We Discuss All Things AI And Performance & WordPress
With Special Guest Remkus de Vries, Founder of Truer Than North & The Co-founder of Scanfully, plus the podcast “Within WordPress Podcast.”
In this video, we delve into the intricate relationship between performance and WordPress. Join us as we explore essential tips and strategies to optimize your WordPress site, ensuring faster loading times and improved user experience. From plugins to caching techniques, we cover it all! Don’t miss out on these valuable insights that can elevate your website’s performance. Click to watch now and take your WordPress skills to the next level.
This Week’s Sponsors
Kinta: Kinta
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:07.240] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 970. In this show, we’ll be discussing all things performance, WordPress, and AI. We also need to discuss AI. We’ve got a fantastic guest. We’ve got Remkus de Vries here. I have probably butchered his name, but I don’t think it’s a terrible attempt. But he is the co-founder of Scanfully. It’s a service that monitors your WordPress website and informs you if it’s performing as you want. It’s going to be a great discussion. So, Rampers, would you like to give us a quick 10- to 15-second intro, and then when we move into the main part of the show, we can delve more into your background. Sure.
[00:01:19.620] – Remkus de Vries
Remkus de Vries and I are long-time WordPress users of mostly complex and weirdly fast, and I think the word is complex. Complex sites and builds that I’ve built with my agency over the years. And I’ve, as such, focused a lot on everything having to do with best practices in terms of tools, tooling, and, of course, the output of WordPress performance itself.
[00:01:54.480] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. And I’ve got my ever-ever patient co-host. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:02:03.260] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yes, thank you, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Ahnen, and I own an agency called MananaNoMas. We focus largely on learning and membership-style websites, and I work directly with the good folks over at WP Tonic as well.
[00:02:15.420] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Before we delve into the meat and potatoes of this great show and discussion, I have a couple of messages to share, including one from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. Additionally, I’d like to highlight our curated list of special offers from sponsors, as well as a selection of the best WordPress plugins and services that will save you a significant amount of time, my valued WordPress professionals. You can go. Where do you go to get all these goodies? Just go over to wp-tonic. Com/dills. Wp-tonic. Com/dills. What more could my WordPress professionals ask for? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page. They just love that, actually, because they just listen for that, actually. They’re not children, are they? So let’s go in. How did you get into the world of web design development, and especially in WordPress? What led to this decision, Rampes?
[00:03:36.380] – Remkus de Vries
Dreadful? I don’t know about that. In 2002, I started doing in-company training when I was working for a company and project management, and then transitioned to doing that outside of the company for my own. I started my own business, and I needed a website because I needed to be at least show off my services and topics that I could do trainings on. I asked a friend to build me a website. He built me one. About two weeks later, I asked him again, Can you change this business? Now, I had a list of four or five things. He’s like, Sure. But that’s about the same amount of work, so it’s going to cost you pretty much the same money again. I go, Well, hold on. There’s got to be a smarter way to do this. Landed on Mumbo. Started doing more and more. I think you need a Hilmery here and there now for that, Jonathan, to work.
[00:04:39.600] – Jonathan Denwood
You’re bringing back glorious memories.
[00:04:43.680] – Remkus de Vries
For from Mambo, I transitioned into June. Right around the time I was… I built my first site for myself. And as soon as I had that, another friend of mine said, That’s a cool site. Can you build me one? And I go, Sure, I’ve just done it for myself. I can do it for somebody else. And within the year, I was still doing some training, but essentially my full working days were filled with creating sites. Then in 2006, well, in 2005, I started playing with WordPress. In 2006, early 2006, I got serious because we then had proper pages, so that meant a It was CMS. It was perfect for what I needed for most of my clients. I started building WordPress and haven’t stopped ever since.
[00:05:37.900] – Jonathan Denwood
Fantastic. Any experience with Drupal? You’ve thrown in, obviously.
[00:05:42.660] – Remkus de Vries
I’ve played with it, and I think I built one or two sites with it, but it just never rang true for me. I understand how to set it up and play with it. But I found what drew me in into WordPress and actually playing with it is understanding very quickly what type of controller that had. So that started with just CSS playing and making a site look the way I wanted based off of a template. And I use a lot of Brian Garner’s stuff in the early days as the starting point. And then at some point, I was like, I understand enough to build something myself, and I did. But I’ve never really had the the calling to look into Drupal. I played with Typo. I’ve played with… I see you doing a lot of Hilmeries there.
[00:06:40.840] – Jonathan Denwood
Are you reading up for a reason? I’ll be partially sarcastic with a Drupal question, but there we go. But thank you so much. You brought back glorious memories to me. That’s why I haven’t got your hair half in there. Can you hold a bit? I My sound isn’t the normal quality as some of the sound nutsies like Matt Madais would say, but I am traveling, folks, so I am on the road, but my commitment to you is such that I still do these podcasts. So don’t send emails about the sound quality. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:07:23.400] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I was just… It’s funny because when I talk to folks on the show, it seems like we have very similar starts and similar timelines. I started in WordPress in 2004. I started WordPress 2004, but I went through the Dreamweaver, the Joomla, and stuff like that as well. Earlier, when you were Coming into the show, you were saying that you build more complicated things. And I think there’s an interesting discernment that happens along the way where, could you build a four or five-page marketing-based brochure-style website and knock that Absolutely. I think the attraction for a lot of people, what was it that led you to go from, I can build these simple marketing style brochure websites to using WordPress to build more complicated things? What made you fall in love with going to the next levels?
[00:08:17.520] – Remkus de Vries
First of all, the way my brain works is I need a constant challenge. I would say yes to a project that… I’m sure you’ve heard that saying, whatever the client asked, Can you this, this or that? Your default answer is yes. And I started saying yes to a lot of stuff I had never heard of how to do. Just because I know that’s how my brain works, it needs the challenge, and I found ways to I learned the thing that I needed to know to be able to fulfill the request. And in the early days, I’ve asked other people to build me small solutions. But in the early days, there was also a lot more sharing going on of solutions to do certain things inside of work. So it was relatively easy to figure it out as I went along. And what really propelled it for me were custom texonomies and custom post types. So that combined with CMB at the time, which later became CMB 2, which now for me is ACF. But that’s around 2010. Wordpress version 3. 0 made most of those tools fully available. And then started building sites that had 10 different custom post types hooking into each other and doing weird stuff, dozens of custom taxonomies.
[00:09:42.930] – Remkus de Vries
That’s when it became fun for me. Okay, this is really, really fun.
[00:09:47.580] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, you can build something interesting. So I’m an ad reader.
[00:09:53.300] – Remkus de Vries
I was going to say, if you can think in data structures and how things interconnect and how are the tools inside of work is how they can allow you to build the thing that looks too complex, but really it’s just you understanding the data. That’s when the fun part starts.
[00:10:11.880] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice. So our next question was like, will WordPress be able to adapt to the new realities of AI in the next year, 18 months, 24 months? But I think that question is particularly insightful or has the opportunity for insight with you. You author that newsletter. I’m a fan of it. I read it every week within WordPress.
[00:10:33.080] – Remkus de Vries
Thank you so much.
[00:10:33.940] – Kurt von Ahnen
So I’m assuming that you have a little more insight with AI, what’s coming, what’s not coming, because people share stuff with you. But what thoughts do you have on the new realities of AI going forward with us in WordPress?
[00:10:49.140] – Remkus de Vries
So the trend that we all saw as soon as AI became, let’s call it 18 months ago, became somewhat more mature. The trend we all saw was that everybody thought of AI as the thing to enhance your whatever product. And we’ve seen a lot of those types of solutions, where there’s a sprinkle of AI doing this and a sprinkle of AI doing that. There’s even a plugin now called Hide AI by Andrew Hoyer. I don’t know his last name, pronunciation, but he released that this week. It’s a good example of fighting that wave because that’s the wave of we’re just throwing stuff at the wall and we’ll see what stick because AI, and it’s the buzzword, and we need it. I think we’re slowly but surely moving into a phase where the maturity of AI and what it can do becomes more of a… Wait, there’s stuff that’s very laborious for us to do, very complicated for us to do. But here’s an AI who really doesn’t care how much data and context we throw at it. It’s going to figure it out because that’s what it built to do. I see that trend happening more and more.
[00:12:09.640] – Remkus de Vries
So meaning, very concretely, I see more and more solutions becoming smart about how they implement AI without necessarily calling it AI, if that makes any sense. It’s less of, Hey, look, we have AI. Great. Great. Everybody has AI now. That’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is, how are you leveraging AI to do the thing you do? And we see that on every level, including the new WordPress AI team. I had a podcast with James Lepage, and one of the things I was curious about, you’re saying this team is going to cover everything AI inside of WordPress. But what does that mean? And he goes, Well, just inside WordPress, we also have this huge bucket of tickets and issues which are very hard hard to herd as a human. But if we figure out how to have AI look at that and then combine and close the tickets as it figures out these are related, these are not, this and this and that, wow, what can AI else do? Now, that’s the type of thinking I see more and more.
[00:13:18.280] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice. Jonathan?
[00:13:21.060] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, thank you. Because obviously, it’s strength, one of the strengths of WordPress, and also one of its weaknesses, is the plugin architecture, free or premium. You have these separate Lego bricks and you combine them and you can do things at a cost and at a speed of set up that you couldn’t do if you were attempting to do the same thing with a full custom code extended solution, which has its own problems as well. But where does plugins, which is a key part of the WordPress platform, where do you see that in 18 months, where you could just tell AI, my language or coding platform, I want these features, and it just produce the code for you to some extent. Where in a year, 18 months, where do you see the plugin part of WordPress being?
[00:14:52.020] – Remkus de Vries
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think it’s a little bit in line with my previous answer, where we’re reaching a level of maturity now in how we’re using AI, and we’ll see that in all the areas that WordPress touches. So Let’s start with assuming that of 100 people in the world, maybe one or two actually knows AI intimately. I’m sure there’s more people actually using it in various ways, but intimately understanding AI. If you then turn those two people into 100 people, so 2% becomes 100% again. I think we are slowly seeing more people jump in the pool of let’s deep dive into AI. And that inherently has the result of people understanding how to better use it, meaning there’s ideas that are too complex or just too laborious to do in the plugin that you’re building. But if I use AI as an assistant to help me debug, to help me think, to help me write out structure or incorporate best practices or make sure whatever I’m building is secure, scalable, performant, things of accessibility and all of those things, you can just tell it. Now, you’ll still need to understand what it is that you’re building.
[00:16:28.900] – Remkus de Vries
You still need to understand code, you need to understand the principles of scaling and performance and accessible, all of those things. That doesn’t change, but it allows you to much faster iterate through what would this function look like. What if I can combine this and then have that? That’s like two weeks of work. But what if I have the AI play with it and do it in cursor or bolt or whatever and have it spin it up for me, and then I can check the validity of it, and then I have my proof of concept, and then I can then work on having AI help me turn a proof of concept type of plugin or addition or whatever into an actual fully fledged, fully integrated, thought of all the different areas where you can type a new release. I think we’re moving into where that pool of people thinking in this particular way is growing rapidly currently because we’re well past the I’m going to just wait it out for a moment and just look at it and see when I need to jump in. I see people jumping in left and right. People have been just looking at it from the generational type of stuff.
[00:17:43.800] – Remkus de Vries
So create me a blog post that talks about this, this, and that. Sure. But to have AI. We’re reaching the phase now where that group of people is leaning in on AI and saying, Look, I understand if I give you specific commands in a a certain chain, and I take maybe two hours to configure my prompt to be absolutely perfect, then my output is in maybe four hours, I’ve done what normally a week would cost. I think we’re going to see a lot of speeding up of ideas and things like that. I see that for myself as well. I have two side projects in my head that I wanted to do something with for the longest. When waiting for a call and there’s 5, 10 minutes to kill, what I now do, what I force myself to do, is I have a separate project inside ChatGPT, where I’m just brainstorming with the AI as I’m waiting. I keep throwing stuff at it. Okay, great. But I also wanted to do this, and I also want to do that. I have an idea where there’s a whole bunch of complex custom post types that are with permalinks as parent, child, and grandchild, which is tedious to write out and test out.
[00:19:03.020] – Remkus de Vries
But I keep throwing stuff at it, and then it figured that out, and I’m then throwing stuff what I would like to see in the custom post types and what I want the functionality. I can go about it much more granularly and actually have a result. And that’s just me playing with stuff. But what if I sit down and seriously do that for eight hours a day, weeks on end, you end up with a hyper productivity that is actually going to propel all different types of software releases, WordPress plugins included.
[00:19:36.200] – Jonathan Denwood
I agree with a lot that you said here. What about there’s a lot of discussion like this five page brochure site. A lot of people say, if you’re in that space, because I’m bombarded, it’s totally because I’m over 40, I’m well over 40. I’m getting all these YouTube adverts where you’re only using AI, you’re only using chat, but you could build a fully functioning business website in two minutes by using AI. There’s a group of influencers on YouTube, and there’s platforms that allow you to do that, but it’s a little bit more complicated motivated. Also, I was thinking, what’s the real difference then using a WordPress theme or using Wix or Squarespace and using one of their themes and just using some AI content. I haven’t really clarified the real difference between what’s already there in some ways. What’s What’s your thoughts about it all?
[00:21:02.460] – Remkus de Vries
I think we have to accept that there are certain sites… No, there’s a certain group of people that are going to use whatever is the easiest thing for them to start using. If they get their hands on an AI and that allows them to build a five, six, seven-pager with just some visual input and play around, and it’s fine if it’s static and build off of whatever JavaScript library, and they know how to FTP it in and move it over there, and it then works, that’s fine. That stuff has been happening for ages anyway. That group will go a little bit larger now, sure. But I think the strength of WordPress is and always has been its flexibility. Meaning if you wanted to, you can do extremely extremely highly-regarded architecture, structural WordPress sites that are just absolutely blazingly modern, use PHP 8. 4 to the best of their ability, and you You can make an incredibly high-end type of solution if you wanted to. Now, the vast majority is not going to use that and just wants to set up your site and, sure, add functionality here and there, and we’ll run Woocommerce and all of those things.
[00:22:30.400] – Remkus de Vries
And you still can do that as well. So at some point, whoever starts with a small site and just figures out how to play with it and have it, they’re just going to continue to do that. But I think the move from, I’m working on this static I think to, I’d like something more flexible because I do want to add or change certain things more easily, you’ll end up with a CMS. And whenever you make the move to a CMS, I think it’s quite logical It’s logical still to continue using WordPress. Sure, there’s Wix and Squarespace and all of those types of solution, and they have a certain flexibility. But I think it serves in a slightly different crowd. Certainly, once you’ve been exposed to WordPress in terms of what it allows you to do in terms in terms of flexibility and an absolute control over your data, your design, your any choice for any type of functionality. I think WordPress has always been in the best position. I think it still is. That said, Wix and Squarespace, they are going to take up a portion of the people starting those brochure sites off of static stuff they can build with AI.
[00:23:56.300] – Remkus de Vries
Sure. But bottom I don’t think WordPress is going anywhere soon in terms of not disappearing because the tools we have to our availability, the ecosystem is just too large, maybe even too large to fail, who knows? But It’s for sure not something that’s worrying me.
[00:24:21.080] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, before we go for our break, I totally agree with you, but I just want to add a little bit and get you in for it, and then we go to break. Is that I think there’s, for obvious reasons, a lot of attention on Wix, on Squarespace, on Shopify. I actually think one of the biggest attack factors at WordPress is that if you go into any… I do another show with Kurt, and I think we talked about this in our other show, is there’s a hole. If you go into any industry sector, any Pacific industry, that’s our online presence, you will find SaaS platforms in that industry sector that also offer a website as part of a CRM or other online function. Functionality in a package. I think they have been gradually taking away market share very gradually from what agency might build out for a local client using WordPress. Those type of customers go for the SaaS solution.
[00:25:58.990] – Remkus de Vries
Yeah, the website as a service solutions.
[00:26:02.280] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, where with AI, the cost of using something like WordPress and building a Vistoke semi-custom solution will go down because a lot of customers, they’re okay with the SaaS solution, but it doesn’t quite fit what they’re really looking for. But I don’t know if I’m deluding myself there. It could be totally different. What do you think before we go to So websites as a service is for sure something we’re seeing more and more.
[00:26:42.440] – Remkus de Vries
It’s the nichefication of websites as a whole, I’d say. If you wanted to and you’d only want to focus on websites for plumbers, I’m sure if you start researching 15, 20, 25 plumbers, you have a good idea of what they need. And if you then build a solution, you market that solution and you then host it. Yeah, that’s something we’re seeing a lot. I don’t have data to back this up, but my gut says a lot of these types of solutions are having to consider either fully build the whole thing custom or use something like grade suite And then that is a solution that lives inside of WordPress, who plays to the advantage of WordPress, but also introduces the whole set of features that you need in a website as a service solution. If you continue to throw money at every single niche that you think you can turn into a website as a software, as a was solution, I think you’re doing yourself a disservice. And at some point, I think, how far do you want to take this? Certainly on this side of the point, I haven’t seen any huge examples of where that really is making a dent.
[00:28:15.980] – Remkus de Vries
So my assumption, again, I don’t have any data back this up, but my assumption is that these types of solutions are just not making a dent yet.
[00:28:26.660] – Jonathan Denwood
I think they’re pushed much harder, if you’d like to say, but I’ve got no-For sure, but there’s money for them. Real credible data to support my statement. But I think if you look at any industry, any sector, there’s Software as a Service and WASP. Wordpress as a service had initially some traction, but it faded a bit. But I think that was more down to… It’s tricky. You can do it, and I think Lifter LMS has done a good job of providing a lot of functionality, but not being a full wasp, not being a full… Still being open enough that it will work with other core WordPress plugins. I haven’t formulated all this clearly in my own mind, to be truthful.
[00:29:24.460] – Remkus de Vries
Yeah, I think Chris Badget is… I think it’s a valid choice for him to make, do I include the whole, the was, the hosting, and everything that comes with it? I think it’s an interesting one because it makes sense, but I don’t necessarily see a lot of… I don’t come across a lot of those types of sites other than gyms, I have to say, because there’s a lot of gym sites that are just part of Oh, you want our booking system for the-Personal training. Personal training and all that stuff. We have that for you, and we also have a website for you. So I see those. Virtua gym, for instance, is one of those services that it’s adding. But I also built four websites for personal trainers, and they are clearly on WordPress because they have realized how much more freedom that gives them. So they’re like, Yeah, okay, it’s going to cost me a little bit money to get the plugin that does the same type of booking, and there’s a subscription thing I need, sure. And there’s a few other things. But I’m not seeing loads of people moving off of WordPress or making a dent in that type of growth.
[00:30:55.420] – Remkus de Vries
Again, I don’t have any data for this, but this is anecdotal in terms of I see and who I talk to at WordCamp and all that.
[00:31:04.520] – Jonathan Denwood
Thank you. Well, thanks for that. We’re going to go for our mid-break. We’ve got a couple more messages from our sponsors who are much appreciated. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. Also, I want to point out we’ve got a great free resource. That’s the WP Tonic YouTube channel. We’ve got interviews like this, We also sometimes have bonus content, plus we’ve got a load of other content that is helpful to the WordPress professional. Reviews, the latest plugins, marketing advice. We cover a load of stuff on the WP WP Tonic YouTube channel, and it’s a great way of supporting WP Tonic. So go over there and subscribe. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:31:54.880] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I’m just biting my tongue the whole time we’ve been talking about the subjects with the AI, and we hear about sometimes the AI code is bloated, and it’s this, and it’s that. And I’m thinking to myself the whole time, we’re talking to a guy who focuses on performance, right? So when it comes to performance in WordPress, what are the things that people really need to consider? And I should clarify, I’ve been horribly distracted lately. I’m distracted by Marooni is this new thing that’s going to help give people front-end access to make request for changes on their website. So I talked to Zack about Marooni. I’m one of the people that Kevin got money from right away for Etch. So I’m trying to learn how to use Etch in the background. There’s all these things happening, and at the same time, I’m like…
[00:32:47.280] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t know how you do all this because I feel threatened, and I don’t do all the interview what you’re doing. I don’t know how you do it, actually.
[00:32:55.580] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I think to myself, not only is it the budget, but you have I think I’m learning all this stuff, but at the end of the day, I still want to have a website that performs well and meets the needs of the client and the page speed and all that stuff. But I’m also packing all this other junk in. So there’s got to be a balance. And now I finally got you on camera to ask you what your thoughts are on all these tools, and when do we say no, and when do we say yes, or do we just buy more hosting?
[00:33:23.040] – Remkus de Vries
So getting a WordPress site fast is, if If you start googling this particular topic, you’ll find a great many tutorials, and they’re all pointing essentially to make sure you’re using as few plugins as possible, make sure your assets are optimized, so your CSS, your JavaScript, your images, all that stuff, and get yourself some optimized CSS while you’re added. But that’s pretty much the focus they have. As it so happens, I have softly prelaunched my first WordPress course, which is called Make WordPress Fast, and you’ll find it within wp. Com. In it, I have 25 modules, 25 modules that discuss all the things that go into how do I build a performant website? Because it’s for sure more than mind your plugins, optimize your assets. There’s a lot more layers. There’s a lot of layers of caching. There’s a lot of layers of optimization, but there’s also a lot of layers of access, meaning the first thing you can optimize for is DNS. It’s simple as that. I’ve seen sites where it was a wonky DNS, adding a second, almost a second to the just to time to first bite element. The biggest thing in terms of understanding performance is understanding, first of all, all the layers, making all the right choices per layer, or at least understanding the choices you have.
[00:35:09.560] – Remkus de Vries
Then as you end up with the theme and the plugins that you’re using, every single choice needs to be weighed. And most people just skip that. They just build, and at the end, they go like, Let me finish the output. And the biggest problem with that is that, because fixing the output, we can… Let’s call that caching. Caching doesn’t make your site fast. No. Not at all. And people don’t fully grasp that because what caching does, it optimizes the output that your site produces. So that’s HTML with its assets in a rendered fashion. It then stores it as flat HTML on server level. If you’re doing it smart, you’re doing it in front of your site, so at the edge, we call that. So there’s solutions like NitroPack or Cloudflat that help you do that, but you still haven’t fully fixed how to build for performance. So that means if you want to do this right, every single commit that you make, whether that is absolutely just pure code added to the code base or a full plugin or a change that is significant in any way, shape, or form in terms of settings that you alter, every single one of those choices that you make You should validate for its performance impact.
[00:36:34.860] – Remkus de Vries
If you don’t, you have no clue where it’s at. Now, when you don’t do this and you have, here’s a site and I need to optimize it now, you have to backtrace all the steps that have been made, all the choices that have been made. So sometimes it’s hosting. Sometimes it’s hosting, sometimes it’s a database designed. It just does not want to perform for this bulk of data. Sometimes it’s a theme. Chances are high if you get something off of Theme Forest, and I think most WordPress professionals know this, there’s a large possibility that your theme is just not performant, or it introduces unwanted stuff. So every single It’s tedious, but it’s necessary. But every single decision you make in terms of what do I add to my site needs to have gone through your testing per change. Again, tedious, but let’s say you spend 10 working days in building a site. Every single at the end of the day, somewhere, you need to test for performance, somewhere. Now, my course goes into what are the layers? My course goes into you understanding your choices in those layers, and my course goes in there, so how do we debug?
[00:37:50.990] – Remkus de Vries
How do we figure out where stuff is doing the weird stuff? But yeah, you have to build with the mindset of, I want to do this in a performant way. It all starts there. It has to stop being, I’ll slap some caching on it. Because if you’re not aware, there’s a thing called cash hit ratio, meaning of 100 request your site processes, what is the percentage of sites that you are supposedly offering in a cached version, but they’re not seen in a cached version? You’ll be shocked to learn how low that can be, especially if it’s a member site as the types sites that you’re building, any site that requires a login, for instance, a Woocommerce. In fact, Woocommerce and all other e-commerce solutions are even worse. But from the moment you add something to your cart, that’s the moment the rest of the site cannot be cached. So what are you optimizing for with your caching plugin if a very large portion of the traffic your site sees is uncashable?
[00:38:58.180] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, on our end, we see a lot clients that will have multiple caching tools installed, not even recognizing that they’re caching tools. And so we go through. And to your point, if they’re on a Lifter LMS website, a LearnDash, a Woocommerce, I mean, the site just starts locking up. People can’t log in. They’re seeing orders they didn’t order. They’re seeing courses they didn’t sign up for. And people are frustrated and think the platform is broken. It’s not the platform, it’s what you’re doing with it. You’ve got all this junk floating around. Yeah.
[00:39:28.580] – Remkus de Vries
I’m I was advertising for a very long time. I was advertising a quick performance scan, and you could purchase that off of my site. The vast majority of these sites had multiple page builders, different ones, but working together in some way. Or, for instance, a one-page builder, but then with three, four, five extensions that add something to the core of that page builder. People wonder why stuff gets slow. It doesn’t take a lot of time to fully scan through the site. Then I start chasing where does a particular thing come from or whatnot. That might take some time. But if I see three or four extensions to, for instance, Elementor, I know for a fact I have already found a large reason of why your site is slow. If you then also add Thrive to the mix for whatever reason, then yeah, sure, your site’s going to be slow.
[00:40:34.380] – Jonathan Denwood
All right.
[00:40:36.080] – Kurt von Ahnen
Jonathan, over to you.
[00:40:39.280] – Jonathan Denwood
So let’s have some fun, shall we? Or let’s get me… Well, I have lots of time. I might do this in the bonus content, actually. If you’re up for doing some bonus, do you have to go at the hour? Or can you hang on?
[00:40:56.780] – Remkus de Vries
I have a bit of time.
[00:40:58.900] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. Kirk, I got to go before the hour, but we can have some fun after. But I totally agree what you’re saying, because it’s just complicated, but there seems to be this, and it is important, Don’t get me wrong, your hosting partner is important, but there seems to be a lot of stuff out there. It’s solely about hosting. What you’re pointing now is obviously so right. It’s the plugins, it’s the theme, it’s the way the whole thing’s been set up. There’s a lot of various variables to it. Why do you think… I don’t know if you agree what I’m just going to ask you, but there seems to be this total obsession around hosting. But what is hosting? Because there’s all types of hosting out there using all sorts of different technologies. You’ve been in this game, you’ve been in hosting yourself. So you know there’s all sorts of hosting out there, isn’t there?
[00:42:08.260] – Remkus de Vries
There is. I think hosting the bare surface of just hosting, for that, you can go anywhere and you can measure the performance. There’s various tools out there that will tell you exactly technically how performant your hosting environment is. And there’s a good case to go with hosting environments that have, let’s call it a high throughput, meaning a lot of database interactions is fine and a lot of file rights and stuff, I/O, is fine. And again, those are measurable, right? If you go to Kevin Ohashi site, wphostingreview. Com, I think it is, or otherwise, review, signal. Com. He’ll show you the test that he does independent. They don’t tell him to pay attention to a specific thing and ignore other things. They go, Just please test us. And he tests everybody in the exactly same way, and the results are as methodical as you can have the hosting result. So if you want to know how well the machinery works, that’s a good way to start. But hosting is not just that. Hosting is also the tooling around it, the stuff that you can also use in conjunction with just the hosting. So for some people, that includes support.
[00:43:42.000] – Remkus de Vries
Support needs to be there within a minute. I go, I really don’t care. Let them take their time. But I want the answer to be an intelligent answer. I don’t care for somebody to respond within a minute.
[00:43:52.920] – Jonathan Denwood
Low-grade quality 24/7 support.
[00:43:57.480] – Remkus de Vries
Exactly. If that’s all you’re doing, then I think you’re missing the opportunity to focus on the quality of the hosting and the stuff that goes around it to be at the absolute utmost highest level. Hosting is important, but most people choose hosting because of either the pricing or the level of support they get. But I think they should look at what is the raw performance here, what am I paying for that, and how easy is it for me to extend on it? So I look at other stuff. So I don’t- If you’re a WordPress professional, an agency owner that’s got a lot of experience.
[00:44:43.250] – Jonathan Denwood
The average business owner that likes WordPress, got used to using it and likes it- Yeah, they make different choices. How are they supposed? And then you get some curves and say, Well, don’t you go to it? And I’ll make it clear I’ve got no problem. Not done me any on. So go to Cloudflare. Not Cloudflare, Cloudways. For the right type of individual, I’ve dealt with them, and they expect you to be able to put your questions in a certain technical way. They’re not set up to deal with the average retail customer.
[00:45:32.720] – Remkus de Vries
What I want to be clear about, it’s fine, right? That’s totally fine. Not every single type of hosting needs to be the same level of services they provide, focus on what type of clients, all that. I think hosting Companies have a wonderful way of niching down into the crowd that they like to service. The price is going to be, generally, you get what you pay for. I don’t see really bad hosting asking $100 a month type of deals. I see the other way around, sure. You’re going to pick the hosting that matches your desires the most. Performance and speed is part of it, but I think the vast majority picks a host because of ease of dashboard, ease of tools they can use, monitoring and all that stuff. And that’s fine. That’s how it works. At a certain point, if your site is running into performance issues, that’s the moment you start looking into, Okay, what am I missing here? And I advocate for that moment to not be when the shit hits the fan, but for that moment to be while you’re building it.
[00:46:42.600] – Jonathan Denwood
Sorry.
[00:46:44.180] – Remkus de Vries
That’s exactly the driver for why I created the course.
[00:46:51.500] – Jonathan Denwood
Nice.
[00:46:52.540] – Kurt von Ahnen
If we shift the conversation to community, because you guys just had WordPress Europe, right? And then there’s all kinds of activities going on. We had a press comp here. That was interesting. What do you think are the major weaknesses or strengths of the WordPress community now? I didn’t really get involved in the community till a few years ago, to be honest with you. I went to WordCamp US in San Diego, and that launched me both feet in on the community. I bought and sold and paid for right there. But then I’ve noticed this last So this year, things have felt completely different.
[00:47:33.020] – Remkus de Vries
Well, there’s a lot that’s happened in the last year, so I don’t necessarily care too much to dive into that because as things are ongoing, going for the debacle between automatic and WP engine. I’m going to leave that be what it is. But what I am seeing is that the community as a whole is changing. And that was going on before. I’ve been very much part of the WordPress community very actively since 2008, co-founding WordCamp Netherlands, co-founding WordCamp Europe, and having been part of both organizing teams in a leading fashion as well as team leads and all that stuff for 15 years. So I’ve seen what was a natural growth pattern for the community as the And I think the software is… I think it’s still growing, but it’s growing differently. I think what it’s mostly growing into is a more professional approach. And if it’s a more professional approach, that means a different profile of type of people that are into the community side of things, which I think is a natural thing to happen. And you can see the difference, for instance, between the US and Europe, but it’s specifically in Asia. The The level of enthusiasm that’s happening in Asia is akin to what it was seven, eight years ago in Europe and the US.
[00:49:12.040] – Remkus de Vries
Whatever is happening now, I don’t have the answers in terms of what’s really happening and why are things happening. All I can do is look at it and as I’m talking to people at these events, get a gage of how they perceive the thing we’re visiting. And that for me, mostly is a… There’s an uptick in professionalism, which means there’s a certain crowd that is less prone to come. We’ve also had the blip from 2020 to 2023, which also has forced us to reprioritize what are my priorities? And then when you find your new priorities, then where it is going to an event and going to this and this and that. So if I’m sure you’ve heard the expression, If you throw a frog into water and you start boiling it, the frog is going to stay afoot. If you throw a frog into boiling water, it’s going to jump out right away. So what we’ve had, maybe not the best analogy here, but what we’ve had is we’ve been sitting in water that kept getting warmer. To make the analogy somewhat decent, the water was getting very nice, very comfortable. When there was no more fire heating up the water from 2020 to 2023, we got cold a little bit.
[00:50:33.940] – Remkus de Vries
We got scared a little bit. Hold on, what’s going on here? Am I still consciously choosing to do the thing that I did on automatic? No pun intended. I think that opened the door for people reevaluating their choices and where am I focusing my time? I have a suspicion it would have been just flattening out all the same, but slower if the blip hadn’t happened. But I don’t have data to back any of this. This is a gut feeling. This is what I hear people talk about at work in the hallway tracks and stuff like that.
[00:51:15.880] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, but my personal thoughts were like, I don’t see a lot of young people at the events. I started speaking at some of the high schools and community colleges and then asking direct questions in those talks about what’s your exposure to WordPress? Do you know what open source is? And by and large, they’re not even familiar with our platform, even though it runs 43% of the web. They know how the internet works. They just don’t really understand how it’s built. And the schools aren’t really filling people in at that level.
[00:51:48.860] – Remkus de Vries
Don’t forget, that is a generation that has grown up on close platforms.
[00:51:54.940] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.
[00:51:56.140] – Remkus de Vries
Us three all here, in a few In two weeks, I’ll be 52. I’ve grown up on the internet. I saw it come from nothing, and I come from a place where privacy is much more a forethought instead of an afterthought. So open source and owning my own data is something that I hold very high. Now, my kids still understand that concept. They’re 18, 25, 27. But a lot of my nieces and those who call me uncle, I forget the word, but they just don’t see it the same way. They are aware that if I point it out to them, they go like, Yeah, I get it. But then When their accounts get deleted because they are just abusing the terms of service of the platform they’re on, they go like, Can you please help me figure it out? Because they understand I know a little a bit more about the internet and how things work. I go like, Well, this is what happens when you build on somebody else’s garden. They go like, What else should I do? There’s ways. So times have shifted in terms of what technology does and allows us to do, sure.
[00:53:22.540] – Remkus de Vries
But I think that particular part of why do we not see young people? They’re not on our platforms, period. So they’re not much into websites just yet. They’re into whatever their Snap says, whatever their WhatsApp says, whatever their… No, not even Facebook that much anymore. But Instagram, for real, TikTok. And I use all these platforms as well. But I understand how I’m interacting with it. Like nothing I save on Instagram or TikTok, I’m not going to ever assume is saved. I’m going to assume I lose my account at some point for whatever something stupid I did. That’s my base assumption. It’s not my garden. So I can’t assume that I’m going to be having my account and all my connections there. So what do I do? I make sure that whatever I find interesting there, I copy that, I screenshot it or whatever, I bring it into my own system. I use Obsidian for that. That generation just does not see it yet. I think they will. I think they will hit a wall that They have to. But at a certain point, I don’t know, maybe it’s the more mature world you end up in anyway.
[00:54:40.840] – Remkus de Vries
And those are websites, and those are other types of data structures. I just don’t see them jumping into WordPress as quickly as everybody keeps saying, No, we should just bring in the youth more. You’re not going to make that happen because we don’t provide their platform. It’s just as simple as that. If we can have federated versions and everybody joins, so TikTok, Instagram, threads, whatever, and everybody joins the same protocol, so we have an equal fighting chance, and we have a solution on top of WordPress that acts like it’s one of those walled gardens, yeah, sure, you’ll have potential. But I feel miles away from being in that position. Sorry for that, Grant, but- No, no, no, no.
[00:55:34.020] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s all good stuff. Jonathan, over to you.
[00:55:36.760] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think we’re going to wrap up the podcast part of the show, but we have some bonus content. I’ll give some of my own feedback on what my own courses just said there. But so Rames, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?
[00:55:59.060] – Remkus de Vries
Our EM kumk. Us.
[00:56:02.980] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, I’ll make sure.
[00:56:04.510] – Remkus de Vries
I cannot make it shorter.
[00:56:05.980] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ll make sure it’s all in the show notes. And Kurt, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and your thoughts on what you’re up to?
[00:56:14.340] – Kurt von Ahnen
For Personal Connection, just hit me up on LinkedIn. I’m the only Kurt von Ahnen on LinkedIn, so it’s easy to find. And then business is Manana Nomas. Anything that’s Manana Nomas typically leads back to me.
[00:56:25.420] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. To ask from you, tribe, if you’re getting value from this podcast, and we are getting more listeners and viewers. Much appreciate you. But if you’re getting some value, why don’t you consider going to YouTube, or YouTube, iTunes, or Spotify, and leave a review Especially if you’re using your phone app, it’s really quite easy on both those platforms to leave a review, and it really does help the show to be publicized and new people to find it. And that helps me get better sponsors. So it’s a win-win for you, and it means the show will continue. So if you could consider that, that would be well appreciated. We’ll be back next week with another fantastic guest. Like I said, we’re going to be doing some sponsored content, bonus content, which you will find the whole show, plus the bonus on the WP Tonic YouTube channel. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye. Like I said, Kerb had to go quick because he’s got another thing online to do. So I really thought what you said about the younger generation being on these closed platforms, really spot on. I think the other thing, they feel that, Oh, I will never get banned because I’m not involved in politics or anything.
[00:58:00.000] – Jonathan Denwood
But what they tend to forget is if they get hacked because I’ve had to help their clients that’ve been with me a long time. It’s got nothing to do with me, really. But they’ve just outreach to me, and they’ve been with me for years, and I’ve just got sucked in. They’ve built quite a large audience on YouTube or whatever platform, and they’ve got hacked. I’m trying to get a response out of these platforms.
[00:58:34.860] – Remkus de Vries
It’s impossible. My daughter got hacked.
[00:58:38.870] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m not allowed to do outreach and find somebody that knew somebody. I’ve helped these people, but it’s been a nightmare, and they just don’t realize, do they?
[00:58:53.340] – Remkus de Vries
No, my daughter’s Instagram got hacked about a year ago, and there was just no way to fix it because she still had access. But as soon as she changed something, they took over again and again and again because of Facebook business accounts allowing themselves to grant more access, whatever. So whatever she was removing on a higher level was being added again constantly. And there was nobody on the side of Instagram providing any type of feedback or help or whatever. So she ended up just deleting the account and creating a new one. But that’s the consequence of, again, building in somebody else’s garden.
[00:59:44.900] – Jonathan Denwood
Which is fine if you got a small audience, but if this is the main driver of your business and you’ve spent a lot of time, this getting a new account or only having that option could be disastrous, couldn’t it?
[01:00:02.760] – Remkus de Vries
Yeah. This is going to happen more and more because even if you were to say, Whatever I’m doing now on those social media channels, I’m well within the bounds of what I’m allowed to do. But what if legislation changes? What if terms of service change and they look at your account retroactively? This has happened before. Who’s to say this is not going to happen again?
[01:00:39.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I’ve had to take a very pragmatic position around Twitter, i. E. X, because I am not a big fan of Elon Musk, and my feelings towards him get worse and worse as his behavior, in my opinion, gets worse to worse. But I’ve had to take a very pragmatic approach to it because it’s taken me years to build up around 7,000 people that follow me. And I’ve cut back a bit, but I’ve been traveling a bit last few weeks. But I just can’t walk away from a platform because I just But if I was spending money on a platform and the propensity about the owner and also about his new AI platform becoming semi-nutsy vibe, it’s not a great image if I’m spending a lot of money on the platform. Is it really something that I want my brand to be linked I don’t think so. So what do you think?
[01:02:05.620] – Remkus de Vries
I share your sentiment there, but I will start by saying I really dislike Jack. So I was on his platform.
[01:02:15.920] – Jonathan Denwood
Jack, sorry. Jack, the former, yeah. Sorry. Oh, Jack, the former… Yeah, sorry. Yeah.
[01:02:19.340] – Remkus de Vries
So the previous owner of Twitter, I thought was absolutely horrible.
[01:02:23.320] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, he had his own problems, didn’t he?
[01:02:25.960] – Remkus de Vries
Yeah. And I seriously dislike Mark Zuckerberg.
[01:02:29.740] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah.
[01:02:31.620] – Remkus de Vries
I loathe anything Bill Gates. The same goes for Elon. I can give you a whole list of things.
[01:02:41.940] – Jonathan Denwood
The way I look at it- They’re not a great group What do you think the figures really are?
[01:02:46.800] – Remkus de Vries
No, not at all. The way I look at it is I know where I stand, I know what I’m sharing, and I know what I’m doing. If I make the conscious choice to use somebody else’s platform that I’m doing so willingly. Do I like the first release of Grok for spouting anti-Semitism left and right? No. But to be fair, so did ChatGPT in the first iterations, and so did other AI. So it’s fine-tuning the data set. I also understand parts of it. But do I think Elon is a loonie? Oh, hell, yeah. But is there still a platform that I can use to my benefit? And that may sound very cold and calculated, but ultimately, that is how I’m going to have to judge this thing. Then I can find my way of having absolutely… I’ve blocked them, so I don’t ever see them. And yet I still can find joy out of the platform because of the connections it gives me and the information.
[01:03:55.280] – Jonathan Denwood
I can’t. Have you managed to block these tweets? Oh, yeah. I can’t block them. Is there a way of blocking them?
[01:04:04.000] – Remkus de Vries
I’m on a paid account, so maybe that’s the bare minimum it needs.
[01:04:08.830] – Jonathan Denwood
I still get his insights, which I would love not to get.
[01:04:16.820] – Remkus de Vries
But I do spend quite a bit of time on the platform very actively blocking all the accounts that I don’t like. So I go in to mute this person and block this person. I do that very, very actively. I’ve been doing so ever since we could mute and block. So for years. And the end result is, I think, is I have a fairly okay platform. I don’t see the extreme political left, extreme political right. I don’t ever see it. What I see is I have a list of people involved in WordPress that is close to 1,700 people on there, and I mainly look at that list. That’s my experience of X. That’s fine. That’s been wonderful since, what was it? Fifteen A couple of years ago?
[01:05:02.760] – Jonathan Denwood
Let’s go on to… Let’s have a little bit of fun. You mentioned Elemator.. Yeah. I thought we could pronounce it. Once What do you think about Gutenberg? You really want a fast site, and you’re looking at all these different page builders, Gutenberg or non-Gutenberg. Do you think Gutenberg… No, I’m not a I’m a great fan of full-site editing, and I think in commercial terms, my dislike is proven by data. But I like other Gutenberg solutions like Cadence. Yeah. Generate Press. That’s another great one, I think. What’s your views about Gutenberg in general? Do you think going that route helps you get a really fast site, or can you look at some of the I’m going to give you the extra lead.
[01:06:01.180] – Remkus de Vries
If your goal is to build the fastest site possible, then the native block editor is the way to go. So the site editor is the way to go. There’s different ways of being frustrated about the site editor, and I fully get that. But for me, full site editing is the first thing I look at. Now, once Edge, the new and upcoming page builder Kurt also referenced, once that one’s out of alpha and moving into beta and then eventually full release, that is for sure a solution that I’m going to start using first. But the beauty of Etch is whatever you build in there as a page builder gets synced back to native Gutenberg. So that’s a win-win. I think that’s Kevin Geary. I think that’s his smartest choice ever to understand the benefit of having a page builder build pages the way you’re supposed to from a design and development perspective, best practices and all that stuff, and then to ultimately have the solution synchronized back into the block editor, I think that’s super smart.
[01:07:21.820] – Jonathan Denwood
Professionally, I’ll stay from building websites.
[01:07:27.440] – Remkus de Vries
I will stay away from any other page page builders. I have used Elementor, I have used Beaver Builder, and I’ve transitioned people away from pretty much any of the other page builders. But I I have no desire to lock myself into a page builder environment again.
[01:07:51.960] – Jonathan Denwood
I totally agree with you. I think you’re spot on there. But I think if you’re a non-agency, a non-freelance professional, I think you’re just an average DIY, which a lot of our hosting clients are. We don’t insist on a solution, but we provide, and we’ve provided a library of starter things for our particular niche. And that’s Cadence, because Ben and what the team at Cadence WP has done-Cadence is a wonderful solution. It has its faults, but for the non-professional, I think it’s a great-It gives you a lot of control. It’s got a lot of add-ons which we provide as part of our package. We provide the whole shebang with cadence, and it works well with woocommas and everything else. But I also like Generate Press. For the same reason as I like I think with their class structure, it appeals also maybe more to the professional. It’s one of it. Otherwise, I think it’s either bricks or etch, really, what Tomas has done with bricks, I think. But if I was an agency and I was doing semi or full custom design and development, I probably would be It would either be generate press or it would be bricks and maybe looking at edge.
[01:09:35.800] – Jonathan Denwood
Would you agree with that? Yeah.
[01:09:38.280] – Remkus de Vries
I’ve never used bricks other than play with it. But in general, yes, I agree with that approach. I have an elitist way of looking at this thing. I want to think- You got an agency way of looking at it. I need performance first. That means there’s a whole bunch of page builder solutions out that are just not going to cut it for me. So I’m just not even considering them.
[01:10:05.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, because there’s a whole library of them out there, isn’t it?
[01:10:09.920] – Remkus de Vries
Yeah, about 25, 26, 30, whatever.
[01:10:13.400] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t know. What’s your feelings about the direction that Diffie’s gone? Because people love Divi, and I’m not. I love the people, but I just don’t like… I never have loved the project. Same.
[01:10:26.820] – Remkus de Vries
Not my copa. I don’t like Diffie.
[01:10:29.700] – Jonathan Denwood
No. But the other thing is, how do you think what’s the future for Elementor?
[01:10:37.500] – Remkus de Vries
For Elementor, I think they’re starting to transition into being more aware that their solution was originally a marketing-driven solution, meaning marketing people thought of the product, marketing people built it. And I think the volume of what they is catching up with them and we have a responsibility to be smarter here. From what I’ve seen from Element 4, it is highly performant. It is much less of a concern in the nested and crowded dom. It just becomes a better and smarter product. I’m very curious to see where they go with that. In terms of volume that they have, it’s a force to be reckoned with. If you were to just take all the sites that live on Elementor, that’s a larger market share than Wix and Squarespace and all of those. So it’s massive.
[01:11:38.400] – Jonathan Denwood
Amazing how they got amazing, really, the job they did marketing-wise. But they were the first to get really the Beaver builder crowd, lovely people. They still have a couple of customers that are using it, but they got Elementor just got back traction, didn’t they? And outside the investment, didn’t they? But I haven’t used Elemator for a lot. We’ve got some clients that use it, and I don’t actively. We recommend Scutenberg, basically. But where do you see the full… Because I just don’t like it. I’ve got to be honest. I’m just going to be honest. I just don’t like full. But where do you How do you see that going? Because it has been in commercial. You look at the amount of themes and third party, it just hasn’t got any traction, has it?
[01:12:40.840] – Remkus de Vries
It does have traction.
[01:12:42.700] – Jonathan Denwood
You disagree with me, right?
[01:12:44.740] – Remkus de Vries
Yeah. So the traction was very slow, let’s say, 18 months ago. But for the last, let’s call it 10 months, this is starting to change. And you can see the data showing there’s an uptick in full site editing. I think it’s very much having to do with the site editor being in the earliest stages of being mature. It’s absolutely not mature, but like I said, it’s in the earlier stages. You can build good sites with it. You need to spend time understanding how it works to fully leverage everything that’s in there. There’s a lot of parts of the UI are just wonky. I don’t even want to start and begin to tell you how badly the navigation section is. That’s just horrible UI, UX, everything. That said, it is maturing and it is getting better. And as people are moving into the moment where redesigning their site becomes an option, I think more and more people start to use full site editing, especially when you have base themes like Ollie. Ollie is my absolute favorite. Mike McAllister and Patrick do a wonderful job in bringing to life what the editor can be in terms of how the patterns work and how you can play with it and all that stuff.
[01:14:19.320] – Remkus de Vries
So I’m quite optimistic that it’s going to continue to become more mature and seen as such. You also see more content creators talk about it, which is obviously Here’s a caveat. There’s a good argument to be made that the growth of the site editor hasn’t been as exponential as it could have been because we have content creators spreading the word focused on page builders because they’re getting paid by the affiliates or them creating videos about it. I think Jamie Marsland is a wonderful example. When he started really sharing what the site editor could do, we saw an optic on all things site editor. People started to go, Okay, I get it now. Wait, you can do that with the cover blog? That is smart. Wait, I can also do this? I have that stuff, that education by large accounts, content creators, that’s what we need a lot more of. And then it becomes a fair game. But right now everybody is pushing bricks or is pushing Elementor because there’s a way to incentivize on that. It’s not It’s not a fair comparison. The full site editing crowd has been that crowd because they consciously made that decision.
[01:15:41.560] – Remkus de Vries
And all the page builders have been talked into working with a page builder.
[01:15:46.440] – Jonathan Denwood
My position is a little bit different. I agree with you there. And I’ve got to point out, Kurt is more in your camp when it comes to full-site editing. And he trains a lot newbies or in to react with… And he said a lot of people that are new to WordPress really love full-site editing. I don’t. And the way I cope with it is to use something like Cadence, because I don’t hate the interface of Gutenberg, but I don’t think in UX and usability terms, it’s a great interface. It’s okay. When you get your teeth and you just get on with it, it becomes better and better. But it is not a polished- No, not at all.
[01:16:38.900] – Remkus de Vries
I think there’s an argument to be made that you are burdened by the past.
[01:16:45.040] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes. Well, there’s a lot of the past for me because I’m old.
[01:16:48.660] – Remkus de Vries
Yeah, but if you’re jumping in now and you see full-side editing for the first time and somebody just explains it to you with a little bit of care, you get it. It’s not difficult to comprehend. I would argue there’s page build a functionality that’s a lot more complicated to comprehend. All the controls you have, I think for a few page builders, it’s just overkill. If you’re used to a different type of past and all that. You look at it and you go, Yeah, it’s not there yet.
[01:17:24.200] – Jonathan Denwood
You pointed out it’s also the efficiency in your navigation.
[01:17:29.330] – Remkus de Vries
I can’t hear you now. The audio is falling away.
[01:17:32.200] – Jonathan Denwood
Can you hear me there?
[01:17:34.080] – Remkus de Vries
A little bit, yeah.
[01:17:35.360] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’m sorry. It’s navigation that… I just I just expect something that’s been around for over six years now to be more mature and to be more- The block editor is.
[01:17:53.420] – Remkus de Vries
The site editor is not that old. No, that’s true. There is a difference. If anything, you do inside the post editor as you’re writing your blog post, that’s pretty mature. Still, that UI can be significantly improved as well. But the site editor itself is moving too slowly. It’s been what? Two full years?
[01:18:18.240] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, I think you’re right. Yes, can you hear me?
[01:18:23.660] – Remkus de Vries
Yeah, I can. I’m still positive, but it’s also because at a certain point, I made the conscious decision to switch everything. Then, when you dive deeper into that realm, it becomes more logical.
[01:18:42.940] – Jonathan Denwood
I also think that a product can appeal to both the consumer level and the power user. It’s the same. It can be the same product that appeals to both hard-core freelancers and agencies. I don’t actually think that’s totally possible. I think you’re probably going to have different… Because I do think there’s probably a place for something like Etch, and I totally agreed. I think it was really clever that it produces Gutenberg blocks; that’s a great way to do it. But what a power freelance and what agency wants on their building tool is going to be totally different from the average person who just wants to get a five-page site up, isn’t it? Kind of, or would you disagree with me?
[01:19:59.760] – Remkus de Vries
I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I think it’s very much a question of where you are accustomed to. If you come from the classic editor, if you come, for instance, from Genesis, and you make the switch to full-side editing, you have a lot more freedom. You also lose control. It’s a matter of you compromising the thing that you care the least about. If there are ways to build complex block-based full-site editing themes as an agency and you have more technical staff, then that’s the most logical direction. If you have staff who are very accustomed to clicking their way through building a site, meaning a page builder like Diffy or Elementor. That’s a different crowd. So even if you wanted to switch, you don’t have the people to back it up with knowledge. So it means you need to educate everybody. I think it’s a larger conundrum we’re having to solve there.
[01:21:08.480] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s also a price point as well, isn’t it?
[01:21:12.400] – Remkus de Vries
No. I mean, maybe if your sites are 500 bucks a pop, but if you’re still on the strategy that a site should be somewhere between €500 and €1,500 or dollars, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice. I think that’s opening a whole different realm of unoptimized running your agency.
[01:21:34.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, all right. We will have to come back at the beginning of next year. I thought we’d had a fantastic discussion. I think we’ve covered a lot of stuff. I agree with most of your decisions, although not everything. I just thought it was a great discussion. So what’s the best way for people to find out more about this?
[01:22:01.380] – Remkus de Vries
I have multiple sites, so the easiest way is to go to my short URL version, which is remk.us.
[01:22:11.040] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s easy. We will be back next week with another fantastic guest. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
[01:22:18.280] – Remkus de Vries
Bye
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