[ad_1] [00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My Is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes and in this case, the effectiveness of the wordpress.org repository for promoting new plugins. If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players. If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea featured on the show. Do that by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there. So on the podcast today, we have Matt Cromwell. Matt is Senior Director of Operations and Marketing at StellarWP, where he provides marketing and business insights and coaching to burgeoning WordPress product owners. He’s also one of the founders of GiveWP, a donation plugin, which uses the freemium model. Having a free version on wordpress.org’s repository as well as a paid premium offering. The wordpress.org repository is where you find yourself when you click the add new button in the WP admin. It’s a place where plugin developers can, if they follow the guidelines, hosts to their plugins. It provides a direct line of access to all WordPress websites, and is therefore a convenient, free place to host your plugin. In return, the plugins in the repository must be freely available by the plugin authors. In the past few weeks, the repository has been in the news. Some statistics were unexpectedly removed, and this has led to a conversation about the governance of the repository, as well as questions about whether or not the repository is still a worthwhile place to offer your free plugins, if you have a premium tier. Alex Denning wrote a post entitled, “WordPress.org is ineffective for plugin distribution in 2022”, in which he lays out his thoughts as to why he no longer recommends the WordPress repository. The battle against already successful plugins, low conversion rates, and the difficulty in gaining visibility are amongst the arguments that he puts forward. Shortly after Alex’s post was published, Matt Cromwell posted a rebuttal entitled, “The case for the WordPress freemium model”. And this is the basis of the podcast today. We talk about Matt’s history in WordPress as a premium plugin owner and how his experience leads him to conclude differently. That the WordPress repository can be successful, given the right expectations and approach. He’s found using the repository to be an effective channel to drive the plugins premium tier, as well as a way of offering a useful free donation tool to the community. It’s a fascinating chat and is sure to be of interest to anyone thinking about starting a freemium plugin. If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast. Where you’ll find all of the other episodes as well. And so, without further delay, I bring you Matt Cromwell. I am joined on the podcast today by Matt Cromwell. Hello, Matt. [00:04:19] Matt Cromwell: Hi, thanks for having me. [00:04:20] Nathan Wrigley: You’re very welcome. We’ve got a, an interesting subject today, all about the wordpress.org ecosystem and whether or not it would be sensible or otherwise to put your free plugin over there. Before we get stuck into that debate, though properly, anybody that is unfamiliar with Matt, let’s give him an opportunity to introduce himself. So, Matt, just give us a few moments of your time to tell us who you are, what your relationship is with WordPress, what you’ve done in the past in the WordPress space. [00:04:47] Matt Cromwell: Sure. I’ve been in WordPress for a while. I would say about 2012 or so. Jumped in and started building websites with WordPress, mostly helping non-profit organizations, churches, educational institutions. Then ended up partnering up with my longtime business partner, Devin Walker, and he and I decided to tackle a big problem in WordPress, which at that time was how to take online donations. And so we created a plugin called GiveWP, and that was launched in 2015. That has catapulted us into our career, and has done really well and we’re really proud of it. So much so that we sold it last year to uh, Liquid Web, which is where we are now in the StellarWP brands. There, we have also just recently been asked to uh, take on a bit more. And so now Devin and I are both managing GiveWP as well as iThemes, Iconic and Kadence WP. So things keep getting more and more exciting. [00:05:44] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much. Yeah, really broad and rich history there. We could have spent the podcast talking about those products, but we’re not going to. Well, I think we might do tangentially as a way of demonstrating different things. But we’re on the podcast today to talk about a couple of pieces which came out. I will link correctly to both of the pieces that we’re in discussions about today. But I’ll mention them both in turn so that those listening to the podcast could possibly have a quick read of them before they pursue any further. So the first one was produced on the 18th of October by Alex Denning over at getellipsis.com, and that piece was called wordpress.org is ineffective for plugin distribution in 2022. And then a few days after that, you, Matt Cromwell, wrote a piece and that was at mattcromwell.com and it was called the case for the WordPress plugin freemium model. And in effect, your piece coming a little bit later was a rebuttal about what Alex was
Continue readingCategory Archives: wordpress news
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How to Install and Setup WP Super Cache: Our Beginner’s Guide
[ad_1] For fast websites, caching is an important tactic. It will store files that see a lot of use in a portion of memory, which is faster to recall than loading them from the server. As such, there are lots of WordPress plugins available. A perennial option is WP Super Cache, for a few reasons. In contrast to other plugins such as W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache is super simple. In many cases, you’ll use a minimal-click setup that will still give you a boost to your site’s speed. However, there are more settings under the hood, and it can fit your needs regardless. For this post, we’re going to go over how to install and setup the WP Super Cache plugin. Along the way, we’ll look to explain almost everything you need to know about the plugin. What the WP Super Cache Plugin Does for Your Site Your website’s server contains many different files, some of which will load more often than others. A fundamental of the internet is that files will move between servers, often across the globe. However, this distance coupled with the constant loading stream of data can slow down your site, and cripple it in the worst case scenario. This is where a plugin such as WP Super Cache comes in. It hooks into your site to provide a temporary storage option for those files your server will load on a frequent basis. This ‘cache’ will pull files out when there’s a request, which cuts down on loading time. It’s a near-essential piece of functionality you can implement in minutes. There are lots of WordPress caching plugins available. For instance, the WPKube blog uses WPRocket. However, WP Super Cache has a charm of its own, along with a nifty feature set. Looking at the WP Super Cache Plugin’s Features and Functionality WP Super Cache is almost as old as WordPress itself. It’s a longstanding option to cache files, and it’s also a ‘first-party’ plugin. This means Automattic looks after its development and maintenance, much like WordPress itself. This plugin takes your ‘dynamic’ WordPress files and turns them into ‘static’ HTML ones. The contrasting PHP files will be heavy and slow to move around. The HTML ‘copy’ of sorts is light and will give you the same level of interactivity in most cases. Here’s what else it can offer: It offers two modes: Simple and Expert. These will suit different types of users. In fact, most will likely choose the Simple option and never look back. There’s also a WP-Cache option, which handles the caching process for known users, certain URLs, and others. It’s more complex and slower than the typical caching options, but it also provides a greater level of dynamism with regards to your content. You can connect a compatible Content Delivery Network (CDN) if you use one, and WP Super Cache can leverage its functionality. There’s lots more to discover about WP Super Cache, but the best way to find out about it is to use it. Over the rest of the article, we’ll run over how to do so. How to Install and Setup WP Super Cache (In 3 Steps) WP Super Cache is so straightforward that in many cases you won’t need a tutorial. However, there is much more to the plugin than selecting the Simple mode and leaving it alone. The next few steps will look at the following: However, you’ll need to install and activate the plugin before anything else. Let’s deal with this first. 1. Installing the Plugin and Finding Its General Settings In the beginning, you’ll need to install and activate the WP Super Cache plugin. Because it’s free, you can do this directly from your WordPress dashboard. We have an in-depth guide on how to do this without fuss. Once the plugin is live on your site, head to the Settings > WP Super Cache screen: You’ll pop up on the Easy tab. The first radio button here will give you the option to turn caching on or off: However, we’d recommend you keep this to Off for now. This is because you’ll want to tweak all of the necessary and relevant settings before you pull the trigger. Speaking of which, we can look at this in the next section. 2. Customizing the Advanced WP Super Cache Settings The real main settings screen for WP Super Cache is the Advanced tab. This contains almost every option you’ll need, but requires heavy use of your scroll wheel: The top few options are simple to understand. There’s an option to turn on caching, then to choose the appropriate delivery method: The difference between delivery methods can be complex, but Simple uses PHP to serve cached files, while Expert uses your .htaccess file or Nginx rules. It also enables a few other options to leverage. If you use custom permalinks, you may not need to tinker within your server’s files. However, the Expert mode still requires some technical knowledge to implement well. While it’s faster, the negatives could outweigh the positives. Our advice is to use Simple mode, unless you are comfortable poking around within WordPress’ files. As for the other sections on the Advanced screen, let’s look at them in turn. Miscellaneous This section will help you determine how caching works for different users. The recommended approach is to disable caching (and associated functionality) for those users who log into your site. This is because the dynamic functionality is important for them. The plugin does a good job to note which options you should tick – everything that states its Recommended is a good idea. Here’s a quick list of options to go for: Disable caching for logged in users. Compress pages so they’re served more quickly to visitors. Cache rebuild. 304 Browser caching. As for the other settings, the only optional one you’d set is Don’t Cache Pages with GET Parameters. These types of pages will render on a per-user basis. As such, you’ll want
Continue readingThe Easy Way to Improve Your Content Production with Artificial Intelligence
[ad_1] If you’re relying on quality search engine-optimized posts to grow your WordPress website but you’re struggling to find the time, energy, and effort to create those posts, this Content at Scale review is worth paying attention to. Launched in late 2022, this powerful AI platform promises to take your keywords and turn them into complete, fully-optimized content with no intervention on your behalf, helping you to increase your content production tenfold. Still, Content at Scale isn’t the only AI writing software on the market, so what makes this one so special, and how exactly do you put it to work on scaling your content creation process quickly and effectively? You’ll find the answer to both of these questions, and more besides, in this comprehensive review. What is Content at Scale? Content at Scale is the first AI writing tool designed by marketers, for marketers. Many of the other similar tools you may have encountered are created primarily by AI developers who simply lack experience in content creation and search engine optimization. Ultimately, that means that while the content they produce may be of a good standard, it not only lacks many of the subtle nuances and emotional connection of human-created content but also requires more input to create the content. That’s before we mention the amount of work that you often need to carry out to proof, fact-check, and optimize that content. By drawing on their decade-and-a-half of experience in the digital marketing industry, developers Leadfuze have solved this problem by coming up with a platform that they promise will automate the entire process of creating engaging, well-optimized articles that require little (if any) intervention on your part. In fact, the company assures us that this sample blog post was created entirely without human input, using only a combination of three different AI engines along with two NLP (Natural Language Processing) and semantic algorithms. Article Continues Below Ultimately, this means that whether you’re a solo blogger who is pushed for time or a marketing agency that is already getting results from SEO content and now wants to scale that process further, you’ve got everything you need to dramatically cut the time it takes to write meaningful posts thanks to all of the following features. Content at Scale Key Features: AI-generated article length, headings, and media count based on what already ranks for your chosen keyword Search Engine Optimization features Plagiarism detector White label tools for developers AI-generated metadata Image gallery for adding featured images and in-post media Intuitive dashboard and post editor. Content at Scale User Experience: How to Automate Your Content Creation Process with AI 1. Create a New Project Your first task is to install and activate the Content at Scale plugin. If you’re not sure how to do that, we’ve written a step-by-step tutorial in our complete beginner’s guide to WordPress plugins. Activating the plugin ensures the platform is synced with your website so that the AI tool can do a better job at creating the kind of content that’s right for your website as well as publishing your AI-generated content directly to your WordPress installation. When that’s done, return to the Content at Scale app and log in. As a first-time user, you’ll find that your Projects dashboard is currently empty, so click the ‘Create New Project’ button to get started. 2. Enter Your Project Details Each website that you want to create content for should be its own individual project. With that in mind, you’ll need to enter a name for your project and your website URL. Below that, Content at Scale asks you to provide it with some context. This essentially means entering a few words on what you write about and who you write it for. To use WPLift as an example, we entered the following in the Project Context field. “We help WordPress users learn about how to build blogs and websites through plugin reviews, theme reviews, and tutorials.” To give you another example, if you were running an eCommerce or affiliate marketing site focusing on basketball, you might enter something like this: “We create content that helps basketball coaches, players, and fans.” From there, you can choose whether or not to enter the number of monthly posts you’d like to create the platform for you. Entering this figure here will help you to keep track of how close you are to achieving your content scaling goals, though you can always skip it and it won’t affect the quality of your posts. When you’ve done all that, simply click ‘Create Project.’ 3. Enter Your Keywords Your next job is to give the platform a keyword (or multiple keywords) that you want your content to rank for. If you’re not sure where to start with this, our guide to WordPress SEO has some handy tips on how to do keyword research, including using platforms such as SEMRush to find the most searched-for keywords in your niche. If you want to rank for multiple keywords, you can click on the attachment icon and upload them in a .CSV file. If you do this, Content at Scale will create an individual post for each keyword. After that, you’ll want to give the platform some additional context so that it knows what you have in mind for your finished content. For this tutorial, we’re creating a piece on the best AI writing software with the following context: “Cover the different types of AI writing software that are compatible with WordPress, including top plugins and platforms and how to use them. Mention at least one free tool and include pros and cons plus frequently asked questions about AI writing tools for WordPress.” Once all that is in place, all that’s left to do is to click ‘Create Content.’ The AI generator will then get to work on creating your post. You’ll be able to see how far that post is progressing under the status heading in your project dashboard. For our ‘Best AI Writing software’
Continue readingUseful Safari Extensions: Twitter and Nags
[ad_1] In 2019, I started writing a bit about the different things I was using to make my online experience a more private (because I, like many of you, think privacy is important 🙂). Though I’ve not written much about since then, I have found a couple of utilities that I use to help my browsing experience. Though they don’t necessarily fit in with things you may find in my articles on privacy, they still help with certain things that are simply annoying. Here are are a couple of Safari extensions that I’ve found useful to have installed on iOS when browsing the web. Safari Extensions: Twitter and Nags 🐦 Tweaks for Twitter Tweaks for Twitter is a Safari extension (well, technically it runs in other browsers, too!) that turns off much of the things that make Twitter annoying (no, I’m not talking about whoever you’re following that’s always tweeting about the things you hate – that’s up to you do unfollow). Tweaks for Twitter is a web browser extension that improves the user interface of twitter.com in many ways. Tweaks for Twitter For example, this removes promoted tweets, hover cards, “See more tweets from,” and then that little insert that Twitter shows where its “Followed by others you follow.” It gets Twitter as close to back to basics as it was once upon a time. 🛑 Banish In short, Banish is a Safari extension that hides or removes those annoying pop-ups that show on sites like Reddit that say “Open this in [our dedicated app] for more!” An ultra-efficient Safari Extension that blocks annoying ‘Open in App’ popups & other dark patterns on the web. Banish No thank you, please. I’d rather just stay in the browser and not download yet another thing, especially if it’s a web wrapper. (And if it’s going to be Reddit, Apollo has your back anyway.) Note these work on iOS and macOS but I spend a lot of time in other browsers on my desktop for development work. But for browsing on any device, these work great. More To Come When I was writing regularly, I enjoyed sharing some of the things I was using even if it wasn’t explicitly about development. Not only do I think it helped surface things that I found through others, it also helped to others continue to share things that I find useful. Maybe this will do more of the same. [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingLife At The End Of Your Comfort Zone
[ad_1] It is often said that life, adventure, challenge, growth, etc, begins at the end of your comfort zone. Like all much-abused aphorisms, that is both true and not. Yes, growth comes from outside your comfort zone, but then your comfort zone just becomes bigger. Before I get ahead of myself though, I should introduce myself. Hi, my name is Akshat, and I am the founder of BlogVault, MalCare, WP Remote, MigrateGuru and AirLift. I have spent 12 years on a rollercoaster WordPress journey, building these solutions for high performance WordPress sites. Today, I am going to tell you about my comfort zone. If you are wondering what WordPress has to do with my comfort zone, you’re about to find out. But first, a little context In the pre-BlogVault world, I was working at Citrix, doing kernel hacking for a product called NetScaler. This is as far removed from WordPress as you can possibly imagine. I was about to discover my new path rather abruptly. One fine day, The Coding Horror blog crashed. In case you are unfamiliar with this stalwart of the programming world, it is Jeff Atwood’s blog. Jeff Atwood is the founder of StackOverflow, another keystone of the programming community. If Jeff Atwood’s blog didn’t have backups, I thought, what about the legions of sites out there? Thus, BlogVault was born; its siblings mentioned above soon to follow. Stage 1: Products for problems When I created BlogVault, I wasn’t thinking about building for people. I saw a problem that I could fix, and created a solution for it. In fact, I understood so little about how people purchase products that every time someone bought a subscription, I thought it was a miracle. Obviously, magic wasn’t part of the equation, so I figured that I would have to actually meet people in WordPress. I needed to understand them, and why they were buying my product at all. This was a big step out of my comfort zone, by the way. I do not excel at meeting new people. That may be the understatement of the year. Hello strangers! Enter WordCamps. Now, everyone knows that WordCamps are events of inclusion, bringing people from all walks of life together. I didn’t at the time, and attending my first few conferences was me actively putting myself out there. I volunteered at a few, and spoke at others. None of this came easily or naturally, because it was innately difficult to interact with strangers. Over a few events, the discomfort became less and less, till it has gone entirely. I met wonderful people and built lasting friendships. For instance, I attended a WordCamp Europe in Spain one year, and got in touch with a friend who lived in the country. We’d never met before, but we’d corresponded a few times. He and his wife came to pick me up, and they showed me around for 2 days. It is incredible that someone can have so much generosity for a virtual stranger. Stage 2: Products for people Once I crossed the hurdle of interacting with strangers, I started to understand that building a product cannot be done in a vacuum. It is important to consider the people who are going to use it, why they would use it, and how it solves their problems. The WordPress community helped me reframe our products in terms of value propositions. Our marketing evolved to be about creating and showcasing value, and solving issues. I also learned how to use the right metrics to measure interaction. I found myself moving towards a more analytical mindset. This was in stark contrast to how I started: with a gut-based approach and the joy of making. I pivoted quickly to add people into the mix. It feels great—almost romantic—to say we build for the joy of making, but it is not a viable business model unless you factor in people. The courage to be imperfect BlogVault is a great backup product, even if I do say so myself. MalCare is too. MigrateGuru is the stuff of dreams, even. But. BUT. AirLift isn’t. Not yet, anyway. These are all products that we have made for WordPress, and have continued to improve over the years. It took us ages after we built MalCare to actually release it. It wasn’t perfect, how could we possibly release it? Eventually, I realized that this wasn’t the way to grow. And, I’m not going to lie, it took a lot to overcome this mindset. There were unexpected cheerleaders in every corner, and bit by bit, we were emboldened to take a leap of faith. Customers who loved our existing products encouraged us to let them try our new ones. Slowly I developed the courage to be imperfect, and trust in the process. We moved forward with the certainty that we would make it better. A fair field and no favor WordPress has been around for decades, and there are competitors on every level. This knowledge contributed to the desire to perfect our product. How will something that is less-than compete with established products in the market? I needed to develop a competitive mindset! Not quite. WordPress is big enough for everyone to thrive. But more than that, it isn’t a dog-eat-dog world. The community doesn’t have a win-at-all-costs mentality. People here have a lifestyle approach to business, without the hyper competitive spirit. It is a wholesome and largely ethical ecosystem. I discovered that the competitive spirit I thought I needed to develop—which didn’t come naturally—wasn’t necessary. I could succeed and make a mark, without that trample-to-get-ahead mentality. (If only I could stop using trite-but-true phrases as adjectives as easily.) The wheel has come full circle 12 years ago, I started my entrepreneurial journey with BlogVault, a definite outsider to WordPress. While I have encountered the boundaries of my comfort zone many times over the years, WordPress has helped me push past them. Today, I can proudly claim to not only be part of this amazing
Continue readingWordPress 6.1 Retires Default Site Tagline in Favor of Empty String – WP Tavern
[ad_1] WordPress’ default site tagline, “Just another WordPress site,” is now a thing of the past, though not yet fully retired to the realm of nostalgia. The recent 6.1 release resolved a ticket that lead developer Mark Jaquith opened 15 years ago to encourage people to change their taglines. The tagline has now been changed to an empty string for new installations. This was added as a note of interest in the 6.1 release post, which was the first place many learned about it: “The site tagline is empty by default in new sites but can be modified in General Settings.” For those who are sentimental about the tagline, rest assured that it has been preserved as placeholder text in the admin. “I do think the easier solution is to replace the ‘Just another WordPress site’ value with a placeholder,” WordPress Core Committer Jb Audras said in the discussion on the ticket. “By doing this, we keep this sentence which is in my opinion part of the WordPress history —by doing so, it would at least appear on the Settings screen, so we keep this signature sentence somewhere on the admin— but the value is empty by default for new installs.” This is the solution he committed, which landed in 6.1. The commit message identifies the reasoning behind the change: Administration: Change default site tagline to an empty string. This changeset replaces the default “Just another WordPress site” tagline with an empty string for new installations. The reasoning is: Not all themes display the tagline; Not everyone changes the default tagline; When people don’t see the tagline in their theme, they may not realize it is still visible in some places, like feeds. The string “Just another WordPress site” and the related multisite string: “Just another {NETWORK} site” are now only used as a placeholder for the tagline admin option. The advent of block themes was also another factor, since the Customizer was where users often managed their taglines in the past. Contributors concluded that the increasing use of block themes might result in more people who have the default tagline on their sites without even knowing about it. The conclusion was it is better to make it an empty string than to add a bunch of admin prompts to update it. This is a welcome change to how taglines are presented, and it was past time to update it. Although most WordPress professionals had become accustomed to it, more casual users often searched for how to get rid of it, sometimes without knowing it could be customized. The message also wasn’t doing WordPress any favors, unless it was originally written to imply WordPress’ ubiquity on the web – a claim that was aspirational at the time it was first committed to core. In that case, it has long since served its purpose. An empty string ensures that the only taglines showing up for new installations are ones that admins intentionally wrote for their sites. Category: News, WordPress [ad_2] Source link
Continue reading7 Best WordPress Image Optimization Plugins and Tools (Tested) – 2022
[ad_1] Searching for the best image optimization plugins or tools to speed up your WordPress site’s images? By now, you probably know the importance of website loading times and page speed. The internet has been abuzz with news about how loading times impact your bottom line and Google has been pretty clear about favoring fast loading websites and blogs. While there are many ways to optimize the speed of your website, one of the first places you should look to make improvements are the images you use. To help you with optimizing your images, in this post we’ll take a look at seven best image optimization tools and compare their results with real testing. We’ll start by sharing details for each image optimization tool along with its individual performance. At the end of the post, we’ll put everything together into a few different comparison tables so that you can easily see how the different tools and plugins stack up. 📚 Here’s everything that you’ll find in this post: Seven Best WordPress Image Optimization Plugins and Tools: Individual Details and Performance Below, we’ll share details for the seven best WordPress image optimization tools and plugins. Beyond sharing basic features and pricing information, we also tested each plugin on this list by seeing how well it was able to optimize the same two test images using both lossless and lossy compression: Both images are 1280 px wide and we’re sharing data for the full size image (rather than one of the smaller thumbnail sizes that WordPress automatically generates). We also did not convert them to WebP, which is a feature that a lot of image optimization tools offer. Instead, we kept them in their original image formats. Of course, beyond the file size savings themselves, you also might be concerned with the quality of the compressed images. To my eye, all of these tools resulted in more or less the same image quality, so I don’t think it needs to play a role in your decision: For lossless compression, there was no difference in quality (which is the definition of lossless). For lossy compression, there was a small reduction in quality, but it was very difficult to notice and I didn’t see any noticeably different results between the different tools in terms of image quality. 1. EWWW Image Optimizer When you install and activate EWWW Image Optimizer, it will automatically optimize any images that you upload to your website. It can optimize JPGs, PNGs, GIFs, and PDFs and it also allows you to go through your existing media library and optimize already uploaded images. The plugin can also convert images to the best format if you decide to enable this option in the plugin settings. One of the benefits of EWWW Image Optimizer is that it allows you to optimize images using their specialized servers to provide both lossy and lossless compression. In short, this means that image optimization won’t cause additional load on your server. The paid service also offers other enhancements such as a built-in CDN, WebP conversion, automatic scaling, and more. Alternatively, you can do the processing on your own server for free, but you can only access lossless compression if you use your server. Pricing: If you use your local server for processing, you get unlimited usage for free. However, this only supports lossless compression, which is a pretty big limitation. Paid plans start at $7 per month for unlimited image optimizations for a single site, along with a built-in CDN. 👉 Use our exclusive EWWW Image Optimizer coupon to get 15% OFF. How did the plugin do? Image File Type Compression Type Original Size Reduced Size Percentage Reduced JPG Lossless 271 KB 271 KB 0% JPG Lossy 271 KB 151 KB 44.2% PNG Lossless 416 KB N/A* N/A* PNG Lossy 416 KB 105 KB 74.8% *I couldn’t get EWWW Image Optimizer to run a lossless PNG compression for some reason. Even if I chose lossless, it still used lossy compression. 2. Smush Image Compression and Optimization Developed by WPMU Dev, Smush Image Compression and Optimization plugin is available in both free and premium versions. After you install the plugin, you’ll be taken to the plugin settings page where you can see how many images were already optimized and configure which thumbnail sizes you want the plugin to optimize, whether images should be resized, and more. The free version of the plugin lets you optimize unlimited images, but each individual image cannot exceed 5 MB. The plugin can optimize your JPEG, GIF and PNG images individually or you can use their bulk optimize feature. In addition, you can optimize image files that are uploaded outside your media library such as images stored in your theme files. Pricing: To remove the 5 MB limit for individual images and access other paid features such as CDN image delivery, WebP conversion, and more, the paid plans start at $7.50 per month. How did the plugin do? Image File Type Compression Type Original Size Reduced Size Percentage Reduced JPG Lossless 271 KB 268 KB 1% JPG Lossy 271 KB 224 KB 17.5% PNG Lossless 416 KB 320 KB 23% PNG Lossy 416 KB 74 KB 82.3% 3. ShortPixel ShortPixel is a freemium plugin that can compress JPGs, PNGs, and GIFs. After the plugin installation, you will prompted to sign up for an API key by providing your email address. The plugin will automatically optimize every uploaded image and you can also bulk optimize images already present in your media library. The plugin supports both lossy and lossless compression methods. It will also optimize all the thumbnails created by WordPress, remove EXIF data, set a maximum resolution for your images, and save a backup of every image you upload to a new folder. Other useful features include the following: Conversion to WebP or AVIF formats for smaller file sizings. Retina image serving. PDF optimization in addition to images. The original ShortPixel plugin optimizes the images on your site’s server. However, there’s also
Continue readingFuture-Proof Your Website with AVIF Images
[ad_1] Is the fear of slower page load time preventing you from using high-quality images? Are you struggling to compress your existing images without them losing quality? With Converter for Media, you can overcome these limiting factors and efficiently improve your website’s speed. Converter for Media is a premium WordPress plugin that helps you reduce the weight of your images without altering their original appearance. The plugin allows you to convert images to WebP and to AVIF simultaneously. Although you can convert images to WebP via Photoshop or other WordPress plugins, the AVIF format is much better and enables you to compress images by an additional about 30% compared to WebP. But how easy is it to convert images with the plugin? What browsers recognize the AVIF format? In this hands-on Converter for Media review, you’ll learn the answers to these questions and more. Converter for Media: Overview and Capabilities If we talk about image compression plugins, most offerings focus on minifying JPEG and PNG images. And while they can help you achieve a faster loading time for your site, they aren’t future-proof, i.e., most aren’t updated/optimized for Google’s Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals are metrics Google uses to quantity and score a website’s user experience. They’re made up of specific user interaction and page speed elements, with images affecting one of them (Largest Contentful Paint). Serving images in next-gen formats is one of the keys to improving your Core Web Vitals score, and this is where Converter for Media helps. Converter for Media converts your images to AVIF — the latest next-gen image format to date. The AVIF format is backed by big companies such as Netflix, Amazon, Google, and Apple. Displaying images in this format makes for a high-quality user experience — AVIF images have even better quality than WebP images and don’t carry unnecessary weight. Some notable features of Converter for Media include: One-click optimization. Convert all your images with one click. It’s that easy! No server load. Convert using the company’s remote server. Keep your server free. High level of conversion. Use specially configured tools to achieve better conversion quality. Ready out of the box. No need to touch any script — just install and start using. Image testing. Check how much you can reduce the weight of your images upfront. It’s worth mentioning that AVIF is currently supported by over 70% of browsers, including Chrome, Opera and Firefox. In other browsers, the images will be used in the WebP or original format. The plugin converts images to AVIF and WebP simultaneously. Pictures are loaded depending on the browser type of the website user. But the URLs of the images will remain the same — Converter for Media does an invisible direct to a file in the next-gen format. This means the best support for any browser. Article Continues Below Hands-On With Converter for Media Now for the fun part — I’ll show you how to install Converter Media on a WordPress site and use it to convert images to AVIF and WebP for better optimization and SEO. Installing the plugin First, buy and download the plugin from matt plugins’ website. Then, upload its .zip file in the Plugins section of your WordPress admin. Once installed, you’ll be able to configure its functions by going to Settings > Converter for Media inside WordPress. Plugin Settings General Settings are where you can choose a conversion strategy. Options include: Lossy – maximize size reduction with quality loss Optimal – reduce size without visible quality loss Lossless – minimal size reduction without quality loss I went with the default option, i.e., optimal, because AVIF delivers a high-quality result even in this setting. You can also choose which directories’ files should be converted to the output format. By default, only your uploads (images in the Media Library) will convert. But you can check the /themes or /plugins directory if you want to convert image files from either. Additionally, you can set maximum image dimensions — I went with the plugin’s recommendation of 2048 x 2048 pixels. And if you want to automatically convert the new images that you upload to the Media Library, just leave the toggle in the last option on. Advanced settings are also available, but you do not need to change them. The default plugin settings are recommended for most websites. The plugin is ready out of the box, so you don’t need to be a technical person to handle the plugin without any problems. Bulk Optimization of Images One feature that impressed me a lot is bulk optimization. This option appears below the General Settings and lets you convert all uploads to AVIF and WebP with just one click. Additionally, the list of files that will be optimized is displayed in the form of a tree. By clicking on the “+” icon you can see them. I bulk-optimized the images on my site — the plugin hardly took 2 minutes to convert around 344 image files to WebP/AVIF. If you interrupt the process for some reason, you can continue it later — no need to start all over again. Converter for Media also shows you: How much weight of your images it saved The number of files it successfully converted The amount of failed or skipped file conversion attempts Optimization Results Apparently, you just need to use the bulk optimization option to convert all images to AVIF and WebP. Once done, you can check the optimization results directly in the Media Library. Note that after installing Converter for Media, any new images you upload will be converted automatically. Converter for Media PRO Pricing Converter for Media PRO has three monthly and three yearly plans. You can use one license on multiple websites, so it’s a very attractive offer for people who maintain multiple websites on WordPress. Monthly plans: 10,000 optimized images per month for $5/month 25,000 optimized images per month for $10/month 70,000 optimized images per month for $25/month Yearly plans (includes 2 free
Continue readingQuick Tip: Sort All Users by Metadata
[ad_1] If you’re working with the All Users screen in WordPress and want to sort all users by metadata, it’s possible with the pre_get_users hook. In WordPress, though, there’s a handful of pieces of data that you’ll need to work with this hook. Namely: the meta key off of which you want to read the information, how you want to order the query, and how to set up the meta query. Additionally, if you just want to run the query on the All Users page, it’s helpful to prevent the query from running except for where you want it. Sort All Users by Metadata First, here’s a simple helper function that we can use to determine if we’re on the users.php page within the WordPress administration area. /** * Determines if we’re on the users.php page. * * @return bool True if we’re on the users page. */ function isOnUsersPage() { return str_contains($_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’], ‘users.php’); } Next, let’s assume that our users have a status of being active or being inactive. That is, we’re maintaining their accounts but perhaps they are no longer active in the system for whatever reason the application calls. Further, let’s assume these are numeric values where 0 is inactive and 1 is active. Now we can set up the initial function so it looks something like this: add_action( ‘pre_get_users’, function ($query) { if (!isOnUsersPage()) { return $query; } // TODO return $query; } ); Note the pre_get_users hook accepts a function with a single argument – the query running on the page – and this is the query that we will manipulate to order the users by active information. The passed WP_User_Query object contains the query variables, not yet passed into SQL. Developer Handbook We’ll set up an array of arrays (though it’s a single dimensional array) that indicates we’re going to use the status meta key for querying users. After that, we’ll do the following: set the meta key on the query, assign the query in the array of arrays to the meta_query attribute. The code should look like this: add_action( ‘pre_get_users’, function ($query) { if (!isOnUsersPage()) { return $query; } $metaQuery = [ [ ‘key’ => ‘status’ ] ]; $query->set(‘meta_key’, ‘status’); $query->set(‘meta_query’, $metaQuery); // TODO return $query; } ); And since we’re going to be ordering the users in ascending order by their status, we need to also specify the orderby and the order for the query: add_action( ‘pre_get_users’, function ($query) { if (!isOnUsersPage()) { return $query; } $metaQuery = [ [ ‘key’ => ‘status’ ] ]; $query->set(‘meta_key’, ‘status’); $query->set(‘meta_query’, $metaQuery); $query->set(‘orderby’, ‘meta_value’); $query->set(‘order’, ‘asc’); return $query; } ); Note that how the status is set will depend on the plugin you’re working on and whether or not you want to render a column on the All Users page for this. And I can show that in another tip in a future post. [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingThe good and the bad of open source WordPress
[ad_1] Here is Lesley reading her own story aloud. Why I believe open source is the best and worst thing about WordPress. When I first discovered WordPress in 2016, it was merely a tool for me. It was the cheapest and most flexible way to get a website started for my fledgling explainer video business, so I used it. As a long time blogger and website-maker, since the days of GeoCities, I was very confident I would find WordPress a breeze to use. I opened up a fresh new install of WordPress for the very first time in my life and was confronted with an intimidating admin interface. The stuff on the right seemed meaningless and unhelpful, and the stuff on the left was way more complicated than I was used to. What did media library mean and when do I use it? It was lucky that I’d been making websites and blogging since I was a child. It was also a good thing that I knew WordPress was really really popular. Had it not been for those two things, I would likely have given up. Instead, I powered through, confident that, if millions of people could figure it out, I could too. After some tinkering, and reading recommendations, I purchased and installed a page builder, Thrive Themes, and started building my site. I watched many tutorials, made tons of mistakes, and got frustrated countless times. But after a month or two, it finally felt like I’d gone from pushing a boulder uphill, to chasing the boulder downhill. Incidentally, I still use Thrive today! Why Open Source Matters I owe a big part of my journey to the open source nature of WordPress. Being able to play around for almost no money allowed me the freedom to experiment and make mistakes with little penalty. I didn’t have to worry about paying $50 or even $5 per month for each random side project I start, which allowed me to play around and really deepen my knowledge of building websites. I bet lots of other people attribute their web building journey to WordPress and open source too. And that’s likely to be a large reason for WordPress’ popularity. It’s free for anyone to use, so lots of hosts offer it as one of their default options. There are also loads of plugins out there that help you turn your WordPress site into anything you can possibly imagine. It means that a receptionist or a journalist can move from one job to another and easily log into their company’s website, update the opening hours or write a blog post, because everyone is on WordPress. It means a first-time business owner like myself can create their first website and not worry about making newbie mistakes since the cost of wrong decisions is low – it’s really easy to migrate from host to host, change themes, remove plugins and more. Where’s It’s Not Perfect However, open source is not without its drawbacks. Like I mentioned above, the first time I logged into WordPress I found it overwhelming. It’s hard to draw a direct line to the exact reason why, but here are some of the reasons that came to mind: Firstly, there isn’t a dedicated team with KPIs to hit who are focused on making onboarding super easy for complete beginners. In commercial software, this is typically a top priority as customers who can’t get onboarded, will usually churn, which loses money for the company. In contrast, in WordPress, we have contributors who are typically seasoned WordPress pros. They no longer remember what it’s like to use WordPress for the first time. And because of the contributor model, we also don’t have enough teams with dedicated UX researchers, product managers, and more for each aspect of WordPress. In addition, WordPress is largely built by developers with a developer-first mindset. Thus, the teams are conceived from a developer standpoint (performance, multisite, etc) rather than from a user standpoint. For example, it would be wonderful to have teams focused on the experiences around onboarding, dashboard, plugins, themes, which is how the average user mentally structures WordPress. Also, it’s impossible to keep track of usage data, so there’s no way to know where people are struggling across the entire WordPress project. This matters because the best way to justify having teams focused on certain aspects of WordPress is to present numbers. However, since we don’t have numbers, it’s impossible to present a strong case. The final issue is that WordPress is gigantic. It powers everything from The American Whitehouse website, to small businesses in Singapore (like mine). This pins WordPress in a very tricky spot, because the needs of the Whitehouse are very different to the needs of a small business on the equator. And any updates that are made to WordPress have to take the breadth of use cases into consideration. Ultimately, I’m glad that WordPress is open source, even despite the drawbacks. It helps so many people grow their businesses, communicate, and simply share their thoughts with everyone on the internet. There is no such thing as only good without the bad. And I’m glad WordPress exists. Related [ad_2] Source link
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