over here. And I repurpose it as a, we take the video that you're watching.
Now, we package that up and what have you and put all the links down below, but then I also turn it into an audio podcast. So if you click on one. You'll see that. So for example, you can watch the video, but you can also just consume it as audio if you prefer. So anyway, that's, that is the stuff that we are doing this week, but we should probably crack on with it and actually talk about some WordPress stuff.
And let's begin here. Shall we? This seems like a good place to start. This is to say that I'm over on the europe.wordcamp.org site, we have a WordCamp Europe organized for this coming year, 7th of June, 2021. So it's not that far away, actually. And as with all the CA as is this so often the case with WordCamp Europe they get out well before the event is actually going live and asked for things like sponsors to get involved for speakers, to submit their submissions for community people to get involved and volunteer, to help out.
This is happening all in the next few months. Do you guys expect that you'll attend this? Is this something I imagine the answer's going to be yes, but just in case, I'm going to throw the floor open and say, you'll be attending this one.
Paul Lacey: [00:08:30] I'm not sure because you go, Maya, you go
Nathan Wrigley: [00:08:35] surely.
Maja Loncar: [00:08:35] VCU is one of the, one of the biggest, the world events, right?
When it comes to work Transworld. So surely as any year, we will be Tresona. But when it comes from, just the date itself, it's a huge organization, little thing that we need to prepare as sponsors for these type of events and the events not being physical anymore, moving to virtual, we also had to adapt and people have to adapt and everybody's in the process of a bad thing to the some new type of knowledge sharing.
Yes. VCU, surely I missed I really miss the Berlin times. I don't know where it was the last time you guys have you been to Berlin, but it was awesome.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:15] Yeah. Yeah. It was Sabrina was there. Why don't you bring her there? Maya was there. Oh, Paul, what top, top?
Paul Lacey: [00:09:26] No, I know I was, I bought a ticket for that one and I didn't go because it, the day it happened was my son's fifth birthday.
So in the end I weighed it all up and decided not to go. But obviously, and then last year it was an online event and I dipped in and out, but I do love a camp. It's probably, my favorite thing of the year, WordCamp London, and I've not been to any of the European or the American ones or any of the international ones yet.
And I really want to do that, but I don't seem to commit personally to an online event in the same way I do. To a digital one. And I clearly, when we're not going to get a word camp, a major word camp in physical form this year. So I just wonder what that's going to do to the community, because I know how binding the real events are that the real relationships that you make when you go to these events, and I know we can do the best we can at the online ones, but it isn't the same, but I do wish that the team who's organizing this all the best and I hope I can dip in and out and come along in a digital form and meet some new people because we've got to make extra effort to meet people online.
It's a, and this is what I love about doing shows like this is that Sabrina and Maya were saying how lovely is to meet each other and. And th these are the sort of opportunities we have to keep creating. As, as people in the community, otherwise we would just get stuck on our own and just start complaining about everything and get too negative all the time.
So I hope to dip in, but I just think if you don't, if personally I'm just, cause I've got two kids and loads of animals and all sorts of stuff like that. If I don't get out the house and go somewhere, then I. Here's an idea. We can all book hotels if that's allowed. And we just go to a hotel with our laptop and good luck.
Do you know what I mean? So we've gone, but we were out of the house and then we were participating in the event and we really focused in on it that could
Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:29] work. Do you know what I do think though, there is something totally to be said about the fact that you've committed a lot of, probably money and time and what have you in the real world events.
If you made the effort to go all the way over to Berlin, even if that just meant you were moving from one city in Germany to another, it's still a significant. Portion of time and effort and money. And you're far more likely to become engaged. And the online stuff is, it's just easier.
Isn't it to drop out because like you were just saying, Paul, you've got the animals, you've got the real world, you've got your mates, you've got all the social things that you could be doing. And so competing against that, the word camp competing against all of that is all free, difficult. But if you've already gone to Berlin, there's no competition.
You just that's, you're there for that one thing. Sure. You could go and do all the touristy things that Berlin has on offer, but you've probably allocated a bit of time to do that when word camp isn't on. So I do think it's a tough sell, but
Paul Lacey: [00:12:21] hopefully you basically mix into universities when you get to an online event.
You're in your house, you've got your current life going on and then you've got a screen. We've another life going on there when you go somewhere, you've left that part behind and you're just dedicated to. It's times you'll find yourself at a real event, just sitting there and I'm on my own.
There's no, I don't know anyone. And then you meet someone and you just wouldn't probably do that. So I can't wait until the real events start and I'm going to give it a go to, to try this the Europe one this year. And my you're saying you would likely a sponsor. Everybody goes to GoDaddy.
Everyone goes to GoDaddy for money when there's an event. I don't know. That's. No.
Maja Loncar: [00:13:03] It's the fact that it's, you love to be there. It's not only a part of being the sponsor actually. Partnering with those people. What we offer is something that will change someone's life or save him some time or, improve his quality of life in that from any point of view.
So we actually like to be there and the community is awesome. Look, I've been working in so many different industries. I'm. I'm like an older person a little bit. So basically, in my twenty-five years or 30 years of my work experience, it's just that. The CU community values, this bond, this ethical relationships that these people have developed among each other.
It's unbreakable. I've never seen this in any other industry. So this is why I think that our brand should really be there and support these people because you guys have such great life ethics, which which should be our guideline and value,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:59] right? Yeah. The w we'll come to a bit in a minute in two pieces time about just Safir Hayden John Posey, and who's the executive director of WordPress, but it is interesting that one of the things that she was.
Speaking about in the article that we'll mention in a minute is how the fact that the real world events haven't happened during the last year has really caused a bit of a what's the word it's made it more difficult to just keep the whole core stack moving forwards, because it was terribly important that a lot of these people met up automatic would often pay for them to all go and be there.
And they would throw ideas around they'd have dedicated time. Whereas once it's all on Slack and it's much more disjointed and so on, it was, she was saying more difficult to keep that going. She wasn't overemphasizing that point, but that point nevertheless is quite important. So these real world events, I want them back.
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:14:54] Everyone wants them back. I think that the thing about working together also is that like when you work together in a virtual sense, it's. Equal maybe 100 times to something which happens in person. For example, like if we were work in person for 30 minutes, we need maybe a 30 minutes multiplied on 100 minutes to get the same kinds of bundles to connect with each other.
That's just my opinion.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:15:28] Yeah, no, I think that's true a lot. And it's just nice to meet people in that sort of real space. So sadly we are left with, as the article clearly shows we're left with the online version of things. But what I would suggest is that you head over to this website, europe.wordcamp.org, and keep your eyes peeled.
Maybe add it to some sort of RSS feed because in the next few weeks and well months there'll be slowly, but surely drip feeding out their content, getting everybody ready for the event happening.
Paul Lacey: [00:15:54] Now, one thing I've seen is that like over the year, Online events, even though it has been like a kind of fatigue around online events to a certain extent after awhile, that a lot of the online events are starting to do things a little bit differently and host them in a little bit of a different way to try and counsel that.
What can Europe last year? It didn't really have much time to figure it all out. Yeah. But I imagine that the planning they've done, I imagined that straight after that event, there were the planners here who were the kind of permanent planners when I. What can we do next year to, to make this more engaging if this is the case.
And so I think really interesting to see an event of what's normally such an absolutely huge physical event, what they can, if they've got some ideas that they're going to put in there too, to try and help people connect a lot more. I saw some great talks as well from a, I don't even go to many of the talks, but I saw a great talk at work camp London and which funnily enough was from someone who used to work at GoDaddy pros nev Davina Tom of itch.
She used to work for managed WP and go daddy, pray. And I what I hope is she did a great talk on using storytelling in your. In your business and stuff like that, which I was probably the best dog that I've seen at a word camp. I didn't go to that many talks, but I'm hoping that there's some more talks like that kind of thing as well.
Cause I think last year was quite the ones I jumped into were quite technical talks. And I'd like to see it. I wonder if, because it was online, it didn't quite attract as many of the more conceptual left-field talks like, like that one that Navina did. So I'm looking forward to seeing how it moves forward.
Really. So I'm laboring the point a little bit.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:45] No, sir. You are, you actually met Sabrina. You were telling me that word camp didn't you, you were sat next to, I think
Paul Lacey: [00:17:50] that was the year after. Yeah. I was sitting outside of peach and there is talk on user experience design, and basically that talk was oversubscribed and we, nobody could, the room was full and there was probably 50 to 60 people sitting outside with a screen, but you couldn't hear anything on the screen.
And I was just sitting there and Sabrina was sitting next to me. We didn't know each other. And I opened my laptop. Do you want to watch. Yeah. Do you want to watch it on my screen? And and now, and then we were friends. That was it. So that's the kind of thing that you can, that happens in a real word camp that doesn't really happen.
And you don't tend to get that in a lot of business conferences as well. It's a little bit more stiff. But I love the word camps at the friendliness. So hopefully we can see some of that, that feeling into the online version
Nathan Wrigley: [00:18:37] of it. I think probably there'll be a hybrid style approach in the future, because one of the benefits of having it in this manner is that people who for re for example, you, Paul, you were saying that you couldn't go because of family commitments, you could still have attended some of that and got some of the flavor of it live.
And maybe there'd be some way of, I don't know, cameras on the audience and looking at the reactions and things like that. It'd be interesting how it goes in the future, by the way. Thank you to anybody who's commenting. Thanks Chris. Thanks Heinrich. Thanks Cameron. And we've got a Facebook user appreciate you making the effort.
You've either decided to remain anonymous or you didn't click the stream yard link saying we've tried so many different events over the past year pros and cons to all of them. Yeah, indeed. We're going to stay on the online events. Thing if that's all right, because we're going to talk about go daddy pro.
This is one of those total coincidences of planning. There was no actual planning here. It just happened that Maya was on, on the same week. So we've got a events.godaddy.pro. And I suspect my you're probably the best person to talk about this does that. I don't mind if I'm happening more or less exactly a month from now, it's happening April 27th to the 28th, it's called expand 2021.
I suspect that you and your team have had to wrangle the things that we've just been talking about, how to do it in an engaging way, but it looks nice. It's divided up into two days, which I think is quite a nice and different approach. Ones that I've been organizing have all been five days, which is brings its own benefits.
Do you want to tell us about that? Miss Maya?
Maja Loncar: [00:20:12] Sure, thank you for all the hard work introduction. You said everything's fine. Just relax now and observed a couple of points. Thank you. Really appreciate it. And by the way, I really love this show. Oh, thank you. I think you're doing your job perfectly. So talk, talking about expand.
This is first ever expand event by GoDaddy pro. And this event is tailor made for eager side hustlers or websites, freelancers to give them instructions, resources, and connections. They need to start or grow their business as well as how to streamline workflow or how to make the most of their time and easily scale their business.
So it's what we would like is not only to provide a solution, but also. Some more why their business framework, where the solution would be applied and how to, what to do in certain situations and how you should think and whether the best practices. So basically for those who might know what GoDaddy pro is being a sub brand of school, that it's a sort of tools enabling businesses to scale at the desired pace.
So this is a, like a sock that fits from 32 to 55. Okay. So you just need to actually understand what the needs are. So the aim of this event is to help workforce professionals succeeding online, buying, giving them an intriguing mix of business and hands-on knowledge, which they could apply in their own thinking or business developing.
So it's a business conference, which actually. Observes a point or go that pro how to actually use it in order to build your business. So I hope this actually gives this different
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:58] points of view. Yeah. What's really interesting about this as well, is that, because you have scale which a lot of people like myself doing the page builder summit, much more small, we've got our time is more constrained.
We don't have a team to work with is some of the partners that you've got on here. So I noticed, you've got people like you've got two speakers from Google, for example, is the sort of thing that I don't imagine I'd ever be able to manage. Not that it would particularly work in that way, but it Securi.
You've got the guys from woo commerce over there. You've obviously got your own staff coming on. It's just a little bit of a different mix from the usual suspects that we might see. It looks great. Yeah. Some new faces, right? Yeah. Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [00:22:37] I was thinking exactly the same. This there's a couple of people that I recognize, like cliff Almeda, who is legitimately fantastic at sales and building relationships with clients.
He's an absolute legend. Expert at this. And there's also Christina Romero down there somewhere talking about care plans. A lot of people who are listening probably know of Christina and have maybe seen some of her talks before, but care plans is super useful at the moment. If you are running any kind of WordPress agency or a freelance, so you really need that regular money coming in over and over again.
And like you said there's a whole load of people there that I've never heard of before, but the companies that they work for, there's somebody doing a talk who is from WooCommerce talking about the opportunities in e-commerce to freelancers and agencies in 2021, 2022. And yeah, Jonathan, Walt they're in top, right?
I wanna know. I want to listen to that one. I wanna watch that one. I want to know what the opportunities are right from the organization that knows the trends and where stuff's going on. And by the way, the comment in the in there that said about that, we've tried so many different event formats over the past year.
That was actually Adam Warner. So he's in a Facebook group at the moment from GoDaddy pro. So there is on the screen that he's a, the second in the screen. I didn't say that. That's great. That was awesome.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:06] Yeah, that was it. Yeah. Oh, thank you, Adam, for joining us. That's lovely. Sabrina, anything to add about this one?
Or would you like us to move on?
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:24:14] Actually I was going to ask my how like we know we all know how the speaker selection goes with WordCamps right. My house is different with organizing and events like these.
Maja Loncar: [00:24:26] Let me tell you, first of all, Adam is the driver of this event, so I'm not.
The, I didn't pull this all these names. And although I also run GoDaddy pro meetups each Monday. So this is where I am actually the one selecting the peoples. If you're asking me if I have a scheme or how do I select people, but first of all, I select, if I were to select for this, I would need to, I would need them to understand both the platform and the business point of view.
That's very important. So there has to be somebody from a development. If audience has a question, technical one, the things and improvement, or that it's confusing them, or it needs some type of direct contact with them. Surely you need to have someone from care. Surely you need to have someone. If you'd like to talk about a solution, then you have to bring all the faces behind as well as influencers or people who do understand the value of that certain software solutions carry.
And they can make comparisons and, so it's it's a V it's always a mix of of of a business and a technical technical person.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:25:33] I'm going to venture that, this, sorry, Sabrina, your face has been covered up by my rude. Rude sticking up of the caption there. I'm going to venture that this might be Adam.
I'm not sure. We purposefully kept this event short each day, three hours, max. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. And I think probably this may be as common. The prior one as well. Fatigue is real. Yeah. It's a thing. It really is a bit of a thing, but it looks like a fabulous event. And what a great bit of coincidence that that you may, or on the call today to talk about it, let me just go through a couple of quick things, the dates so that you're absolutely sure.
First of all, the URL go to events.godaddy.com. Then there is actually a string of stuff after that, which is too long for me to say, but I'm sure you'll be able to find it. It just Google maybe expand the 20, 21 GoDaddy pro 28 to the 27th to the 28th of April PDT. And there's a button here. You can click river reserve RSVP for this event now.
So brilliant books. Great. I'm not sure about this next one in all honesty. I don't know. I feel slightly bashful and I didn't even put it in Paul will you please? Thank you. I'll put it on the screen, but you did it wrong.
Paul Lacey: [00:26:43] You'll do a particularly bad job of this one because yeah, you don't like to show off about your own achievements, but so there's a new word.
A WordPress based podcast launched at WordPress Tavern, which is one of obviously the most popular WordPress based websites. Second only to WP builds.com and it just so happened really choked at that point. Sorry. But the wonderful thing about this news is that the person who is the host of this podcast is our very own Nathan Wrigley.
And this has been something that. You've been working on for a good three or four months building up and getting everything, getting all the different things in order and figuring out who you can interview and that kind of thing. So there's a brand new podcast officially on the WordPress Tavern.
Nathan is the host. He's got some great guests lined up and the first one is just for Hayden chomp, posi, who is the what's her job title? It's she's
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:41] the executive director of the WordPress
Paul Lacey: [00:27:44] project. Yeah. And by, by the WordPress project, generally, that's referring to the wordpress.org project. As in the open source project, you can find out a lot about what just effort actually does in that role and the challenges that she faces in the interview.
It's a really good lesson. And also just want to take this opportunity to say, well done, Nathan. That's an absolutely fantastic achievement too, to win that opportunity. Did you done a great job and you've been a good voice of WordPress over the last couple of years, so well done, dude. Thank you.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:28:19] It was yeah.
Oh dear. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. I feel very humbled to be on that particular website. You know how, if you're into a particular thing, if you're really into, I don't know, in our case, WordPress, there's probably properties in WordPress that you really admire. And if you're into, I don't know football, there's probably particular football clubs and what have you that you admire.
And so if you're a fan of Manchester United, if you were to be invited to the Manchester United football ground, you'd feel so pleased. But if you're invited to the, I dunno, Chelsea football ground, you'd probably just think whatever, maybe I'll go well, I've I am, if you followed this podcast ratings, you'll know, I just dip into WP Tavern like habitually and I find it to be such a fabulous place to find the WordPress news.
And so the fact that. I've got this podcast up and running. I'm so pleased. It's great. Anyway, it's not about me. This episode was all about WordPress from just surface point of view. And it, honestly, I think it is worth the listen. She talks about what she, how she got into WordPress, all of that stuff, it's not necessarily relevant, but it's quite nice to hear the story.
But then she talks about all the stuff that's going on at the moment, the move to full site editing this really aggressive roadmap that she's laid out to try and get things in the next few months into core full site editing and so on whether or not that's possible, whether or not as I put it, there's enough bums on seats to actually pull it off, whether there's a bit of fatigue going on and we talked about word camps and COVID and all of that, and whether or not there's literally enough manpower to make that happen.
And so it, it was quite a nice interview. I've got a few more lined up, not with just Josepha, but I've got a few more lined up. So the plan at the minute is to do one a month. That's how we'll take it. But yeah. I'm delighted. You might say,
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:30:11] I just wanted to check congratulations, Nathan, on the launch.
I listened to this episode and you just mentioned there, personal things are not that relevant. Like the future of WordPress, the what we're heading two-inch or things, but I don't know how to you guys, but for me, it's always interesting to listen to the personal stuff at the first place.
Like what, who are the people behind the things, how they got there? This super interesting, because for example, Josepha she mentioned that it was her mom who introduced her to WordPress, that she also told about what you had to learn to become a leader in this position. This is super interesting to me.
And if you're into, even if you're listening to this show and you're into this stuff as well, take your time and listen to it. It's nice.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:31:02] Yeah. Thank you. I did definitely miss I misspoke just then, because I wasn't certainly, wasn't trying to undermine that because obviously I'm asking the questions.
I did find that really interesting. I love the backstory bit. That for me is one of my favorite bits as well, because it gives you a real kind of window into somebody's life. And she is really instrumental in just about everything that we do, that WordPress project is moving forward because of decisions that she and other people are making.
And she did say in the interview that sometimes she just has to say, We're doing it this way. No matter what the, no matter what the consensus may or may not be, so it's important to find out what her motivations are. And she does come across as very sincere. I have to say she really I've met her.
I did meet her once Berlin naturally. But again, it was like an interview type thing. So I didn't really get to know her. I had a much more of a lengthy chat with her this time and it was really nice to get to know well, anyway should we move on quickly? There we go. What's next? I believe it's Paul.
Oh, so we go from something very joyous in my case. Anyway, so something a bit sad, Paul. Sorry. I've just realized the segue. There could have been better to something really sad,
Paul Lacey: [00:32:16] Paul. Yeah. Yeah. You're talking about the article. Not me.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:32:20] I this is a caldera forms. Article. I'll hand it to you. That's right.
Paul Lacey: [00:32:23] So caldera forms, I think it was last year was acquired by Ninja for Ninja forms. And we've got to there's a lot of form plug-ins in the market and pro form plugins in the market. So doesn't it. Absolute crowded space there and a ton of competition. And then you even have other tools like Jetpack and elemental, or even creating their own form solutions as well.
Anyway caldera was acquired by Ninja forms last year, sometime. And the plan was at the time that it would carry on going alongside Ninja forms, but it seems that over that time it's worked out that they've decided to sunset this product and it will be shut down as a product and no longer supported from the 31st of December, 2021.
So there's almost a whole year for people to move on to something different. And I'm sure it was a really difficult decision to make. I think that the people who had accounts with caldera are getting offered a like for light kind of account with Ninja forms. Apart from, I know that some of them are not happy because some of them had lifetime deals with the caldera form plugin, and then not getting offered that with Ninja forms.
Now there's nothing to say that just because you have a lifetime deal with one product, And it gets bought out and then shut down that you have some kind of right to a lifetime deal with another one. But I do know that from a sentiment point of view, it would go a long way to give those people something so that they become raging fans of Ninja forms in the same way that they were as caldera forms.
But I'm sure that who is the person who created caldera forms? Is it Josh? Paula? I think
Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:11] it was that's what, that's the name I was going to say. Yeah. Yep.
Paul Lacey: [00:34:14] So he, his product is effectively getting shut down. I think he was acquired into Ninja forms as well, as far as I know, but he's now got, and the team have got a kind of year of recreating.
A slow kind of shutdown of this, which must be quite a sad thing to do over the space of a year when you've built something up. But moving on to other things, I don't know what to say about the users with the lifetime deals that don't get grandfather did it fathered in it's a business decision that Ninja forms have made and they've every right to do it, but I'm sure that those kinds of things don't go down too.
I think the Academy offered a good deal on something else, but that's a shame for those WordPress users. One of the things I would just say is that we're in a period at the moment where companies are making acquisitions all over the place. Hosting companies are buying other hosting companies, plugin companies are buying other ones.
We've missed one of the articles. We might skip back to it in a minute about products So as end users, I think that we've just got to be mindful of, this is the situation that we're in at the moment. So don't put your eggs all in one basket too much because the plugin that you use and might depend on might one day get bought out.
And that might be the end of it a year later.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:29] If it's all right, I'm going to speak next because I have a thought on this and it, one of the things that occurred to me is if you were involved in the caldera forms, a you'd be very sad that it's going, but also it must be a bit, I don't know. I would feel if I had a product that I knew was going to go away, that I had to apply lots of development time because they talk in the article about all the things that they're going to do to make it as one clickable as possible to take you over to Ninja forms.
And I didn't really realize that it was an Acura hire as well. So I didn't know if the people were going over, but the fact that you're going to spend the next two or three months writing adaptations to the plugin in order to make the plugin make everybody disappear from you must be a little bit disheartening, but I don't know about the lifetime deal stuff.
But then on the flip side, they could just have said, it's going away. We're not doing anything we're just gonna, you'll just have to deal with it. So I think it's quite impressive. If you read the article, you'll see the lengths they're going to make it as simple as possible. And Ninja forms might not be where you want to go.
But if you can cope with that, they're going to, by the looks of it, the roadmap is that they're going to take care of you. There's going to be an option to click buttons, to make things go across. But also they, for their premium users, they're going to do a sort of white glove offering where if you've got any technical problems or something, hasn't worked out as you'd hoped, they will reconstruct the forms for you.
And I think that's pretty admirable from everything I've seen so far. Yeah. Good. Anyway, over to Maya and Sabrina.
Maja Loncar: [00:37:02] Maybe I talk too much. I don't know. I'm 70 and I would like to go first, but yeah, business concepts, if, when I, for instance, work in the automotive industry Mitsubishi at one point, for instance, was giving lifetime deals on On cars, so on their Mitsubishi Pajero.
So that was all awesome for the first 10 years. But then later on, that was an issue totally foreign liability for the company, for the local dealers, not for the producers. So making any type of of hard commitment and then not being able to fulfill it, but then finding a way how at least something can be done.
I think shows a great effort by these people who are behind caldera forms, who are trying to, they couldn't envision the future, but at least they can help with the presence activity. So I really like what they're doing. Maybe that's the best, what they can do. Maybe they cannot do any better.
Maybe someone else was expecting more, but then again, it's a, their effort is clearly enough ethical and human.
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:38:02] Yeah, I agree. I like the way they put it as well. And I was just thinking as a producer of something, for example, the producer of plug-in and producer of theme, or produce a podcast, for example, you set certain expectations and to your user's listeners and you can't the more popular you get, you can just walk away and forget about the responsibility that you already took.
It's kinda your level or responsibility grows with the level of your popularity and love to you. There are sensibility level gross as well, and it's nice to see people remembering about
Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:43] it. We had Chris Hughes in the comment just now saying, unless there were literally tens of thousands of people on lifetime deals, he was surprised that it didn't just honor that lifetime deal and flip it over to Ninja forms because of the bad press that may be caused as a result as we are now highlighting.
And then Facebook use again. I'm going to say that it's probably Adam Warner. I don't know. He says, agreed. Just the revenue outweigh the negative sentiment. Only. They know I should probably stop saying, is that a mourner? Cause it could be a multitude, but I'm putting words into his mouth. But there we go.
And Paul, I'm sorry. You're quite right. I did totally miss an article out. Which was this one? The reason I missed it out because I just muddled up my tabs. So I'll just introduce this one. Let me get you a pop on the screen. This is back to WP Tavern. Oh, I love WP town. Yeah. The, this is such an interesting story.
This is a plugin. Is it even a plugin? What is it extended? Has acquired editor plus. Now we've been going on about editor plus on this show for ages and as the improvements to the free plugin have been introduced month after month by Minea Kemal, we've been saying how fabulous it is.
It turns out that Manea, I think joined the extended team, I think in December was what he told me. And he's taken on editor plus over to that side of things, there's been a slight change in that some of the options which were previously available, because it was only available on.org have become a premium offering.
Now you've got to join the the extend defy subscription, but that it is just to say that if you were enjoying editors, plus you will now have to go and sign up to a subscription. The article talks about the fact that they've introduced commercial templates and they employ a plan to improve their block editing.
There's actually a lot to say about this. They've got this fabulous. Ton of templates that you can use. And now exactly the same thing. They've stifled, what you could have for free. I think it links up with Guttenberg hub. I believe it was called, which was, I think money is offering over on the template side of things, but quite interesting, this extend if I seem to be hoovering up things from all over the place, because Dovi, who's often on this show seems that back in November, I think Paul, you knew about this, but were unable to say, or didn't say they've also acquired the redox framework.
I was want to say redox, but I'm sure he says redox. And they've got a bunch of other things as well. So really taken the WordPress block editor to a new level. You can click on the link, whereas the extend, if I probably just go and Google extend defy, and you can see what they're opting. You got something to say here, Paulding.
Paul Lacey: [00:41:24] Yeah, there's some big stuff in here, really? So this is Munia camels. Plugin, isn't it editor plus. And he's been a total leader in these third party products for the block editor. He's been good. And if I'm leading the way ready and showing how it can be done, and so well done to him for joining the team and because he deserves to be very successful and have a lot of eyes on his products and people will really love it.
I think what's really interesting is this team up with the Redux products that like you said, Davey has sold now and also. Did we said, well done a lot. This this episode, well done Davey for selling your product because he's been quite open when he's come on to our show. That Redux was a product that is huge, 2 million websites use Redux because a lot of the websites on code Canyon,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:42:22] theme, forest
Paul Lacey: [00:42:22] Canyon, theme, forest theme, forest, all use the redox framework.
So 2 million is probably not even even near the amount of websites that have got the Redux framework built into it. But Davey made almost no money out of it. And so all of these end users were making a fortune out of Redux and he wasn't really making that much money out of it and was making money in a different part of his life.
And he's, that's not a secret, that's something that he's totally open about and mentioned it and makes jokes about it on when he comes on, on here as well. But he's sold it now, but what's really interesting is that before he sold it, they started changing what Redux was to be a kind of good Sundberg template library that you would be able to see a whole load of different templates and apply them to your pages.
And he made it so that it was compatible with all of the major themes that people are tending to use. And that you could preview how this template would look on your site. So one of the things happening here is extended files are looking at joining the two things. So instead of Muniez. Oh template library.
I think that what's going to happen is that redox is going to be the template library and extend defy is the, or the toolkit plugin is the functionality part. So I think they've done a really smart move in buying these two products. The one thing I don't know about there is that Redux has completely changed his direction.
So if anyone doesn't know what Redux really was before, it was more of a advanced custom fields, pods type tool, and a lot of the users who created themes on code Canyon. And and vAuto, we're using it to create options settings in the backend of WordPress. So if you use a theme I don't know if a Varda uses it, but I think it might, if you're living like a Vada all your theme options about what fonts we're using and all that sort of stuff was inside there now.
David didn't really make any money out of it. As he said it's been sold he's on the board, but I don't think he's probably active developing it anymore. And redox is going in a completely different direction in everything apart from its name. So I wonder what happens to those millions of websites that used it, and it's not really going to get moved forward.
So if I wasn't invited based theme developer, I'd be checking as much information as I could about this, but that's like we said, caldera, it needs to move forward and Ninja forms needs to move forward. Redox needs to move forward and we're just coming into a new age of WordPress where everything is changing and there's going to be some casualties for sure.
But it's what comes with progress. I think in the software, Sabrina switchover.
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:45:07] Yeah, I think I think last time when I was on the show, Paul mentioned this as well, that when you move forward, you need to break some eggs. We were talking about if you terms, I think great. When you do something, you, there is just the consequences of this.
And if you're someone who is involved in this you have to be prepared and say, it's problem. Developer's responsibility to look after all the things and to get prepared before they're
Nathan Wrigley: [00:45:40] yeah. Okay. Maya.
Maja Loncar: [00:45:43] I thought I already. Wrap that in my previous one, but yeah, it's everybody should understand what market opportunities. Whether, the whole process of understanding how the market works is probably in understanding. So I hope that people will understand what works best for them.
What doesn't work longterm short term, there's a lot of things and goals that need to be re reconciled and aligned in successful business. Yeah. There are times when there are problems and there, those are exposed, but, and it's always the end. All depends how we deal with certain types of situations. Are we honest or we don't want to be too honest or it's just a matter of a business lifestyle and it's very see it.
You can see it
Nathan Wrigley: [00:46:28] everywhere, Yeah. W what I'm quite interested in is, cause I've never heard of extend defy before. I don't know exactly how long, but until quite recently, and yet they bought this redox of they've now bought as editor, kit. I won't say editor kit, is it editor, kit editor, plus I know it exists, but it's a different thing.
And they've also taken on Tammy Lister, I believe who until recently worked for automatic on the Guttenberg side of things. So they're obviously investing a lot in the editor experience and the options to just take the editor and. Sign up to their subscription service. And as the name says, Xtend it in terms of templates.
And obviously now with Maneer coming in, in terms of what the actual editor can do, the ability to, I don't know, resize images and put nice borders around things and so on, and basically have a little bit of a page builder thing going on. So yeah, really interesting. But the fact that they've got so many templates now, that's a really interesting direction.
I wonder if that's what they're banking on as being the way that we're going to build websites in the future. It was quite interesting, a new I don't know if anybody caught this piece of news, but there was a new page builder that came along during the course of this week. We haven't really included it, but it was called bricks.
And it was launched by the guy who has happy forms. And you could tell that the front and center thinking of this whole new page builder is templates, that the whole experience is driven by templates. In other words the new user. Wants to just click a button, drop something which is pre-built in, and then fiddle with it a bit, alter the styling, alter the fonts, but the left, the right, the images, all of that is taken care of.
And this whole new page builder, where the first thing that you've got to do on every time you start something pretty much is to Chuck in a template. Maybe that's the way these guys are coming. Anyway, sorry, Paul, to miss that one out. That's me.
Paul Lacey: [00:48:19] That's good. The bricks theme. It's a theme of a builder built in.
So it's like the old divvy sort of approach or maybe similar to the oxygen. I'm pretty sure that the that there is a video about it by, on WP tuts tube. There is, I forget his name. It's Paul Charlie. Paul is his first name. So I remember that part Paul chart, and yet from dopey tuts. And I know that that Carl van Dusen, who will be listening to this in one week's time when he's cleaning his house on Saturday morning, he was doing some tests with this as well, because he's a big fan of oxygen at the moment.
He's moved away from elemental to oxygen. And he's very interested in this as well. But if you want to find out a bit more about bricks builder, then go and check out Paul chart and video on YouTube under WP tuts.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:49:07] Yes. Yeah, it was good. Actually. I learned a lot from it. I actually went through that documentation.
I bought it and went through all the documentation because yeah, just interested, really keen to see what it was like. I enjoyed it. I liked it a lot. Anyway, we were totally straying off the point. Should we add that in for next week? Let's talk about it. Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [00:49:22] Yeah. Speaking of buying things, the ex the extended five plugin is on half price sale at the moment as well.
If someone is interested in investing in that. You can buy [email protected] website and it looks like they've got a temporary or sh or a limited time offer of $149 for the first year. A limited time offer. Normally it's $299 a year. And for that's for unlimited sites. And then for one site it's $49 reduced from 99.
It does say for the first year. So my guess is that renews at the full price of 299,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:50:00] that there's far too much. The language is not clear enough there for me to know which way that would go. But that is th this is such interesting pricing. One site for a third of as many sites as you can possibly get.
This seems to be the new thing doesn't it is. And clearly they want to sell the one four, nine one, and they just don't want a single person to buy the one, one, but the breakfast thing, isn't it. Yeah, the brick guy had the same thing. I think it was three sites or a thousand sites. And the difference was like, it was double the amount or something like that.
So yeah, it gets
Paul Lacey: [00:50:36] there so that if you were to say, Oh, a 299 or 149 that's a bit too much money. I don't want to, I think it should be a lot less and they can say how much, if I do the one, one site, what's it gotta to be 50 cents a year? How are we going to make a business out of this?
How are we going to, make any actual, real money? Because, so I think I think that the single site there is almost. I imagine that's the one that doesn't sell very much, but I don't know if, when you spoke once didn't you to the person at grid search, what's it called? Oh,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:51:07] grid, WP grid, builder, or grid builder, WP.
He was the first person. It was a black Friday last, no. When is black Friday? Is it November? He was the first person that I'd seen use this pricing. It was like one site for this. And then and then it was on limited or a thousand. I remember thinking that's weird. That's just weird pricing.
But then I spoke to him and guess what? Everybody bought the one for 1000. So you virtually sold hardly any of the cheaper ones. So it really worked. And I suppose from his point of view, what does it matter if it's the same code base, you just, they just have to download the plugin and.
Anyway. Yeah. Interesting. It seems to be the way
Paul Lacey: [00:51:46] you think as well, the people who buy an unlimited one probably gonna reach out to support less because they're more likely to be a pro versus the person who's buying a one site. One. They might be building it for their own mom and pops business and they don't really know what they're doing and they're going to need more support.
So it's priced imbalanced, but I guess for the people that they do want to just buy one, they need to factor in that they might need to help them sometimes. And that's probably what I'm really paying for. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:52:15] Okay. Now I think our show notes, I've got all booked because have we dropped the strike one and what have you?
Yeah. Okay. Got it. All right. In which case we'll go to this one next. This is the this is the agency 10 up in the UK. They have created a new plugin. It is called convert two blocks and yeah. Guess what it does. It converts things from old things to new shiny block things, actually I could do with this because we've got a bunch of stuff on.
Yeah, that's right. Just for the benefit of those who are listening to this Maya's dude, give him his wavy hands. The a, it is shiny and new. The, I could do this because when I moved from the classic editor, because I downloaded the classic editor, cause a bit afraid when WordPress five came about and continue to use it for.
I don't know, four or five months and then thought forget it. I'm going to use the block editor. And it messed up a few things like the way that shortcodes rendered and the order in which they rendered compared to other things. And so there was a few posts which got messed up in that sense. And this is quite nice because this plugin gives you the sort of opportunity to inspect whether things have gotten broken and it adds a new UI element to the post screen.
So if you're looking at the screen, we've got this new editor and it shows you which of the editors you're using. So you can go through on a one by one basis. And I don't really know what the technology is, but the idea is that it helps you through the process of seeing if the update from classic to the Gothenburg block editor, if anything got broken along the way.
And I feel for me the time for the classic editor has long since gone. If my name was David Wamsley, I would just be warming up. I'd just be just loving the classic editor. He totally thrives on it. But it's just a nice little handy plugin. If you've got any anxiety about things being broken, like I did this, hopefully we'll give you a way out and make it much more straightforward to, to get things fixed ops by 10 op.
And there's obviously links in here and you still stick in with the classic editor. No,
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:54:24] this will be a super, super useful for those who are on, for example, like big block, big blocks or newspapers use portals or something who kept using classic editor because it's the way they have their workflow for ages.
And then when they tried to move to Gutenberg, they saw some something broken and they decided to hold on with the idea because this plugin helps you to make it semi automatic semi-manual so you can see what's going on there. And if all is right, you just click the button and most of course gets converted to multiple isn't that?
Correct?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:55:03] Yeah, it reminds me of one of those websites services that use weight. It's creates a diff of here's what the website used to look like. Here's what it now looks like. Are they matching? Yes. Great. Let's just click the let's. Just click go and if not, go in and worry about it. But also the fact that in the UI.
There is a button to show which one is currently, it's really obvious, right? There's just a big, fat new column, which makes it obvious you don't have to hover over and what have you. So that's quite nice. Nice. I like it. It's a nice little plugin.
Maja Loncar: [00:55:34] I think if this blogging works, it will save so many lives.
And, I think that the mental, what do you call it? Mental cohabitation or the community will feel much better if this works because once the restless. And there are many other plugins actually that help that gives you this visual view, that you're a hundred percent sure that what you're doing, you know what you're doing and you don't have to spend the 20 additional hours next day to fix it.
So praises to the guys, but did this and saving lives in WordPress.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:56:04] Oh, that's a nice way of putting it. They should actually call it that shouldn't they saving like the saving lives in WordPress plugin. That's great. Justin makes the point that, you can do this manually, but if you're a big organization, once you get past a couple of dozen posts, this, you really can't do this manually anymore.
You need some kind of automation to make sure that things are going. And, I would imagine that if you've got identical looking posts and you've gone through 20. Just click the button and go for it. See how we go. Okay. Assuming that everything is equal. I think I feel that we're maybe going to stray into ground that Sabrina is more confident on than either me or Paul.
I don't know about Maya, but we're talking here about core web vitals, the words, core web and vitals when put together, make me run away. And and so Paul, you introduce it and then Sabrina can slowly draw me back in again and make me less terrifying.
Paul Lacey: [00:57:00] Yeah. I'm also glad that we've got Sabrina on the show today to give us some insight into this one.
So this is on specie boy.com and there's an article that says our Google's core web vital metrics, unreasonable and in. Summary, if you use WordPress or a page builder or any of these different tools, or maybe even Wix or Squarespace, or it doesn't really matter any of those tools, it is quite difficult to satisfy Google's core web vital metrics, especially on mobile.
So this articles show some examples where an a particular webpage does absolutely brilliant on GT metrics. It's using the same scoring mechanism. It's using the lighthouse system and it does absolutely brilliant, but then you run it through a Google page, speed insights, and it does really bad.
And now for years, we've had this thing where we were able to confidently tell our clients if we're a developer or a freelancer or an agency, Hey. Don't worry about those scores. They don't really mean anything to you much. Look here, look at this one. It's different than the score over here and look at the BBC website.
Oh, one second. My camera's going off. Let
Nathan Wrigley: [00:58:11] me just switch still. Hey you, by the way. So
Paul Lacey: [00:58:14] I tell you what else, what I'll do, I'll stay as this kind of this, hopefully my it's my hands sticking up,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:58:18] You look very Roman almost dislike that kind of Roman posture. I've got a real, yeah. For those not watching, Paul's got one hand raised in the air, almost like saluting.
Very nice. Yeah. Can you stay like that
Paul Lacey: [00:58:29] for goodness? I'm a man spy. Yeah. Mansplaining this at the moment. So that gesture thing works quite well. Yeah. So I think that the key issue is here is that it is people are finding it difficult to pass the Google core web vitals tests, especially on mobile.
And how much of a worry is that for us as freelancers and agencies? Here. We're going to have suddenly a bunch of clients saying, Hey, what's going on in my website, it's scanning all these file notifications on the Google analytics and all this sort of stuff. Are we supposed to fix that for them?
What if we can't? And what does it mean for website owners who are choosing WordPress and simply can't pass these tests? I don't know what the answer is. I don't know Sabrina, should I be worried? And should other people be worried or is this something that you think that Google will work out and find a way to make it?
So some websites can actually pass the test because it seems that 99% of them won't at the moment.
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:59:27] First of all, I want to know that on the page that we just saw it wasn't a correct comparison. They compare it to two metrics tests. If you can bring that back again, they can purchase metrics test with field data in Google page speed insights.
So Google page speed insights has two sections, right? The first one is lab data, which is based on simulating users behavior, right? And you have a older laptop data. And here we're looking at the field data, which was measured by the real user experience on the website. So with Google analytics or something, and this is different, like in the same report in P in Google page speed insights, lab level data, and fill data for the same website for the same page in the same report it can be quite different.
So for example Google per student sites measured that this site should shoot. Like probably would have largest content rule paint three seconds, for example, but then feel data shows that it's not three seconds, but six seconds, for example, and this is the place where developers and site owners should pay attention because what Google would consider in their renting factors, real user behavior.
So they would consider field data, but not the tests that are made with artificial tools like GT metrics, for example, or like lab data section in page, student size. So this is the first point. And another thing that you mentioned before, and I think this is a huge misunderstanding about this as well, process developers that it's super hard to get nice.
Results for mobile experience. This is so untrue because what is our user experience? This is the place where we can interact with the website when it's loaded. And if it's a desktop website, just to mention desktop website, we're looking at it right now. There are loads of things to load.
If it's a mobile website, it's just a small screen towards tough and just start interaction with it. So if you need to optimize real user experience, you don't need to optimize on mobile as much things as you need to optimize some desktop. Can you see my point? There are small images.
There are a few elements on the mobile version usually, and you need to optimize only the first screen to get used to interacting with your website as soon as possible. So you can do all the stuff in the background. And this is I think this is the point that a lot of developers miss, they try to optimize everything while they need to target only the use experience.
The first screen, they tend to interrupt you and stuff. That's why it's not that hard to optimize from wireless people might think,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:02:27] Oh, sorry. Paul. You
Paul Lacey: [01:02:29] all. I was going to say it was I've been doing a lot of experimenting myself and David Wamsley. I've both been doing a lot of experimenting with BeaverBuilder to see how well we can do with the scores.
And we've been. We've been doing really well. In fact, we've both managed to create full, full pages with videos and images and all sorts of stuff and get passed the test. But we've had to, we've had to I guess do what we're supposed to do and be professional basically. But the one thing that I can say is that removing, oops, sorry.
I'll go off for a minute. Oh,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:02:59] okay. Is that your dog? I don't care that your dogs barking if anybody else cares. Yeah. Just let the dog park.
Paul Lacey: [01:03:06] What I was going to say is that
Nathan Wrigley: [01:03:08] dog's really annoying.
Paul Lacey: [01:03:11] One second.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:03:13] Oh, I was joking. Oh, he's taking me seriously. Oh, nevermind. I'll just drop in the point I was going to make before I rudely interrupted Paul.
And that was that the, it feels like the. The whole industry is becoming like little silos. There's now the sort of the SEO side of things, that's a total field in of itself. You can be an SEO expert and that's where you stick your flag in the ground and that's what you do.
And it feels like Sabrina or a whole new. Industry is opening up, which your right at the beginning of which is this, trying to grapple with this. And I know that this has always existed in the past, but the level of technical detail, which is required, which is what this article is trying to spell out and the pitfalls for somebody unlike yourself who doesn't understand it and the confusion and all of the things that you just said mean that it's harder than ever to make this work.
And I don't know, it's easy for people who take the time and put the effort in, but I think it's quite nice that somebody like you, Sabrina will come to some of the stuff that you've been doing recently in a moment. You're you're at the beginning of what feels like an, a new industry almost in a way.
Yeah. And
Sabrina Zeidan: [01:04:18] I think just because we have so much information about this, the right information is getting drowned in misinformation, and that's why it seems to be harder to find what you S what is true. If you didn't run tests or didn't dive deep in the field by yourself.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:04:39] Paul, I have to apologize.
I was joking about the dog. I don't care
Paul Lacey: [01:04:42] about the time, but it was, there was somebody at the knocking the door and they were ringing the bell. So the dog wasn't going to stop until I went in and answered the door there. That's typical. That's typical may have think on live podcast. So all I was going to say was I did in that testing when I couldn't pass the the mobile tests.
I actually had a hero image at the top and for mobile, I just made it. So the hero image behind the kind of gradient banner didn't bother showing the image didn't load in on mobile. And that made the difference. In reality, when I looked at it, it was pointless having a photo that you can barely see in the background of the top of a mobile screen, on a hero anyway.
So what ended up being was that desktop had a photo with a gradient over it, and on mobile, it just had the text with the gradient underneath and the photo wasn't loading in. And as simple as that, the rest of the page like Sabrina, you said it, the test didn't seem to care about the rest of the page. It was just about this top section.
So there was some little tricks that you can do, just for instance, forcing that top hero banner on your pages on maple to be full height. That means nothing else is going to try and load in from below, below that banner there, and try to reduce the amount of media that you've got loading into that top section.
Now that's just one little hack that I discovered, but it's been very interesting trying to figure out how to satisfy these tests. And yeah that's what I was going to say really? That we've been trying some things out.
Sabrina Zeidan: [01:06:07] Yeah. I see. A lot of people complain about all these bots. Don't you guys feel that all these changes pushing us to think out of a little bit out of the box.
If previously we tried to take the way we have the size, we already have the site and squeeze it and compress it and kinda. Try to feed it in some limits right now. We are looking at it and okay. Do I really need this? Do I really want this here? Do, does my user really benefit from seeing this over here?
Or maybe I should just rearrange stuff on the things on the place of, on the page. So it would be more, user-friendly more beneficial to the user and I think this is a good thing, actually.
Paul Lacey: [01:07:00] I totally agree. Yeah. I think that, if this shows us the end of hero sliders and flip boxes and all these kinds of user interface toys that people use on websites to, to try and enhance something that is essentially a adult website versus.
Focusing on writing. Good copy that people don't bounce off on Google, keeping things light, helping the environment by not having, a hundred media elements learning in doing all those things to me makes for better websites. One of the interesting things as well, Sabrina that I found and David found as well, was that when we optimize the page really well, so all the images were done and the elements were clean and all that kind of thing.
When we're adding things like caching, plugins, like dopey rocket, where you used to work and Swift WP and Perth matters and all these different tools we find in that. The scores actually got worse when we added those tools on top. We were better to have a clean page that was well optimized with some server caching than to have the after third party caching tools.
So it seems to me that those tools do a great job of hiding junk that you shouldn't really have, but a much better approach is to do it really well in the first place. So I think it's a good learning experience.
Sabrina Zeidan: [01:08:25] Yeah. It's always easier to optimize something that is not total trash the first place.
Yeah. And I just remembered, just as an example, you said writing a good copy or something. But it really depends on the web of, on their website content. Go right. For example, YouTube can do right. YouTube can be writing a good copy. Their purpose is to deliver video. And they just remembered like before they used to have common section load it automatically.
They have comments opened by click, so they won't be imploding the YouTube page. Won't below it in comments until you click it. And our approach before would be, if you have a comment section, what would be thinking how I differ creates or something, how I compress them to make these scripts be loading faster while now, like Google is pushing us to think, do I need this to download it in the first place?
If no, maybe I can just make a button that will be triggering some events only when I needed and YouTube, for example, they want, we have this path. And I think this is a good example for sites who, for the websites, which is whose main purpose is not delivering text content, for example, entertaining the websites, all this, just just recently yesterday I entered HBO website address.
And I was just amazed how slow it was loading for the huge challenge like that. I dunno.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:10:05] The Cameron makes a comment in the Cameron Jones, I should say makes a comment. Cameron, thank you for staying up, but Cameron's in Australia. So it's way past your bedtime camera. Obviously most of what Google is asking for in these tests are good things, but he worries we're beginning to make sites, to make Google happy more than we are to make our target audience happy.
And I'm going to play devil's advocate for a minute and say, I think it really depends on the context of what you're doing. As an example, can you imagine buying a copy of, I'm going to say Vogue magazine. I've never read moat Vogue magazine in my life, but I'm going to assume that it's full of color.
It's full of unnecessary elements. Whereas Vogue could quite easily put it out in black and white with tiny little images in the corner that would save a lot of printing and it would be unsolvable. It would be dull. It would be disinteresting nobody that wants to read that magazine would be happy with that.
So I wonder if in the future, Google needs to compensate a little bit and say, okay, the purpose of this website is this it's entertainment. It's HBO. It's, whatever it is, let's just cut them a break. They need to load these heavy images because that's what they do. Whereas this one, which is a blog and it's clearly all text-based, we'll judge it on that.
And I don't know what the answer is there, but Cameron, I share your concern. If all that we do is feed the Google monster, then you know maybe that's a problem getting into the future. Actually, they are
Sabrina Zeidan: [01:11:28] already doing this because. Because the ranking factors they rank, you're not in the vacuum they rank you against your competitors.
So in the same field, for example, if it's a eCommerce store selling, I don't know, mobile phones, for example, they will like 50 websites for the word like Samsung galaxy, blah, blah, blah, buy in London, for example. So they won't be comparing these e-commerce website with someone's blog. They will be comparing these websites to each other.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:12:01] W when they give the data back though. So we're looking at the spiky boy article and you've got to obviously feel your client's concern against the numbers that are coming back. Is there any way of saying, look, I'm in this cohort, this is a website. Can you please judge me against my competitors and give me the data based upon that?
Or do we just get the data which everybody else gets?
Sabrina Zeidan: [01:12:24] Yeah. Google even made a two for that. What was that thing? I think my side, I think my competitors or something. Okay. So you put your website address there and also you put in three competitors of yours and you can compare yourself with them. It's not quite a nice comparison because it's on the compare as whole page, which is not a entire website, obviously, but it just gives you an idea, a direction who, how you should be thinking about your website speed.
You shouldn't be like treating it like something. In vacuum, but compare it to your competitors. First of all, and also compare and not just homepage, but important pages of your websites, landing pages, the pages, blog
Nathan Wrigley: [01:13:11] posts. Yeah. I don't know if it's just me, but my audio just went all noisy. Yeah.
Here
we understood every word that you said there was just a little humming noise in the background is totally fine, but thank you for that. That was fun. Thanks for unplugging it. Anybody want to throw in their last little piece on that? I don't know if Paul or Maya want to come back on that. If not, we'll
Sabrina Zeidan: [01:13:37] probably anyone is interested.
It's a people book and dumped by this, that laptop. When you plug in the charger, there is a noise in your headphones.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:13:48] Yes. Yes. Okay. So we can still hear it. So if you've got, I'd rather that we had the noise and you were still with us, then you unplugged your laptop and died and we had a nice quiet time of it.
So just plug it in and we'll cope. I forgot Sabrina. I was going to say, we're going to wrap it up. And that of course means that I've missed entirely some of the things that you brought to the show today. Cause we do like to enable people to who make the effort to come on the show to talk about the stuff that they're doing.
And I've got two pieces. I confess Sabrina. No, this isn't it. Where's it gone? It's this? Yeah. Is that the one?
Sabrina Zeidan: [01:14:24] Yeah, that's it. Th the original piece that was about what the press is dropping support for insurance Explorer, 11, which is quite an use based one. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. So it was discussed for a while, but here now we're process driven sports, for instance, explore and what it means.
It means that wagon and theme developers shouldn't, they are not obliged anymore to find an alternative for cheap query based functions for, to support internet Explorer. Yes. Let me explain. So for example, there is a plugin, or there is a theme that uses jQuery library, right? Now they decided to move away from , which is a nice thing to do, because if you have jQuery on your, in as a dependency, you need to wait for
You need to wait for all the stuff to load, and then you load your old functions, but you can do a lot of things. Without Jake world when he cheers. But before if you decided to move from jQuery to when you achieve, yes, you still have to support internet Explorer, 11, which you had to have fully fuels or something to support.
And no, you don't. This is a nice thing. I wrote a post last week showing how I replaced all G queer stuff in my pockets, because the pointer set speed using page spits and say CPI. So I replaced all the queries tough in the plugin views when you a chance. And it's nice. I was inspired by I'm not sure I will pronounce the name, because I always see it's written Gigio while Chris WSP betters posts about moving away from jQuery. I. I just wanted to mention it so that other things developers and fucking developers know that they're there always to exist without Jake. It's not that hard.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:16:35] It's easy. Was this a task you've been putting off for a bit of time and eventually thought this is the moment when, whenever now that we've got no support for ILM and that was it.
I'm off to the races. And was it an arduous task or was it as, was it not too difficult for you to achieve? Yeah,
Sabrina Zeidan: [01:16:52] It was well much, much easier than I thought it would be like, I would think, okay, one day I will get rid of jQuery dependencies in my plugin. One day I will do that, but I would think it would be hard, but it's not hard at all.
There are like more than vanilla JS libraries. That's what you do the same stuff with a no dependencies tool, very easily. Oh
Nathan Wrigley: [01:17:18] congratulations. Well done. I'm going to name the URL. So Sabrina's a down SAB, R I N a Z E I D a n.com. And I'm imagining, rather than me reading out the article sluggish, just replacing jQuery with vanilla JavaScript in my WordPress plugin published on March 26, 2021.
So you can go and check out that. And if you're a plugin developer, and you're thinking about doing this, you could get in touch with Sabrina and she'll be able to tell you how it all worked out. I am very conscious of the time. I feel that we're fast approaching the witching hour.
I dunno what happens at the witching hour, but in exactly five minutes, we'll have used up the amount of time that we should have. And maybe Paul Lacey will accidentally reveal the plugs behind his head. That's the sort of thing that could happen
Paul Lacey: [01:18:04] is the
Nathan Wrigley: [01:18:05] writing that he's hiding that all
Paul Lacey: [01:18:07] day to keep very, still
Nathan Wrigley: [01:18:10] consciously been true.
Sorry. Sorry.
Paul Lacey: [01:18:12] Yeah, I don't want the plugs to plug sticking out the side of my head. Just this, normally there's a cable going in. I've always. Yeah. Yeah. But Sabrina, thank you so much for that insight on, especially on as well on the Google page speed insights, because I think it's something anyone who's been listening is it's reassuring as well.
Because a lot of people are concerned about it and don't really know 100% what their position is on it yet. So that's helped me a lot for sure. So thanks for that.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:18:48] Okay. So I guess I'll just wrap up. I do apologize. About the beginning where I, there was no Sabrina at the start and then a little bit of noise, but I'm glad that you managed to stick with the Sabrina.
You've gone quiet again. If you unplugged for a second. Yes. Oh, you saw it? Yeah. You give it one minute charge and then 30 seconds. Yeah. Okay. Oh dear. Oh, is that is tragic or just to see if we can get you a new laptop or naughty laptop in which case I'll say that this will be coming out. It will be released tomorrow at 7:00 AM.
UK time. It'll be a podcast. It'll also be a video episode. If you want to subscribe to it. WP builds.com forward slash subscribe. This kind of content can't be created unless we have guests and. As always there's Paul Lacey. There, he's not a guest, he's a host, but I would like to sincerely thank my Allanco.
I hope she's enjoyed it and comes back on another time. We'd love to have you back. And and Sabrina's a dam. We always just end. We don't keep this bit very long, but if there's anything you just wanted to throw in at the end, feel free. It is in the UK holiday time. The kids are off school. So I'm trying to do as little work as possible and spend as much time with my children.
That's what's going on for me. If there's anything you want to say, Maya, go for it. If not after a little pause, Sabrina, you just go for it.
Maja Loncar: [01:20:03] Thank you for hosting me. This was, like any of your episodes, which I'm always expecting with such a wish, such happiness. I really enjoy even this one, even though Paul was here.
So it was
Nathan Wrigley: [01:20:14] just
Maja Loncar: [01:20:18] serious. Thank you for everything you guys are doing for as human beings and as professionals still to to enable the successfulness of our community. And if there is anything new, I will shoot out. Of course. And I will call you and say hi, if you guys have anything to ask, please do
Nathan Wrigley: [01:20:34] thank you, Sabrina.
Sabrina Zeidan: [01:20:37] I just wanted to remind to everyone who is watching all these saying that Nathan's new podcasts is called w two books,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:20:45] right? It's a funny one. It's called WP toughen jukebox, but I think we might have filled out the form incorrectly, but if you just go to your podcast player of choice, hopefully it is now on Google Sabrina.
I got the green light. Yeah.
Sabrina Zeidan: [01:20:57] Yeah. It's it already is.
So
Nathan Wrigley: [01:20:59] yeah. Yeah, it was interesting. Cause Apple who traditionally take ages to authorize podcast feeds, they took about eight hours and Google took nearly four days to, to authorize it. And you would've thought in this day and age, what's, that's a check.
Really? It's just, is it, does the feed, was the field, do all the fields map to being a successful RSS feed and yes, they do. Maybe they're actually scraping the content and making sure it's not, I dunno, just inflammatory or something. Maybe there's a bit of that going on. I don't know. But yeah.
Thank you. I'm Paul, anything with you this week?
Paul Lacey: [01:21:34] I just need to unpack my house and set up my office. And so next week, hopefully I'll be in a space where it doesn't matter if the door rings. It's not my problem.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:21:44] So there's three top tips. First one, keep the dog out. Second one, get rid of that plug.
It's an eyesore, frankly. And thirdly, please, would you charge Canberra, which is just ridiculous. Got to change camera off. No, it's been great. I've loved the fact that you've made the effort this week. When really you showed us before there's boxes everywhere. Isn't there. You've got probably a million things you should be doing instead of doing this.
So as always, thank you, Paul, for doing that, we've reached the awkward moment. Yeah. Oh, that's very cool. We've reached the awkward moment where we all have to wave and say goodbye. And then some random period of time passes before the platform ends the show. So I'm going to say goodbye. I'm going to start waving and say, Oh, hi.