If you are considering using either of these free solutions for building websites locally, this guide will tell you everything you need know before making a decision. We’ll talk about what Local and XAMPP offer, laying out their features, advantages, and differences. Get ready for a detailed rundown.

Local vs XAMPP: Setup

Local and XAMPP are both powerful tools that share some common ground. Both are free to use, making them accessible to a wide range of developers. And, they both provide environments for local testing and development. 

Despite these similarities, Local and XAMPP differ significantly in their feature sets and approach. So let’s get started with a closer look at how the setup process compares. 

Local

To get started with Local, you’ll need to first visit the Local website and download the version compatible with your operating system.

Run the installer and follow the prompts. The process is intuitive, similar to installing any standard software.

Once installed, open Local. The initial setup involves a few basic configurations, like selecting your preferred language and agreeing to terms and conditions.

XAMPP 

Getting started with XAMPP is a similar process. Go to the XAMPP official website and choose the appropriate version for your operating system.

During the installation, you’ll select components like Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl.

After installation, use the XAMPP control panel to start Apache and MySQL services and set up your local server environment.

Local offers an easier, more streamlined setup process, ideal for beginners or those who prefer simplicity. XAMPP, while still accessible, requires a bit more technical involvement and is suited to those who want more control over their server environment.

Local vs XAMPP: Creating Development Sites

Once installation and setup is complete, you can move forward with creating your first development site. Here’s a brief rundown of how that works on both platforms.

Local

In Local, click on the button that says Create a New Site.

Enter the name and specify the local domain and path.

Choose between Preferred or Custom environments. The Preferred setup is quicker, while Custom offers more control.

Local automatically installs WordPress. You’ll just enter admin credentials to access your WordPress dashboard.

XAMPP

The process to set up a new site is completely manual in XAMPP. You start by launching the XAMPP Control Panel to activate Apache and MySQL. 

Then, you manually download WordPress and place it in the htdocs folder of your XAMPP installation. 

You also have to set up a database for the installation just like you would on a remote server. In XAMPP, this happens under http://localhost/phpmyadmin inside your browser.

Finally, to complete the setup, you navigate to localhost/your_site_name and run through the WordPress installation wizard. 

This process gives you full control over every step but requires more technical involvement compared to Local.

Local vs XAMPP: Importing an Existing Site 

Importing an existing site into Local and XAMPP involves distinct processes as well. 

Local

Importing a site into Local is straightforward and you have basically two options for doing so.

Using the Connect Feature

For WP Engine or Flywheel users, Local’s Connect feature lets you easily manage your site. Simply log into your account and upload or download your site directly from Local’s interface.

There’s also a MagicSync tool that helps you synchronize only the modified files instead of the entire site, streamlining updates.

Manual Import

For non-WP Engine or Flywheel users, manually importing a site into Local is simple, too. You’ll need a zip file containing your site’s SQL database file and wp-content folder. Drag and drop this file into Local, or use the Import option, and Local will handle the rest, including setting up the WordPress environment.

For more detailed instructions, check our Local import and export guide.

XAMPP

For XAMPP, the process is more manual and involves several steps.

You’ll need to prepare your WordPress site for migration. This typically involves exporting your WordPress database and compressing your WordPress files (especially the wp-content directory) into a ZIP file.

Once XAMPP is installed, you’ll need to set up a database for your WordPress site using phpMyAdmin and import your SQL database file.

Then, extract your WordPress site’s ZIP file into the htdocs folder of your XAMPP installation. You’ll then need to edit the wp-config.php file to match your database name, user, and password as set in XAMPP.

After moving your files and database, you may need to update the site URL and home URL in the database to reflect the local setup. This can be done either through phpMyAdmin or using a database database search-and-replace tool.

This method requires a more hands-on approach and is suitable for users comfortable with manual server and database management.

Alternatively, you can use a WordPress migration plugin to complete this task. A couple of options include All-in-One WP Migration and Duplicator, which simplify the process by handling the migration of files and databases automatically. They are particularly useful for seamlessly updating URLs and other settings without manual interventions. 

Local vs XAMPP: User Interface and Experience

When comparing the user interfaces and overall user experiences of Local and XAMPP, there are distinct differences worth noting.

Local

Local features an intuitive user interface that is neatly divided into three primary sections: Sites, Blueprints, and Add-ons.

• Sites – Here, you can easily manage your WordPress websites. The interface allows for quick creation, starting, and stopping of sites. You can also view each site’s details, including its URL, SSL status, and PHP version.
• Blueprints – This section allows you to save site configurations, including themes and plugins, which can be reused to create new sites quickly.
• Add-ons – This area provides access to additional features that can be integrated into your Local environment to enhance your development workflow.

Local’s interface goes beyond basic server management, providing a comprehensive tool set for site-specific actions, from easy access to the WordPress admin and database, to utilities for debugging and site performance.

XAMPP

XAMPP offers a more traditional user interface centered around its control panel.

• Control Panel – The main interface in XAMPP is the control panel where you can manage server services like Apache and MySQL. It’s functional and straightforward, mainly focusing on starting and stopping services, and checking server statuses.
• Server settings and configurations – XAMPP’s control panel provides detailed control over server settings and configurations. However, it doesn’t have an integrated interface for site-specific management like Local. Instead, you often have to edit system files manually.

XAMPP’s interface is less about website management and more about managing the server environment itself. It’s more suitable for users with a technical background who prefer direct control over server components.

Local vs XAMPP: Features and Functionality

Next, let’s compare the features Local and XAMPP offer.

Local

Local has the ability to switch between Apache and NGINX server environments with a click, accommodating various PHP versions. This flexibility is beneficial for testing your site under different server settings.

Setting up a new WordPress site is streamlined in Local as well thanks to one-click installation, making the process quick and efficient. This feature is particularly handy for developers looking to rapidly deploy WordPress sites.

Local includes SSL certificates, which allow for secure HTTPS connections for testing purposes. While they don’t secure the site in the same way as a certificate from a trusted authority would for a live site, they do allow you to simulate a secure HTTPS connection.

Another included feature is Live Link, which makes it so you can share your work effortlessly with clients or collaborators using shareable URLs. This feature eliminates the need for setting up staging servers, allowing real-time presentation of your local WordPress sites.

Additional Features of Local

Other notable features include: 

• HTTP/HTTPS tunneling – Enabled by ngrok, this allows your WordPress site to be accessed from any device with an internet connection, aiding in browser compatibility and responsiveness testing.
• Mailcatcher – Integrated into Local, it handles outgoing emails from PHP sendmail, useful for email debugging without overwhelming your inbox.
• Blueprints, clones, and exports – These features let you save your site as a template, clone sites easily, and export or import them with all configurations.
• Dev Mode and new site defaults – You can customize your environment (like PHP and MySQL versions) and use Dev Mode to prevent aggressive caching.
• Database connectivity and MailHog tool – These allow easy connection to your site’s database and the use of MailHog for testing transactional emails, streamlining processes for e-commerce sites.

For more details, check our comprehensive list of Local features.

XAMPP

XAMPP is a versatile option as well. It runs on multiple operating systems, including Windows, macOS, Linux, and Solaris, providing flexibility for various user environments.

It includes Apache, MySQL (now MariaDB), PHP, and Perl, making it a comprehensive web server solution. XAMPP also uses phpMyAdmin as a web-based utility for easy administration of MySQL databases.

Other features include: 

• Supports various CMS platforms – This includes WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Magento. 
• Application prototyping – Suitable for rapid prototyping of web applications in a local setting.
• Security features – Provides options for encrypting MySQL databases and setting passwords, enhancing data protection.

Local vs XAMPP: Site Management

As you might expect, managing sites varies between these solutions as well. 

Local

Local streamlines the site management process, particularly for WordPress users. You can easily navigate to the site’s folder or open a command shell with a single click. Quick access buttons are also available for the WordPress backend and the live site.

In addition, while in the Overview section, you can perform the following tasks: 

• Modify the site domain.
• Trust SSL certificates for browser safety.
• Change web server type and PHP version.
• Enable one-click admin login.
• Turn on Xdebug for PHP debugging.
• Update WordPress directly from Local.

The Database tab provides essential database details and a link to Adminer for management.

And the Tools tab is where you can set up and manage MailHog for email testing and use Live Links for external site access.

Right-clicking on a site offers more functionalities like starting/stopping servers, cloning, exporting sites, and saving as blueprints.

The hamburger menu in the upper left corner leads to settings, software updates, and log access.

XAMPP

XAMPP, being more manual, doesn’t offer too much in terms of site management. It basically consists of the aforementioned control panel where you can manage its different services. The panel also provides direct access to key components like phpMyAdmin for database management and it’s where you can configure and monitor logs and access settings for each service. 

However, that’s about it. Anything else you want to do always happens directly on the websites and their CMSs themselves.

Local vs XAMPP: Support

When it comes to support and community resources, both Local and XAMPP have unique support options.

Local

Local has a strong community and support system around it, making it an attractive choice for those who might need assistance or want to connect with other users. Here’s what you can expect:

• Community support – Local has a dedicated community forum where users can engage in discussions, ask questions, and find answers to frequently asked questions. This active community is a valuable resource for both new and experienced users.
• Documentation – On the Local website, you can find detailed help documents, providing immediate help for common issues and questions.
• Opportunities to get involved – Local also offers opportunities for Local users to give back to the community by writing a tutorial, building an add-on, or even speaking at a WordCamp.

You also get access to all of these support routes from inside the Local user interface.

XAMPP

​​XAMPP, while not having as centralized a support system as Local, does still have easy-to-find help resourced.

There is the Apache Friends forum, supported by users worldwide, with sections in various languages, including English. This forum is a valuable resource for troubleshooting and gaining insights from other users.

Here, the diverse, global user base surrounding XAMPP contributes to a wide range of discussions, covering various aspects of using XAMPP for different development needs.

Local vs XAMPP: Which is Better Overall?

After comparing Local and XAMPP, it becomes clear that each tool has strengths tailored to different user needs. However, if we were to lean towards one, Local is the favorable option for most people, particularly those working with WordPress.

Local excels with its user-friendly interface and simplified workflows, making it a standout choice for both beginners and experienced WordPress developers. Its one-click WordPress installation, comprehensive SSL support, and seamless integration with WP Engine and Flywheel enhance its appeal. And the supportive community and extensive documentation behind it offer valuable resources for troubleshooting and learning.

While XAMPP offers greater flexibility and control for diverse web development projects, its technical nature and manual setup process can be more challenging, especially for those new to web development or specific to WordPress.

That’s why Local presents itself as a more accessible tool, especially for those prioritizing ease of use, efficiency, and a WordPress-centric development environment. 

When it comes to Local vs XAMPP, which do you prefer? Please let us know (and why) in the comments below! 

The post Local vs XAMPP: Which Should You Use for Local Development? appeared first on Torque.

File permissions are a very important part of protecting your website. They keep your site locked down while giving WordPress itself, its plugins, and other scripts the ability to modify what they need to.

But sometimes things can go wrong. Errors may pop up, or file permissions get changed to improper values. In that case, it’s helpful to know how WordPress file permissions work and how to use them.

That’s exactly what we’ll explain today. Below, you’ll learn all you need to know about file permissions, how change them, and best practices to keep your site functioning smoothly.

Understanding File Permission Levels

If you want to learn how to change file permissions in WordPress, you’ll need to understand the basics first. For that, we need to look into Linux permissions. Here’s a quick crash course on that topic.

Types of File Permissions

There are three main types of permissions files can have. You can set these not just for individual files, but entire directories/folders.

• Read (r) – This allows a user to view a file’s contents or the names of files within a directory.
• Write (w) – Write permission enables a user to modify the file’s content. They might also create, delete, or rename files within a directory.
• Execute (x) – Here, users may execute programs and scripts, or access a directory’s files and subdirectories.

Permission Groups

However, who exactly can have these permissions? In Linux, there are three groups of people who can access a file/directory.

• User (u) – Refers to the owner (usually the creator) of the file/directory.
• Group (g) – Several users that share common permission levels. Any user can be in one or more groups.
• Others, World, or Public (o) – Any users who are not the owner of the file and are not in a defined group.

For each of these, you can set different levels of permission. In WordPress, these are called user roles. For example, you wouldn’t want random website subscriber to have the same permissions as the administrator. That would be a recipe for disaster.

Symbolic and Numeric Notation

When you deal with file permissions, they are represented either in symbolic or numeric notation.

Symbolic notation uses the letters above to denote read (r), write (w), and execute (x) permission, or a dash for none. They are grouped in three sets of three with the first three letters referring to User (u) permissions, the next three to Group (g) permissions, and the final three to Others permissions (o).

Take this example: rwxr-xr--

Here, the User has full permissions (rwx), the Group has read and execute permission (r-x), and the Others group has only read permission (r–).

With numeric notation, each permission is instead assigned a value:

• Read (r) = 4
• Write (w) = 2
• Execute (x) = 1

These are added together to form a three-digit number representing permissions for User, Group, and Others.

Using the same example above, the User’s permission is 7 (r + w + x), the Group’s 5 (r + x), and Others’ 4 (r). That means, the same permission level’s numeric notation is 754.

File Permissions in WordPress

In the context of WordPress and websites in general, file permissions use the same principles as above. But there are also a few differences you’ll want to be aware of.

• File ownership – In a WordPress environment, files and directories are often owned by the web server process (www-data for Apache and nginx for NGINX) rather than individual users.
• Plugin and theme considerations – WordPress plugins may require read and write access to particular files and directories to function properly. Plugins usually use the Filesystem API to interface securely with your server.
• Some groups are already built in – As mentioned, WordPress uses built-in roles like Administrator, Editor, and Contributor. Contributors only have the ability to create and edit their own articles, not others. Functionally, this means they have read permission on all post/page files, and read/write permission on post/page files they create.
• Look out for shared hosting environments – Shared hosting can present issues with file permissions. Certain files may be locked down to prevent other users on your multi-website server from accessing sensitive data. You may find some files set to read-only even for administrators, requiring root access to edit.

The Dangers of Incorrect File Permissions

Now comes the question, why is this even important? Why should you care about this very technical-sounding topic?

The reason is that file permissions form the foundation of website security. Being too loose with them can seriously endanger your site in the following ways:

• Hacking and malware – Improper permissions can let hackers slip through and do basically whatever they want. That includes installing malware, viewing private files, or deleting your site.
• Site takeover – If someone manages to break into your website thanks to lax permissions, they could easily take ownership of your account and lock you out of your own website.
• Data leakage – Improper permissions could result in visitors gaining access to private files, including images, unfinished/test/draft pages, and confidential data.
• Improper file access – Certain permissions may allow users to change existing files on your website, or upload and execute damaging files like malware scripts.

But it’s not just about too much access, it can also be too little. Making your permissions too restrictive will inevitably break your site by preventing WordPress from functioning properly. It’s a fine line between too much and not enough with file permissions.

WordPress File Permission Best Practices

Before you start combing through your website files looking for anything out of place, it’s important to know what a good practices for file permissions look like WordPress. So, let’s go over that now.

Don’t Change Permissions Unless Necessary

The first thing that’s important to keep in mind is that, in most cases, you won’t need to change file permissions. If you are using a good hosting provider and install WordPress properly, this part of your site should be set up in the correct way automatically.

So, unless you’re running into a specific WordPress error, don’t touch your file permissions, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. Messing with settings you don’t understand can cause more harm than good.

Some web hosts, especially shared hosts, may make some permissions more restrictive due to the nature of the hosting. If you’re having a problem with insufficient permissions, it may be best to contact your host and ask for help.

Recommended Permission Levels

If you do run into a problem and you’re not sure what permission settings your files and directories should be on, there is information for that in the official WordPress documentation.

Below is a quick rundown of generally recommended permissions for various files and folders. However, remember that this varies depending on your setup.

• Directories – 755 (rwer-er-e). For your server to work properly, most directories need execute permissions.
• Files + .htaccess – 644 (rw-r–r–). This allows users to see public files on your website without being able to edit them. Most files should only be writable by your user account.
• wp-config.php – Varies; 400 (r——–), 440 (r–r—–), 600 (rw——-), or 640 (rw-r—–) may be appropriate depending on site setup and security needs. The most important step is to prevent random visitors from accessing this important file.

Don’t Be Too Restrictive

Finding the right balance with file permissions can be stressful, but you can’t just set them all to “000”. While your site would be very secure, at the same time, no one would be able to use it.

Functions on your site, from your web server to plugins to WordPress itself, naturally need some access to specific files and directories to continue functioning properly. Even visitors, who should not be given write or execute access to a majority of files, need to at least be able to “read” the public-facing parts of your site.

It can be tempting to clamp down on file permissions, but you can do some serious damage. When plugins and functions stop working, a plethora of warnings will appear on your dashboard. You could even cause your website to encounter the dreaded White Screen of Death if you’ve severed WordPress’ access to core files.

Use the Principle of Least Privilege

The principle of least privilege states that users (including your web server and WordPress itself) should be given just as much access as what’s necessary to do their jobs.

Granting “root” ownership means giving full control and access to the entire system, which is usually excessive. If a hacker gains access to a WordPress site with root privileges, they could potentially wreak havoc on the entire server.

Instead, the owner of most files should usually be your web server user, usually nginx (NGINX) or www-data (Apache), both of which only have the permissions necessary to function properly. This limits the damage bad actors can cause.

There are some situations where root ownership is necessary, so you shouldn’t go changing permissions if you don’t understand what you’re doing. At the same time, seeing it can be a cause for concern – especially if you notice that a file or directory owner has suddenly changed.

In any other situation where you may be creating files or assigning owners, follow the principle of least privilege. Don’t hand out excessive read, write, or execute permissions. Most files you create on your server will not need root ownership.

Back Up Your Website

Before you touch any sensitive settings on your website, it’s best practice to back up both your website and database files.

Things can easily go wrong when modifying file permissions, so this provides a safety net. If you accidentally break something on your website, you can just roll back your server.

Never Use 777

Setting any file or directory permissions to 777 is basically giving everyone in the world free reign over your website.

This grants any random visitor the ability to view files, edit and delete them, upload potentially malicious programs, and execute scripts. Obviously, this is a terrible idea.

While it may seem benign to give full permissions to just one file, a savvy hacker can easily use this to execute a malicious script or escalate their privileges and worm their way deeper into your server. So just don’t do it.

How to Change WordPress File Permissions

Now that we’ve covered the best practices for file permissions, let’s learn how to change these in various server setups.

cPanel or Dashboard

Most web hosts offer access to cPanel or some custom dashboard. You’ll want to check your hosting provider’s documentation, but within cPanel you can generally go to the File Manager, then right click any folder or file and click Change Permissions.

FTP/SFTP

You can also change permissions using FTP/SFTP access. Start by installing an FTP client like FileZilla and log in to your server. Right click any file or folder and select File permissions…

Then, enter the numeric value or just tick the boxes you want to set.

SSH/Command Line

For this step, use a command line access tool. This is usually provided by your web host. You’ll want to use the cd command to navigate to the directory of whatever file or subdirectory you wish to change. For example:

cd public_html/example_folder

You can then modify the permissions of a file or subdirectory in this folder using the chmod command. 

chmod 755 example.html

You can also recursively set permissions for an entire directory at once, but be careful when doing this.

chmod -R 755 example_subfolder

Use a Plugin

Some security plugins will allow you to easily switch file permissions from the dashboard. One example is All-In-One Security (AIOS). With this, you can change file permissions, identify insecure file permissions, and fix issues in one click. 

Common File Permission Errors in WordPress

Finally, let’s take a look at a few common file permission errors in WordPress and what causes them.

• 403 Forbidden (You don’t have permission to access on this server) – You’ll see this error if you try to access a file when you lack read permission. For example, visitors will encounter this if they try to access unpublished articles or pages. You may want to check your permissions if you’re seeing this as the administrator.

• Required file permissions missing – Certain plugins may throw up this error. This may be caused if your website files are not owned by nginx or www-data.
• You need to make this file writable before you can save your changes – You’ll see this in the WordPress editor if you lack write access to certain files.
• Permission denied. Error code: 3 – This error appears when trying to modify or upload files to your website. The causes vary, including website files being owned by root instead of nginx or www-data, needing root access, or simply lacking read/write permissions.
• Installation failed: Could not create directory – If you see this when installing or updating themes and plugins, it means that WordPress does not have write permission to the directory it’s trying to use.

Proceed With Caution When Changing WordPress File Permissions

File permissions are a very important part of maintaining website security, so you shouldn’t change them lightly. One small tweak could break your website, or let hackers more easily slip through.

But it’s good to know how these permissions work, especially if errors start cropping up. Now you know what to do – and especially what not to do – if ever you need to change your WordPress file permissions.

Did you manage to fix a WordPress file permission error? Share your experience in the comments and help others with the same problem!

The post WordPress File Permissions: Everything You Need to Know  appeared first on Torque.

Now Google has updated E-A-T again, adding an extra letter: E-E-A-T, or Double E-A-T. The new E stands for “Experience”, as in personal, hands-on experience.

While this is likely a change for the better, an algorithm update is always confusing. How can you maintain your SEO status? How do you avoid being penalized under the new rules? What does this change about the way you create content? Knowing what adjustments you need to make can save you a lot of headaches.

For that reason, if you’re worried about your SEO, this guide will walk you through the updates and how to master E-E-A-T.

The Evolution to E-E-A-T

E-A-T was first introduced to Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines back in 2014. Quality raters were instructed to rate sites on their “Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness”.

As Google released more updates and refined their search algorithm over time, E-A-T became more and more important impactful to SEO. Notably, in 2018, Google released a major algorithm update which made E-A-T more important than ever.

As a result, sites that were credible, had experienced authors, and produced quality content received preferential treatment in the SERPs.

But the Internet has faced a big change. Unless you live under a rock, you probably know all about ChatGPT and generative AI. While AI has a lot of use as an assistant and productivity tool, it’s also led to a web inundated with poor-quality, AI-generated books and articles.

Noticing this, Google’s algorithm update has added the second E to E-E-A-T: “Experience”. This requires you to show first-hand, personal experience in your writing.

Many people speculate that this is a direct response to AI-generated content. After all, AI is not currently capable of having subjective experiences.

Yet, in the end, this new update will impact more than just AI-generated content. Even if you don’t use AI at all, it can still affect your website. How can you write high-quality content that passes the E-E-A-T test?

How to Master the First “E” in E-E-A-T

Assuming you don’t rely solely on ChatGPT to write your blog, your work is already human-created. But that doesn’t mean you don’t need to worry about the new update.

The new E in E-E-A-T is all about first-hand experience. Have you ever written a sponsored post about a product you didn’t try? A roundup of popular software or services you never actually used? Given instructions or advice off the top of your head without double-checking?

These can all lead to bad user experiences – instructions that don’t work, accidental misinformation, or recommendations for products that aren’t actually any good.

Google now prioritizes first-hand experiences above all else. That primarily means no AI-generated opinions, but it has a lot of other implications.

Don’t Use Purely AI-Generated Content

If you’re looking to buy a product, download an app or program, or subscribe to a service, would you rather read an AI-generated review or one written by an actual person who had tried the product?

You probably chose the latter. So why would you put your readers through that?

Even for articles that don’t rely on first-hand experience, it’s a simple fact that AI-generated writing is wordy and lacks direction – subpar compared to the work of skilled human authors.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with using AI as an assistant, but no one wants to read something copy-pasted out of ChatGPT without even a cursory editing pass.

Since AI can’t have the “life experiences” Google now prioritizes, lazy use of AI should now be pushed out of the SERPs.

Actually Try the Product

This requirement is pretty simple, but one bloggers are sometimes guilty of not following.

As mentioned, the new “E” is all about experience, so don’t just write about something – actually use it and demonstrate your “first-hand, life experience”.

So what does this look like in practice?

• When you recommend a physical product, software, or service, actually use it before you write about it.
• Instead of copying quotes from another source, interview someone yourself.
• Actually visit a place you mention, bake and show off a recipe from a cookbook you recommend, use a featured website builder and show the final product, etc.

There are too many articles from people recommending products without even trying them, but the E-E-A-T update will at least attempt to stifle that.

Give Your Honest Opinion

Honesty is important. No product is perfect, and you’ll inevitably have some criticisms about anything you try – or you’d better have a big list of reasons about why it’s actually the best thing ever.

Even sponsored products usually don’t require you to write a glowing review without any criticism. They just want you to try the product and give some compelling reasons why you recommend it.

There’s a reason why informed consumers often place more trust in four-star reviews. A thoughtful four-star review from someone who’s clearly actually tried the product can mean a lot more than a ton of one-sentence five-star reviews that could very well be from bots.

People tune out meaningless praise, and it could indicate to Google that your review isn’t really genuine. If all you have is a bland list of features that looks like it was copied off the company’s website, how can anyone be sure that you actually did your due diligence?

Be honest about your opinion and don’t be afraid to include your real thoughts, including criticism.

Provide Proof

No matter how compelling your praise or criticism, there’s only one way to really prove you actually tried something you’re recommending — pics or it didn’t happen!

So snap photos of yourself using the product, record videos or GIFs, or in the case of online services and downloadable apps, take plenty of screenshots. This will instantly indicate to search quality raters that you have the “Experience” they’re looking for.

Conversely, avoid solely using images and screenshots scraped from the product or service’s website.

Cite Your Sources

If there’s one thing ChatGPT is bad at, it’s citing sources. Sometimes it will even make up academic papers that don’t exist.

If you truly wrote a thoughtfully-researched article yourself, you should be able to link to the sources and references you used while working on it.

Put Yourself Out There

This is already a big part of E-A-T itself, but it will also help in proving that there’s a person, not a bot, behind your articles.

Create a detailed “About” page for your website. Why did does your site exist? What’s it about? Make sure all your writers have author bios, too. Talk a little bit about yourself, any qualifications, and what got you into writing or blogging.

Be transparent about who you are and what your website is about. Proving a real person is running your website and writing your articles is best practice for excelling at E-E-A-T. It’s also great to build trust online.

The 4 Levels of E-E-A-T

To get good at E-E-A-T, it helps to be familiar with its different levels. Because it’s not a criteria your site either succeeds at or doesn’t – it’s an entire spectrum. This is defined fully in Google’s Search Quality Guidelines.

Lowest E-E-A-T

Lowest E-E-A-T is reserved for websites that are illegal, deceptive, misleading, or otherwise provide no value to anyone except scammers. If you’re reading this, let’s hope you don’t run such a website!

These are the qualities of lowest E-E-A-T websites.

• Provides untrustworthy and/or inaccurate information. May provide actively deceptive and/or harmful information.
• Covers medically or financially dangerous YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics while lacking necessary experience or expertise.
• Fraudulent, criminal, and/or scammy behavior (like an e-commerce website that doesn’t fulfill orders).
• Bad reputation in the community.

Lacking E-E-A-T

Low quality pages are defined as lacking in adequate E-E-A-T. Even bloggers with genuine intentions could end up with this designation if they fail to meet Google’s guidelines.

The worst part: No matter how high quality your content or good your reputation, if a page fails the E-E-A-T check, it will be branded “Low Quality” and take an SEO hit.

These are the qualities of websites lacking E-E-A-T.

• Fails to demonstrate first-hand experience (reviews a product or service without having used it).
• Lacks necessary expertise to cover a chosen topic, especially moderately serious/dangerous YMYL topics.
• Does not demonstrate authority (like a website providing advice on a topic outside of its scope).
• Untrustworthy practices like an e-commerce store without an about or contact page.

High Level of E-E-A-T

Websites that satisfy Google’s requirements will be granted “High” page quality.

Achieving this is pretty simple; follow the E-E-A-T guidelines already put down. Demonstrate first-hand experience, expertise where necessary, authority on your topic, and trustworthiness via honest business practices.

Very High Level of E-E-A-T

Demonstrating E-E-A-T may net you a “High” rating, but if you want to distinguish yourself, you need to go above and beyond.

These are the qualities of a website that more than satisfies E-E-A-T requirements.

• Provides an authoritative, “go-to” source on a particular topic.
• Demonstrates a high level of expertise and relevant experience.
• Unique, original, high-quality content with clear effort put into it.
• Fully satisfies users’ search intent.
• Fully qualified to advise on covered YMYL topics.

Other SEO Considerations

“Experience” itself is fairly straightforward: Just write content that reflects first-hand, human experiences. But several other factors are at play here that can complicate things.

To learn more about how Google ranks pages based on E-E-A-T and other factors, check out their Search Quality Rater Guidelines.

E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness

The original E-A-T is still in effect, and it’s important to demonstrate expertise in your field. But how can you do that effectively? Here’s the lowdown:

• Create high-quality content – Bring value and a unique perspective to your readers. Avoid lazy tactics like, again, copying out of ChatGPT.
• Demonstrate expertise – What makes you qualified to write about this topic? Do you have years of experience? Licensure, certification, or relevant education? Awards? A successful business? Show it off on your author bio and about pages.
• Consult experts – If you’re not an expert yourself, having one checking over your content or interviewing them as part of your article can still effectively demonstrate expertise.
• Build your reputation – Having authority in the industry means everyone trusts you and your blog as a great source of information. That means plenty of mentions, inbound links, and collaborations.
• Be transparent – People want to know who you are and where your information is coming from. Be honest about your intentions.

YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) Content

YMYL content is about topics that could impact your life, health, or money. The most notable examples are medical and financial issues, especially those that are life-threatening or where misinformation is particularly damaging.

Google demands that publishers of YMYL content adhere strictly to E-E-A-T standards. That means medical information should be written and/or vetted by medically licensed individuals, and qualified financial advisors are handling sensitive topics like taxes and investments.

Some medical or financial YMYL topics allow for perspectives gained from real-life experience. For example, tips on saving money while on a low income or suggestions on staying comfortable while coping with chronic pain are appropriate if you’ve lived through these situations.

Google added some extra guidance on Experience vs. Expertise in their Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.

The Needs Met Rating

One of the primary ways Google’s search quality evaluators rank pages is through determining if the search result does what they wanted – the “Needs Met” rating.

Does it answer the question they asked? Was the content high-quality and helpful? Does it satisfy their search intent?

Maximizing SEO means understanding the users’ intent behind the keywords or queries you’re optimizing for, and meeting that intent as much as possible. Your keyword optimization might earn you clicks, but if you’re not satisfying search intent, you’re failing the Needs Met rating.

What Makes a Low Quality Page

Page Quality is another important ranking separate from Needs Met or E-E-A-T. It’s influenced by the presence of YMYL content, the purpose of the page, the type of website, and, of course, the quality of its content.

So what makes a page low or lowest quality by Google’s standards?

• Lack of E-E-A-T, especially for YMYL topics.
• Does not satisfy search intent.
• Factually inaccurate and misleading content (like titles that don’t reflect article content).
• Disruptive ads or spammy website design.
• Plagiarized or copied content.
• Deceptive and untrustworthy content (including not disclosing purely AI-written works).
• Harmful, hateful, and/or dangerous content.
• Illegal content, scams, and spam.

E-E-A-T: First-Hand Experience Is More Valuable Than Ever

If you’re worried about the new E-E-A-T guidelines, don’t be. As long as your articles aren’t low-quality and purely AI-generated AI but incorporate your first-hand experiences and opinions, your rankings will probably be fine.

Just follow the four tenets of E-E-A-T – Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness – to meet Google’s quality guidelines and succeed at SEO.

What do you think of the E-E-A-T Google Search update? What steps will you be taking to keep your site in line with the latest best practices? Share what you think in the comments!

The post Google’s E-E-A-T Guidelines: How to Show Experience in Content appeared first on Torque.

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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. 

I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and my contributions on TorqueMag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app. You can also download the episodes directly from WMR.fm. 

Now, I have to tell you, I am extremely excited about today’s topic: Data portability. I’ve been blogging since about 2004. Back then, if you wanted to migrate your content from MSN Spaces to Blogger, you pretty much had to manually copy/paste every post, every title, and every accompanying image and just go through and do that. 

Now, luckily, I only had like a dozen posts at the time, so it didn’t take that long. But in 2006, when I migrated my site from Blogger to WordPress, I was blown away by how easy things had gotten. Blogger had this export function, and LaughingSquid, the WordPress host I was using at the time, had an Import From Blogger function. 

It was super easy and seamless to move, and I honestly took it for granted. I just thought, “This is how it’s going to be now. I’m just going to be able to move things from one place to another.” And, obviously, the things didn’t work out that way.

As the years progressed, it started getting harder and harder to export your content and move it elsewhere. For example, you wouldn’t even dream of migrating your posts from Facebook to Elon Musk’s X and vice versa. But you also might have some trouble going from one CMS to another these days. Enter the Data Liberation project, announced by Matt Mullenweg at the State of the Word in 2023.

This open-source initiative aims to break down the barriers of content migration, making it easier and much more seamless to move your precious content from one platform to another. So joining us today to shed light on the challenges and aspirations of the Data Liberation project is Jordan Gillman, a Happiness Engineer at Automattic and the shepherd of this groundbreaking endeavor.

Jordan, how are you doing today?

Jordan Gillman: I’m doing well. Doc, how are you doing?

 Doc Pop: I’m doing so well. Right before the show, I asked you this, and I just want to kind of get this—I want to brag about it: This is your first interview about the Data Liberation project, right?

Jordan Gillman: It is. I’ve done one written interview, but this is definitely my first podcast, hopefully of many, about the Data Liberation project, which I’m very excited about.

Doc Pop: And I’m excited too. This is one of those things that there’s a lot of fascinating technology out there right now. And it’s kind of funny, at the State of the Word 2023, this is the thing that got me most excited. I was the most excited about it. So why don’t you tell us about the Data Liberation project, what your goals are, and the history of the project?

Jordan Gillman: Yeah, sure thing. Well, you’re right. Matt did announce it at the State of the Word late last year. And at its core, the Data Liberation project is a community project by the community, for the community, and for an open web. Imagining a time where you can move your content with a single clip, bring it into WordPress and take it out of WordPress.

Ultimately, our mission is to democratize publishing, and what that really means in terms of content is having the power to move your content freely to WordPress from wherever. The freedom to move your WordPress site to another host with a minimum of fuss, but also the freedom to export your content out of WordPress in a format that’s usable however you want to use it.

So I’m excited about the potential of that in freeing people’s content from walled gardens.

Doc Pop: As you alluded to there, this isn’t just about importing from one platform to WordPress. This isn’t about a Squarespace to WordPress importer. This is also trying to unlock even migrating from WordPress. We’re not trying to lock people into anything, right?

Jordan Gillman: I think that’s exactly it. I mean, as much as we, we want everyone to come to WordPress. That’s obviously, you know, a huge goal of the project, but we don’t want to be doing that in horrible ways. We don’t want to lock people in. We don’t want to free them from somewhere else only to feel locked into us.

So I think it’s an important part of this conversation, an important part of this project, to be talking about what freedom of content coming out of WordPress looks like.

Doc Pop: And if we were to go to, wordpress.org, wordpress.org/data-liberation, we would find a lot of the guides. 

And that kind of feels like what the current state of the Data Liberation project is right now. Is saying—I might be wrong—but it looks like instead of saying, “Here’s the tools, it’s a little bit more about like, “Hey, here’s a guideline. If you want to go from RSS to WordPress or Wix to WordPress or Drupal to WordPress or WordPress to WordPress, here’s some guides, well-written.” Is that kind of the current state of the project right now?

Jordan Gillman: That is the current state of, I guess, what’s user facing, for the project so far. And a lot of that happened around the timing of the State of the Word and a lot of that was “let’s take a look at what existing resources we have,” so a lot of those guides from the support documents from wordpress.org, a lot of the tools that are kind of in another section there existing tools that people have linked to. And so at that stage it was really a case of, well, let’s pull together a resource of information we have to use as a starting point.

I’m hopeful that those guides will continue to be really useful, even as we see more tooling introduced, because the nature of things at the moment in terms of migrating to WordPress is: Even when we have importers and we’ve got a range of core importers that are available. Many of those still require a little bit of user work.

You know, so we’ve got the guide to how to export your content from Squarespace, which gives you a WordPress import file. Or we’ve got the guide to use RSS. And so some sites will give you an RSS record that you can download and then import that with an RSS importer. 

So at the moment, there are some solutions, which are part manual work and then part a tool to finish the job, and that’s really what those guides are for. So we’re hoping to build those out further, but ultimately, by the end of the project, I’d love to see those guides be integrated in a way where they’re part of the tools and if there’s any manual steps required by users that we’re guiding them through those kind of in real time as they’re needed.

Doc Pop: And that’s what I’d like to know about. Like looking long term, is the goal for the Data Liberation project to be to create a tool or to create some sort of standardized data structure that everyone adheres to or is it. 

Or is it…I don’t know, like, currently right now, it’s just like, everything’s so different, you’re sharing the tools and the resources, and it’s just a nice hub for learning how to do that.

What are the long term goals? So for the project.

Jordan Gillman: That’s a really good question, and it’s something that ultimately I’m hoping that the community as a whole will help drive exactly what that’s going to end up looking like. 

There are a few ideas that have been floated. So we’ve got a GitHub repository where kind of the work and discussion is happening at the moment.

One proposal in that discussion is centered around the idea of maybe a plugin, like a generic import plugin that you might install on your site. And you would give it the source URL, and it would detect the kind of site, the platform of your existing site, and then it would walk you through the steps that might be needed.

So it might show you the guide, and then it would direct you to the plugin that you’d need to install to then use whatever you’ve been able to export. So that’s, I suppose, an idea that fits kind of within the existing paradigm of WordPress plugins and importing. We’re just kind of putting a neat front on it to tidy it up.

There’s another proposal which kind of goes a step further and imagines almost a hosted service on WordPress.org itself where that would happen seamlessly behind the scenes and so you would provide the URL of your existing site. It would detect what platform you’re using and then it would get the content however it needs to, and it would roll up a new playground site for you, you know, within a couple of minutes, so that ideally with one click you have a playground site of your content in a WordPress install. And then once it’s in playground, we have options of how you might want to export or migrate that in a WordPress format to kind of use as you wish.

So they’re both really interesting proposals. It may be that they are different phases of the same kind of idea. But I suppose to answer the second part of your question as to what the end goal is: That’s really something that I don’t see it as my job to decide. Which is why I consider myself a shepherd of the project.

The current phase we’re in is really just about facilitating discussion amongst the community. We want to see brainstorming, we want to see ideas, and then we want to see people, you know, challenge those ideas and together come up with what the actual work might look like and what our actual end goal might look like.

Doc Pop: And I imagine part of this is also not just about creating resources and creating tools. I imagine there’s some sort of political element here where we’re trying to call out services that aren’t allowing exporting. I feel like Squarespace does have an export option. So if you’re in Squarespace, you’re not locked in as a consumer, you can export to WordPress.

Wix, on the other hand, doesn’t, and I feel like part of maybe what’s going on here is sort of trying to get people on board. And as you get those numbers, then you have an easier time saying, “Wix, everybody else does this. Why aren’t you allowing your consumers to migrate off of your platform?”

Jordan Gillman: Yeah, I mean, it’s not a current goal to make this a political or social statement, I suppose. It really is about empowering WordPress users as a first step. However, I won’t deny that I can imagine that a successful project of data liberation within WordPress certainly does start to ask those questions.

And yeah, if our, again, if our mission is to democratize the web, then perhaps those are good conversations to be having. But I should say that it’s, you know, it’s not a goal of the project to be starting those bigger, broader conversations and lobbying and pressuring, I suppose, other organizations to have to be on board with that.

] Doc Pop: It is fun though, when you look through seeing how RSS comes to save the day with so many of these projects. If they don’t currently support any sort of migration, data portability, there’s always that RSS feed, which is this open-source thing that everyone still uses, thank God. 

And so, worst case—it seems like with some of these—the worst case scenario is, “Hey, at least you still have your RSS and you probably still have to build a front end, I suppose, but at least you’ll have all that metadata and blog posts and titles and images and alt text that’s in the images.” 

All that stuff should hopefully get sucked up in the RSS and be very easy—that’s a very easy format to move around from one place to another, right?

Jordan Gillman: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I think in my head I’m actually building out as part of my role, building out a list of basically the current state of migratability of a whole bunch of platforms and what we’re going to see with the potential of roping it into WordPress is there are going to be some platforms which we have, you know, we’ve got API access. So with the right development, we can actually probably make API calls and pull the content in a very similar format. 

Or we might have services like Squarespace does at the moment, which allow you an export of content. And then so we import that XML file, and you’ll get the content, but you’ll lose some fidelity of the experience.

And then we’ve got RSS, which of course you’re still going to be able to get your content, but you’re not going to be pulling in a layout. You might have troubles with some of the media might not come across. So I think there’s going to be like a differing level of fidelity or parity of display of how we might be able to migrate things.

And for me, that’s one of the reasons that I’ve been very much thinking about the Data Liberation project at this point about content portability. So getting a full migration of my site looks like this on Squarespace. To my site looks like this on WordPress is an admirable goal, but it’s a big shot.

And I think what we definitely can do, and this is, you know, this is the open web kind of side of it is that we can definitely say, “well, you created this content, you should own it and take it where you want, and it may not look exactly the same, but they’re your words, they’re your images. It’s your video, your audio, and you can take it with you.”

Doc Pop: We’re going to take a short break and when we come back, we’ll pick up our conversation about data portability with Jordan Gillman. So stay tuned for more after the short break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This. Today, we’re talking data portability with Jordan Gillman, a Happiness Engineer at Automattic who’s also a shepherd of the Data Liberation project. 

Jordan, before the break, you were talking about the different places that we can migrate from and how We currently have this resource center for learning how to migrate from one place to another.

And part of that, and part of the data liberation, is not just for making it easier to import to WordPress, but even making WordPress easier to migrate to other platforms, including a thing that’s kind of surprising: WordPress to WordPress. There’s challenges that some people have migrating from WordPress—one WordPress host to another.

Can you talk a little bit about that? Maybe what y’all, what thoughts y’all have heard so far about that process?

Jordan Gillman: Yeah, absolutely, I’d love to. It’s actually very fresh in my mind. I was lucky enough to attend WordCamp Asia a week before last, and I spent a lot of time in the sponsors area talking to hosts there about the challenges that they have with migrations, because for many web hosts these days, you know, they offer free migrations for sites, and it’s a big part of their kind of onboarding for users.

So, one of the bigger things that came up is just, in many ways, the shortcomings of the WXR support format that WordPress uses natively. It has served us really well. It is, you know, it’s done a fantastic job. But there’s no denying it has shortcomings when it comes to a full-site migration.

There are challenges with filtering what content you want to export. It doesn’t natively bring the images with the export. Kind of the source site still needs to be live to fetch those images. So, in speaking to hosts, very rarely did they use the native WordPress features for migrations. They were most often using third-party plugins and tools to kind of do a full migration of basically the WP content folder and then bringing the database over. 

And so, there was very little work using native import-export tools. And speaking to them, they had a lot of troubles when it came, usually, to just dealing with access to the source site.

So trouble with credentials for logging in or two-factor authentication being active. Clients who wanted to migrate and had already pointed the DNS, so the domain was pointing to the new site instead of the old one, so they couldn’t access it. And issues with existing hosting, like timeouts and memory issues.

So a lot of the time, the biggest successes they had when doing migrations were using these third-party tools, which are really great. They do a good job, but I don’t think that means we shouldn’t try and bring some of that stability and ability to migrate site to site into WordPress itself. 

Cause I think part of part of democratizing publishing is that if you, for some reason, want to move hosts, you shouldn’t be locked into a WordPress host.

You should be able to very freely shift to whoever suits you best.

Doc Pop: I haven’t really thought about WXR in a while, that’s the—I just had to look that up. The WordPress extended RSS, that’s the export/import file that’s usually used for WordPress. Is that correct?

Jordan Gillman: Yeah, that’s correct. So if you are doing an export from your WordPress site just using the native tools, it will download an XML file in that specific WordPress export format. 

It contains all of your content, it contains references to your media, but it is a little bit limited in that it’s just a single file, so it doesn’t bundle media. And of course, it doesn’t include your theme or your plugins or any of those things that kind of make your site visually and functionally your site. It’s just a content export.

Doc Pop: So what does the Data Liberation project mean for WordPress migration plugins?

Jordan Gillman: You know, that’s a great question. And the answer is at the moment, we don’t know. 

I think there’s—it’s a highly competitive space in the kind of WordPress migration plugin space at the moment. And I think there’s plenty that core WordPress can learn from approaches there. But I don’t I don’t think we’ll be aiming to, you know, overtake any of those.

But I think it’s fair that native WordPress allows a bit more flexibility of migration than it does currently.

Doc Pop: I understand why maybe there’d be a plugin to help you import to a certain tool. I guess, is there any reason that plugins or—I don’t know how to phrase this.

But I’m thinking about how, when we’re exporting and importing, we’re oftentimes given options of both sides. Like, where are you importing from? Where are you exporting from? 

Why is that? Why can’t we just have one type of file that we export as, and then maybe have that interpreted to whatever platform it’s going to in whatever way it needs to.

Jordan Gillman: You know what, I think that’s a really great question. The short answer is I don’t know. I think that the, I mean, it sounds like the question you’re asking is perhaps a little bit around like a standardization of format for migrational content. Which I think is another thing that’s—it’s not off the table, but it’s a very big conversation.

So I do know that, kind of, over the last year, there was a working group amongst learning management systems, kind of the LMS plugins in WordPress, to standardize their format so that there was greater interoperability migrating between, you know, Sensei and LearnPress, and those kinds of learning plugins.

And that was really successful, but it was also in a very specific small niche. So I think there is some precedent there, but aiming to standardize that is not, at the moment, part of the goals of the project. Certainly, you know, like I said we’re in the stage of discussion, and so if that’s a discussion that grows and interest is fierce then we’ll need to consider that.

But I think that approaching it from that point of view runs the risk of getting bogged down in conversations about what the standard is before we actually provide anything useful to users. So I’m very strongly in favor of let’s give users some tools. Let’s make life easier for them. Let’s make it easier for them to get onto WordPress.

Perhaps at the same time that does raise questions about a standard, but it’s certainly not where we were looking to start.

Doc Pop: It’s early days for the project and I keep asking you about, like, the end goal, and I apologize for that. You’re still figuring this stuff out as well. 

One thing I’d like to hear though is maybe just your personal opinion so far about some of these companies might not ever want to quote unquote opt into allowing users to export their data. Maybe they have some sort of a user agreement saying “hey, once you’re with us, you’re not allowed to use some sort of content migration tool.”

 And I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts about, like, do platforms need to opt into this or is it okay for us to work around when platforms are being selfish with our content?

Jordan Gillman: Obviously, it would be great for people to opt in. That’s always going to be the preference is if we can be encouraging a broader environment in the web where this idea of content portability is the norm, but we’re not always going to get everyone on board with that. Our first approach will be definitely to try and be using, I suppose, open methods of doing that.

And so we’ll be looking at places that do already offer exports. For those that do not offer exports yet, it may be that we start to be in a position to, you know, have that conversation with them about opening it up, but I do fully expect that there will be many of platforms for which we’ll have to figure out, you know, workarounds to try and, you know, liberate the content for people.

And I say we, in the very broad sense of the word we, because I’m not from a development background, I’m from a kind of design and front end background. So the work of doing that kind of thing is exactly why I’m talking to the community and looking for folks to get involved who have much more experience in those kinds of areas than I do.

Doc Pop: We’re going to take one more quick break. And when we come back, we’re going to wrap up our conversation with Jordan Gillman about the Data Liberation project. So stay tuned,

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This. We’re wrapping up our conversation about the Data Liberation project with Jordan Gillman. 

And 2023, Matt Mullenweg said the following at his State of the Word. He said, “Imagine a more open web where people can switch between any platform of their choosing. A web where being locked into a system is a thing of the past. This is the web I’ve always wanted to see.” 

When he announced this project, I was extremely excited about it. And I know it’s still the early days for the project, but I just wanted to hear how is the project doing amongst other key projects in the WordPress space, such as marketing and site editing and feature polish? Like how do you think this Data Liberation project is kind of currently doing compared to the other projects within WordPress?

Jordan Gillman: Yeah, that’s a great question. I suppose in terms of the goal for the project it is one of the key projects that has been earmarked by Matt and Josepha, the Executive Director of WordPress for 2024. 

So in terms of the plans for the year, it’s a really major part of that. One question I’ve had from a few folks in the community has been, why are we focusing on this instead of X?

You know, why are we starting this new project rather than fixing the editor more? Or why are we doing this rather than working on user management more or any of those things? And I think the important thing about the Data Liberation project is it’s not in place to try and take resources away from any of the other work that’s being done on the project.

We are a huge community of people. There are a huge amount of people working on the project, but there’s always room for more. So part of what we’re seeking to do is really hopefully activate people for whom this is exciting, people who are passionate about content freedom, people who have skill sets in those areas.

And so rather than taking resources from other important work, like working on the editor, like, you know, the existing teams within Make WordPress, whether that be the marketing team, or the meta team, or any of them, we’re seeking to really engage with and activate potential new contributors back into the project and really kind of resource things that way. 

So in terms of the overall goal it’s a big goal for the year, but it’s something that we’re starting at a really grassroots level, I suppose.

Doc Pop: We’re running low on time. I have two questions for you. Maybe we can wrap them together. 

I’d like to know if any organizations outside of the WordPress space have volunteered to contribute to this project. And I’d also like to know what organizations have currently been the biggest contributors to the Data Liberation project.

Jordan Gillman: Sure. So the short answer for the first one is that we’ve not got any resources coming from, kind of, outside the WordPress space at the moment. Again, as when, as we’re not at this stage, kind of seeking to make it a more political, broader statement. That’s not too surprising to me, but it’s definitely something that I’m open to.

And in terms of the second one, the shortest answer is that there has been a little bit of discussion within—in terms of within the WordPress community—within the Data Liberation Slack channel, there’s been some good discussion which has come from, you know, a variety of organizations, obviously, in the Make Slack instance. There’s also been a little bit of contribution by members of Automattic who are also full-time contributors towards WordPress particularly from the meta team.

Some of the proposals that have been raised for discussion have come from those sources. But what we’re really seeking to do is get more eyes and a more diverse set of opinions into that conversation at the moment, which is part of, a major part of what I’m working on at the moment.

Doc Pop: Jordan. I really appreciate your time today. Where can people learn more about what you’re working on?

Jordan Gillman: Awesome. That is the best question you could have asked. The best place to head right now is to go to WordPress.org/data-liberation. That will get you to the existing tools, but there’s also a couple of notes at the top about where you can get involved and join the discussion and join the planning.

A secondary place that I would recommend is if you are in the Make WordPress Slack community—which you absolutely should be, it’s a great place to be—the Data Liberation channel within Slack is where most of the brainstorming and thinking and on-the-fly stuff is going to happen. And I’ll be increasing, kind of, the activity in there over the coming weeks.

Doc Pop: That’s awesome. Thank you so much for your time today. And thanks to everyone who’s listened so far. 

Press this as a WordPress community podcast on WMR. You can visit TorqueMag.io to read transcribed versions of these podcasts, plus more WordPress news and tutorials, that’s TorqueMag.io. You can subscribe on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or download directly from WMR.fm. 

I’m your host, Dr. Popular. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and I love spotlighting members of that community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: Data Liberation appeared first on Torque.

The 1950s New York Yankees are prime examples, as are the 1990s Chicago Bulls. But now, as this year’s Plugin Madness draws to a close, the winning plugin Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) joins the ranks of all-time championship dynasties, securing its third Plugin Madness trophy since the event’s inception in 2016.

This year’s victory also marks back-to-back championships for ACF, the world’s most widely used custom fields plugin, which edged out WooCommerce in a nail-biting, buzzer-beating finish.

Before the final round, ACF also outmaneuvered other formidable competitors, including Table Press, Wordfence, and previous Plugin Madness champion Smush, underscoring ACF’s enduring relevance and widespread popularity within the WordPress community.

What is Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)?

ACF is the most widely used custom fields plugin that transforms WordPress sites into fully-fledged content management systems, providing comprehensive tools to manipulate data more effectively.

Using the plugin, you gain total control over your WordPress edit screens and custom field data. The plugin allows you to add customized fields to any page, enhancing site functionality with elements like customer reviews or detailed product descriptions. It’s also user-friendly, and its intuitive interface ensures both novices and seasoned developers can maximize its capabilities.

With over 5 million active installations, ACF has long been a cornerstone of the WordPress plugin ecosystem. The team behind ACF consistently drives innovation with new features and improvements that empower developers to build highly functional websites effortlessly.  

Now, with its third Plugin Madness championship in tow, the plugin has further cemented itself as a pillar within the WordPress community, with more innovation and inspiration to come.     

Previous Plugin Madness Winners 

Now in its ninth year, Plugin Madness has seen a wide variety of notable winners. 

While ACF won its second championship last year, The Plus Addons for Elementor took the crown as a first-time competitor in 2022. In 2021, FluentCRM made headlines with a Cinderella story of its own. 

Elementor claimed victories in 2020 and 2019, while Smush had a similar back-to-back run in 2018 and 2017.

A big thank you goes out to everyone who nominated a plugin and participated in the weekly voting. 

Plugin Madness is an excellent platform for highlighting outstanding plugins and the teams and individuals behind them.

Congratulations once again to ACF on clinching this year’s Plugin Madness championship!

The post Advanced Custom Fields is Your 2024 Plugin Madness Champion!  appeared first on Torque.

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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. 

I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and my contributions on torquemag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app. You can also download episodes directly from WMR.fm. 

Now, the media landscape has always had its ups and downs, but the past few months have felt particularly grim to me for journalism. Prominent newspapers like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have had massive layoffs in January. 

And since then other sites like Sports Illustrated, National Geographic, Pitchfork, and Vice—that’s a big one—have had their newsrooms gutted, turning them effectively into ghost brands. These companies will still exist as a brand, but just without the journalists. 

In the wake of all this, we’ve seen a few successful worker-owned sites like Defector, Flaming Hydra, and 404 Media popping up and doing great journalism. We’ve also seen the rise of independently owned newsletters powered by platforms like Substack, Patreon, Ghost, and yes, WordPress. 

I wanted to learn more about the future of publishing so today I’m talking with Ryan Singel, the Co-Founder of Outpost Publishers Cooperative, which helps subscriber-driven newsletters and sites thrive with independent tools rather than using the VC funded platforms of the olden times. 

Now, Ryan is, like I said, the Co-Founder of Outpost Publishers Cooperative. He’s also the founder of Contextly, which is one of my favorite WordPress plugins and a former editor at Wired Magazine, Ryan, how are you doing today?

Ryan Singel: Great! Thanks for having me on, Doc!

Doc Pop: Yeah. Yeah. With that big bummer intro hopefully you’re gonna brighten things up today. I know that you came from the world of journalism. Why don’t you give us a little bit of your just a brief rundown of your WordPress origin story.

Ryan Singel: Yeah so I had had my own kind of blog sites. I think the first one I had was on MovableType, and then when I was working at Wired, which was part of a, you know, owned by Condé Nast, a big publishing, you know, conglomerate, we were stuck on sort of terrible magazine-centric CMS that we all hated, and we kind of had an internal revolt and managed to sort of get Wired to be allowed to run WordPress and it was a liberating experience for us. 

So I think that was, maybe that was fairly early on. I wanna say like 2007-ish maybe I wanna say. And so just, it freed things up, launched a bunch of just sort of like standalone blogs that did really well. Folks like, and the biggest one people might remember is Danger Room, which is, was led by Noah Shachtman, who then became, you know, Editor in Chief over at Rolling Stone as of late. 

But we were able to sort of, you know, it sort of freed us up and then as we were working, you know, working on it, I got frustrated with how we picked related stories for our posts and and eventually created my own solution and then left journalism to start Contextly, which kind of like makes it easier for people to show great recommendations back to their own content, whether that’s algorithmic or editorially picked.

So, WordPress, you know, both changed my daily life publishing and also changed my life in terms of turning me from a journalist into an entrepreneur.

Doc Pop: You know, I’ve talked to you several times on this show and a few others. 

One of my favorite plugins, Contextly, is a WordPress plugin that allows people to have a way to keep visitors on their site longer. Like, they read an article and Contextly helps suggest another article, hopefully to keep them sticky and, hopefully to let you know what people are interested in. It gives cool daily information and analytics that are pretty different and more useful, I think, than Google’s analytics.

And we might talk about that later. I don’t know if that’s really relevant to today’s conversation, other than the fact that, I think, right after you left WIRED, you started thinking about the issues you faced in the times of journalism and publishing and kind of wanting to find solutions for it.

How do you keep people sticking around and using things like WordPress to use those tools? Currently you’re working on a project, the Outpost Publishers Cooperative, I don’t know if it kind of fits that vibe or not, but why don’t you tell us what’s going on there?

Ryan Singel: Yeah, so one of the things we really wanted with Contextly was, you know, you get somebody to come into your site is you want to get them to read more so that they come back, right? Or, you know, kind of become a subscriber or a loyalist. The goal we were trying to build there was really like how do you build a loyal audience, right? Not just, you know, getting sort of a viral hit.

But that was, you know, during the days of, the fire hose of Facebook traffic. So most publishers were just fine. You know, we didn’t care if we got people’s email addresses. We don’t care if they come back as long as we kind of just keep pumping stuff out and we’ll just make money off of the, you know, the Facebook ads and, you know, the Facebook traffic.

And that was a little frustrating. And then, you know, what we’ve seen is a change over the last few years, you know, where people are starting to sort of want to be loyal, they want to, you know, support the people whose stuff they like, right? Whether that’s on Patreon or or Substack or, you know, there’s a number of different platforms for that.

And then we started looking at Ghost, which is an open-source publishing system. That’s a little, that’s more sort of like, has membership and newsletter sending kind of baked into it and decided like, this was the, you know—felt like there was kind of a mixture of the zeitgeist of change in the world and people wanting to do some, you know, wanting to sort of build publishing, you know, sort of, I don’t know—build a publication that is sustainable and people being willing to pay for things. And just seemed kind of the perfect storm of sort of social, economic, and then technical changes.

It just became easier to run a site that is subscription driven. So I feel like it’s a continuation of what we were doing with Contextly and it’s an interesting moment to be in because it’s both full of peril and bad news and also lots of opportunity.

Doc Pop: You mentioned Ghost, it is an open-source platform. It seemed like it started off as a competitor to WordPress. I didn’t follow it very closely, but it feels like it then pivoted to, sort of, you say subscriber-based; I tend to think of them as powering a lot of newsletters while still having kind of a front-end kind of WordPress-y website.

Is that, is that kind of a fair thing to say is that they, you know, started off as a competitor to WordPress and pivoted to a slightly different model that focused on subscribers and newsletters?

Ryan Singel: Yeah, I didn’t follow them super early on so, you know, I think early on they wanted to be kind of the, you know, a fast, React-based alternative. We’re doing a lot of stuff to, like, help, you know, people run headless websites. I think a lot of their early clients, we saw a lot of, sort of, corporate blogs, you know, startup blogs that were running on a different-ish platform. 

And they have kind of a different underlying architecture, so it’s more API-driven rather than plugin-driven. And I think it was about three, maybe three or four years ago now, they started to move to more of a sending out newsletters. And I like to think of it less as the, sort of like, you know, I like to think of sites as being sort of like—what I think Ghost is really good at is the subscription part.

The newsletter is kind of nice, you know, that it’s very easy to sort of write a post and send it, but I think, you know, with subscriptions, what you’re really kind of talking about there is sort of like the community-ness of it, right? Being able to easily get someone and sort of, like, have them, their member, I don’t know, their member-ness being like very much a part of your publishing system.

So, yeah, I think they’re less of a sort of a general attempt to be a general replacement, you know, in the way that I think WordPress feels like a Swiss Army knife where it can, you know, you really can make it kind of do everything, to being a very specialized tool that’s focused on publications that are really about getting members and distributing, you know, distributing via newsletters or being, you know, paid or graded content.

Doc Pop: We’re going to take a quick break here. And when we come back, we’re going to pick up our conversation with Ryan, and we’re going to talk about some of the journalist-owned publications that are kind of filling the gap and using these small tools to, like I said, fill the gap in the news space.

So stay tuned for more after this quick break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This. Today, we’re talking to Ryan Singel, a Co-Founder of Outpost Publishers Cooperative. 

We are talking about how journalists can use new tools to hopefully fill the gap that’s left when these larger journalistic empires are now gutting and getting rid of their staff. I think of some of the successful stories that have happened in the past year: we’ve got Defector, Racket, Flaming Hydra, 404 Media, which is a personal favorite, Lever News, and Tangle. 

These are just some examples. I don’t know if they’re all worker-owned, but they are all small publishers that are focused around finding sustainable ways to bring journalism to readers. Ryan, can you tell us a little bit about some of these sites and what they have in common?

Ryan Singel: Yeah, so I think what we’ve seen is, you know, we’ve got people who have, you know, journalistic experience right? They know how to write stories, they’re hungry, they want to move fast, and they’re looking for independence and so that they’re not at the whim of, you know, in the case of sort of newspapers, right, you get private equity that just buys up the whole chain or just bad corporate decision making or the reliance on advertising, you know, that’s where you just need tons and tons of page views in order to pay the bills.

And so I think what we sort of, the common thing is like, you know, everybody’s trying to do something new, but they want to do something journalistic, right? You know, they want to report news, they want to build a community. 

And so I think we’ve largely seen is like most of them, you know, the main focus is build a loyal community, sending out things via email addresses, but, you know, can also be having their paid members get the paid version of their podcast, for instance, or join their Discord community, right?

So it’s just very community-focused, and then other sources of things like ads or even events, are kind of, they’re secondary to that. So I think what we really see is like a mixture of sort of a frustration with the current world, trying to do something new, and a tenaciousness to sort of fight their way to the point where they’re sustainable.

Doc Pop: Now, when I think of a few of these publications that we just mentioned, it seems like they are shifting from the days of ad-funded news and leaning in more towards subscriber-paid funded news. 

And oftentimes it kind of, brings to mind paywalls. I don’t know if necessarily all of these are paywalls, even if they are kind of raising money from subscribers. But It definitely feels like we have the shift in how journalism is getting funded, but also in how people like you or I might interpret someone asking us for money up front for news, where I definitely two years ago would have been like, “why are you sharing paywalled articles?” And now I’m probably guilty of sharing articles that I’ve paid for without even thinking about, like, the old me trying to read them.

Is there like a shift in how this is being funded?

Ryan Singel: Yeah, there is a shift, you know, and especially on the small side. You know, I think you’re starting to see it, you know, we’ll see a mix of, you know, I think what a lot of people do is a mix of like, the majority or half of their stuff is not behind a paywall. We’re seeing more stuff that is behind, kind of, a registration wall, so you have to give your email address to read it.

And then some portion of the site being, you know, for paying subscribers only. And it’s definitely a tension, you know, because nobody really wants to paywall their stuff. But they, you know, at some point you kind of have to—there’s, you know, the calculation of like, “how do we get someone to go from being free to paid, right? How do we do this?” 

In the kind of local news space, there’s a large portion of the, sort of new sites that are out there that are on a nonprofit model and don’t do any of the sort of, you know, sort of the hard paywalls. And then the memberships, they are generally kind of, cast as more of a, kind of like a donation model, you know, sort of a public broadcasting-ish model.

But that tends to mean they’re more reliant on grants and other sorts of funding because it’s just they just tend not to get as much membership money that way. But they see themselves as being, you know, a public service and, you know, often bringing news to communities that just don’t have any other source of news.

But there’s definitely been a change in the number of things that have gone behind paywalls that, you know, used to be only the Wall Street Journal could get away with it, and now, yeah lots of small indie folks are finding out that, you know, that can work for them as well.

Doc Pop: Emotionally, there’s a difference between me landing on a Washington Post article and being asked for money, and me landing on a 404 media page, where I know there’s literally four journalists who are getting paid with that, right? 

It’s not like a whole staff-wide thing, it’s like, “oh, this is going to pay for your writing,” which also kind of goes hand-in-hand with, like, why I might be more likely to subscribe to a newsletter is because it’s like, there’s a person and there’s a name and there’s a human connection there. 

Where if it’s a large company, at a certain point, and they’re asking me to pay for something, but there’s still ads and, you know, product marketing happening inside there, I’m a little less likely to do that.

Ryan Singel: Yeah, I think there was just, there’s just definitely been a shift, you know, and I don’t know if it started with Patreon, but like, there just seemed to be a cultural shift where, you know, we’re just more willing to hand over money to people whose stuff we kind of, like, we just want them to be out in the world, right? 

We want their stuff to exist. We want them to be able to do what they’re doing and, you know, make a decent living doing it. You know, because, the amount of content you’re gonna get for, you know, ten bucks a month from a newsletter from someone who you really like, you know, you’re going to get a lot more from the Washington Post, at least in terms of volume, right?

You give the Washington Post ten bucks a year, you get tons and tons of stuff, but you may not get, you know—but that misses the person whose, like, perspective you love, or who is writing about a niche topic that you care about, or someone who’s writing about your local community. So I feel like there has been, you know, a aort of a cultural shift. 

And then we’ve just also seen the tech tools have made it easier to do that. So, that smaller site, the 404media, has, you know, a membership system that I would say is as good as most mid-range publishers, you know, mid-sized publishers, you know, or even better. You know, some of those, some of the larger tech sites, larger news publishers have terrible tech.

So, it’s—there’s been a democratizing function of, I think, open-source CMSs and, and even some of the corporate-funded, well, you know, VC-funded ones that kind of goes hand-in-hand with that. 

Doc Pop: On the subject of tech. If someone was running a WordPress news site and they wanted to get it funded, one alternative, we mentioned Patreon. Patreon has a really good plugin for WordPress that allows you to connect it and paywall basically articles so you can have your Patreon site, but you don’t have to just publish on Patreon.

You can still have a WordPress site that has, like, “Oh, to have access to this section, you need to, you need to do this.” And it might be like, some of your articles are free, but there might be bonus content or podcasts or things like that. I think bonus stuff is a way a lot of these people are doing it.

Like we’re providing a lot for free. But if you want a little bit more, or if you want this free without ads, here’s a way to do it. 

Another alternative in the WordPress space is something you told me about. I haven’t heard about this, it’s called Newspack. Can you tell us about that?

Ryan Singel: Yeah. So Newspack is actually, I think, I believe they’re an offshoot of Automattic. So Newspack essentially bundles together vetted plugins that basically all kind of like local news people basically need, right? 

So kind of including advertising analytics, ways to send newsletters, etc. And then there’s kind of a flat fee that you pay per month for them to provide all of these sort of vetted plugins and help your site run, etc.

Newspack has been around for a while, you know, and it tends to be used by smaller local publishers mostly. There’s money out there trying to help all the, especially around local news, trying to survive and come back, cause there’s been such a decimation of newspapers.

So the Knight Foundation, which is this gigantic foundation based out of Florida is now—has been traditionally giving money and giving grants and so forth, and now they’re going for a big push to essentially try and figure out how to make all of this sustainable and how to get local communities to get funding.

So they’ve got 500 million dollars that they’re wanting to spend over the next few years to try and revitalize local journalism, both by supporting individual publishers, organizations that help those publishers, and then also some of the tech. So NewsPack got, I think, something like eight million dollars from them to help build out this, sort of, like, this tech stack.

And then there’s a, yeah, and there’s a number of other tools. I think there’s Memberful, which is, I think also from Patreon in the WordPress space.

Doc Pop: And in the Ghost space, there’s Tiny News Collective?

Ryan Singel: Yeah, so they’re a little bit different. So Tiny News Collective would be one of those organizations that gets funded to help publishers. So they work with people that want to start something up, maybe, you know, who, especially in communities that just don’t get any representation, or in communities that just don’t have anything.

And they help them, sort of, launch something, right? So folks that, you know, maybe don’t have—don’t know what to do in terms of the tech, and so forth. So they’re big, sort of like, they help folks there. 

And then they have their publishers that they work with use Ghost. So, and they’re kind of, they’re separate from Ghost, they’re their own organization, they—Tiny News Collective also got money from the Knight Foundation to help. So, Ghost is kind of off on its own sort of like, you know, in the same way Automattic is largely separate from all the things that you can do with it and the people helping it.

So Tiny News Collective…Yeah, so essentially, like, help people get launched, get them on Ghost, give them a nice-looking theme, and then give them kind of ongoing support in, you know, both on the tech side and the sort of strategy side.

Doc Pop: You know, we’re going to take another quick break and when we come back, we’re going to wrap up our conversation with Ryan Singel and talk a little bit more about CMSs such as WordPress and Ghost and talk about how they can help the future of journalism. 

So stay tuned for more after the short break. 

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, the WordPress Community Podcast. My name is Doc. I’m talking to Ryan Singel, the Co-Founder of Outpost Publishers Cooperative. 

And Ryan, early on in this interview, you mentioned your days at Wired and how there was an internal revolt about the CMS, and it kind of reminded me—and this was the CMS before they switched to WordPress—it reminds me, though, that I think just yesterday I heard an interview with Nilay Patel, the editor at Verge who said, I’m going to read his quote here.

“Boy, I’d like the reporters who work here to write for us in the text box that pays us money instead of over there in the text box that extracts value.” 

Now what Nilay is saying there is that he’s seeing his writers having more fun publishing on, you know, Twitter or threads or wherever. And he’s like, “why can’t it be fun to publish here?” And he goes on in that interview to talk about some of the changes that they made to the CMS to, I guess, streamline it, to make it more fun. And I guess that just kind of seems relevant to what you’re talking about. 

If it’s painful for a writer, if it’s literally painful to write on a CMS, then obviously they’re going to want to go to Facebook and write their post or somewhere else. Did you find that to be true? 

Ryan Singel: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. So, you know, we had sort of the one main CMS and the workflow all worked through that and it was very slow and it involved the art desk. 

And then when we moved to WordPress, you know, we ended up being, you know, I think we were actually like 10 different WordPress sites. So we had, we kind of changed things so that, you know, each sort of vertical had its own like WordPress site.

And so we could just do fun, quick posts. We could, you know, and one of my favorite ones we did back in the day is we—I remember when the Homeland Security had its threat level color-coded things, and every once in a while we would just make a fake version of that, you know, we did like a hot dog version, you know, with a, you know, Tijuana Danger Dog being at the top, and then a vegan pup being at the yellow color. And, you know, we could just write that, send it out, it was fun, right? And then we would still go do the real journalism kind of stuff.

But we couldn’t, you know, when we didn’t have access to the CMS ourselves and, you know, couldn’t press publish, you know, ourselves. We had to wait to go through, you know, four levels of editors and the art desk. So it did make things a lot more fun and things got a lot more experimental and we were able to try things about what would happen if we, you know, published ten posts a day really quickly, you know, little short things, or, you know, should we focus on long form? Or so forth.

So it was just a really fun time, you know, sort of putting that publishing power more towards, you know, in a large organization, pushing that down so that, like, individual writers and editors could make decisions and do things quickly really did revolutionize what Wired was like in the 2000s.

Doc Pop: You’re mentioning experimentation and how y’all could kind of play around more quickly. I do hope that maybe something that happens from all of this, I do worry about, not the sustainability of these smaller sites, but like the fact that they are not going to necessarily hire as many people as ou know, previously it’s, you know, all of these collectives we’re talking about are still pretty small. 

But the one nice thing about having a small group is that they can experiment more and they could create their own Mastodon instance or whatever. And that way, when they’re writing in the small box that that isn’t the official website, it could still be like their Mastodon instance or something like that. 

You know, maybe we’ll see people kind of trying different things and experimenting more and still owning more of the content as a result, and not just willy nilly sharing the content around onto other platforms that are extracting value from them.

Ryan Singel: Absolutely, yeah, I think we’re going to see some fun experiments with that and so, you know, I would love to see more of, you know, even when you do sort of like share out there doing that sort of like “POSE” thing, you know, the “publish once, syndicate everywhere” idea from the IndieWeb, where even if you do share your stuff out there, it’s still live somewhere on your own site, right?

And you can do more fun, interesting things. So if you want to do your snark it can be over there on the, you know, in the sidebar or in a different part of the site, right? 

You know, the main homepage still looks serious, right, but then there’s the the fun places, you know, the places for people to do things that are a little more fun and not, you know, necessarily, you know, the kind of thing that you’re going to have show up in Google News, right?

Doc Pop: And on that note, Ryan, where is a good spot for people to follow your snark online? 

Ryan Singel: Yeah my snark these days is mostly over on Mastodon. I am RyanSingel, all one word, and that’s S-I-N-G-E-L @writing.exchange. And then the sort of the fun stuff we’re doing to help publishers on the Ghost Platform build their businesses, you can see what we’re up to over at outpost.pub. 

Doc Pop: Outpost.pub, and here I see the list of services you’re proudly powering, including The Atlantic, 404 Media, Tangle, Future Crunch, a lot of great stuff here, Vallejo Sun. So that’s super cool to see that, you’re part of those awesome networks. 

Well, thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Please visit TorqueMag.io to see transcribed versions of these podcasts, plus more WordPress news and tutorials. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or download it directly from WMR.fm. 

I’m your host, Dr. Popular. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine. And I love spotlighting members of that community each week on Press This.

The post Press This: WordPress and the Future of Journalism appeared first on Torque.

Continuing to make a living – especially if you’re a freelancer without a steady flow of cash – means knowing where to hone your skills and look for work. Keeping on top of upcoming WordPress trends can help with that.

That’s why we’ve taken a close look at where WordPress is headed and identified these ten business trends and opportunities. Keep these in mind as you pursue your WordPress career and perhaps you’ll win out over your competitors.

The State of WordPress

WordPress continues to dominate the web as the software of choice for 43.2% of all websites. The user-friendly interface, extensive customization, open source philosophy, and lively community likely all contribute to that.

Check out these other stats for an idea of how well WordPress is doing these days:

• The official plugin repository has almost 60k plugins.
• The theme repository contains close to 12k themes.
• The most popular WordPress plugin is Elementor, with over 400 million lifetime installs and 5+ million active installations.
• In 2023, Wordfence blocked 100 billion credential stuffing attacks alone.
• Just WordPress.com users produce 70 million new posts and 77 million comments each month. Also, 409 million people view more than 20 billion pages in that same timeframe.

It’s clear that WordPress’ popularity isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Yet, the platform and the environment it exists in continue to change. What new opportunities do these developments offer for savvy entrepreneurs to earn money? Let’s take a look at that now.

1. Incorporating Generative AI

Generative AI has swept the Internet. Seemingly overnight, businesses of all kinds now use AI-generated artwork, writing, and marketing as a major part of their strategy. And there’s no sign of this changing any time soon, or ever.

In an interview between Pootlepress creator Jamie Marsland and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, the latter expressed optimism for the future of AI and various ideas on how it might become a part of WordPress. This was also a popular topic at WordCamp Europe 2023.

With high-profile figures putting their stake into AI, it’s definitely something to look into ASAP.

AI has grown increasingly common in WordPress plugins and services already. Some well-known examples:

• Akismet Anti-spam has been using AI to detect spam comments for a long time now, and recent advances have only hardened its defenses. In addition, they just partnered up with Arwen.ai, which similarly uses AI to detect harmful comments.
• SEOPress has begun bundling in generative AI features, allowing you to generate meta descriptions and image alt text. Yoast SEO Premium comes with similar features.
• Bluehost launched Wondersuite in 2023, an AI-powered onboarding and design tool for new websites.
• Elementor developed Elementor AI, which adds the ability to automatically generate images, write copy, and design websites from within the drag-and-drop editor.

And the list goes on. There are already plenty of things you can do with AI in WordPress. The above cases are just the tip of the iceberg.

So, how can you use this trend as a business opportunity in WordPress?

First of all, if you have a plugin, theme, or service where it could fit in, consider adding AI to your feature list. However, you can also consider the AI route when building websites and find ways to give your clients access to it in the back end.

2. Offering Hand-Made Content Creation and Marketing

AI has become a major productivity tool for many creators. It’s great for coming up with ideas or helping you get unstuck. Unfortunately, some people have had other ideas about how to use AI.

There’s now a lot of low-quality AI-generated content bouncing around the Internet. You’ve likely run into some of it already: completely unedited, AI-generated writing supposedly published by a human author. Even academic journals aren’t free of it.

Some people even dishonestly sell AI-generated artwork and writing to clients without disclosing it.

With the state of AI not changing any time soon, you can expect a market to emerge for skilled content creators – copywriters, ghost writers, developers, marketers, artists, and so on – who don’t rely on it.

That doesn’t mean you can’t use AI as an assistant. It’s completely fine for content creators to do so. However, it’s important that it serves as a foundation for useful and original content.

So, those skilled artists and authors who have a strong style no AI can fully replicate, you may find an emerging market for your work.

3. Focusing on E-commerce

If you’re interested in making a career out of WordPress and not yet sure where to specialize, or considering opening a business of your own, focusing on e-commerce could be a great opportunity.

The business of selling things online continues to grow globally, and has long been a dominant industry. It makes up over 19% of all retail sales and will possibly generate $3.2bn in 2024. As more businesses pivot towards online sales, the demand for e-commerce solutions, particularly those integrated with WordPress, continues to surge.

Even among popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify and Squarespace, WooCommerce wins out as the top ecommerce platform, eclipsing all other options with a 38.74% market share. It’s clear that WooCommerce and WordPress are a favorite among online retailers.

This presents a significant financial opportunity. Capitalize on this trend by specializing in building or working with e-commerce stores using WordPress and/or WooCommerce.

Whether you’re more comfortable creating small boutiques or large-scale enterprise stores, offering tailored e-commerce solutions rather than general WordPress design services can be an opportunity to differentiate your business in a crowded market.

4. Getting Into Headless WordPress

WordPress is a world-renowned CMS and many are big fans of its simple and elegant handling of content like blog posts, pages, categories, and tags.

However, the nature of WordPress means you’re effectively locked onto the platform. Maybe you don’t like the front end side of things and would rather build your website from scratch while still utilizing the CMS features. Or maybe you’d like to port CMS data to multiple channels.

Headless WordPress has been a popular solution for some years now. It means decoupling WordPress’ front and back end. For one, this allows you to utilize front end technologies like Ruby on Rails, Vue, React, or Angular that were incompatible with WordPress before. It also lets you turn WordPress into a dynamic, omnichannel marketing platform.

You can use this concept to make your own unique and profitable projects. Alternatively, take advantage of the ongoing headless WordPress trend to develop and design headless websites for clients.

5. Adding Subscriptions to Your Strategy

Subscription models and membership sites have become more and more common ways to keep customers around long-term. Some examples of platforms that successfully use these models include Netflix, Amazon Prime, Adobe, and Google Workspace.

But it’s not just for massive companies. Small businesses can also benefit from subscription business models. For example, subscription boxes have become a popular and fun way to retain customers. At the same time, platforms like Patreon demonstrate the success of offering monthly goods, services, and exclusive access to content.

The benefits here include greater customer retention compared to a traditional e- commerce store, as well as an ongoing revenue stream for your company.

For WordPress creators and business owners, consider offering recurring benefits like exclusive access to articles, videos, downloadable resources, software, and other members-only opportunities. Plugins like MemberPress and WooCommerce Subscriptions can help you set this up.

6. Taking Advantage of Gutenberg’s Growth

On its initial release, WordPress’ Gutenberg block editor was heavily criticized and caused a big controversy. Many people were not fond of the new editor and its workflow, and even today five million users have the Classic Editor still installed.

Yet, it’s important to point out that the block editor has actually improved a lot. Many UI and workflow issues people disliked have been cleaned up, and more improvements and features are constantly making their way into Gutenberg.

There’s also the shift towards Full Site Editing, allowing you to edit global styles, header, footer, page templates and so on within Gutenberg. This includes, for example, the ability to make the WordPress header sticky.

Gutenberg is even expanding outside WordPress and into other platforms, including Tumblr.

Even if you don’t like it yourself, there’s no denying it: the future is in block-based themes and plugins.

What does this mean for you? If you develop themes, plugins, or client websites, consider focusing on and incorporating Gutenberg.

You may want to design block-based, rather than classic, WordPress themes. Or create and sell custom Gutenberg blocks and pattern collections. Blocks are the new shortcode, so consider adding these to existing plugins – see WooCommerce’s product blocks or Contact Form 7’s contact block for examples.

You might even consider adding Gutenberg to your non-WordPress project.

7. Creating Niche Content

WordPress is an absolutely massive platform. Millions of designers, developers, authors, and marketers wish to apply their skills in a WordPress environment – and millions of businesses small and large are looking to hire them.

While this has led to a sharp increase in job opportunities, it has also made the market very saturated. It can be hard to stand out, especially if you don’t have a decade of experience. Just how many “WordPress developers” are you competing with? It’s a lot.

With generalized designers, developers, and authors struggling to find a job, it can be wise to specialize in a particular niche. Focus on and promote a particular skill or market.

For example, perhaps as an author you’re particularly proficient in a certain topic. Maybe as a developer you specialize in using a particular tool, like WooCommerce or Divi Builder. As a web designer, you could primarily create website mockups for luxury retailers.

In such a large market, it’s better to specialize than to spread yourself too thin and not attract enough clients.

8. Specializing in Mobile-First WordPress

Whether you like it or not, most people are now using primarily or even only mobile devices. Mobile traffic makes up 66% of traffic share, and these days, a quarter of adults can’t even use a computer. Not to mention, Google now prioritizes mobile-first indexing.

As a consequence, a lack of mobile friendliness will damage your SEO, and if you’re building a plugin or theme, this becomes your users’ problem.

So, whether you’re building client websites or add-ons like themes and plugins, it’s extremely important to focus on mobile-first and responsive design. In addition, clients or users will prioritize hiring you and using your extensions if you make mobile usability a key part of your strategy.

9. Get Ready for Real-Time Collaboration

The Gutenberg project has gone through many phases, including the addition of Gutenberg itself in its first phase. In Phase 2, we saw the addition of the Site Editor, block patterns, and block themes, among other customization additions.

Now Phase 3: Collaboration is underway, and with this comes some major changes. Look forward to real-time and asynchronous collaboration, a better publishing workflow, and improved navigation in the WordPress’ back end.

While this doesn’t have any direct profit potential on its own, real-time collaboration will be a boon for many businesses. Faster and more streamlined workflows means more efficient creation of WordPress content. And who knows, as a savvy developer, you might be able to build on top of the new workflow and offer additional value with a plugin or theme.

10. Researching Jobs in the WordPress Industry

By now, WordPress has become basically its own industry. Many designers, developers, and other creators work specifically and primarily in the WordPress environment, rarely if ever using any other platforms. Those who know the ins and outs of WordPress can do powerful things with it.

Finding a job as a WordPress specialist is difficult mostly due to the amount of competition rather than a lack of jobs. With so many businesses relying on WordPress, they’re quick to snatch up skilled employees whenever there’s an opportunity. Now’s a great time to pick up a new skill.

As mentioned above, you may find it easier to get hired or find clients if you work in a specialized role like setting up e-commerce stores or working with particular, well-known plugins.

If you have yet to develop your career, specializing in WordPress may be a good idea. Check WordPress job listings to see what people want and what is hot. You could focus on learning what there’s an obvious demand for and end up making a lot of money down the line.

WordPress job listings can be found on WordPress.org, Indeed, Codeable, and these job boards.

WordPress Business Opportunities About

The WordPress ecosystem is constantly changing, influenced by design and development trends that impact the web as a whole. It’s hard to know for sure what the next big thing is really going to be.

But a little guidance can go a long way. These upcoming WordPress trends can give you an idea of where the platform is headed. Using this knowledge, you can pick up a new skill or take your fledgling projects in the right direction, and perhaps get ahead of the competition.

Did we miss anything exciting on the WordPress front? What business opportunities do you think will dominate WordPress in 2024 and beyond? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

The post What Are the Next Big Business Opportunities in WordPress? appeared first on Torque.

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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. 

I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and my contributions on TorqueMag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app.You can also download episodes directly from WMR.fm. 

Today we’re diving deep into a topic that’s not only cutting edge, but also crucial for making the web more inclusive: AI and accessibility and how those two things can work together. 

I’m thrilled today to be joined by Amber Hines, the CEO of Equalize Digital, who recently impressed our audiences with her keynote at DE{CODE} 2024 on the potential of AI and making websites more accessible.

In today’s conversation, Amber and I will be exploring those promises and perils and how you can leverage generative AI, large language models, and everything else to enhance accessibility on WordPress websites. Amber, thank you so much for joining us today.

Amber Hinds: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Doc Pop: Let’s start this off with that DE{CODE} talk that happened last week as we’re recording.

And I got a chance to watch the whole thing. I really enjoyed it. I’m just wondering if you can kind of summarize: what is DE{CODE} and what was your talk there?

Amber Hinds: Yeah, so DE{CODE} is of course WP Engine’s developer-focused conference, which is one of the few WordPress conferences that’s fully focused on developers, which is neat. 

And I gave almost like a five-minute lightning talk as part of the keynote presentation, which the whole of was about AI. And of course, me being an accessibility advocate, I spoke about AI’s impact on accessibility, good and bad.

Doc Pop: Yeah, and before large language models and generative AI were the hot new thing, there were many tools out there that claimed to easily fix accessibility issues and, in particular in the WordPress space, there was a lot of accessibility overlays or all sorts of tools that claimed to be quick fixes—just download this plugin and you’re all good.

And those were criticized often for not really fixing issues, for just giving the website owners the feeling that maybe they had done something, but not actually fixing things for users. Is AI likely to be the same, or is this going to be different for us?

Amber Hinds: Yeah, so I mean those, the accessibility overlays, you know, I think we almost talked about they’re criticized in the current tense, right? They are currently criticized because they make a lot of really bold claims. And the biggest challenge about accessibility is that not every problem can be detected automatically with an automated testing tool.

And so, if you can’t find all of the problems automatically, how can, you know, something come out and fix it? And that’s sort of what’s leveraged against the overlays. 

And I think to some degree, that is a challenge that AI models are having. So, you know, these large language models are trained off of millions of pieces of content—billions of pieces of content on millions of websites around the world. 

But the vast majority of websites have, if you look at the WebAIM report, they do a report every year called the WebAIM Million, where they scan the top million websites by—it was Alexa ranking—and check them for easily detectable accessibility errors. And 96 percent of them have easily detectable accessibility errors. 

So this becomes a problem because we are training our AI models on inaccessible code and inaccessible content. And, you know, we’ve all probably seen where ChatGPT—what do they call it, hallucination? It makes things up. And, you know, if you don’t give it the exact right prompt, it might give you just something that’s a little bit wrong.

And if you aren’t trained enough to know that, you might not catch it. And so unless you’re really specific, like if you’re using some of these tools like GitHub Copilot to help you code, you could potentially get out of it inaccessible code. For example, it might use divs instead of buttons because a lot of websites use divs instead of buttons. So I think that’s a challenge that we really have to figure out on the AI front.

Doc Pop: In the space we call this garbage in, garbage out. And in the context of AI, I think that’s often associated with when the models are trained on biased or incorrect data, then they’re gonna repeat that data as fact.

And in your presentation you mentioned, you know, Copilot is trained on sites that aren’t necessarily accessible. So if you’re using GitHub Copilot to help you build a site, it’s likely to repeat those errors. 

And I just—I was hoping to get an example of one, and you just mentioned one: buttons versus divs. Can you just quickly tell us about, like, why is that different? Why is that important to note?

Amber Hinds: Yeah, so one of the most important things for accessibility is using semantic HTML, which means HTML elements that have meanings in and of themselves that the browsers can interpret and do certain things with. 

So, when we talk about buttons on websites, there’s a couple of different kinds of buttons. In WordPress, we have the button block, which adds buttons, but they’re not actually buttons. They’re links that are styled to look like buttons. And then we have elements that control functionality, and these are true buttons. 

And so, these are things that might change a slide in a carousel or a slider. Something that might submit a form or something you can click to trigger an accordion to open and close. This would be a button. 

And in semantic HTML, we use a literal button tag. So it’s like, you know, the <button> and there are different things you can do with it. And button tags can receive keyboard focus.

So you can tab to them with your tab key without using a mouse. You can use both the return or enter key and the space bar to open and close them. Now there are ways that a lot of developers will make things that don’t have semantic meaning. 

So something like a div or a span function like a button. So we see this a lot in carousels or accordions where they’ve added JavaScript, which is using an element that is not a button, maybe it’s a heading on an accordion or a div on a carousel, to actually open and close the thing or to move to the next slide. 

But because these don’t have the semantic meaning, they can’t be reached with a keyboard and they only function with a mouse.

Doc Pop: Thank you so much for clarifying that. I always learn a lot when I talk with you about this and I appreciate you diving into that. 

One more thing I kind of want to talk about that you brought up in terms of cautionary things—and I think later on, we’re going to be talking about maybe some of the things that are working really well—but one of the cautionary things is a lot of these models might have biases in them and if they’re creating alt text, there might be mistakes.

Not even necessarily mistakes based on bias that it has in its training data, but maybe just because it’s missing the context of what the photo is being shared for. And it’s probably important as with, you know, being able to not just generate the code, but actually look at it and understand what it’s doing and if it’s doing best best practices, it’s probably also good if you’re using it to write alt text for images that someone goes through and, and reviews it.

Right? Like everything you’re talking about, it sounds like it comes down to, you can use this, but it’s not going to replace anybody. Someone still needs to double check it.

Amber Hinds: Yeah, alternative text is so interesting. There’s a lot of WordPress plugins out there that are connecting and trying to auto-generate alt text. I did call out one in my talk, alttext.ai, which one thing that they’re doing that is slightly better than some of the other ones is it’ll reference, like, maybe what information you have in your Yoast SEO details, it’ll look at the post title when it’s trying to generate the alt text instead of just sending the image over.

But alt text is so contextual. I have tried a lot of them, including that one, and every time I try them thinking it’ll save me time, I end up being like, “no, it gets it wrong.” 

You know, if it’s, if it’s pictures of specific people on my team or even on my personal blog and it’s a picture of my family or something like that, I don’t just want to say “woman,” I want to name myself, right? Like the alt text should say “Amber standing in an office” or something like that. 

I’ve tried it on product images. And like t-shirts where there’s literally words on the t-shirts and almost none of them do a good job of saying what the words are on the t-shirt. 

And you’re thinking, “well, if somebody wants to buy this and they can’t see it, they have to know what the words on the t-shirt say to decide if they want to wear the t-shirt or not,” right? 

So those are pretty challenging, but I feel like there’s some possibility there where it can—there can be some quick advancements and where that can end up helping site owners even if it just gives them a head start and they have to do some editing along the way.

Doc Pop: On that note, we’re going to take a quick break, Amber, so that our sponsors who are probably t-shirt sellers with great text on their t-shirts, so they can get in their messages. 

But when we come back, we’ll talk more about some of the tools that you might recommend that are AI-powered, accessibility related. So stay tuned for more after this short break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, the WordPress Community Podcast. My name is Doc, and today I’m talking to Amber Hines, the CEO of Equalize Digital about accessibility, WordPress, and AI.

Amber, you’ve been in the space for 15 years—in the accessibility space for 15 years. Are things radically different now that AI is on the scene?

Amber Hinds: Yeah, I think so. I mean there’s, there have been a lot of advancements. I don’t know. Are you a Super Bowl watcher, Doc?

Doc Pop: No.

Amber Hinds: No, okay. So to be honest, I’m not much into football either, but I did see part of the Super Bowl, and there was a commercial, which is definitely worth everyone going and finding, for Google. What they have is what they’re calling “guided vision,” and basically, it was a commercial that was taken from the experience or the perspective of a blind man, or I would say low vision, so not totally blind.

And he was using his camera on his phone to take selfies. And, When he would hold it up, it would tell him how many faces. So if he didn’t hold it in the right angle for himself, you know, it would say like, “no faces in the picture.” And then he could, like, move it and it would say it. But it was very sweet because it goes from one face in the pictures to two faces in the pictures. And then you see what looks like it might be a hospital. And it ends, of course, with three faces in the pictures. 

But I do feel like in the last few years, there’s been a lot that AI has been doing, in general, to enhance people’s experience on the web. I know before the break, we were talking about alt text. There’s some stuff where some of the generative language models can do summarizations of things.

So there’s a version of ChatGPT called ChatPDF and you can upload a PDF and it will summarize it for you. Which could be helpful, because a lot of people a lot of people don’t create accessible PDFs, and so being able to upload a PDF and get a text explanation of what it is or what information is contained in it might be really helpful for a screen reader user or maybe someone who has a lower reading level and is having a hard time with, you know, more complex medical knowledge or something more detailed in that PDF, it can explain it to them at a reading level that makes sense for them.

So I do feel like there’s a lot that AI is doing that is positive.

Doc Pop: Have you seen anything specific in WordPress that’s using AI to help increase its accessibility to, like, a specific plugin that users could check out or, or multiple plugins?

Amber Hinds: I haven’t, to be honest. I don’t know if I really have a good WordPress-specific recommendation on the literal AI front. I will say, you know, our Accessibility Checker plugin does some automated testing. 

It’s not AI-integrated, but we have some plans for some areas where we are likely going to integrate it with some of the generative AI models that are out there to improve our testing rules. But I don’t know of any good ones that I super recommend people check out, unfortunately. I feel like we’re still in the early days on that.

Doc Pop: Yeah, it’s early days. And that brings me to my next question is: If someone is building that tool or if someone’s building AI onto their website, what are some of the best practices that they should be keeping in mind while they’re moving forward?

Amber Hinds: That’s a great question. I mean, I think in general, no matter what you’re doing, of course, accessibility is really important. 

If you’re trying to come up with ideas, though, and you’re trying to think, like, “how can I use AI to enhance accessibility?” I would think less about the toolbars or that sort of thing, but maybe thinking about “is there ways that we can build websites to be smarter to maybe recognize certain things about people’s systems?”

So for example, we can actually detect whether or not someone has their system color mode preference set to dark mode on their operating system. And potentially having the website—obviously there’s CSS where you could just code the website to have dark mode—but there might be certain scenarios where, beyond the CSS coding, you’re actually using AI to change some of the other experiences.

I think you have to be careful about that, because there’s there’s possibilities that it won’t, you know—it could remove, and there’s been a lot of conversations in the accessibility community about this, like recommendations on whether or not we think that it’s a good idea to say, “oh, I can tell someone’s in dark mode,” or ‘I can tell someone’s using a screen reader, I’m going to give them a more simplified version of the website.”

Like, that’s not a great idea, but I think there are some, maybe some creative things people could do. I think having chatbots could be really helpful as a stopgap, assuming the chatbot is well-trained on your content and actually provides decent information. 

If you don’t have a really good search or something else about your website is not accessible, having something that allows someone to just ask a question and get an answer back right away, especially if you’re a smaller team and you can’t have a human available to chat with them 24/7—that could potentially do a lot to help with accessibility and getting people where they need to go and getting around issues that you are maybe still working on remediating in your website code itself.

Doc Pop: Yeah, and if you don’t mind, I’m going to toss out some that I think might be important, cause these are just kind of broadly important for anyone using AI, and I imagine it would still be true here. 

Transparency: I think if you are—if you do have an AI solution on your site, be transparent with it. Like, you know, as an example, chatbots, let them know that this is, this is a chatbot and not like try to trick them into thinking that… 

Amber Hinds: It’s not a human.

Doc Pop: Right, not a human, you know. But just, just be transparent. I mean, in, in a lot of cases, I think that could be like, this text is AI-generated, even if that’s like a text in a post or alt description, or if you’re doing generative image AI—I think that that sort of stuff is always important to just be transparent that this is not done by a human.

And similarly, we’ve got accountability. Accountability in terms of, if you are using AI as part of your solution, like a chatbot again, just acknowledge that if it says something wrong, you’re willing to still back it up or whatever. 

Like you’re not giving people bad information or if you are, you’re hopefully saying, “okay, well, our chatbot said this, so I guess we have to give you that discount.”

I just feel like accountability is a thing that some people might miss out when they’re doing AI. Like they just think, “oh, it’s AI. So obviously it’s going to sometimes be wrong and people should just expect that.” But if you’re implementing that tool…

Amber Hinds: Yeah, I actually saw a court case about this very recently where someone—a company’s chatbot told someone that they could get a full refund. And they’re like, “well, our Terms of Service said no,” and the court said “it doesn’t matter. The chatbot is your agent, and they are operating as your business, and therefore, the customer has, you know, has the legitimate expectation that they’re going to get correct information from the chatbot.”

So I do feel like if you’re using these things, you need to really be aware of what the implications might be of using them on your business as a whole.

Doc Pop: Yeah. And then the final thing I was going to mention is just user input. 

As always, that’s important to have. Listen to your users, hear how they’re using the experience and how it’s working for them. And I have to say, some folks that I’ve seen rolling out AI are unhappy with how users are interpreting the thing instead of listening to the feedback and being like, “oh, maybe this isn’t doing the right sort of thing that what they want” or something like that. 

So those three things, transparency, accountability, and listening to users, that’s important for any business, but I think it’s important for folks who are trying to use these AI tools. 

Amber Hinds: I think on that line, like, it’s really important to talk to your real customers, but also don’t forget to include people with disabilities, because they’re,—one in six people worldwide, one in five U.S. adults has a disability. 

They’re very frequent users of websites, sometimes even more than we think, and we want to make sure that everything we’re building works for them as well, and not just typically abled people who are using a mouse and a keyboard.

Doc Pop: Absolutely. And on this topic, is there anything outside of the WordPress world in terms of how AI is being used to make sites more inclusive that you’d like to see brought into the WordPress space that you think “this solution works here, we should adopt that.”

Amber Hinds: I do know, and I’ll throw a link so you can put it in the show notes. But I saw in January, Ohio State University, in their news, they were talking about some of the researchers that, at Ohio State, have been working on trying to use AI to create agents that do really complex multi-step processes for people.

So, for example, if I wanted to fly to WordCamp Europe, and we know that there’s really a lot of challenges around booking an airplane ticket, having an agent that could be voice-controlled. So we have very basic, right, like we could say to, “Hey Alexa, order me more laundry detergent.” And she would just go do that, right?

But, but being able to do really complex things where we could say to our agent, “I need to book a trip to Italy in June for WordCamp Europe,” it would know what the dates were, it would go out, it would tell me the fares, then it would say, “okay, yes,” and then it would, you know, fill in all the forms, enter my credit card information and do everything for me automatically.

I think that is something that would be really interesting to see more tools in the WordPress space to try and, like, automate these very complex processes for people.

And to be honest, you’re going to see even typically abled people use them because it’s nice to not have to fill out, you know, you know, eight different steps in order to get your airplane ticket or whatever it might be.

Doc Pop: Well, yeah, as true in the real world, it’s also true on the web that accessibility makes it better for everyone. Not just not just certain groups of people, but we all benefit when the web is more accessible. 

On that note, we’re going to take one final break. And when we come back, we’re going to wrap up our conversation with Amber Hines about AI and accessibility.

So stay tuned for more after the short break. 

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, the WordPress Community Podcast. We’re wrapping up our conversation with Amber Hines about AI, accessibility, and WordPress. 

And as we, I think, established pretty clearly, AI is not a Band Aid. There is no, there is no Band Aid that you can just slap on and fix everything. But there’s a lot of possibilities for things that could be done.

Amber was just talking about, like, the potential of being able to easily book a trip to a WordCamp and have all sorts of stuff just handled for you and make it really smooth. And you know, it’s hard for us—because it’s so early, it’s hard for us to see exactly what AI and WordPress and accessibility, what those are going to mean together.

Hopefully this time next year, we’ll have lots of cool examples, but as we said, it’s not always a Band Aid and it’s important to be able to check for accessibility issues. And I’m sure there’s not one thing that you can just run that just automatically checks every possible issue. But I do know that Amber, you have the Accessibility Checker plugin.

Can you tell us a little bit about that and how that works?

Amber Hinds: Yeah, so our plugin is open source, it has a free version that you can get off of WordPress.org or paid versions, and basically what you can do with it is it will check draft pages even before you’ve published them and or published, already published content, and it will scan them and it will come back to you and say things like, you know, you have a, link that doesn’t have meaningful text.

Let’s say you’ve used the words “click here.” You have images missing, alternative text, you aren’t using headings in the right order, oh you put in a link to an audio file, but you don’t have a transcript, those sorts of things. 

So it’ll flag common accessibility problems and put that report right in the WordPress dashboard. And we’re really trying to make it easier for content creators to create more accessible websites and learn accessibility as they use the plugin.

Doc Pop: And where can people find the Accessibility Checker plugin?

Amber Hinds: Yep, so beyond WordPress.org, if you just go to our website, equalizedigital.com, that has all the information about the plugin and you can also download the free version off our website.

Doc Pop: And on that note, where can people find out more about what you’re working on online? 

Amber Hinds: Yep, so, outside of equalizedigital.com, you can most commonly find me on Twitter or X, and I am @heyamberhines, I’m occasionally on LinkedIn and Mastodon, but that’s probably the best place to find me.

Doc Pop: Right on. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Amber. I really appreciate it.

Amber Hinds: Thank you for having me. It’s been fun.

Doc Pop: And thanks to our listeners for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Please visit TorqueMag.io to find transcribed versions of these episodes, plus more WordPress news and tutorials. 

We’re also in the middle of our Plugin Madness competition, so you can go support your favorite WordPress plugins there. 

You can subscribe to press this on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or Overcast—my favorite. You can also download directly from WMR.fm. 

I’m your host, Dr. Popular. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and I’d love spotlighting members of that community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: Can AI Make The Web More Accessible? appeared first on Torque.

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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Each week, we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop, I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and my contributions on Torquemag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you find your favorite podcasting apps. You can also download the episodes directly from WMR.fm. 

Now, WP Engine has recently announced DE{CODE}2024, the company’s annual developer conference. It’s a virtual conference that you can attend from anywhere, but it will be happening from March 19th to March 21st. 

And joining me today is one of the guest speakers from DE{CODE}, Miriam Schwab, the head of WordPress relations at Elementor. Miriam, how are you doing today?

Miriam Schwab: I’m great. How are you?

Doc Pop: I’m doing super well. Thanks so much for joining us. You just arrived back from, I’m assuming, back from WordCamp Asia. So we will be talking about that later on in the show and talking about your talk at DE{CODE}. 

But before we get into that, Miriam, why don’t you start off with just a little bit of your history in the WordPress space.

Miriam Schwab: Okay. So I’ve been in the WordPress space for about 17–18 years. I got into it actually after my fourth kid was born and I wanted more flexibility in my work life. Discovered WordPress, fell in love with it, and started offering it as a service.

That eventually developed into an agency providing custom development solutions for WordPress websites for businesses, generally larger organizations, a lot of high tech and big nonprofits.

I did that for about 13 years, and through my work in the agency became very familiar with the pros and cons of WordPress. So, you know, the pros being open-source flexibility, extensibility, and an amazing community. And the cons were, you know, struggles around performance and scaling and security. And I was looking for a solution.

And based on trends that were happening at the time, particularly around something called Static Site Generation, I came to the conclusion that if we could publish WordPress sites in static architecture, that would solve everything. 

So, actually started working on that as a venture, sold the agency, built that up as a startup, and in June 2022 Strattic was acquired by Elementor, and I am at Elementor until today.

Doc Pop: You have this experience of coming from the agency side, doing a startup afterwards, and now working for Elementor, which is a powerhouse in the WordPress space. You’ve kind of, I guess, seen the three different types of businesses that I think can survive in a WordPress space, and you’re going to be talking about business and ways for entrepreneurs to kind of work within WordPress at DE{CODE}.

And again, that’s going to be coming up March 19th through March 21st is going to be DE{CODE}. You’re going to be on a panel with James Hall, who’s going to be the host, Sujay Pawar, the CEO and co-founder of Brainstorm Force, and Leslie Sim, the co-founder of Newsletter Glue—we love Leslie here, huge Leslie fans here.

And so you’re going to be talking about entrepreneurial solutions for WordPress. Was just wondering if you could tell me how things feel now compared to previous years as for entrepreneurs in WordPress.

Do you think this is a great place to be for entrepreneurs?

Miriam Schwab: I think that we’re at a really interesting place for the WordPress industry where on the one hand, I think in some ways it’s more challenging. 

In the old days—I’ve been around long enough to say that—if you created a plugin and it provided value, it got attention. People were excited about it and it gained traction. And I think in some ways it was easier back then. 

Now, the ecosystem has grown so much that if you are bringing something new to the table, I think that the efforts needed to gain awareness for it and gain traction are much harder. 

On the other hand, I think that the industry has matured in a way that, I don’t know if any of us saw it actually coming, where it’s become much more business-oriented and there’s an awareness of the importance of the businesses in WordPress in terms of keeping it sustainable, supporting it, and taking it forward.

So, that newer business-y type of perspective I think is actually healthy for the industry. From that perspective, it does make it more viable for people to come and be like, “I want to build this product and bring this product into the space, and it’s going to be a proper business.” And I think there’s more respect for that and more appreciation for it than there was in the past.

Doc Pop: You mentioned something interesting about that professionalism or business kind of shift in WordPress. It seemed like you could just roll out a plugin and if there was a need for the plugin, people would find it. 

And now, as you said, it does definitely feel like you have to be a little better at like, maybe having—you have to have a social account or maybe even have a Discord. You have to market it. You have to do a lot more. 

So it seems like the investment is higher, but the payoff—there’s a bigger pie now for all of us to have. 

Do you think that investment in startups in the WordPress space has changed with that, or is it still like it was before, but people have to put up a little bit more of their own capital now to start their own company in WordPress?

Miriam Schwab: I think from what I can see and what I’ve seen—so for a long time, there wasn’t investment into the WordPress space. And then there was like a few years where people started to be like, “Oh, WordPress is huge. Like that’s a ginormous addressable market, and so that seems like a good place to invest.”

And so hosting companies were taking on investment, whether from venture capital or private equity. And there was a lot of movements around that and acquisitions and, you know, Elementor took on investment at one point. And of course, Strattic, the company I co-founded, we were venture backed and we took on funding.

But I think there’s kind of been a slowdown around that. I think we will start to see more investment over the next 6 to 12 to even 18 months coming back. I do think that the slowdown in investment in the WordPress space has a lot to do with the general trends in the overall market where, you know, there was a kind of tech bubble that kind of burst.

And so investors are being more careful in general in the downturn of the economy, so that’s affecting the WordPress space. But I am hearing chatter and conversations of some WordPress companies that are actively working on raising funding. 

And I think they will be successful and I really hope they are. I think it’s better for everyone. So I think if we all keep our eyes open, we’ll see some of that coming back soon.

Doc Pop: Yeah, and I’m thinking there’s folks like Yoast and Marieke who have left Yoast and are doing venture capitalism now in, presumably, investing in WordPress. So these are folks that have seen the WordPress space from both sides and are looking to invest in it. 

Aside from outside investment, what are some of the advantages someone might have if they’re developing within WordPress, if they’re starting a company? 

There’s obviously open-source tools that we have. Is that something that young entrepreneurs can use to start their WordPress businesses?

Miriam Schwab: I think WordPress is a great place to start for a few reasons. 

One is, because it’s open source, your kind of startup costs can be pretty low. You know, you don’t have to license software and all sorts of things like that. And you can get up and running with some amazing tools that exist for developers and otherwise and, you know, just start working on your thing.

So getting an initial product to market, in terms of the costs and resource intensiveness of it, I think it’s pretty low in the WordPress space, and so that’s an advantage. 

And then, once you get it to market, because of the cohesiveness of the community and the accessibility of the community—meaning the community is accessible to you pretty easily—you can start a feedback loop, which is super valuable, especially at the beginning of, you know, trying to get people to use your product, test it out, and give you feedback so you can make it better. And I think you might be able to have a tighter feedback loop in the WordPress community and potentially in other spaces.

So those are two pretty big advantages of starting to build a product in the WordPress space.

Doc Pop: So obviously we’re all giving back to the WordPress ecosystem and trying to contribute to core kind of on top of what we’re doing. 

Do you see many businesses that are not just asking for feedback, but also, like, maybe a small business actually asking for contributions, you know? Like help us translate this or, you know, help us fix these bugs.

Is that also part of what businesses are doing now?

Miriam Schwab: I hope so, because the nature of the WordPress community is that people are just, are doing that anyways. 

So Elementor is an example of that. So we’re contributing to the WordPress space, we’re contributing to the performance, core performance team, and to the plugin review team, and we sponsor the big flagship events, which we see as an important contribution to making sure that they happen and are well supported.

But interestingly, we, you know, our core plugin, like the free one, it’s in a GitHub repository, and people submit PRs to us to review and consider merging into our product all the time, and they don’t have to. 

And, with regards to our translation, also, we have active translators, many of whom are in the company, but also not—people who just care about making sure it’s accessible in their language. 

It’s quite amazing, actually. It’s remarkable. So I hope people, you know, set themselves up for that type of feedback, because the community wants to give it.

Doc Pop: You know, that’s a good spot for us to take a quick break. I definitely want to come back to talking about getting community involved, but we’re going to take a short break, and when we come back, we’re going to pick up our conversation about the business of WordPress with Miriam Schwab, head of WordPress relations at Elementor.

Stay tuned.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. 

Today I am talking to Miriam Schwab, head of WordPress relations at Elementor, about Miriam’s upcoming panel with several other greats in the WordPress space about the business of WordPress. 

And right before that break, Miriam, you touched on something that I think is very interesting, where you said that sometimes folks do—you put, you put stuff up on GitHub, right? 

Which is kind of different than the ways we used to—we used to have a landing page and you know, here’s the final product and download the zip file—but now things are kind of different. And sometimes people like to be involved in a project and maybe even make a pull request, like you said, to help contribute.

How do WordPress businesses now—what are some ways that they can kind of keep those passionate users or make users more passionate and turn them into not just people who use the product, but advocates of the product?

Miriam Schwab: That’s a very good question. I think there’s a technical side and the communication side. 

So first of all, make sure that you’re set up with easy tooling, easy instructions and directions, so that people can contribute with as little friction as possible. So you want to make their jobs—not that they’re their jobs, but their tasks—easier for them. You know, as easy as possible.

So that’s, you know, the GitHub repository, making sure you have documentation in there, how to contribute, how to submit different types of issues, etc. So, that’s number one. 

And the other thing is communication. You know, in the end, people don’t understand the value of just saying “thank you.” People think everyone wants, like, some kind of reward, but very often, people just want to be recognized and given credit for their work and their contribution. 

So I would say make sure that you have, you know, a good cadence of communicating with your contributors, talking to them, seeing how things are going, asking for feedback, and just saying thank you and giving them credit one on one. 

But also, there’s ways to give contributors credit more publicly, like, you know, in a post or in different ways, like a more public forum, like saying, “Hey, Doc Pop, thanks so much for everything that you’ve been doing in the last month. You submitted 10 PRs, you know, pull requests or whatever issues, and we really appreciate it.” And, you know, sometimes that, that just means so much and it’s really important.

Doc Pop: I think now it would be a good spot for us to switch over a little bit. And this year has felt so much different than these last few years, just in tech in general. And you, you talked about some of those changes that have happened globally. 

I’m wondering, what trends are you seeing on the business side of WordPress these days?

Miriam Schwab: I think we’re seeing a lot of consolidation with the bigger companies emerging as the main companies in this space, they’re, you know, picking up the smaller products and plugins. And those bigger companies tend to be hosting companies. 

I think that there’s a positive aspect to it, which because those companies are so big and have so much volume in terms of revenue and resources, it creates greater stability.

Also, in the host—in the WordPress space, the hosting companies play a very important role in terms of how users experience WordPress. Because, whatever you do, your WordPress site needs to be hosted somewhere. How is that experience for you? It’s just, it’s equally as important as the WordPress experience itself. So, you know, strong hosting companies play a big role, and I think we’re just seeing that kind of consolidation. 

My one concern with that, you know—and I think this is in any industry—is that there might be a stifling of innovation because of that. You know, creating something new is very risky and it might feel more comfortable to kind of just find a home in a hosting company.

And sometimes when products get picked up by larger companies, they kind of stagnate. So, that’s a concern, but I think with the right attitude and the right approach, even in this kind of era of consolidation, we can still encourage innovation in the ecosystem.

Doc Pop: I remember when that wave of acquisitions within the WordPress space started, I want to say like four years ago, but maybe more recently. 

It felt like, well, in a way, this is nice because some of these folks did start something very casually and, you know, they were providing a service that people liked, but they didn’t have health insurance or, you know, they had a hard time, like, you know, being able to pay rent and they still had to kind of do other stuff.

And so that definitely, that first wave, at least, felt sort of empowering or kind of like a nice safety net. Like people had to—they didn’t have to be so reliant on generosity and they had a little bit more predictability and they could focus more on just building the product and not having to maybe worry about marketing or HR or anything like that because other folks were working on it. 

And you are kind of touching on this thing where as it’s been going on, there’s this fear, maybe, that by having these acquisitions, things start to kind of go under these pillars and maybe be a little bit less usable by everyone or feel, just, I don’t know—

It’s an interesting…the vibe of those acquisitions has shifted a little bit where in the very beginning, it felt sort of like, “Oh, good for them.” And now, there’s a personal part of me where if somebody does get acquired, you know, there’s that little part of me that’s like, “Oh, I hope that this isn’t the end of that product or something. I hope this isn’t just a way to kind of stop that competition.” 

Are you seeing any changes even in how acquisitions are happening now? Are they, is it, am I—am I being a little nervous about these acquisitions or is it still going pretty well as far as you’ve seen?

Miriam Schwab: I think it’s going well. I think we’ve seen some companies do acquisitions in a really good way where the plugins or products they acquired definitely continue to develop and provide value and that’s amazing. 

So I think there’s enough of that. There was this recent news about Quickly, you know, shutting down. And so, you know, it can go either way. A product you love can be acquired and then kind of just disappear because nobody actually is investing in it. 

On the other hand, if a product is standalone, that’s also risky, especially at earlier stages. And so if you love a product, it can also end up disappearing just because it’s so—I don’t know the reasoning behind Quickly, so just, I know that it happened—but in general, because running a business like that is so hard.

So, you know, if you go either way—and I just really hope that the companies in the industry, when they acquire something that people really love, do their best to try to keep it running and developing it and, you know, continuing to provide value. 

But again, nothing, nothing’s guaranteed one way or the other. Yeah, that’s just how I see it.

Doc Pop: That actually kind of has me wondering if you think there’s any mistakes that companies might be making now in the WordPress space. 

We’ve talked about how they could leverage different tools, but is there anything you’ve seen companies doing that you think maybe they shouldn’t be focusing on as much?

Miriam Schwab: No, not that I can think of. What I find to be very hopeful and I love to see is that, you know, in the last few years—and that to me is pretty new—there’s been some really cool companies that have risen up in the space. 

Entrepreneurs who are really trying to make excellent products that provide a lot of value, they’re innovating. They’re even kind of pivoting or creating new angles to their products. And it’s really cool. And I think mostly they’re doing it right. 

It’s a struggle, you know, there’s not exactly a right recipe for anything. So, everyone has to kind of get advice and hear what other people have to say, but then you also have to figure it out for yourself.

And overall, I see that these types of companies—and maybe that’s why I know about them—they’re very community oriented, which is great. And so then it gets on the radar of people like me and others, and I think that also is helpful. So, I’m seeing good stuff happening. 

It’s a good thing to see because WordPress is over 20 years old, right? Almost 21. And you could think that it’s, you know, legacy and maybe people aren’t excited to innovate in the space anymore, but I’m seeing quite a lot of innovation. It’s great.

Doc Pop: We’re going to take one more short break, and when we come back, we’re going to wrap up our conversation with Miriam Schwab. So stay tuned for more after the short break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, the WordPress Community Podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today, I’m talking to Miriam Schwab, the head of WordPress Relations at Elementor. 

And at the beginning of the show, I talked about an event happening virtually: DE{CODE}. It’s a free event that WP Engine is hosting. It is a developer’s conference and it’s going to be happening March 19th through March 21st, 2024. 

As you’re hearing this, that might be tomorrow. That might be today. That might be yesterday. Either way, good news. This is still something you can find if you are listening to this after DE{CODE} has happened, these episodes—the talks will be available for folks to watch. And Miriam’s going to be part of a panel called the Business of WordPress.

And I’m wondering, as someone who just came back from WordCamp Asia, which I’m so jealous of, Miriam. Did you see any business trends specific, kind of, happening at WordCamp Asia that stuck out to you? 

Maybe something unique either to that area or something unique to that moment in time of where we are, that’s a little different than the last WordPress WordCamp that you went to.

Miriam Schwab: I know that we had some really great business meetings while we were there. Less, like, business-y, but more product oriented. There were some companies demo-ing their products, like new features and new directions, which is really cool. 

My sense of the flagship WordCamps—Asia, Europe and US—is they each have their own kind of vibe.

And I would say that the WordCamp Asia vibe is pretty developer oriented, meaning a lot of the people who come to this conference are people who are developing with or for WordPress. They either, like, have their own little plugin or they’re providing WordPress development services.

So they’re there very much to learn. And there’s—this is just how I see it, and I may be wrong—but my sense is less to, you know, conduct business. Which is okay; it’s great that each event has its own kind of style and focus. It’s just, you know, a matter of being aware of that. 

But definitely business was happening there to some extent. It’s just less business-y than, let’s say, Europe and US.

Doc Pop: Yeah, well, that’s fun. That sounds kind of neat. Less of the hallway chats and more people taking notes during the talks I can imagine. That’s pretty cool.

Miriam Schwab: Oh, totally. Yeah. They’re very enthusiastic audiences for talks at this conference.

Doc Pop: And let’s wrap this up since I have someone from Elementor here, why don’t you tell me a little bit about what y’all are working on this year? Like what trends that you’re jumping on and taking advantage of this year.

Miriam Schwab: Well of course there’s AI. So we launched our AI integration and we have an early launch of our next feature which is called AI Copilot, which is basically like an assistant for you while you’re working on your site, whether in terms of layout or content. I think that will be pretty cool and, in general, you know, we’re super excited about AI. 

Also, we’re branching out with new products. So obviously, you know, people are most aware, familiar with our page builder, which is—we actually just crossed the 16 million active install mark which is super exciting. And we have hosting, but we’re also releasing what we’re kind of calling “apps.”

So we have a new plugin called Image Optimizer and the adoption there has been really great. We’re seeing it providing a lot of value for people. And stay tuned for more of those; there’s some others that will be coming along over the next few months. 

So it’s exciting. It’s exciting to see, you know, new approaches within Elementor to our product suite and how we want to better provide value for our users.

Doc Pop: And on that note, where can people find what you’re working on online? 

Miriam Schwab: So a very active place where we provide detailed updates about what’s coming or what has been released is actually our Facebook community. So I think it’s called Global Elementor…something. I would join that and stay tuned for what’s shared there. 

And other places you can definitely follow me on Twitter. I try to make sure that I’m updating about our releases @MiriamSchwab, and we have the Elementor account as well. 

And our blog. We actually have two blogs. We have our main blog, but we also have a developer blog at developers.elementor.com which provides a detailed breakdown of every release, what went into it, and, you know, that’s a really good place to stay on top of what’s coming and what was released as well.

Doc Pop: Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Miriam. And just one more reminder that folks can check out your talk about the Business of WordPress at DE{CODE} happening March 19th through March 21st. You can go to wpengine.com and just find the label that says DE{CODE} and click on that to be able to find those talks.

And that’s it for this episode of Press This, a WordPress community podcast. Next week, we’ll be talking to Ryan Singel about how WordPress and other open-source CMSs can help save journalism. It’s a very noble topic. We’re excited about that one. 

Thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Please visit us on TorqueMag.io to see transcribed versions of all these podcasts, plus more WordPress news and tutorials. You can also subscribe on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or download directly from WMR.fm. 

I’m your host, Dr. Popular. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and I love spotlighting members of that community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: The Business of WordPress appeared first on Torque.

Unfortunately, there are tons of classes to choose from, and narrowing down the best ones is no easy task. What you need is a curated list of some of the best courses so you can decide from there. And that just happens to be what we have put together here.

Below, are going over 15+ beginner WordPress courses, crafted by experts and used by thousands of WordPress novices. Whether you’re creating a blog, an online store, or something else entirely, one of these courses is sure to help you get started.

The Best Online Course Providers for WordPress Learners

Before we get into any specific courses, let’s go over a few reputable providers of online learning material. Even if none of the courses we suggest below are quite right, you can use these to expand your search and find more fitting ones.

1. Udemy

If you’re looking for online classes on any topic, most people will point you to Udemy. This is “the” place for comprehensive lessons hosted by experts of all kinds, and a significant WordPress community is present. There are 1400+ WordPress courses to choose from.

Udemy is a paid service. You can either purchase a monthly plan to gain access to most courses, or purchase them individually at a higher price – though with a lifetime license.

There are also ways to get access to Udemy courses for free, such as through your company or even with certain library cards.

2. YouTube

If you’re on a budget – and that budget is $0 – YouTube is the place to go. There’s a massive amount of content here, from sprawling online classes that cover everything related to WordPress to short videos that quickly explain individual concepts you’re struggling with.

The big problem here is that there’s zero quality control. And this doesn’t just mean less than stellar video editing. You could actually receive dangerous misinformation and bad advice without even knowing it.

If nothing else, it’s a good idea to see what people say in the comments or find recommendations for specific YouTube courses.

3. LinkedIn Learning with Lynda

Lynda was a long-running learning hub, offering online courses since 2002. Before Udemy, this was the main hub for online courses on all sorts of creative and business topics. In 2017, Lynda was acquired by LinkedIn and rebranded to LinkedIn Learning.

Luckily, much of the old content remains, including the popular WordPress courses. You can find 1800+ WordPress courses here.

Just like Udemy, you may be able to access LinkedIn Learning for free or with a library card. Otherwise, you can pay for a monthly plan or buy courses individually.

4. Coursera

Coursera is another popular provider for online lessons, though its WordPress content is sparser compared to other platforms. There are only a handful of actual WordPress-focused courses (though plenty of related, general web design classes), and most have just a few hours of content.

The big benefit is that most of them are free to enroll in. That’s not true for all of Coursera. Many trainings are more guided projects that can take months to complete, and these may require Coursera Plus. But you’re free to sample the beginner WordPress lessons.

Once you’ve looked through our suggested WordPress courses, you may wish to return to Coursera and pick up some useful web design and development skills for free.

The Top 17 WordPress Courses for Beginners

Now let’s dig into the best of the best beginner WordPress courses. One of these is sure to have what you’re looking for.

1. Toto Coaching Web Design Courses

Aspiring web designers and WordPress builders should check out Toto Coaching’s suite of courses.

There are four versions to choose from: a simple but very useful DIY website building course, a full course that teaches you everything you need to know and more, and two fast track versions of this, one without live coaching.

All of these are appropriate for beginners, and the “Building DIY Websites” course in particular can help you get off the ground.

2. WordPress for Beginners: Create a Website Step by Step

Absolute beginners who have never worked with WordPress or made a website before will get the most out of this popular and highly-rated course.

WordPress for Beginners will walk you through the very basics of using WordPress and building a website. You’ll learn all about themes, plugins, and page building, and by the end you’ll have your own website with a few pages and useful functionalities – plus, the foundational knowledge you’ll need to create more.

3. Elementor Academy

Finding high-quality, free WordPress courses may be hard, but you can start with these lessons offered by the creators of the popular Elementor plugin.

The classes will teach you all about various WordPress topics, from website design to content creation tactics. Some are full courses and some are just single videos, but all are free and hosted on YouTube.

Not sure where to begin? Try their Get Started With WordPress training.

4. How to Make a Website with WordPress – Full Course

If you’re looking for a crash course on WordPress that you can finish in an afternoon but still covers all the important bases, try this lesson from freeCodeCamp.

In less than two hours, you’ll learn how to set up WordPress, navigate the Dashboard, create a basic website, and install plugins. No time is wasted, but nothing important is left out.

5. Become a WordPress Developer: Unlocking Power With Code

Do you want to become a WordPress developer with almost zero experience? Then this course is perfect for you.

You should already have some basic WordPress knowledge and a rudimentary understanding of HTML. Besides that, you don’t need anything, this 42-hour, 200-lecture course will cover absolutely everything you need to know as a novice developer.

6. WP101

WP101 was created to teach beginners about a variety of WordPress topics. WordPress 101 will walk you through the basics, and from there you’ll find tutorials on everything from WooCommerce to Ninja Forms.

You can get access to all these courses for a yearly fee of $48, and you’re free to trial the lessons for seven days.

7. WordPress 5 Essential Training

You may notice that this course is a little outdated – the latest version of WordPress now being WordPress 6.4+ – but a majority of the lessons still fit perfectly and the sheer quality offered by instructor Morten Rand-Hendriksen makes it more than worth your time.

This community-loved course will teach you not just the basics, but extremely important advice that you’ll use for years to come. Give it a try and see why so many people recommend it!

8. Up and Running by WPShout

Tired of WordPress development courses that only feed you bits and pieces, never the whole picture? Then you’ll love Up and Running. This course will teach you all the skills you’ll need to become a seasoned WordPress developer, leaving little to nothing out.

While this course is targeted at all skill levels, including beginners, you should have some basic knowledge of PHP, HTML, and CSS going in.

The entire course costs $197, and comes with an eBook you can continue to reference with video tutorials for each and every lesson. There’s also a Pro Bootcamp version which will give you a chance to apply your skills in an instructed environment.

9. Learn WordPress

You want to learn WordPress – where better to start than its own official resources? The Learn WordPress team has crafted a variety of video courses and tutorials that will teach you everything from the very basics to WordPress development.

New free content is always being added, so check back often. Start with the three “Introduction to WordPress” courses to get on the right track.

If you prefer learning and applying your skills with a group, check out the Learn WordPress Online Workshops and see if there are any upcoming live events that cover these courses.

10. Complete WordPress Theme & Plugin Development Course

Maybe you’ve already got the WordPress basics down, but instead want to dive into creating your own themes and plugins. If you’re a new developer, this is the course for you.

You’ll need to have the basics of HTML and CSS down, but besides that, you don’t need to know anything. By the end of these lessons, you’ll be able to work with PHP, Javascript, and templates in a WordPress environment.

11. WordPress.com Learning Hub

Anyone new to WordPress and struggling to grasp the basics should check out WordPress.com’s own Learning Hub. Here you’ll find a handful of free, self-guided courses on blogging, SEO, podcasting, and more.

And if you’re hungry for more, you can also watch the webinars, which are less structured but offer guidance and insight on all sorts of topics.

Try the Get Started course if you’re completely new to WordPress. This will help you get on your feet and prepare you for more advanced lessons.

12. The Complete WordPress Website Business Course 2.0

When your interest lies in business and management, it’s hard to find beginner-friendly courses that fit in this niche. This Udemy course covers topics like ecommerce and creating profitable projects with WordPress.

If you’re planning on starting a business, setting up an online store, or selling products and services, then you’ll want to take this one. It will teach you how to set up WooCommerce and plenty of other relevant skills.

13. Build a Full Website using WordPress

Want to learn WordPress in two hours or less? This course is the one for you. You’ll learn WordPress basics like setting up a website, designing a homepage, creating more pages, and publishing blog posts without wasting a second of your valuable time.

By the end, you’ll have a good grasp of WordPress basics and will have the foundations needed to create your own full website.

14. Yoast SEO Academy

Or are you looking to learn more about search engine optimization specifically? SEO is one of the best ways to get more eyes on your content, and Yoast’s SEO Academy offers specialized training in this field.

Besides SEO-tailored topics, there’s also a basic “WordPress for beginners” course, so you can start there if you need to. A handful of beginner courses are available in full for free, but some others you’ll need to pay a yearly subscription. A free sample is available for all the premium courses.

15. WordPress for Beginners – Master WordPress Quickly

WordPress has changed a lot in the past few years, and you’ll often run into outdated courses with completely different UI and features. If this has you frustrated, try this modern WordPress beginner course, which the creators often update with major releases.

With the 20-step website plan and a detailed tutorial on each part, you’ll learn how to create your dream website from scratch in just under 11 hours.

16. Page Building 101

If there’s one YouTube course that’s free and high-quality, it’s Page Building 101. Rather than teaching you to use Elementor, Divi, or any other specific page builder, this course educates you on the fundamentals of page building and web design.

These skills are very useful and will carry over into any web design project you tackle in the future.

If your specific interest is in WordPress design and crafting beautiful websites, you’ll definitely want to check out this one. There are currently nineteen free, in-depth lessons, though more may come in the future.

17. How To Build An Ecommerce Store With WordPress & WooCommerce

Building an online store in WordPress adds some extra complexity you may struggle with as a beginner. With this course, you’ll pick up the necessary skills to both create a WordPress site from scratch and turn it into a thriving business.

You’ll learn how to use WordPress, WooCommerce, and Storefront, all free tools you can use to start your business with a minimal budget. The lessons are also quick and to the point, so you get all the essential skills in only three hours.

What’s Your Favorite WordPress Beginner Course?

Finding the right WordPress starter course is no easy task, especially if you’re looking for something specialized. This can be courses for newbie developers, ecommerce startups, or absolute beginners with zero web experience.

But with 17 courses to choose from, you’re sure to find something tailored to you. This mix of free and paid courses was hand-picked for quality, and we hope you find what you’re looking for among them.

Which course are you going with? Have you tried any of them before? Let everyone know how it went in the comments below!

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