[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You have reached episode number 394, entitled new show, get it optimized with Remkus de Vries, episode one. It was published on Thursday, the 17th of October, 2024.
My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before we begin that show a few bits of housekeeping.
The first thing to mention is that if you have a product or service in the WordPress space, you will know that black Friday is just around the corner. And positioning your product successfully is vital. Well, we have a very popular page, which comes out around black Friday. It's live now. It's at WP Builds.com forward slash black. And for you guys out there who are just consuming WordPress products, or looking for WordPress products. You should head over there and bookmark it because as the days and weeks go by, I will be adding loads of deals. All the WordPress deals that I can find. Typically there's about 400 on that page, and it's searchable and filterable. So WP Builds.com forward slash black, bookmark that.
But if you are in the WordPress space with a product, why not go there and click the add a deal button, it's blue, and I will add your deal for free when you fill out the form.
If you really want to go soup to nuts, there are some sponsor slots in the little black cards at the top, and you'll be able to see that WS Form and Gravity Form have taken advantage of that. But if you would like to have that pride of place, top tier spot as well, hit one of the get started buttons on those little black cards. We'd love to get you on board.
Once more WP Builds.com forward slash black for all your black Friday WordPressy stuff.
One other thing to mention is that I'm involved in the WPLDN masterclass, which is happening on Halloween, the 31st of October. It's happening live, in person, in London. And if you would like to find out more head to wpldn.uk/masterclass. It's all about security. Tim Nash is going to be joining us and extolling his wisdom, all about how to keep your WordPress sites secure. He is a security expert after all. So that's all happening under the auspices of WPLDN or the WordPress London meetup. And again, the URL wpldn.uk/masterclass.
Join us for that it's during the day, and why not stick around for the WPLDN meetup in the evening. There are two sessions and we'd love to have you there.
The last thing to mention is that if you have a product or service and you would like to advertise on the podcast, a bit like the companies you're about to hear, from head to WP Builds.com forward slash advertise to find out more.
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Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, I am joined in a brand new show. You may have been listening to the podcast and you'll notice that there's a whole slew of these coming. I've done ones with Courtney Robertson. I've done ones with Tim Nash and Rae Moray. And this is a new one as well. It's with Remkus de Vries, and he is a WordPress optimization expert and he's on the show today, hopefully the first of many, to teach us how to get our site optimized.
So we begin that journey today and Remkus explains the very basics, if you like, of optimizing your website. So he talks about the baseline things that you should be looking at. So, for example, things like themes, page builders, and of course your choice of host.
I hope that you enjoy it.
I'm joined on the podcast again by Remkus de Vries. Hey Remkus. How you doing?
[00:05:31] Remkus de Vries: Hey Nathan. How's it going?
[00:05:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Good. We've, I love it when we do these podcast episodes, like we just begin the show. Like we've not spent the last hour having a right old chat about all the things that you can possibly chat about.
Most of it not to do with WordPress frankly. Let's pretend like we've just, just met each other other for the first time. Remus is joining me because. As with some other people, if you've been listening to this podcast, you'll know that I've started a show with Tim Nash. I've started one with Courtney Robertson and Ray Moray, and, MKU is joining that, that fine collection of people.
He is gonna be joining me every three months or so, to do a show, which as yet is on title, but it'll be something to do with optimization, speed, something around those kind of words. Performance, that kind of thing. So we'll come up with a title at some point. But firstly, Remus, thank you so much for joining me.
I really appreciate that. And your commitment, to, yeah, thank you. That's brilliant. Remus has been in the WordPress community since I think more or less right at the beginning. Do you wanna just tell anybody who's listening, who hasn't heard from you, just gives you a little potted bio.
[00:06:38] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, the first year, but 2004 is when I started playing with WordPress.
[00:06:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:06:44] Remkus de Vries: as a hobby in the beginning. but, built a few sites. I was asked to build some more for other people, started charging money for it. And, I, could say, and the rest is history, but there's a little bit more going on than that. But, let's just say that around, 2010 started becoming way more professional, more complicated type of sites. and then slowly but surely, performance and scalability, became main topics in pretty much any, build that I've ever done. and, in the la I'm a quite active member of the community, in terms of I've organized, Ooh, I don't actually know how many, but I would guess I've organized 20, 25 work camps. I'm the co-founder of Work Camp Netherlands. co-founder of Work Camp Europe, and being quite active in organizing those, alongside, my agency. And, yeah. recently, we launched, and I say we, because, my co-founder, buddy Coy, we launched Scantily, which is a, WordPress performance monitoring tool. just aligns with what I've always been doing. and yeah, very, active in the workers community as a whole
[00:08:10] Nathan Wrigley: I recently saw you at WordCamp us. You were there and you were wearing a scan, fully T-shirt and yeah, so, so firstly that was kind of nice, but it also tells me that you are kind of out in the wild about this product now. 'cause I think, I think in the conversations that we've had, it was scan fully, by the way, do you wanna drop the URL for that so that people can pause the podcast?
Go check it out.
[00:08:31] Remkus de Vries: Com.
[00:08:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so S-C-A-N-F-U-L-L y.com really straightforward. so the fact that you've got a T-shirt tells me that it's like out in the wild. Now, is that the case? Is it ready for public consumption? We're not got any beta label or anything on it yet, or.
[00:08:47] Remkus de Vries: no, we, we are live, we are about, 20%, with the features that we wanna have. So it's a, it's a lightweight version from our, perceived, True, full set of features, but, it's fully usable. We, monitor for uptime performance. we have, certificate monitoring. We have, a very highly configurable notification system. there's a WordPress events, timelines, so everything happens inside your WordPress timeline of whatever you do in your site. Is recorded. there's a site health, import. So you have insight into your site without having to log into your WebPress site. So everything is in one central dashboard.
[00:09:38] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.
[00:09:39] Remkus de Vries: but yeah, it's, usable for anybody,
[00:09:42] Nathan Wrigley: Is the intention for you Mku to, to sort of pivot over to Scan Lee? Would you, would you like to see that be the thing that you do? Because I know at the minute you've got fingers in many pies. Yeah, I.
[00:09:53] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, so the, goal is, there's two things. Scan fully, taking over, whatever I do with my agency. and the second thing is within WordPress, which is my newsletter and podcast, and then there's a third thing being added to it shortly. that's go, my goal is to have those two be the main pillars of what I do.
[00:10:17] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. yeah, we should say, within WordPress is a newsletter drops on a Friday and rem well t typically a Friday. I dunno if you've. Sort of lost that schedule, but on a Friday. So if you want something to read over the weekend, WordPress, check it out. Mku puts a lot of thought into his newsletters.
It's not like long, long, long, long. You could probably read it in, I don't know, top to bottom in five minutes, something like that. So definitely go and check it out. would you, would it be fair to say you've got, like a, you lean more into the sort of tech side of things as opposed to the community side of things?
Is it more related to speed, that whole thing?
[00:10:53] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, so Ray, for instance, has a wonderful newsletter as well. but that's more on the community side and general news. I try to have a performance and security perspective as much as I can. I try to focus on new features and how to use them, and also on the news that isn't being shared. Iwhere already,
[00:11:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:11:15] Remkus de Vries: give my give my ideas on it.
[00:11:18] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Well, firstly, thank you for doing those things in the community. So that's the community side of things. But once again, go check it out. Scan. Dot com and as these episodes go on, it'd be kind of interesting to start the episode. You maybe just give us a scan, free update. You can tell us what's, what's new in scan fully.
That'd be quite nice. Yeah. Okay, great. So the endeavor of this show is to pop back in every three months or so. Thing and mku, if, if something major has happened, maybe that'll be the focus for the episode. You know, if, if there's some sort of speed optimization thing which has dropped into WordPress core or neat initiative or plugin or something that's dropped, we can mention those kind of things.
But obviously we've got the whole of WordPress's history in this first episode to deal with. So I'll get an armchair, I'll, you know, I'll put on the slippers and just hand it over to you and say, tell her no. What are you gonna talk to us about today? Obviously speed related, optimization related.
[00:12:13] Remkus de Vries: philosophy related actually.
[00:12:15] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. I wasn't expecting that.
[00:12:18] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. so the, optimization of a WordPress site is generally seen as something that you do once you've stopped, finished, stopped and finished the build, right? So the
live. Yeah.
[00:12:31] Nathan Wrigley: I.
[00:12:32] Remkus de Vries: and then you go check, your, core vitals. you check your, whatever metric you want to use.
It really doesn't matter. ideally you're, using scan for that. but there's many different types of, ways to track what your site is doing in terms of performance. and though there's nothing wrong with that inherently. 'cause yes, we want you to have optimized versions of your site. The general idea is that is the wrong moment to do it, meaning you. Whomever is building a WordPress site, right? This, so this, is very specific for people who actually build sites. and it doesn't really matter if you use a page builder or not. it doesn't really matter if you use, the WordPress site editor, any which version of a site is being built by the principles that you are aware of.
And if you're not aware of optimization and performance while you are building, you're just stuck at the end of, okay, now I have to fix stuff. My goal is to, and this is also the content that I put out, is, to start switching that, let's finish at the end and by doing some optimization bringing it back to where do I actually start from?
What is my foundation? What is the, blueprint or template, collection, whatever you wanna call it. what is my, what does my tool set look like? What am I actually using as a base and have I verified that I'm actually using the most performant version? switching to that sort of philosophy to have your, first steps be. they are really doesn't matter where you start, but to have your first steps be, cognizant of actual what is performance,
do I build this thing and how do I maintain its scalability. And, there are plenty sites that maybe get 500 visits a month and it's just, it's a brochure site. forms should work and everything like that. where you would think it doesn't really matter if mine site is fast enough or if I fix my slow site with a caching plugin and call it a day. yes and no. 'cause it's also about wasting resources. It's also about being smarter. It's also about reducing issues. really doesn't matter if your site, attracts, a couple of hundred, page views per month, or if that's a couple of hundred per second.
Doesn't really matter. hell, it can be 3000, requests per second. And you'd still be, on the right track by having performance optimization in the build process versus all the way at the end. 'cause you'll have to fix too many things to make that happen. Anyway.
[00:15:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so really you are advocating if you are. So this is for builders, right? This episode is definitely geared towards people who are building websites. You are hoping to inject into their heads a set of criteria, A to-do list, if you like, of things to consider prior to the build so that you're on the right footing rather than retrofitting.
After the fact and trying to turn a Morris miner into a Ferrari.
[00:15:56] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, there's a lot of fun, shoe horn, a Ferrari engine into a Morris Minor. don't get me wrong, I, much of my YouTube watch history is around, revolves around these types of projects. I really enjoy those. So maybe that wasn't the best example here,
[00:16:13] Nathan Wrigley: No, no, you'd love that.
[00:16:15] Remkus de Vries: I, I would, no, but it's the philosophy before you begin as well as the philosophy while you are building it. And, the building, like I said, if you're using a site editor, in a way you don't have to do much development anymore as you would previously with the classic themes and whatnot. so it, the, group of people that should, incorporate a, slightly different approach, is larger than just developers.
it's essentially anybody who builds a WebPress site
matter. but yeah, the, it's like with building of the house, if you want a solid house, you don't start thinking about it when you finish the roof. your foundation is the first thing. and it's not even the foundation.
It's the, type of ground that you build on top of. So if it's, a, rock. It's a very simple question. that's the easiest, But then there's different versions of sand. There's different versions of, building material that you use. And all of them have an impact on the rigidity. No, what's the word?
[00:17:33] Nathan Wrigley: Rigidity.
[00:17:34] Remkus de Vries: Rigidity. There you go. and the every single choice, while building it from a construction perspective as well as the actual material that you use, all of those have an impact. So the same thing goes for a website. wanna start off of a hosting that does what it's supposed to do in terms of it services your WordPress site in the most, optimized version, meaning your database is really shouldn't carry if it's, 40 gigs of size or just 300 mb really doesn't matter. but you want to have, the understanding that the hosting is the first place, where you start. So it's comparable with the do you build, what are you building the foundation on top of, So it's not the actual, what is my foundation look like. It's the step right before it, like hosting, instead of just having a host that fixes performance at the end.
And there's hosting companies that do that. Just by adding their, their specific, caching plugin or recommending that you use any of the, familiar caching plugins, but a hosting company that understands that it really just shouldn't matter for them, whether you are throwing a small site on there or a large site, it should just work.
[00:19:07] Nathan Wrigley: So the, the principle here, the, the building metaphor there is, you know, before you build the building, you go and inspect the plot of land so that you can see what, what the, what the, the, the thing that you are gonna be building it on looks like. And so obviously if it's made of clay, you've then got really.
Difficult decisions to make about how you're gonna go ahead and build that house. But if you've got this nice flatbed of rock, which almost looks like it's concrete, then you're in a different position. So you wanna be going to, going to, to the hosting companies with that in mind. So I'm guessing you're gonna go into some of the specifics.
So, okay, I've got it. I'm with you.
[00:19:44] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. in, general, I would say, the thing to look for is, With hosting, we generally say you get what you pay for, right? So if you're paying, a couple of bucks per month for a site, chances are you're not having the best version of hosting. and at a certain point in time you have to accept that, good hosting cost, money. I don't know where we should, have the, bottom line. 'cause it really depends on what type of sites and how you're building and how many times. You need to play around with it. in general, you want to have a preferred partner that understands WordPress. So any of the, well-known, and I lean more towards the premium hosting versions as, I want my foundation to be as solid as it possibly can be. but there's a whole bunch of hosting companies, and you'll find them at work camps, for instance. some of them are on, wordpress.org hosting, not all of them. you'll need to do some research here, and you'll also need to be aware that if you start Googling for who is the best WordPress hosting, you'll find affiliated.
Based recommendations. It's got the, those things that you find online have nothing to do with who is actually a good hosting company. I would say if you look at, Kevin or Hashi's, review signal findings, he's one, he who's, he's somebody who independently tests hosting. In the most independent way of how you can test, and also in the most versatile way you can test.
So his results actually speak something about the quality of the hosting.
[00:21:35] Nathan Wrigley: I've seen Kevin ha hashi's, commentary before, but I honestly can't remember where we find that. So what I'll do is I'll make sure that before this gets published, I'll put that into the show notes. So, Kevin ha Hashi, if you go to wp builds.com, search for this episode and, it will be there. And so his approach is to, does he have WordPress in mind?
I can't remember.
Yeah. So he goes through and he does like a laundry list of like bulletproof tests and he gets actual data out the other end, right?
[00:22:03] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. Yeah. you'll at least know, what that, hosting looks like, verifiably, in hard data. So you'll have a better understanding than just looking at marketing, speak on a hosting company's website or, listening to somebody's affiliated, verbiage.
[00:22:26] Nathan Wrigley: That's very politely put. is is there anything that you personally, so obviously with big air quotes around it, 'cause your definition will be different to somebody else who's got a website, which is viewed four times a month and that's fine for them. Or the, you know, enterprise level website, which has got.
58,000 concurrent people on it and what have you. What are some of the things which you are going out looking for in a house? What are some of the, the things which are red flags if they don't offer and are also kind of like, Ooh, come my way, that they do offer.
[00:22:57] Remkus de Vries: So I'm, I'm in the habit of building, high performance, high scaling websites, which automatically means I need to look at, what are the requirements that I need and quite differently than most people. So I, if I look at what, just what I need, it's a bit of, it's a bit of a hardcore approach, but. I'll give you an example in, how I look at it. So the most important thing for me is raw metal speed, meaning nothing to do with metal music. Do love that, but that's not what I'm about here. you want to know how a site performs without any caching whatsoever implemented? No. CDN no. Front page caching?
No. No, nothing.
[00:23:46] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask, sorry to interrupt. Remus is, is that phrase that you just used, raw metal, be bare metal? So could I google that? Would that be a phrase that I could go out and, or is that just your way of describing it?
[00:23:59] Remkus de Vries: there's other people using it as
but I'm not sure. everybody calls it consistently, test for bare metal, performance, but
[00:24:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Sorry to interrupt. I hijack you. Carry on.
[00:24:09] Remkus de Vries: So
bare metal needs to perform the best way, and. The reason for this is your site, however well cashed it is never 100% cashed, there will always be, depending on what type of site you have a significant. Or a slight, percentage of users, visitors that see your site on CED or components on cached. So that means if you're looking at high volume type of sites that you need to make sure that both your cache hit ratio is as good as you can possibly get it. That's a whole different, episode to, to dive into how you can do that. But in general, I'll give you a good example of how you can understand why the testing for bad metal is so important. Let's say you're running a WooCommerce site from the moment somebody adds something to their cart, your site is going to be presented on cashed I.
[00:25:07] Nathan Wrigley: Hmm.
[00:25:08] Remkus de Vries: If you are on a membership site, from the moment you are logged in, your site is going to be presented on ced. the moment you visit a a newsletter, there's a link in there. You click on that link, you land on your site because if your campaign is supposed to be doing that, if you have one of those tracking URLs in place, which most newsletters do, that page is also. On, uncashed, and thus we are looking in all those scenarios.
We are looking at a raw metal. We are looking at the raw, bare performance of what that site does, we've bypassed caching for the most part. it, this is a little, simplified, a little black and white. there's more to it than how I explain it here, but, The takeaway here is that your site as well, cashed as it might be, is never going to be fully cashed. So if you are looking at, the problem you need to solve, I need my site to be, performant. I need my site to be fast, and I need to have this all, know, with the least amount of thinking, and it just works. your hosting company is the first one you to look for to solving the first problem.
And the first problem is how does my site look Uncashed, which is to be to, to come back to the, first thing I said about. the first step should be the foundation, like on, on which the foundation is built upon. So the rock, if you have a very rock steady type of hosting, then most of your problems already solved, right?
So the, if the performance out of the box is fast, fast, fast, then it's only going to become slower with whatever you're adding to it.
[00:26:59] Nathan Wrigley: Right.
[00:26:59] Remkus de Vries: and that's just a very different approach. The understanding that not much is going to be, solved for the cases where, you have uncashed visitors, is for most people is even an entirely new concept.
Like they've never heard of that before. oh wait, is that a, thing? Yes, that is most certainly a thing. and I just named it a, a few scenarios. but there's way more scenarios now. some hosting companies that solve this problem. In one way or another, but there's no hosting company that solves all of these things in their caching layer. so that's the thing that you need to, that, that you need to start with as your first assumption. I'm going to assume that depending on the type of site that I bill, the, there's a, very high change of a high percentage of, visitors to my site that are going to see an uncashed version.
[00:27:57] Nathan Wrigley: So if we were to go to Kevin, ah, Hashi's website and, and again, links will be in the show notes, then there is, there is that kind of data available to us and, and,
[00:28:08] Remkus de Vries: in a way. In a way,
[00:28:09] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Okay.
[00:28:10] Remkus de Vries: So he,
[00:28:13] Nathan Wrigley: I.
[00:28:13] Remkus de Vries: how do you get a, so the, metric for this is the time, the first bite. The time. The first byte is the time that it takes for your request in the browser and the server to respond, start outputting their requested URL. That's called the time, the first byte.
So that is a good indicator of how, your site actually works. So if the server responds fast or a response fast, so a short time to first bite, but it then takes a very long time to actually produce something, then you know that your server is all right. you have apparently something going on that takes three seconds before the actual page is rendered in showing in your browser.
time to first bite is one of the best metrics you can use to say, I have a performance server, yes or no. And ideally that is well below the a hundred milliseconds.
[00:29:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that's a good little thing to write down. So if it's below a hundred milliseconds, you kind of have the, the stamp of approval if you like. That's a good metric to work on. Okay. That's easy to pause that. But because there's a myriad of hosts out there in the, in the WordPress space, and a myriad of different requirements from different people for what their website needs to achieve, it's very much like a case of going into the, I don't know, the supermarket aisle for breakfast cereal.
They're all there. You just need to go and have a look, decide what suits your palate, decide what suits your budget. And pick the one that's right for you, but do some research. Don't just expect that because it's expensive, it's good, and because it's cheap, it's bad. You never know. There might be some overlap there, but broadly speaking, yeah.
no, that was, yeah,
[00:29:48] Remkus de Vries: I'd go as far as say that if it's cheap, it's it for a reason.
[00:29:54] Nathan Wrigley: I think what I meant to say there was, you know, if it's, if it's like, I don't know if it's a hundred dollars. As opposed to $150 per calendar month or something like that. It's not necessarily guaranteed. do some research, is what I'm saying.
Okay.
[00:30:09] Remkus de Vries: Absolutely.
[00:30:10] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Okay, so that's the foundations of our website.
That's the hosting. Where would you go from there?
[00:30:19] Remkus de Vries: The next step is installing, WordPress, obviously, by default that'll be fast and performant. there's really no reason for, a, vanilla version of WordPress to be slow. So if it is, you have different, different problems to start with, there's essentially different ways of building your site.
And, There are, let's just say that, there's two, two main, ways of doing this. You either build a site based on what WordPress provides, so the site editor, or you use a page builder. This is probably the most common thing they'll look at now, as the two ways of how do you build, A page builder is not a page builder, meaning there are really good ones and there are really mediocre ones and there are really bad ones. again, this is something you'll have to research for yourself. found, bricks to be the most performant. I. but there's ways you can build in any page builder that by pure definition, makes your site slow just because you're not using the best practices and things like that.
the list of okay, page builders to mediocre is quite large. and there's a, there's also a quite large list of page builders that are just, crap. this is something you're going to have to test for yourself. there's too many ways to determine what's going to work for you. 'cause it also depends on the skillset you have, what you like.
Some page builders are more developer friendly, some are less developer friendly. one of my least favorite is WP Bakery. just don't like what they're doing in terms of performance, in terms of flexibility, in terms of, this is another topic entirely, but, the whole lock in system that they build.
And once you're in there, you can ever leave. I don't like that principle from an open data, point of view, but there's a lot of stuff in between and there's just ways of, testing how things work. the goal here is that you find the tool that works for you in the most amount of scenarios with the least amount of performance hit.
And those are things you can test while you're building. You shouldn't just test homepage, you should test landing pages, you should test blog posts, you should test product pages, checkout pages, all of those things. You should test them in performance on C version and Uncashed version. This shouldn't be a thing that you just haphazardly, oh, I'm done, but now I should look at how that thing is performing. Because if you
[00:33:15] Nathan Wrigley: C, can I just ask? Sorry, I was just gonna quickly ask a question. the, when you are talking about these page builders, it sounded like you've got two things here. You've got page builders and the WordPress block editor, the default editor in WordPress. So at the minute we're talking about everything, which doesn't I.
Com installed with WordPress, the block editor is something different, so you're not classing that as a page builder. This is all the commercial stuff or the stuff that you can get from the repo or what have you. Okay, so I just wanted to make that def definition clear. So at the moment we're talking about things that you either buy or get from wordpress.org.
So bricks element or divvy or, you know, you can list them all. They, there's dozens and dozens of them. okay. Firstly, and there's no affiliate weirdness with this. This is just, you mentioned bricks and I keep hearing a lot about bricks. Why is that, why is that kind of piqued your interest as doing a good job?
Just some specifics.
[00:34:13] Remkus de Vries: What I don't like about Brix is that it's a system which is a lockin. It's a system that introduces an entirely new user interface. I don't think it looks very native to the WordPress and I like things to be native to WordPress. I think it's less confusing for people to see one version of a ux, and ui. that said, they have solved quite a few things quite well, and they are. Everything they've done in their build process of building bricks is done with performance in mind. And you can tell 'cause, a default site built in bricks will, in my experience, outperform a default build in most other, page builders.
[00:34:57] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:34:58] Remkus de Vries: doing things right.
[00:34:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's all the metric that we need really, isn't it? So, okay. Got it. That, that works really well. So yeah, go and search for your page builder of choice, but yeah, just go out and.
[00:35:10] Remkus de Vries: the affiliate thing I mentioned with hosting is also here. quite a thing.
[00:35:15] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see that if you go out and do a top 10 WordPress page builders, it's quite likely that Google is gonna serve you up lists, listicles, we might call them, where the intention isn't to surface information. It's just that you click on their affiliate link and they, they're not really bothered. Okay. Okay.
That's good to know.
[00:35:32] Remkus de Vries: so my, so this, the second, version of building a site is indeed with the site editor, where this internal site editor, I would recommend you start with that in, in most cases because you familiarize yourself with the tools you have to, your availability there, there's not that many sites that you cannot build. you may need some custom code, you may need a few plugins that do a few things extra. Sure. But, your, tool set there has vastly improved over the last two years in terms of what you can do with the site editor and how you can extend it.
[00:36:13] Nathan Wrigley: We are recording this in October, 2024, and as of now, I think basically the WordPress default, you know the one that you download from wordpress.org? You can, you can do so much with it now. There is a few things that you still cannot achieve or you know, that there's just, it's, it's difficult to achieve.
Yeah, right, but it's basically able to do things pixel for pixel as you would get from a designer in Figma or something like that. You just have to learn the tooling basically, don't you?
[00:36:41] Remkus de Vries: Correct.
a wonderful tool that I, I. be bad if I didn't mention it, but there's a create block theme, which is a plugin, which allows you to use, a WebPress default 2024 or the 2025 upcoming version of the default theme. create your own version of, based off of the original, but have it saved separately.
That plugin helps you with, the creation of that. It's very intuitive. It's very straightforward. but yeah, the native version has my preference for, performance and, just general native to WordPress,
preference.
[00:37:21] Nathan Wrigley: So, okay. In the scenario that we've got so far, you've done your homework, you found your host, and basically your preferred way of doing it is just to download WordPress from wordpress.org and run with that, not only as. The software of choice, the CMS of choice, but as the design tool of choice. So the thing that you are gonna build your posts, pages, custom post types with is the block editor.
Maybe you're gonna write some custom code, maybe there's a, a block that you wanna download from the repository or from a third party. But it we're, we're dealing with the block editor and that's the way you are going anyway. Okay.
[00:37:52] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. my two favorite themes to play and work with are, Ollie and Rock Base. Those are quite extensive versions of a full site editor theme that have a lot of extra I. patterns, landing pages, specific solutions, full pages even, available through, just by installing them. rock base is only a premium. Ollie has Ollie's in the, WebPress repository and there's Ollie Pro, which is in addition to, The, their base theme, Ali Pro is a plugin that extends their theme and, both are well with your investment.
[00:38:40] Nathan Wrigley: The, the thing that I like about them is we're in this world now of patterns where pre-installed, pre-designed if you like, but pages or rows or whatever you, you want to call. It just little components that make up the rows
available in those themes. And honestly, if you're just after a quick turnaround for a website, you could be donning with the click of a few buttons if you're just happy with the default design.
But, but also I, I like the opinionated nature of both of those. They've got, they've got a certain design, how you say, brand style. They, they make things which just look very modern and very beautiful. So yeah. Solid recommendations. I like both of those.
[00:39:16] Remkus de Vries: So when you have, when you've made all these decisions, you essentially still have to build a site, right? but it, all the steps you've taken so far have gone, have been from the principle of, I, I need something that is solid. I. Like rock solid. I need something that is, versatile, but I need to be performant.
And, a good designed, full set editing theme is exactly that. So this means that now from the theme, the WebPress site and the hosting, I have made the best decision so far. again, if you want to go the page builder route, there's the same considerations, but, I, have less opinion or, preference on, on that side of the. The building tools.
[00:40:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so we've put in place, we've got a website now, basically, haven't we? We're up and running. We've got a theme. We've got the software we need, we've got it hosted somewhere. is there anything else you wanted to develop in this episode? Any other things
[00:40:19] Remkus de Vries: so the, I think the, I think the next step we, we should, start talking
we're extending it to do what we want it to do and the decisions that we need to make while building it. And how are we measuring and testing. make sure that whatever we're adding doesn't actually slow down your site, doesn't actually make your site too complex, doesn't actually make your site, fully locked into a specific solution, which you can never leave from. that is probably, what we should talk about next in the,
episode.
[00:40:53] Nathan Wrigley: So shall we call it a day of this episode, but we've managed to get the to the point where you've made some decisions about a host, you've made some decisions about a theme. You've got your WordPress site up and running, and that's where we're gonna go today. That'll be the. That'll be for the next episode.
So in three months time, we'll get onto, I don't know, plugins, extending WordPress and clever decisions that you can make to not lock yourself in for one particular vendor. MKU, I really enjoyed that. Thank you very much. That's perfect. Do you want to, do you wanna just drop any URLs of where we can find you on the socials or anything like that before we depart?
[00:41:29] Remkus de Vries: RA MK US is my Lincoln bio thing has pretty much everything on there, so http, S-R-A-M-K, us.
[00:41:43] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Rem. Us. REM us. Yeah. Okay. I will put that in the show notes as well. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. And we're back in three months time to, to carry on this conversation. So you've got a little bit of time to wait, but you never know. There might be some news in between now and then in the WordPress space, all to do with optimization amongst other things, but cough, we're not gonna talk about those.
I'll see you next time. Ku.
[00:42:09] Remkus de Vries: Alright, thanks man.
[00:42:11] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I hope that you enjoyed that. Fascinating chatting to Remkus today all about the very basics of getting your website optimized.
If you've got any commentary on that head to WP Builds.com, search for episode number 394, and leave us a comment there. We'd really appreciate it.
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Okay. That's all I've got time for this week. I hope that you enjoyed it. Don't forget wpldn.uk/masterclass. If you're able to join us live and in-person on Halloween 31st of October in central London. WP Builds.com forward slash black for all your black Friday deals. Go bookmark that.
And that really is it. I'm going to fade in some cheesy music and say, stay safe, have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
