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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
Matt (00:00)
We're back with another special episode of the WP Minute with none other than WordPress community's own Remkus Remkus, welcome. Welcome back.
Remkus (00:08)
Thank you, Matt I was gonna say welcome back. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, sir.
Matt (00:11)
Welcome back. No, no, we don't we're not gonna do that. We're not singing.
Remkus (00:14)
I was gonna say a
you you need to warn me if you're gonna sing. I need to emotionally prepare for that. you
Matt (00:20)
you're back fresh
from fresh off of a vacation. so you're ready to go. within WP.com is where folks can find your home base of all things, and you have new courses, you have new community, you might have new events happening. We're gonna talk about all of that stuff today. but I wanna start with something that's a little bit
Heavier, something a little bit meatier around the the community. And I want to get your take on something that I've been super critical of over the last couple of months. And of course
Remkus (00:50)
Yep, right.
Matt (00:51)
that and and of course that is, well, of course, but through the lens of AI and everyone sort of jumping to new tools and and fancy new CMSs and headless CMSs and static sites. There's been this sort of wave of people going, you know what? I'm done with WordPress.
It ain't catching up. I'm gone. What's your take on that? Do you do you think that people are just chasing a shiny new object? Or are are we really feeling pressures of a better product, whatever that is, somewhere else?
Remkus (01:20)
that's a gr that's a great question. I think it's a good one to ask because first of all, everything that you and I see is inside a very, very tiny bubble. And that bubble is in no way reflective of the actual state. And for all the metrics that we have used to gauge how large the larger bubble is, meaning whether we're looking at WordPress's market share or
How much money is going through the WordPress economy, all those types of metrics and ideas and thoughts about that? We have to start with understanding that those have always been an assumption. We have no clue. So what I see happening is we are entering the phase where AI is sort of.
I wouldn't call it maturing, but maturing enough that it can start to replace some of the core stuff people working with WordPress do. And if you are someone who is close to being somebody who does indeed chase the new shiny object, that's an easy pull away from the core of what WordPress is. But
In my opinion, you're missing a step. First of all, you haven't educated yourself on what WordPress actually allows you to do. You haven't educated yourself on the possibilities that new shiny toy, whatever it's not a toy, but that new shiny thing allows you to do inside of WordPress, with WordPress, in many different ways.
And you're basically going from the assumption that, hey, I see something new, I'm going to chase that. Therefore, if I see others do it, or I see market share of any of the other assumptions we've seen, take a plummet, or even and it's not a plummet, like it's it's it's very incremental. and then draw huge and big conclusions from that, you are you're just not being honest with the data. And it starts with n never ever have has that data been
solid enough to identify as solid data, but it's the best version we had, certainly if you look if we look at market share and stuff. If you look at the same data with the same lens, you don't see other CMSs making great strides. It it's really not. It's going in the same pace. My contention is that what we're seeing is a shift from the bottom of the market, and maybe that's in huge numbers.
But the bottom of the market is reaching the point where it makes sense for them to jump onto the AI that generates my site type mentality. And whether that's pushed towards a markdown file system like EmDash from Cloudflare, or that's Astro itself, or any other version of that, sure, that will happen and that is happening. people have been wanting to shit on WordPress since the moment we said, hey, we're no longer a blog.
and you know, there's fair points in that in that process of of not liking WordPress. I I get it, but it also means you haven't really dived into what WordPress actually does and how it allows you. So I think we're very much seeing that happen. and on the other end, and I I I think that is also the maturing not just of AI in WordPress, but WordPress itself is is hella maturing mo momentarily.
It allows us to use WordPress in many, many different types of ways than just presenting a site. And I think what we're seeing is a colliding of those two types of things happening at the same time. I have no data to back it up, so again, it's it's it's my opinion. It's my digestion of what I see happening, the types of questions I see asked and answered left and right in all the various
Slack Teams, forums, Reddit, Reddit's not a good example. Whatever happens on Reddit, I whatever. But I think we're very much moving into a market where we have to focus on the WordPress agency developer freelancer side side of things. We have to focus on what makes us special. What why do you why do you hire me?
And or or my agency. And we've never had to be in that position. So what we're actually seeing, I think, is is an end result of the data side of things, the shiny object side of things. obviously there's AI, there's a maturing of the market, and I think there's a a lack of
Proper entrepreneurship. And I I don't mean this like no, if you've been running an agency for 10 years, sure you understand business, but maybe you've never really thought about your proposition. Maybe you've never really focused and went in hard on picking a particular niche. why? Well, work was abundant, so you never had to. And now the flip is happening so fast, and all at the same time as that the other three stuff, three things I just mentioned.
It looks like there's a causality, but I don't think there is. Not in that regard. The market is too huge. If you just look at the numbers and what what that would mean in terms of just just looking at the market share of the amount of sites that would now need to be flipped, I don't see it. it's a long-winded answer, but I think there's multiple facets happening at once here.
and I think the the the plug-in builders, the agencies that are struggling right now, and let's not beat around the bush, there's quite a few. I think that's largely about not having profiled themselves well enough. So we've had the luxury roughly since twenty ten, twenty eleven to
Get
whatever client we were going for, because we knew how to build it and and WordPress allowed us to do more and more and clients loved it. But we've we've come at a point where, I don't know, there's there's not that much of a
How how do I differentiate my line of thinking and work and my output to somebody else? We can
Matt (06:55)
Huh
Remkus (06:55)
both build the same thing. Sorry for the monologue.
Matt (06:58)
No, that's fine. That
this is this is the subject. It's a it's a heavy subject. how d who who knows the numbers, right? You said a a few times across that introduction about like I don't have the numbers, the it but it's a huge market. We all know about of course, like I don't know, a year ago we were forty four ish percent, and now we we know we're dipping. That's got some like more tactile numbers that we're getting from sites that aggregate that data. But who really knows the numbers?
or if you can just share your opinion on why maybe the numbers are so hard to wrangle. and I'll give you a second to think, I'll preface it with I follow the podcast industry closely. And I was I worked in a, you know, the podcast industry with a capital P and a capital I for a few years. And the hardest thing for big media, people who are making podcasts for celebrities, news networks, sports or athletes, they had a hard time with RSS.
Because it's open source and it's virtually impossible for them to analyze. You know, if you've got a podcast app, this person over here has a podcast. They don't know who's listening. they can get downloads, but they don't know how long. Because RSS, the technology, is amazing for that open distribution, but terrible for walled garden data. So the industry pushes those networks to go.
Hey, you know what? Let's do everything in YouTube because YouTube is closed. They got analytics. It's this big environment. Same thing with Spotify. So those industries push into that area. Is the challenge of finding out like the numbers and the value so difficult for us because we are open source and it's just the web, baby? Like the websites are out there and
Remkus (08:32)
Yeah, 100%.
Matt (08:33)
that's the challenge.
Remkus (08:34)
100%. I was actually so when I go on vacation, I take about a dozen books and I read one or two books a day. And I've been doing this for since since forever. this year I forgot my books. They were neatly packed, but not taken along.
So I was forced on my phone a little bit more for reading stuff I wanted to read and whatnot. I don't have an e-reader. So I know great argument for me to get an e-reader. I won't. and as I was doing that, I interacted more on both Instagram and TikTok with stuff that I like or had an opinion about. So I commented. And as I was getting likes and replies to those comments, I like, I I get it.
I I get why this process works because we have direct feedback of the impact of my comment. Like one of the comments got more got a few hundred likes, and that means the video is doing great, yes, but it also means I get an instant feedback of what I'm doing and what what that means in terms of how legit my comment was.
Funnily enough, it was about I don't want to own a car that's built after 2015 because I don't like where the technology goes into cars. I do like what's happening on the web, not in cars. and that sort of made me reflect back to WordPress. Like, hold on, I there's no central system for me to check of the comments I've placed anywhere and the comments that are the replies to that comment or the likes on that comment or whatever. Sure, there's jetpack and there's some things that are made visible, but there's nothing.
Of WordPress doing that. And it's not the question should we want that? But it is, it does mean we have no feedback system. So we have some analytics. if it's implemented, and that's about it. Like we don't have anything else. So yeah, who has that data? you I think Yoast has written or or publishes frequently a very well thought out.
Basically saying the same thing in the sense of we don't exactly know, but this is the best way to look at it because this is probably leading to the best type of data. But if if for instance, whatever popular take for instance, perf matters. Perf matters allows you to remove the meta generator in the the tag in the head. If that's removed, we can still kind of figure it out because we then look at file system. Do we find a WPCON slash plugins or slash themes?
But there's tons of solutions where that's not even visible either, because everything's being redirected or or optimized, for instance, with WP Rocket or Nitropack. So it becomes more and more difficult. And I'm not saying that that's that's what absolutely fully obfuscates stuff, but it's part of it. And then the rise of of flat file systems that are generated, for instance, WP static,
Where you work in your WordPress site, but the end result is a static file and it is entirely its own HTML system in a way. Like it stuff is getting harder to detect. That layer is there. And then there's there's just a change of how metrics are met are measured. If we had for every single thing that build with calculates an explanation in depth of how it's being calculated, we would have a better base of comparing apples to apples.
And unfortunately we're you know, we're going from a Granny Smith to a a Fuji apple, and that's a huge, wide range in apples. And it's still technically apples, but we don't really know.
Matt (11:39)
One of the things that we talk about or we were starting to mention early on is about like that that community sentiment around WordPress and some of the the challenges that WordPress faces from an optics perspective. Like this is too slow, this is too old, the code base, et cetera, et cetera. I put out something a couple months ago. we won't rehash the whole thing because I don't want to put you on the spot, but I did call out a
fairly large in the terms of WordPress, WordPress content creator, for really putting out what I felt like fear mongering in the WordPress space. to be like, hey, I think WordPress is is moving too slow. I I don't think it's gonna be the future. I think we should move on to agentic tools and all this other stuff. And I'm going to die on the hill of WordPress for better or worse. Like that's that's the
That's the flag I'm planting on the hill of WordPress. I could be absolutely wrong. I could be absolutely right. But that's my bias. Like I want WordPress to win because of everything that WordPress provides. And I'm not even talking the CMS, but I'm talking the community. I'm talking the education experience. I'm talking about how WordPress can be built in an open source manner. I'm talking about how you can break it apart and learn from it.
I'm talking about all of those things. And one of the things I said was in order to really appreciate WordPress, you have to, you have to appreciate it at its totality from everything that it provides, not just the software, but the meetups, the WordCamps, everything. The the person who uses it just for blogging, the person who uses it to run an enterprise business. You have to appreciate for its totality. I'm wondering if you agree or semi-agree with that statement.
And do you think that that will carry on in the future? Can it survive at at this very big value prop that it's provided us for the last twenty years?
Remkus (13:27)
I I I think it can. I I've seen the same discussion and I've seen parts of your your response. So I I I I I know your fuller stance. the
The the the statement you responded to is the the first question I had is what is he gaining by having this opinion? So this can be triggered simply by somebody who does the the shiny new object type of thing. And because they don't want to do X anymore, they're moving into the Y component of the this or the XY or slightly adjacent, whatever.
I think you I think the the WordPress project has a uniqueness we've never seen before. And I don't think that uniqueness will go away. There's going to be a transformational phase. I think we're we're slowly but surely jumping into this, and this is solely based on what we find in WordPress seven point because the the way we can interact with WordPress natively through any version of AI is just
Going to start blowing up. So 7.1 adds a few more things and hit bits and bobs and 7.2, 7.3. let's let's give it a let's give it a year. And yes, we are moving slower, but we also have so many, like millions of different scenarios to take into account. So you can say
You know, i has that been the smartest decision to always allow for all scenarios? Yeah, we we can have a separate discussion about that. But the fact is that it is being used by separate very s very different and and separate from each other type of channels of indeed the blogger to the entrepreneur to the enterprise.
There's just so much possible. but the community will not stop. It's transforming. the community, I think, has the goal, should set its goal post to let me figure out how do I become the better and more educated WordPress builder. I'm I like the word builder in the sense that it it encompasses both the page builders as well as you are building a site as well as building a business.
But they are forced to educate themselves, find a direction. And with that, the community, the project, and everything that goes in it, indeed, including meetups and and all of those things, that will change. It will look different. It will become slowly but surely more of a business driven and less of an open source. But the base is open source and it will always stay open source.
But we have to we have to accept that the core of people in the world understanding open source and business, like proper, that that's a small core. That's a small group of people. There's tons of people who are really good at the open source side of things and are horrible at anything commercially related to it. and vice
Matt (16:02)
Yeah, yeah.
Remkus (16:03)
versa. And we just have to accept that we're we're moving from this mix to that mix.
Matt (16:07)
Yeah.
Remkus (16:07)
Core core stays the same.
Matt (16:09)
we talk about sort of like that bottom end of the of the market, and and no one better represents that than Mark Szymanski No, I'm just kidding. But
Remkus (16:16)
Heard.
Matt (16:17)
I did interview, we did a a a special episode last week, but he is somebody who, you know, for all of his credit of all the credit towards Mark, like dove in head first, like wanted to learn everything about the community, about WordPress, how everything worked. And I don't fault him for, you know, moving on
to this more.
A agentic workflow. He hasn't totally left WordPress, but he is just really enjoying building with AI tooling, and it's that's totally fine. but when I talked to him, everything that he loved about this new process is just hey man, I can chat with an interface and it can build the thing. I can chat with an interface, it'll update the content. I feel like God, we're right there with WordPress.
And it's just like I think most people are just in love with that agentic building versus the code that's getting deployed. And I think if if we catch up to that finally, where the abilities API starts to improve and and this
Remkus (17:07)
Not not not if. Not if. This is a w this is a when.
Matt (17:11)
is a when. Right, right. This is a when. You're right. when that happens, one, I'm still beyond the hill of my flag saying I told you so. But two, like I think a lot of people who are attracted to, you know, the the
The quick agentic tooling are going to come back to WordPress because why not? It's supported by thousands, tens of thousands of people. And that's a massive advantage than you just sitting there with your Claude Code terminal going, I'm the only person here building this thing. What are your thoughts when it catches up?
Remkus (17:39)
I I I've been following Mark as well. And Mark Mark don't hate me for what I'm going to say now, but I don't think you ever were fully in WordPress. I think you were still in the learning phase of it. And that I again, this is nothing personal, but it just how just how some people are wired. I think he was learning the environment and he he made it far enough to to actually good build good sites and whatnot.
and for him his modus operandi is is into I I like this type of approach, and that's you know, more power to him. If he can make that work and and stable and and flexible at the same time, more power to him, like like honestly, z zero shade, zero hate. That's that's not what I'm trying to say, but
WordPress is very close to being there, if not already there, if you look at products like Miles. I don't know if you've played with that. Andy Peatling has created a a tool that allows you to build WordPress sites and do the design and all of that sort of thing in a very still beta, but I've produced five sites with it now. And I I encountered tons of bugs.
Which I report, which Andy fixes, and you know, I move on. There's no pressure in time, right? This is not for a client, this is for me. those types of solutions, I think, are just going to find a way to have both. Because the one the moment you leave WordPress, it's not just this is antique this antiquated content management system, which, if we're being pedantic, never really was a content management system type of a mentality.
but if we leave that, you are losing what I think makes WordPress great. First of all, the extendability. second of all, the the core features that it has, very simply, users, plugins, themes, and then everything around it, obviously. But the core features of what it allows you to do, combine that with the REST API, it there is there's an infinite amount of
Types of sites that you can build with it from various levels of professionalism. You can go wild. And if if you're if you're worried about loading antiquated code, build your own bootstrapper which bypasses all of this and load it in the smartest way possible because WordPress allows you to do that. And then build in the most modern version of PHP that you can find in any which way. WordPress doesn't stop you from doing that, but you need to invest into that. Out of the box? No, but it's right there.
so what I think what's happening here with Mark is what a lot of other people find. James Welbs is is a similar example, is that they didn't like it fully. I'm not saying that because they didn't know it fully, but not I'm just gonna keep it close to my chest, not the way I see it, which is just you know an abundant amount of opportunities. So the the switching to
WordPress fully facilitating things like miles and we have WP Vibe, by John Turner and the awesome Motive Crowd. those are solutions.
Matt (20:24)
I tried out I tried
out another product called WP God Mode, which is like Claude Desktop inside of of WordPress, which is
Remkus (20:29)
Yeah, I I wouldn't even use it because of the name, but yeah, I've seen it. Get out of here.
Matt (20:35)
it is pretty cool. Like it has a lot of powerful features. But yes, I
Remkus (20:37)
Yeah,
Matt (20:38)
I agree. We we have we're converging on this area.
Remkus (20:41)
Yeah, so the the maturity of that is is going slower than AI is going. So if you really like the full control and all that sort of stuff, go full agentic and knock yourself out. nobody's stopping you. But there's tons of sites that I've built that will never be able to done be done by by AI. I I
Probably 80% of the sites I built is just not AI type of sites to build. Because the management of the creation of the thing itself becomes such a huge task to monitor. And sure, you're yours, agents, sub-agents, all that. I get it. And I do that and I play with that. But it becomes per project, per maintenance, per going forward, becomes such an overhead. I much rather see WordPress as the tool that it is with the
Authentication layer plugins and all that sort of stuff as the extra features, and then WordPress itself as the the data warehouse model. Like put in there whatever you like. We really don't care. No, you don't need to use custom post types for data. You can use your own custom database tables. Woo WooCommerce does it as well. We don't care about that. WordPress allows you to do that. And with that in mind, there's just tons of of of
Hypermodern, super flexible, big data type of sites that you can host on WordPress. And it becomes more of a
I don't know how much everybody knows about Laravel, but Laravel has components combined together and you have a version of a CMS. Other components combined together and you have not a necessarily CMS, but you have more of an application. If you want to see it, we're it if and if you allow yourself to see it, Werpus does a similar thing. It just works from a different architecture, from a different standpoint, from a different legacy, I guess. but the this this whole
I prefer the command line and the agent and and and my MCPs and all that sort of stuff. I I've been preferring the command line for the past 10 years now. You're not gonna hear any any comment on me on that from me on that, because I I agree, but it's not for everyone. And it's certainly not for my end clients.
Matt (22:36)
Yeah. Yeah. Where does
Remkus (22:37)
We're done.
Matt (22:38)
and and I want and we'll get to the your announcement of The Guild, which happened on May the fourth, pun intended. It is now August fourth, by the way. so I
Remkus (22:45)
Yeah, yeah.
Matt (22:46)
I want to get an update on that. so where where does that where do you see again we'll call it the bottom of the market? Like, do you s foresee a future where the plumber, the accountant, the HVAC guy or gal
just launches their own site with Chat GPT sites or whatever AI they've inv i i is tagged along with their cell phone plan. Like are we in danger? Is that bottom market in danger to the average user just spinning up their own sites or or still too hard to tell right now?
Remkus (23:16)
I think there's I think danger is not the right word. will it move in that direction? Yes. but if we're being smart with what WordPress allows you to do, the moment you need a second user on that site, you're already complicating stuff if you're doing that in your own AI version of that. But
If that market has never been really ready to pay money for a a online presence of whatever kind, they were never going to spend much time in the WordPress economy anyway. So that's not to say a a a chunk of the revenue inside the WordPress economy is going to move away from WordPress. It will.
But conversely, I think on the bottom end of the market, there's much more s the the need for stability, the need for multiple editors, the the need for complexity to be solved simply. I think projects themselves are only going to grow bigger. I know tons of agency who have trouble finding not finding, processing a a a project that is less than fifty K.
Because their whole machinery needs to start ramping up and before the due diligence and the discovery phase is done, w they've already hit it. and that serves obviously a different market. But I think it's more of a we're moving higher upwards.
Matt (24:22)
Yeah. Yeah.
Remkus (24:24)
and the market that the example the HVAC person needs needs a site, if we if
Look, there's there's between now and between when WordPress is fully ready to do that fully automatically, there's time. How much? I don't know. But given the rate of how fast things are going, I'd say at the at the end of next year, we should be really mature in how and what we can connect AI to. Like if the moment Claude and ChatGPT and and Gemini and all that have adapted super easy connecting to your site.
and and you know, if you're an agency you get something like like miles. but if if if you don't care to spend any money, you'll and you it's fine, whatever that is pushed up by the AI, there'll be enough power inside that AI for you to build that super simple site.
Matt (25:11)
Yeah. Yeah.
Remkus (25:12)
And I have a cousin who who is in that field and I I'm I'm I'm having conversations with him about because he's smart enough to understand the technicality of the sites. He's built WordPress sites. And he goes, Can I use AI for this? Yes, you can, but these are the consequences. he goes, no, no, no.
No thank you. I don't I don't care to have that level of responsibility. If something goes wrong, I don't know how to fix it. And and if I if I have the AI figure out what the problem is and it can fix it for me, great. But I have no guarantee that it will.
Matt (25:40)
Yeah. Yeah. Within WP.com, May the fourth, twenty twenty six, there needs to be a place for serious WordPress builders and developers and agencies to keep leveling up together. Not a forum, not another Slack and Discord, not another place that starts with good intentions and then slowly turns into a stream of notifications, hot takes, and noise.
You poking fun at the WP Minute Slack, are you, Remkus you announced The Guild. again, go check it out. We'll link it up in the show notes. So what is The Guild? How's it going? It's been six six, is that sixty or ninety days? 60 days? 90 days since you announced it. Where are we at?
Remkus (26:14)
We are on track. I've been to a lot of WordPress events before that announcement and after. I've spoken to dozens of agencies, agency owners, freelancers and whatnot to try and understand if I were to offer you this, does that make sense for you? and the
The formalization is essentially what I finalized on vacation, because you know, what else am I going to do? yeah.
Matt (26:37)
What else am I gonna do but work on vacation?
Remkus (26:40)
no, I I I relaxed, I swam, we went to beautiful cities and whatnot. But no, the the let's curriculum is not the right word. But the the whole goal for me for The Guild is you as an agency. When there's a new version of WordPress coming out.
you hope to have the next project allowing you some teaching time to dive into what is new and what is different and and all that sort of stuff to hopefully process it in a way that makes sense your next project. But if your next project isn't the one, then it's the one after or the one after. In other words, I've I've learned that there's tons of agencies that just work with outdated data of what WordPress allows you to do.
Or what tools there are available, that's longer than a year ago. Like there's there's folks just not having the time to catch up proper. So my goal for The Guild is be that digestion of information for you. And I know there's learn.wordpress.org, and I know there's the developer.wordpress.org, and all the information is there. And on the make WordPress core, there's tons of information to be found, but ain't nobody got time for that.
So my goal for The Guild is to fill that gap. Now, I wanna be compensated for that. Let me be super clear about that. I'm not doing this for the greater good in the sense that, yes, I'll give a lot back, but
I think it on a agency or on a singular person's level, you should see it as this is this is the learning budget that I have for this year. And it'll allow me to become somebody who builds better. Like the only thing I'm not touching is how to grow your agency. I there's plenty of others shouting in that space. not I don't mean that negatively, but
being very loud in that space, which I don't care to replicate. I have pen plenty of thoughts on that. But what I think is missing is the more professional education side of things. So I wanna I'm approaching everything from a prince first principles principle. So
I want you to fully understand performance. I want you to fully understand security. I want you to fully understand what Cloudflare can do for your business, even on the on the free plan. There's tons of stuff in tools out there that were just that are just on tap because nobody covers them in a way that is not affiliate driven or hype-driven or new release-driven. I don't care for that. Not that I'm not going to do it, but that's not that's not that's not my prime motivator.
I want you, if somebody new joins your agency and you go to your within WordPress Guild account, you go in there and you figure out what the the latest of principle is. There's a few courses on, there's mini courses, there's frameworks, there's ways of thinking. So you get to do your job faster with the right emo with the right type of information at the right time.
Over the past ten years, I've been hired by agencies a lot to help bring that sort of information in while working alongside a project and whatnot. So I I've I've understand very close by how that works, what is lacking, what the opportunities are. so yeah, that's the state where I'm in. So I'm currently producing a lot of content, which you're not gonna see currently.
But let's say every single release of WordPress has about 30 pieces of content. That's roughly what I'm shooting for. and if it's a larger release, it might even be more. But that's video, that's text, that's any any any chunk of information that's important enough for you to once learned work better type approach is what I'm going to properly cover and
Make available.
Matt (30:03)
And do you find it difficult? Like is it is it a moving target trying to create the course? I mean, you have the courses on performance. I don't have it in front of me, but I don't know if you have security. But is it a moving target because things are changing so fast? Is that one of the particular challenges to to stay on track with this? Not on track, but to cover that topic.
Remkus (30:22)
so a lot of time, like a lot, like an inordinate amount of time over the past year has gone into how do I solve that particular problem. If I look at all the YouTube channels out there on WordPress, which is the closest thing that we have to a teaching crowd,
Matt (30:37)
Mm-hmm.
Remkus (30:39)
it's very much on the hype of the day. And that means they need to approach whatever they're teaching in a particular way because their livelihood depends on it.
and therefore the stuff they promote and they talk about, it's all connected in a particular way. that forces them to not be able to talk about the longevity of the thing they actually want to teach. Some do, most don't. And when I started really brainstorming on the first course that I've produced, which is Make WordPress Fast.
It's it's a boring course. It's 25 modules with four to five, maybe sometimes six lessons per module. Every single lesson is about four or five minutes. So you do the math. That that's a lot of time. And it's relatively boring because I want I cover principles first. I want you to understand what performance means. That means you want need to understand the layers. This is not
Activating perf matters, WP Rocket, or Nitropak, or or whatever. Anyone can do that. But if you don't understand what that button does, what the consequence of that button is, how are you learning? You're just learning to repeat a tutorial or to click that button and then copy-paste that to the next site.
Yeah, but that next site has other stuff going on and it starts to be much more finicky. And I changed something and now the site is wonky. What's going on? my client sent out a new a newsletter for 40,000 subscribers and the site went down. Why? Well, all preventable. first of all, good hosting, but what is caching? Where does caching live? What can I filter away from the site before it even touches the server? Those are types of discussions and thinkings that I
I feel we should promote more, which is an again a long-winded answer, but that's how I approach how do I teach this in a way that it's valid now and valid within a year, and pretty much valid in two, three years, because the principle doesn't change. We have those layers. at a certain point, there's going to be some changes, but that's an addendum. That's one lesson extra.
And I can just make that available in the addendum module of of that course. So
Matt (32:37)
Yeah.
Remkus (32:38)
the principle stays the same. So we we we we we do ourselves a favor if we start seeing things as what's the best principle here, what's the web standard here, what's the best way to implement this?
It's a challenge, but I think I have a good grasp on on what this is. And and the the one that's probably going to be the most challenging is the one I'm doing right now. the course that I'm building right now, that's it's Cloudflare for WordPress. And that's mainly because stuff happens so fast inside the world of Cloudflare.
They have a new dashboard, so I'm happy I'm at the beginning of a new dashboard when I'm showing stuff and and features and whatnot. But again, I'm I'm teaching principles first, and then here's where you do where you can find this in Cloudflare. So if Cloudflare changes something to a different URL, I I I change the one in my in my my redirect URL, and you'll get to the new section and roughly it works in the same way, right? So
It's a challenge, but I think I found a mix.
Matt (33:32)
Yeah. I I when you talk about the principles and like the fundamentals, like that's something that's always core to it's like one of the detriments I I I learned really early on creating WordPress YouTube videos was like, Okay, I wanna talk about I don't know, if I think back to the past when I was like really starting off and it was like talking about the customizer or then then talking about Gutenberg.
One of the things that always dragged down the channel was like, I'm always explaining the fundamentals of like how WordPress works. Like I I can't help myself but to explain the fundamentals, which is which it becomes a challenge. I think, like you rightfully said, the YouTubers, and this was my criticism on that thing a couple months ago, was like, hey man, if you're running a content business, you're running a content business. And I get it. If you want to go to keywords, go for the keywords.
That's fine. But but
Remkus (34:19)
Yep. Yep.
Matt (34:20)
also
Make sure you're representing WordPress in the right way, or else you get a reaction from the psychopath like me, who's who's just like, I don't think you're representing WordPress correctly. And I need to make sure that, you know, my own aura for WordPress is is correct. But I I I I wanna I don't wanna chat about that. I I wanna talk about back to the fundamentals and the principles. I saw you in a Twitter thread. I don't know, the Twitter just surfaced it for me, or X
And it was about Cloudflare's website, is it AI ready or something like that? Is it a is my website agent ready or whatever the domain is? Which, you know, got me looking into that because I saw you mention something like that. For somebody who's so who's been in performance forever and has followed this so closely, when does a person with your credentials look at a site like that and say, This is the right, like what
Cloudflare is putting out is the right way. Like, do we just default? You can color in the lines, obviously, but do we just default to a big company like that going, This is the way we do agentic web discovery or whatever the hell they call it? Like, how does a guy like you go, Yeah, I think they got it right, and this is something that I will adhere to? Or do we look at something else? And and again, let me just give a little bit more context because I remember the days of Google Amp when everyone's like, we gotta do Google AMP.
And like Google Amp, like now we're gonna do this. And that was like whatever the hell that lasted for, two, two, not even two years. I don't even remember. you know, and I just feel like big company comes out, they go, This is the way, and then we all go, Okay, let's go this way. And then we scale it back. How how do you make draw those lines in the sand, if that makes sense?
Remkus (35:53)
It it does make sense and it it's a very valid question. I look at it from a perspective of are they promoting a set of standards or are they promoting a set of here's our new library, JavaScript library to do XYZ? AMP was very much that. I never liked AMP because it fully moves.
Look, whatever AMP tried to do, you could do natively inside of WordPress in a way
Matt (36:15)
Yeah.
Remkus (36:15)
that just was equally fast, equally smart, all that. So it's an add-on to HTML as I saw it. If you look at what Cloudflare does, first of all, they have a market share of over twenty percent of all traffic on the internet.
But they b this is this is not something they built in sense of this is a solution, but they i it's a set of recommendations. that direction is fine for me because it's not them determining the protocols and everything. They're just combining it and collecting in the one here's a site that if you punch your site in there. is my site agent ready.com is I think the domain.
and you can check if A AI can properly process your site. That's a smart thing to do. And for them to really moving hard on the AI side of things, and it's it's it's in in this particular case, it's them not promoting their specific technique other than the protocols the internet already has agreed upon. They're just collecting a bunch of stuff together.
Which gives you a good indication of how a general AI sees your site or or doesn't. but yeah, from from the there there's stuff that Cloudflare allows you to do on the performance side of things that makes a a lot of sense. And I think they're quite unique in this, in in how they're presenting their their
Their end solution, because the vast majority of what they offer is in their free plan and you can use it and literally never have to charge be get charged for it in any way, shape, or form. the smartest investment you can make for your WordPress site on Cloudflare is their APO plan. APO is their it's a super, super bad name. It's called
I forgot what the A stands for, but platform, automatic platform optimization, I think. And what it allows it to do is for the cache of your your your your full page cache of your site to live at the edge, which is before your site. So traffic that is going for your site will hit their service first. Find the APO caching before it actually hits your own server. So you're saving resources and hits and
you know, dynamic requests and all that sort of stuff that various hosting companies use. and it costs you five bucks a month. That's sixty sixty bucks a year. And you have made your site in every singular way possible faster. It's just it's and I'm happy to promote that because you're f you're not locked in.
it's not some super weird technique. It's essentially caching in front of the server. Makes sense. There's there's plenty of other solutions who are doing the same thing. Varnage does it the same way, Bunny CDN does it the same way, Akamai does it the same way. All of these solutions offer the same thing. I just think the Cloudflare one is super smart and and and super cheap. Like any site that's worth any money,
happy to spend sixty bucks a year that because if I can't sell sixty bucks extra a year, if I want to do it at cost to any of my clients, I'm not doing a good job.
Matt (38:58)
Yeah. Yeah. I remember when I worked for an ISP and we sold T one lines and ISDN lines way back in the day and we had a a co location. I remember Akamai, this is just an aside, remember Akamai wanting to rent server racks from us, and I'm like, What are they doing with this? And they're just like, they're just a caching websites. I'm like, Well, that's stupid.
But we'll take their money. man, those were the days.
Remkus (39:18)
that's funny.
Matt (39:22)
withinWP.com can folks get on a wait list for for Guild? Where do you want them to go to stay connected so that they they'll know as soon as you open up the doors to this offering?
Remkus (39:33)
If if they
go to the site, there's a button that says The Guild, click on it. It's it's a long answer into the all the angles that I see that I wanna cover with The Guild. And at the very bottom is a form, just leave your name behind and I'll update you when there's something to update.
Matt (39:50)
Awesome stuff. Remkus, thanks so much for hanging out today. Within WP.com. The WP Minute.com is the number one way to stay connected. Go to the WPMinute.com, join the membership. you can join the Slack for free by signing up for one of our free courses, different courses than what Remkus does. You want performance, you want infrastructure, you want that sort of fundamental layer of how this stuff operates. You go to within WP. You want a group to help you sub get supported to
Grow your freelance business and just chat about business. Go to the WPminute.com, join the membership for free. We'll see you in the next video.