The New “Learn WordPress” Launches. Here’s What I Like About It

[ad_1] If you haven’t checked out Learn WordPress lately, it’s probably a good idea to do it today. This free educational hub has just had a serious glow-up, and I’m here to give you the scoop on why it’s worth your attention. 👋 What’s Learn WordPress, anyway? For those who might not know, Learn WordPress has been around since 2020, offering free lessons, tutorials, and other training material for anyone looking to level up their WordPress game. The platform was okay (I guess), but the design and content organization left a lot to be desired. A reminder of what the old design was: Fresh new look, better content organization and experience! Thanks to the hard work of the Training, Design, Marketing, and Meta teams of WordPress contributors 👏, we can all now witness the birth of the new Learn WordPress; and it’s looking quite sharp! It’s not just about good looks, though. The whole site feels more intuitive now. You know how frustrating it can be to hunt for the right resource on a cluttered website, and especially when we’re talking things like training materials, right? But what has happened here goes beyond simple redesign. The team also did a lot to improve the content offering and overall organization of the platform. Most notably, we now have: “Learning Pathways” Quite simply, those are your “getting started” points based on your current understanding of WordPress and where you want to go with it. In other words, instead of there being just a bunch of random courses, there’s now a better organization at the top level that makes it much easier to pick the material that’s best tailored to you. When you go to learn.wordpress.org, the first thing that jumps right at you is a nice section that lets you make one of two choices – there’s “Develop with WordPress” and “Start using WordPress.” This seems like a good top-level organization, since most people dealing with WordPress are either users or developers. Plus, the user pathway also creates other opportunities for how this platform can be used (more on that in a sec). The courses Entering either of these pathways shows you a couple of more options and the courses available (for now). Granted, not a huge choice as of now, but what’s there is already surprisingly useful (in my opinion, at least). To take a course, all you need is a WordPress.org account. And, of course, it’s all free. The learning platform itself is neatly organized – it’s basically a classic LMS website structure, but done really cleanly and accessibly. I was wondering what actually runs the LMS underneath, so I did some digging in the project’s GIT, to find out that it’s Sensei PRO. The lessons that are currently there have been put together nicely, with good editing, and highlighting the most important parts of the lesson. Or, to say it another way, even though the ones I checked are basic screen recordings with added commentary on top, they do deliver all the content very nicely. This makes me hopeful for the future of the project overall and the value it can bring to the community. All the lessons right now are technically hosted on YouTube, so I could just embed them here, but I choose not to do that – not to take away from the complete course experience you get with the platform. Practice yourself What’s also unique about this WordPress course is that it allows learners to practice on a private demo site, which is powered by, yes, you’ve guessed it, WordPress Playground. This one’s cool, since you can do all your learning and experimentation there, without having to deal with any “difficult WordPress setup” (although there have been people who installed WordPress on Raspberry Pi in the past – we know those people(!)). Plus, if need be, you can export your work at the end. License and potential The courses are also licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, which is a notable detail. I’m no lawyer, but that license allows you to “copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially” and “remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially,” which means that the courses there can serve as a foundation of your own work, plus you can use them to educate your users/clients/team/colleagues. Check it out! In the end, I encourage you to check out “Learn WordPress,” click around, get a feel for what’s there, and see how you might integrate the material into what you’re working on. Just to give you one example of what you could do; there’s a pathway called “Intermediate Theme Developer,” which goes through the current ins and outs of working on themes, including some newer developments in the WordPress platform. Many of the videos in the course were added as recently as two months ago. The WordPress team isn’t stopping here. They’re planning more pathways, including ones for designers and contributors. So if you don’t see exactly what you’re looking for yet, keep an eye out – it might be coming soon. As someone who’s been around the WordPress block a few times, I’m genuinely impressed with this update. It shows a real commitment to education and community support, which has always been at the heart of WordPress’ success! … Don’t forget to join our crash course on speeding up your WordPress site. Learn more below: Sources: Was this article helpful? No Thanks for your feedback! Or start the conversation in our Facebook group for WordPress professionals. 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The Best Managed WordPress Hosting (Learn Why)

[ad_1] If you’re searching for the best managed WordPress hosting, Kinsta is probably a name you’ve come across. There’s a reason for that – Kinsta is one of, if not the, best managed WordPress hosts in 2021. The objective data backs that up, with Kinsta consistently leading the pack in data from review aggregators and third-party surveys. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves – to help you decide whether Kinsta is the best host for you, we’ll take you through some of its pros and cons and make some recommendations for how to pick the best host for your needs. By the end, you should have a better idea of the best hosting solution for your site, whether that’s Kinsta or another option. Quick Summary of Our 2021 Kinsta Review If you’re in a hurry, here’s a quick rundown on how Kinsta is doing in 2021… Simply put, Kinsta is one of the best options for managed WordPress hosting. Kinsta hits all the important things you need in a host with fast performance, rock-solid reliability, excellent 24/7 support, and convenient features. This is why, when we aggregated data from third-party sources like TrustPilot, WhoIsHostingThis, CodeinWP’s survey, and Review Signal, Kinsta was #1 out of all the hosts we looked at with an impressive 96% satisfaction rating across all those sources. Here’s the aggregated data for popular hosts: You can see that Kinsta leads the pack, even beating out similarly-priced hosts like WP Engine and Flywheel. So – to learn why Kinsta has such satisfied customers, let’s dig into the pros and cons. Five Things Kinsta Does Really Well Let’s start with the best parts of hosting with Kinsta.. Objectively Great Performance One of Kinsta’s biggest advantages is that it offers excellent performance, which is the most important consideration in any WordPress host. To objectively assess a host’s performance, we rely on Review Signal’s exhaustive performance benchmarks, which challenge hosts in a variety of ways including some pretty heavy-duty load testing. Though Kinsta didn’t participate in the most recent 2020 Review Signal benchmarks, Kinsta was a regular participant in the prior years. In the 2019 benchmarks, Kinsta participated in five different pricing tiers: $25-$50 per month $51-$100 per month $101-$200 per month $201-$500 per month $500 per month (enterprise) Kinsta earned Top Tier status (the highest designation) in every single tier. That means Kinsta earned Top Tier from its $30 per month starter plan all the way up to its enterprise plans, which is pretty impressive.  So what’s behind that Top Tier performance? Kinsta runs the following stack: Google Cloud infrastructure with your choice of 25+ data centers spread around the world. Pure Nginx. MariaDB. Server-level caching with Nginx Fast_CGI cache, along with a custom companion plugin to purge the cache from your WordPress dashboard. Built-in CDN powered by KeyCDN. Automatic database optimization once per week. For advanced users, Kinsta also offers free Application Performance Monitoring to really dig into your site’s performance at a more technical level. This tool aims to fill the same role as premium monitoring services like New Relic without forcing you to pay an extra fee or integrate a third-party service. Kinsta also offers some useful guides on how you can use these features to improve performance for WooCommerce stores and membership sites. Top-Notch Live Chat Support Kinsta offers excellent live chat support that’s available 24/7 via the user-friendly Intercom widget. You can get help from anywhere in your dashboard just by opening the widget, and all of your chat histories are automatically saved. You can also click around to different areas of your dashboard without losing your chat, which is surprisingly useful: As for support quality – it really is good and the support team knows their way around WordPress. For example, in CodeinWP’s 2018 hosting survey, CodeinWP asked users to rate their hosts’ overall support and WordPress-specific support (out of five). Kinsta scored 4.9 on both metrics, which was good for first place out of all the hosts that respondents were using. If you’re wondering, WP Engine was second at 4.7 for both, while Flywheel had 4.6 for overall support and 4.8 for WordPress-specific support. Convenient Managed WordPress Features Kinsta is a true managed WordPress host, so you get all those convenient managed WordPress features to make your life easier. Basically, you’ll have a partner that works to make your site more reliable, secure, and quick-loading. I already covered what Kinsta does on the performance front – you won’t have to worry about configuring caching or a CDN because Kinsta handles all that for you. On the security front, Kinsta implements: A WAF (web application firewall) to proactively stop threats. Daily malware scans. Uptime monitoring to automatically detect issues on your site. Free SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt. If something does happen to your site, Kinsta also offers a free hack fix guarantee to get your site working again. To keep your site’s data safe, Kinsta offers automatic daily backups with 14 days of storage. If you want more frequent backups, you can pay $50/month/site for backups every six hours or $100/month/site for backups every hour. There’s also an external backup add-on to send your backups to your own Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage account, which costs $2/month/site + $1/GB bandwidth. Finally, you also get staging sites to safely test changes to your site and then push them live with a single click. Well-Designed Custom Dashboard and Useful Tools Like many other managed WordPress hosts, Kinsta uses its own custom hosting dashboard rather than a pre-built dashboard like cPanel or Plesk. What stands out about Kinsta’s dashboard, though, is that it’s really well-designed and user-friendly. You’ll be able to easily manage things like backups, staging sites, etc. You also get some useful tools, such as dedicated tools to enable WordPress debug mode with a single click or run a search/replace on your site’s database without the need for a plugin: If you’re working as part of a team, you’ll also get different

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