Courtney:
How are you, Robert? How’s your summer going?

Robert:
It’s still summer? I don’t know. It’s been so hot. We were just talking about that in the green room, how the temperature’s been nuts.

Courtney:
Yes, yes, yes. Robert and I, being in America, our weather has been very weird. I’ve been having a lot of Florida weather here in South Central Pennsylvania, which I would like to send back to Florida and now that would be delightful. But the weather in Europe was pretty cool at WordCamp Europe. I liked that temperature better.

Robert:
Everything is cool when you’re in Torino.

Courtney:
This is true. So today we’re going to get into a little bit of some of the talks that we saw at WordCamp Europe, some of the other open-source connections that were made during this event, and a little bit of pulse on the community as to what we’ve seen going on in open source. Most recently we’re just on the heels at the time of this recording of seeing WordPress 6.6.1 ship, which is great. But that said, Robert, how did you spend your WordCamp Europe and what stood out most to you?

Robert:
Wow, attendance. I mean, I’m just going to go with that. So WordCamp Europe was talk, talk, talk, work, work, work, network, network, network.
We had a booth there for Botguard and had to do some of that. But yeah, it always amazes me how full of people WordCamp Europe is and it was really great to see some of, even I’ll call ’em micro-communities, get together. I know there was a large contingent from Serbia that was doing their thing, and then you’d have folks from the Netherlands and Germany and getting that face time that they may not get during the rest of the year. So it’s always the people and the networking and energy that leaves me smiling for at least six months. Hoarse completely, but definitely smiling.

Courtney:
I saw that there was also a sub-community of the Jonathans getting photos together. Were there any photos of the Roberts? Because I think you and Mr. Dunn here could both be in that photo.

Robert:
And Robert Windisch.

Courtney:
Yeah, see, I was just hanging out with him in Canada the other week. That’s right. Yeah, the Roberts need to do a photo. I’m going to petition for that.

Robert:
And we will also include Robbie Adair.

Courtney:
Yes, yes, absolutely. Include all those that have Rob, Bob or some variation of that related to their names for sure. So WordCamp Europe kicked off with a really amazing talk. We heard first as our opening keynote at WordCamp Europe about the sustainability of open source being the future, and this was something that was shared by both Joost and Juliet who gave a presentation on this. Joost, of course, being the founder of a very well-known SEO plugin company, and Juliet is really well-known in the PHP space, but not a lot of people in WordPress outside of those that pay attention to PHP know Juliet yet. Juliet is an amazing, amazing woman, very talented dev, and somebody that I got to know during Europe quite a lot. And so during that time that she and Joost gave that presentation, they were sharing a great deal about how much of what we use or do on a daily basis depends on open source and how people are often unaware of that implication.

And that’s something that’s been eye-opening to me, not just from their talk, but also over the last couple of years as I tune into the automotive industry using a lot of open-source technology. Of course, I work for a web host and I know that our servers use a lot of open-source technology to power the hosting environments as well, but there’s a lot more to open source to learn about that I think we don’t often see. So they were sharing some of the use cases of that, but they were also really great at helping shed light on. Open source is never free, so you’ve got either funding to pay people or the time that people give up for their families and their jobs and these other things to make open source possible. So I thought that they really landed that conversation fantastically well, and it’s something that I believe that the WordPress community especially needs to tune in on. You haven’t gotten a chance yet, go watch the replay on that one.

Robert:
Yeah, I think hopefully Bob can drop that into the transcript of the actual link. Yeah, free and open source are always fun words to mess up. And yes, the code may be freely accessible, but how do you put it together? Who’s put that together? Coming from the Joomla community, which is a hundred percent volunteer where there is no corporate support in any way, shape or form, the burnout is extreme because you just can’t do that all the time.

Courtney:
Yeah, knowing what I do of Juliet, I feel fine in sharing this. Just a few months back, about half a year, maybe a little bit longer ago now, we saw PHPCS, which is the PHP coding standards. Juliet is unarguably the lead dev on this. There are several other contributors to this. That project sat in an abandoned repo and abandoned being that there was a company that created this as an open-source project. The company shuttered and Juliet did not have administrative rights over that area and nobody that did was still contributing. Juliet has been funded through contract work as have others to that area, but it was not at a sustainable level for the amount of contribution needed for that. And I highlight it because WordPress uses WPCS, the WordPress coding standards, and those areas in particular also need to depend upon the PHPCS. So it’s just a set of rules basically that make sure that how we’re writing not just our PHP, but I believe it also applies to HTML and CSS, that these things adhere to specific standards so that we have some security reliability in all of the code that we’re deploying.

If any one of those areas were to fail, that could jeopardize not just WordPress, but also at PHPCS, it would impact many other open-source projects and some that are not, that depend upon PHPCS. And then within WordPress, not only does it impact core, but WPCS that depends on PHPCS also impacts many plugins. Hosts use it as part of securing their environments for managed environments for customers. So there was a lot really dependent on that, and Juliet’s just been through quite a lot in the past year securing the funding needed, not just for herself, but also the couple of other devs that are working on this. And it’s one of those backbones of the internet, so I can’t say enough about the work that she’s doing. And also, Joost wrote a fantastic piece that helped get at least my executives to participate in funding the work inside of PHPCS as well to make sure that our customers are really well protected. So please do tune in, watch, see what’s going on. Even if you don’t really understand code, not the point, it’s knowing that it’s securing you here.

Robert:
Well, it’s to your point about validating the stuff that WordPress utilizes from plugins to things to Gutenberg to all that. Of course, my favorite is having the tabs versus spaces argument, so that’s something else as well. But for those who are not technical, just think of tabs versus spaces.

Courtney:
I just got into the conversation at WordCamp Canada about pineapple and pizza. Now you’re bringing up tabs versus spaces. We’re going to start a riot with the devs. They’re all groaning at us right now, Robert. I can hear them. So in addition to that, there were a couple of other really cool things that took place during WordCamp Europe. One of the first things was that right after Joost and Juliet’s presentation during the Q&A, I asked a question, and then out of that came meeting Matthias from Typo3. Typo3 is one of the organizations that participated in the open source letter to the WordPress European Union related to the Cyber Resiliency Act. What does all that mean? Basically, the European Union has a lot of standards that they’re trying to implement, and the Cyber Resiliency Act specifies a lot of what they expect out of the software being used in various environments, and some of the wording that is in the Cyber Resiliency Act was not suitable for how open source works. And so out of that came, that’s exactly it. Joomla, Drupal, Typo3, WordPress and a few others that I think all compiled a letter together to the European Union specifying some of these things and Matthias that we met is part of the community at Typo3. Robert, did you get a chance to meet Matthias?

Robert:
We got, of course, everyone got to meet everyone at some point, but we’re definitely going to push to have, is it Matthias or Mattias? I’m not always going to look Matthias.

Courtney:
I’m an American and I butcher European names routinely. I will apologize first, but yes, we should invite him on as a guest and ask him to pronounce his own name for us.

Robert:
At least that, I mean, it’ll be a very quick podcast.

Courtney:
Yep, absolutely.

Robert:
That’ll be brilliant. But yeah, I mean not only, it’s great that he was part of that open letter, but it’s interesting how, since we’re on the open talk on open source, how open source gets attacked in different weird ways and the Cyber Resilience Act, which is called CRA before we get all tongue-tied, it just seems strange to make demands of free code and why, yes, there need to be cybersecurity standards, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, last I checked, we can talk about CrowdStrike all day long and they’re probably CRA compliant, and that doesn’t really help anyone when Delta is

still down for day five or six of being able to fly. The NHS, I think, had problems. European banks had problems. So some of these rules and regulations really don’t actually get to the crux of the problem, which is everyone needs to do their homework and stay on top of code no matter what it is and have processes in place.

Courtney:
Absolutely, Robert, I am glad that neither of us were traveling during that in particular.

Robert:
Oh my goodness, are you kidding? I just got home from WordCamp Canada to which I drove. It was a long drive, but I drove because the distance would not have been any different time-wise if I had flown. But still, I am glad to have gotten through Border Crossing and all of that without having an impact there. Related though to your idea there on testing and kind of coming in on the heels of WordPress 6.6.1 coming out and the calls for testing, I will amplify that people should be testing things and to the point where I have been relentless with my employer about giving me a little sliver of an environment to test on production. So in our managed environments and our enterprise-managed environments, I am ensuring that this gets at least the minimum testing possible. But in addition to that, I would like to call in those that are in the plugin and theme space and make sure that you are testing with the beta releases before we even hit RC. We need to be testing at the beta releases.

So not just a good way to do this in the WordPress space as you go to make WordPress dot org slash test, and usually with every release there is a guideline post saying, here’s how you could go test the thing, do that, but in addition, do some other testing, both automated and manual with your own plugins and or themes. If you are a dev and or if you’re managing client sites, the ones that are the most on most of your client sites, I would make sure to also as a user, test those ahead because things will go a little sideways and you might see a maintenance release come in pretty quickly after that. If you are in other parts of open source, the same would still apply. You absolutely should be paying attention to what’s going on in releases ahead of time and testing and weighing that kind of feedback.

Robert:
I’ll just second that, and it all circles back to the sustainability argument or discussion earlier. These things need to be done. Yes.

Courtney:
I will give a quick nod. When I was assembling today’s show notes, I forgot to include that I was on a panel at Europe about open source, about funding open source from the perspective, this time last year, I spoke with Hari and I was on a panel there from the perspective of I’m a contributor that wants to get sponsored. What can I do this time? It was from the perspective of empowering organizations such as my employer or Robert’s employer or a number of others to fund the work of open source. So I will be sure to include those as well. That slipped my mind in today’s show notes, but there we go. Related to other events and things going on in the open-source space. Robert, you brought up All Things Open. Do you know much about this conference? Have you ever attended?

Robert:
I have never. And it keeps getting put into time slots where I can’t make it. It’s really about open source and everything from GitHub and Copilot to specific projects. Of course, AI, I already mentioned Copilot. That kind of stuff is happening. Speakers have been announced, and I’m just looking at, so we got Community Leadership Summit and All Things Open on October 27th.

Courtney:
Yes, that is close to some timelines for my kiddos that I don’t know if I’ll be able to go yet or not, but I know a few others in the WordPress community that have attended in the past. You can reach out if you’re interested to Adam Silver and Nyasha Greene and find out what their experiences have been at this event. But it is really operated like a true open source without an organization besides the conference organizers, this is not an event on behalf of any one open-source project. It is an open-source event of lots of open-source people just getting together, and it’s one that I think is really, really interesting. It is in, is it North or South Carolina in the Carolinas?

Robert:
It’s Raleigh, North Carolina.

Courtney:
Raleigh, North Carolina, yeah. There we go. So if you’re interested in attending that one, do jump in, check it out, get some tickets. I always love the graphics that organization puts forward. I think it’d be a good time to also learn and connect with others.

Robert:
I have been to the Community Leadership Summit in the past, and if you are heavily involved in a project, you should really have this on your radar. I remember having attended, and at the time it was all about codes of conduct and you had folks from all these projects trying to put together codes of conduct, codes of conduct or code of conducts, I dunno where the S goes.

Courtney:
Or the apostrophe.

Robert:
Or the, oh no, don’t make it worse. But these are the kinds of things that are addressed to help projects move forward. So definitely take a look at that if you are spending considerable time in any specific project, and that ties right into All Things Open.

Courtney:
Yeah, I would absolutely agree with that one. There are a couple of other things that have been popping on my radar just in the last week related to open source that are pretty interesting to check out. One of them started. So our show is not just about WordPress, but obviously we’re heavily steeped in the WordPress community and Do the Woo is related very much to all things WordPress related. I think they even have a show by that name. So a couple things that kind of popped up for me. I was watching a YouTube live with Matt Medeiros and Mark Szymanski, forgive me for not knowing how to pronounce your last name, but during this one, it’s great to see from Mark’s eyes sometimes because Mark is a young adult in his twenties, I believe, in the WordPress community and beginning to understand open source and contribution.

And I think that when I think about myself at that point, I was finding WordPress 2.3 and Moodle. So I come from other open source, and at that I found the WordPress philosophies and I thought, oh, this is for me, the ones numbered zero through three, the four philosophies of open source, that area spoke deeply to me about code being free, everyone can modify and edit and all of this and has really captivated me. I don’t know if today with as much software as is available and as much user experience as people can have at their fingertips. At that time, CMSs were new and WordPress WordPress was just for blogging and not for the rest of your website certainly. And there were no pages or sidebars or any of those things. So back then open source had a lot of potential and it really captivated a lot of interest.

These days though, the 20 something crowd is not necessarily thinking first about open source. They’re just thinking of the tool to get the job done. Open source may or may not be on the radar, and if they even are aware of how WordPress gets made, they may not understand their own responsibility for providing feedback. There is a talk I gave at WordCamp Montclair a year and a half ago, and I redid it at Phoenix as a backup speaker this year called We Are They, and it’s on WordPress TV, but it’s about this idea that if you’re using WordPress and you complain into the ether about why did they do this or that, to go log the issue in the place and provide that feedback. And there have been a few YouTubers in the last couple of days even that we’re really looking into one shedding light on the need to do that, but also two, hey, we’re logging this stuff and it’s maybe getting overlooked. And so there was some confusion around this that I thought maybe we could tackle a little bit. Robert, has there been a time in any open-source project where you have directed others to go provide some feedback? And how did that experience go?

Robert:
Oh gosh, it’s brutally painful.

Courtney:
Why is that painful?

Robert:
It’s painful. People are not inspired. They don’t know. A lot of times the feedback loops aren’t there. So you might go in there the first time, drop a ticket, look at a repo and either be overwhelmed by whatever jargon exists, and then it just goes into the ether. Nine times out of 10, you’re waiting for someone to pick up that question, actually do something with that. To your point about Juliet, how many years was that sitting there? Again,

Courtney:
It was a long time and it came down to I’m quitting doing this, I need to go pick up client work. Or you’re giving me the keys and we got to move it and I need funded. And I get that.

Robert:
And so as folks get used to much more, I don’t want to say immediate gratification, but at least some kind of awareness of what’s going on. Open-source projects need to implement the expectation level of, oh, I hit a button at my bank and I got an immediate response either from a chatbot or a human being or whatever. We need to be able to do that. We need to keep up with the Joneses in that kind of user experience because submitting tickets is a user experience.

Courtney:
Yeah, so in the presentation that I did, if your issue was related to Gutenberg, here’s the Gutenberg repo, you could leave a comment and not provide code, and that’s okay. So if you want to either open up a discussion or reply to something, here’s how to go find and see if anyone else brought the topic up and then how to go provide feedback or how to open a new ticket. If it is related to the functionality of WordPress dot org’s website, where to go log that, that’s another place. And so the experience Mark was sharing is that he seems interested, I’m just getting to know him a little bit. He seems interested in doing these things, but he doesn’t know where to go to do it. And there’s not really a clear map of some of those things, how to log the feedback in the right places.

And then you have someone like Matt Medeiros who very understandably has been in our community in the WordPress space a long time. And in our project we have two dozen different teams, and then we have some working groups that aren’t attached to a team and we, oh, it’s a thing. And so how do you find where to go log this stuff or where are, for instance, proposals, that was something that Matt brought up and was sharing about searching through make WordPress dot org for proposals. I have provided a link for the show notes that’s basically just a customized Google search of show me anything on make dot WordPress dot org from all two dozen teams in the past. I dunno, I might’ve set it to a year that used the word proposal because there’s no other clear way to do that. But then over in Gutenberg, there are also proposals sitting inside of Gutenberg’s GitHub repo, and they don’t make it to a make website. And sometimes that’s the case for certain teams. Gutenberg is within core, but if you want to see the proposals about what the block editor is doing or the site editing experience is doing, you’re going to need to pay attention to it in the Gutenberg repo. And then what happens if you write a proposal? What’s the next step?

Robert:
Yes, that is a question.

Courtney:
I’m shaking my hands, which no one can see. We’re audio-only. But it’s just like that both hands in the air of frustration of, again, the user experience of trying to get stuff done.

Robert:
So Robert in Joomla, how did proposals get handled?

Courtney:
To some degree, it was a much smaller community and we didn’t have 4,000 teams like WordPress does. So it was much easier to actually get in front of team leads just right off the bat and be like, here’s my proposal, here’s my idea. Then team leads would take and run with that. So being able just to have that contact with the leader of what’s going on, then that would be actually put into more of the big development process or bug fixes or proposals and whatnot.

Courtney:
So to that point, in WordPress, we do not use the term lead outside of, we have core release leads. Matt, usually, is that on most of the release processes.

Robert:
Matt Mullenweg. There’s lots of Matts in the world.

Courtney:
Yes. And then we have some folks that historically have held this title and it’s now become more of an honorary title. Folks like if you’ve been in the WordPress space, Helen Hou-Sandí and others, Dion Hulse, this crew are some of the originals of the release lead cycle and process. Some of them are still with the project and some are no longer with the project, but proposals overall across all the teams, there is no uniformity to that in our case. Other open source projects, like for instance later in the show notes, I have one on PHP has a request for comments, which is a bit akin to a proposal. It’s saying, here’s the pitch, give some comments, and then they have a defined procedure after you give those comments if it needs to go to a vote, who does the voting, et cetera. And these are points that Mark was bringing up.
Is there any standardized? What happens after someone writes a proposal? Well, sometimes it just sits there. Earlier today I had a meeting related to, there is a post in our show notes here about should the DEIB working group Five for the Future new contributor mentorship be all merged inside of the sustainability team? And it was brought up that Birgit Olzem had written a proposal for a DEIB team exclusively like a year ago. And right now it’s just waiting on Matt to respond to one way or the other. And for lack of a response, there’s a lack of activity happening. And that experience for the community is not ideal. There’s no standardization to the process. And also are the proposals going to be on make or are they going to be in a GitHub repo or what team site should something like that go to and how do we handle those?

So I think it was covered pretty well in this particular video, but I can understand why people have these questions. And I’m seeing currently a couple of other YouTubers that are expressing similar concerns, similar questions, and confusion. And what I want to sort of emphasize there is to look at it again, with fresh eyes, there are some people that are new to understanding contribution no matter what their age, they’re just new to experiencing what it means to contribute or where to provide appropriate feedback besides just yelling into YouTube and Twitter. I mean, those feel soothing for a moment or two, but it does nothing to actually, it’s not recorded somewhere that people could take action on that, right? It’s not somewhere that people have to be confronted with dealing with that type of thing and seeing a bit of that type of activity going on.

And also there are some questions. So WPTuts, on YouTube, I don’t recall the gentleman’s name. I can say that the gentleman that was doing WPTuts the YouTube video also had a lot of those same kind of thoughts, questions, and concerns. If I provide the feedback, is anyone paying attention? I saw recently a contributor Aurooba, a couple of us know who Aurooba is in our community. Aurooba provided a pull request, which means that she fixed it in code, she saw a bug, she fixed it in code, she submitted a pull request to Gutenberg, and then in 6.6, that bug was fixed by somebody else’s more recent rendition of the same solution and how inappropriate that that can feel and what can we do to sort of wrangle some of those experiences in a bit better. And so that’s a little bit of what I’m observing, and it relates a bit to, for instance, governance.

That has sometimes been a hot topic. I’m not going to make it one today, but Red Hat has a really good article, ironically, Red Hat who took Red Hat Enterprise Linux that runs a lot of hosting environments and pulled it back to private. Red Hat has a good article about the different kinds of governance models. And on some of the same videos, people were inquiring what type of governance model is WordPress because things like proposals have no standardization, and we do fall under what’s known as Benevolent Dictator for Life. Matt does not enjoy that term, but it is not unique to WordPress.

Robert:
Linux in general is, I mean, Linus Torvaldsds, that’s where it was born.

Courtney:
Yes, exactly. And so basically a lot of the decision-making process resides upon the Project co-founder at this time, and that’s why procedures are maybe where they are looking for a way forward. I’m going to keep pushing on looking for how we can improve this process. I recognize that our project leadership is a small crew that has a lot of responsibility, especially when 43% of the web rides on their decision-making. So improving that experience is something that I care deeply about, about how we can continue encouraging folks to come provide that feedback, and then ensuring that things like what Aurooba experienced don’t fall off the radar that we continually look for, oh, here’s somebody actually already solved the thing, or somebody provided some really valuable feedback. How do we get this feedback heard by those that need to and take action upon it? It’s a lot to kind of wrangle and deal with.

And I admire recently that Anne McCarthy organized a bunch of the YouTubers that seem to have similar interests like this together for a video to try and unite the YouTuber community because that is a weird niche. I would say they’re not going to be as much active in Make WordPress Slack, although I’ve seen more of that and I’m delighted by it. But they have a whole subset of the community that we don’t see at events. They have a whole subset of the community that we don’t see in Slack, and they can really help bridge those connections if done correctly.

Robert:
Yes, I mean, I would just love to have every you dropped ’em in, but just now. But really, if you’re interested in working on the project in WordPress, step one, make WordPress, get on that Slack. A lot of these questions when I talked about, or when you asked about how was this kind of feedback done in the Joomla space, and this is years ago. I’m sure it’s changed now, but at least get on the Slack. You can find the leaders and have that direct question answered one way or the other. And it would be nice if every team had almost like a triage coordinator, just to Courtney’s eyes just really big.

Courtney:
I’m nodding. I’m thinking, oh, I would love to see project manager layers throughout.

Robert:
I’m just going for triage. You’re required to get back within 30 to 60 days and flag it for yes, this will move forward, or no, don’t have time.

Courtney:
I think in addition, maybe Robert, we do have triage work that happens, especially for Core Editor. I know Damon Cook has been really working on that one. Damon contributes on behalf of WP Engine. There are a few others that are in that space for sure. But also I think that we need to do that holistically throughout the whole project. Last bit of news that I have coming in is that just issued within the past week

, is the state of React informal report about the React community. About React, the open-source project as well. It is part of the JavaScript community holistically. It’s a lot of what Gutenberg is built on. You can

Robert:
Check out. I was going to say, why do we care about React?

Courtney:
Yes, Gutenberg. Gutenberg uses a lot of React. So you could find that information at 2023 dot state of react.com. It will be in the show notes, but it’s really interesting to look at contributors to the React community and what kind of feedback that they are offering too. So that’s the hit list of the news that I’ve got for this week. It was good seeing you, Robert, and I look forward to our next episode together.

Robert:
Great seeing you again, Courtney. Now that we have at least August, I think minimal to no work, travel break before WordCamp US hits us square in the face.

Courtney:
I know I’m the lead organizer for contributor day, so I will have a lot more brainpower in October during Hacktoberfest.

Robert:
Thank you, Courtney.

Courtney:
Thank you, Robert.

Dave:
Welcome to this episode of Do the Woo. We’re talking Emerging Tech, and today we’re talking with Robert Norton from Verisart. Hi Robert, how are you doing?

Robert:
Good. Great to be here. Thanks for having me on the show.

Dave:
No worries. And I should probably say I’m your host, Dave Lockie as well. So I guess a bit about you, Robert. You’re the CEO and founder of Verisart. What came before that and what’s your journey been like as an entrepreneur?

Robert:
For the last 15 years, I found myself at the intersection of art and tech. Prior to Verisart, which is a platform that started doing blockchain certification for the art and collectibles market, I was running a company called Sedition Art, which was, in a way, one of the first platforms that sold digital limited editions by well-known artists. Now, of course, we come to know digital limited editions as non-fungible tokens and NFTs, which I know we’re going to get into later. But it was my time at Sedition between 2010 to 2013 that really got me thinking about how artists can find new audiences in other mediums. The principal medium of most of the artists we worked with at Sedition was physical, not digital. Prior to that, I was the founder and CEO of Saatchi Art, previously known as Saatchi Online. We turned it into an e-commerce enabled platform where artists who didn’t have any gallery representation could have a platform to show their work and sell directly to consumers. So, we did a lot of that heavy lifting for them. In some ways, it’s analogous perhaps to Etsy, but with more focus on independent working artists.

I guess why did I end up in this sort of strange intersection? Probably because, in the back of my mind, I wanted to do something in the art world. Both my parents did art degrees, my grandfather was a restorer, so I grew up in a household where the idea of unauthorized or authorized reproductions was quite prevalent. You’d often see, in the case of 19th-century works, studios like Joshua Reynolds would have many works of the same coming from the studio, some of which just worked on by his studio, some of which he worked on in parts, and some of which he worked on entirely. This area of multiples was really interesting to me. The aha moment with Verisart was looking at the case of the Knoedler Gallery, which came to the press around 2015. One of the oldest galleries in New York was found guilty of selling fake Rothkos, a well-known post-war artist in the states, selling these works by the dozen in modern times, in 2015. It wasn’t just unwitting people that should know better, but people like the chairman of Sotheby’s themselves. I was thinking this is a real problem when you have such trust in authorities that are clearly not able to be trusted. I thought about how to improve trust with the advent of distributed ledger technology. We’ve been tackling that problem now for almost 10 years.

To give you a little insight before that, I started my career back in ’95 at America Online, initially in business development, then running e-commerce, and then did a bunch of startups from health to games. I was the person that launched King.com in North America. So, I was the first managing director for King.com in North America. My whole career has been in consumer-facing e-commerce, as I would describe it. While we’re not a marketplace at Verisart, we do help people with their drops and their releases. We’ve now started offering a token gate app print service, which takes us closer to revenue-generating opportunities for artists as well.

Dave:
Amazing. What strikes me about your founding story is that this was not just a love of art, but a very personal relationship with art. It was all around you, with artists and with people who were trying to make a living with art, the artists themselves, the people around that industry, the restorers, the galleries, the marketplaces. This is obviously a very deeply connected and personal mission for you.

Robert:
I think Steve Jobs said, you can connect the dots looking backwards, but you don’t necessarily connect them moving forwards. I didn’t necessarily feel it as personally, but now I think it makes sense. My wife also has a gallery that we work with, and I met my wife through my interest in art. So, I guess we’re very much an art family at this point. But really, it was the advent of blockchain technology that inspired me to do this business. One of the artists we worked with at my former company, Sedition Art, is Casey Reas. Casey is also the co-inventor, along with Ben Fry, of a language called Processing, which enabled artists to generate their digital art with a rules-based programming language. It was Casey who wrote to me in 2014 and said, “Hey Robert, looking at what you’re doing at Saatchi Online and Sedition Art, I think this technology has real potential for certification of verification purposes, both for physical and digital art.” That got me thinking about how blockchains work, mechanisms to trust a timeline, and commitments to that timeline. It felt like a good application for some of the problems we were facing with our provenance certification. In a nutshell, we were taking the certificate, typically issued by some sort of authority, maybe an estate, studio, or gallery, and the provenance, which is another fancy word for the story—the agreed story around the history of that object. That may include exhibition literature as well. We were taking the registry—who’s ultimately responsible—and binding the certificate, provenance, and registry together by shared distributed ledger technology standards. I think it makes for a stronger provenance. That’s what we’ve been doing at Verisart.

Dave:
Yeah, really interesting. Maybe you could talk to us about what that journey’s looked like. Has it been one with a lot of pivoting, large or small, or has it been more a case of feeling like you’ve got the right solution, but the job is to educate, make aware, and onboard? How would you describe that 10 years?

Robert:
Ten years ago, a small percentage of households owned crypto, and now we’re well into double digits, depending on certain age groups. I think it’s up to 40% in some age groups. As a whole, it’s about 20% or so of households in the US that now own crypto in one form or another. We’ve come a long way, and sometimes people talk about the number of households that own crypto paralleling the growth in the number of households that went online in the early days of internet service providers and online services. Whether those correlate correctly, the point is that we’ve grown from a very small base to something that feels closer to mainstream, although it’s not yet at mainstream levels of adoption. We’re not past a 50% threshold in most markets, except for a few perhaps like El Salvador, where Bitcoin’s become an alternative national currency.

If I could characterize what it was like in 2014, I was at this Scaling Bitcoin conference at Stanford University. There were literally probably about 200 people in the community that then went on to build aspects of the blockchain infrastructure we’re familiar with today. That was probably the size of the industry for well-known players at that point. It was very small, and even at conferences, you would struggle to get more than a thousand people to show up. Now we’ve got huge conferences from DeFi to NFTs to staking, to wallet providers, new L1s, which is layer one blockchains, new roll-ups, and L2s. The industry has really evolved. Back in 2014, 2015, I spent most of my time explaining what a blockchain was and why the words art and blockchain were in the same sentence. Now, because of the NFT boom and bust we witnessed in 2021, no one really questions why the words art and blockchain go together.

We’ve come a long way in terms of people’s understanding of what this technology can do, but we’re still set back by the early years in terms of the bad actors in the space. We’ve seen arrests of the principals of FTX and Binance, and bad actors erode consumer trust. That’s very unhelpful when you’re trying to bring new technologies to market. In some ways, it was like two steps forward, one step back, but we’ve really come a long way over the last 10 years. As a result, we can start focusing more on the applications and less on explaining what’s beneath the hood.

Dave:
And I think because there’s such a visual representation—maybe the only visual representation of crypto technology that most people can find—it has that artistic element to it. There have been a lot of bad actors, and the worlds where art and finance meet are often murky and gray anyway. When you accelerate that with the petrol of the internet, there have been a lot of problematic NFT projects. I can imagine that’s been particularly challenging for you. You’re certainly right, there are lots of data points, but the trend line is increasing adoption, increasing awareness. Now you mentioned this idea about mainstream, and one of the conversations I hear in crypto is that crypto will be mainstream when people are using it without knowing that it’s crypto. I noticed that at Verisart you take a very deliberately technology-inclusive approach to describing what you do. How often do you find yourself in a situation where you’re trying to explain Verisart to somebody who is utterly naive and ignorant to crypto and blockchain? Do you ever find success in converting those merchants or artists, or is this always a more progressive and educational sell where they have to get some foundations before they can see the value in what you do?

Robert:
We’ve got a good history of working with artists, and we were one of the first external curators on SuperRare, which is a well-known premium platform for unique digital artwork. So one-of-ones is what they’re often referred to

. Back in 2021, because of my time at Sedition, where we worked with many well-known artists from Damien Hirst to Bill Viola to Tracey Emin and Shepard Fairey, Christian Boltanski, Yoko Ono, we probably worked with a hundred of the world’s top contemporary artists during my time at Sedition. It’s still continuing to this day. That experience of speaking to an artist and understanding what they want to release as a digital edition, can we help them, have they got the facilities to do it in-house themselves—this discussion was more complex during the NFT boom and bust because there were things like needing a wallet, a smart contract, and deciding under which smart contract to mint. But we were able to have those discussions because we understood the issues ourselves. We’ve done a huge number of inaugural artists’ NFTs. Whether it’s Roe Ethridge, William Wegman, Shepard Fairey, Petra Cortright, or Neil Beloufa, a lot of well-known artists’ inaugural NFTs. They came to us because they were somewhat confused by this landscape and they wanted somebody they could trust to guide them through the process. We did two drops with SuperRare, 10 by 10 and 8 by 8, focused on inaugural artists’ NFTs. We also did Artsy’s first NFT drop in early 2022, which included 22 artists. So, we’re absolutely in the business of handholding.

When it comes to looking for our audience and the actual users of our service—the SaaS users or the people that are subscribed to our software—we’ve found it’s very hard work dragging someone along to the drinking trough. It’s better if they’re already there by the waterside and you can perhaps help them more effectively. We’re not so much in the business of telling people they need to use blockchain technology, but more in the business of explaining how we can provide a good service for people who are already looking in that area.

Dave:
Cool. Yeah, that makes sense. As a small business, you have to focus on what’s achievable within your resources and timescales. I’m sure a lot of the awareness work you’re doing is going to have a knock-on effect further down into the future, but you certainly have to be judicious with the way you’re putting that target of energy. One thing I think about quite a lot, and this is with NFTs generally, not just art-based NFTs—of course, there’s some philosophical conversation about what is and isn’t art—whenever you use a new medium or format for art, it brings new constraints and opportunities creatively. With digital, it allowed for, for example, algorithmic generative art. However, then when you take digital art and put it on-chain, that also changes the format and the medium. What I’m thinking about here is the public nature of interaction with that art—who minted it, who collected it, has it been sold on secondary, what’s the price trend, all of that. My question is, to what extent is that interesting and exciting and offering new opportunities to artists where they may have had glimpses of that historically, seeing their art for sale or auction or whatever, but now they have this opportunity to be directly in communication with people that hold their art because if you both have wallets, there are plenty of ways to contact each other.

Robert:
There’s a lot to unpack there. The first is, obviously, art is now as easily tradable an asset as an NFT, as the fungible token—Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, or Tezos. These chains are in the business of minting coins and having people speculate on the value of those coins and the value those networks will accumulate. Remember, they all sit within the same type of wallets. That was never the case with art before. You had a painting, it may have been an asset, but it didn’t sit within your bank account, and you could trade it like you could trade pounds, dollars, or euros. You’re absolutely right to bring that up first. What the blockchain did, and particularly NFTs, is it basically meant that all the digital art released as NFTs were now effectively like financial instruments. That’s why you suddenly saw crazy amounts of speculation and wash trading, and activities that created these elevated floor prices for works that were sold or given away. The use of CryptoPunks or Bored Apes in these 10K drops became the symbol of the height of the market, where algorithms were spinning out 10,000 different variations of a theme. They were sorted by traits—certain rare backgrounds, shapes on their heads, laser eyes, etc. Artists started to use traits around art, and it became very confusing for a lot of people to determine what is art and what is just PFP—a personal profile picture. Some of these also became very valuable assets like the Punks and Apes.

I think that’s all now beginning to shake out. The challenges for artists probably outweigh the opportunities because artists get exhausted by having to maintain a constant dialogue with their community. The community can turn on them if the financial returns go down. It puts a lot of pressure and stress on the artists. Traditionally, artists have had dealers to remove some of their need to be there talking to their collectors. Healthy, protective art communities exist. The Art Blocks community, which we work with closely, and the generative art community are small and protective of one another. That’s a good example of a healthier discourse, but it’s not completely removed from those who just want to speculate on digital art as an asset and feel disappointed when prices don’t go their way.

The first thing is that art is now more of a tradable instrument than it was. It attracts speculators, and speculators outweigh collectors. We’ve seen that with the rise of marketplaces that don’t enforce artist royalties. That’s symptomatic of more speculators than collectors still in the market. We’re currently doing a show at Gazelli Art House called “Awaken and Metamagical Hands,” which includes pioneers like John Maeda, Golan Levin, Joshua Davis, and Leah, as well as younger artists like Robbie Barrat and Lauren Lee McCarthy. All these artists could have solo shows themselves, but they’re still trying to understand the role of algorithms in their relationship to others or even to themselves. Lauren Lee McCarthy, a professor at UCLA and the Design Media and Arts lab along with Casey Reas, has created an installation called “Saliva Exchange,” where people can come in and spit in a vial, write a few things about their saliva, and share it with someone else. It’s a conceptual piece addressing questions around the way algorithms are based in life and how that changes our interactions and notions of modern-day intimacy.

Different artists are exploring different digital trends—some using midjourney or OpenAI algorithms for generative video and art, others building their own software, and others focusing on conceptual fields. It’s an interesting time. However, the principal responsibility of an artist is to create art, not to pump their communities. Those artists who shot to fame by pumping their communities may not be the ones that last from a museum or historical standpoint.

Dave:
Yeah, interesting. Digital and blockchain art has been extremely disruptive, and that disruption continues. There are some emerging trends—very art-focused communities that are positive and nurturing, and people pushing the boundaries of generative and on-chain art. There’s still a lot more emergence to happen. Let’s switch gears a bit. We’ve mainly talked about art and blockchain so far. I’d like to bring this back down to earth for a Woo audience. We may have merchants listening who are selling art or interested in how they can use NFTs to enhance what they’re doing with e-commerce. We almost certainly have agency folks who would love to get their teams working with some of these technologies. They’re thinking about which of their clients might want to use this technology, what success looks like, etc. We talked about art being wrapped in these digital tokens. Digital assets are tokenized and put into common digital wallets. This extends to real-world assets as well—cases of wine, physical artwork, fractions of an old Mercedes, etc. If you’re just issuing NFTs and transacting on-chain, you don’t need a traditional e-commerce setup because you can do this through marketplaces. The whole idea is that you don’t need fulfillment because it’s all digital. You don’t need a traditional payment processor and checkout because it’s all based on wallet signatures and digital asset transfers. Yet, there is a lot of e-commerce happening where you do need e-commerce—you need to take delivery, accept orders, worry about tax and payments, and everything else. Where do those two worlds intersect? What does a merchant or a success story look like where you get those two things? Verisart operates in both purely digital and intersectional worlds through integrations with WooCommerce and Shopify.

Robert:
It’s super helpful when the certification is happening at the time of sale because otherwise, if you’re creating certificates on Verisart.com and doing your sale through some other mechanism, there’s always going to be a lag between the sale, the invoice happening on some platform—whether it’s your own, a third-party marketplace, or offline. We’ve always felt it’s helpful to close that gap in time for the certification at the time of transaction. With NFTs, you can mint and list the NFT later, but mostly people mint and sell the NFT at the same time. In the early years of Verisart, when we didn’t have any e-commerce integrations, people used us, but we didn’t see enough transfers of the certificates. We wanted to make that easier for people. About five years ago, we did our first app with Shopify. We’re super happy to have launched our WooCommerce app this year. We’ve learned a lot from our time on the other marketplace platform in terms of building a good app from day one with the WooCommerce audience. Our app allows people to certify products, whether physical or digital. We support minting NFTs or tokens. One thing we don’t support is fractions of an object because once you start offering fractions, you’re into the world of securities regulation, which we stay well clear of. Also, fractionalizing an artwork isn’t necessarily where there’s real demand for fractionalized opportunities. Fractionalizing businesses that provide you a yield or return that can be valued is more of an obvious first spot than fractionalizing an artwork because there often isn’t consensus around the price for unique artworks.

For WooCommerce merchants, we’ve seen a big trend in collectibles and a broader definition of luxury. If you thought about luxury historically, you might think of handbags, cars, and rings, but not hoodies and sneakers. But clearly, that is part of modern-day luxury. On Verisart, if you’ve got a collectible with an authority like a living creator or a trusted business, that’s a good opportunity to improve your current certificate of authenticity with digital certification branded by your store that can be verified by new owners in real time. That’s the core of our business. We have lots of different types of businesses using our certification—from custom champagne bottles to special golf clubs to digital prints and photography.

A good example is Johnny Depp. He built a community of NFT holders and sold those NFTs through a native Web3 drop. He then wanted to give something back to those NFT holders—allowing them to have a print of their NFT. These NFTs are part of his artwork, his friends, and they look like pop-up images. There’s a need for orders, and there’s a lag between placing the order and receiving the purchase. You get out-of-the-box order management and porting. In his case, he spun up a Shopify store and used Verisart to certify his prints. When you think about merchant needs, whether they’re Web2 or Web3, Verisart helps with certifying products, physical or digital, and minting NFTs. We’ve come a long way in giving people the tooling to build their own Web3 marketplaces if they want to. Merchants that already have a significant presence through their own website might also be on Amazon. You might have a merchant with its own domain using WooCommerce but also selling on Amazon. It’s helpful to have your own URL for those digital assets to live alongside physical ones because increasingly, they have a relationship. You buy a physical asset, maybe it grants you a token, which is a form of membership. Now you are closer to that artist’s world. You might give away that token for free. We support buying a token that allows you access to purchase a print or exclusive product at a reduced cost or ahead of others. There are a lot of ways digital and physical can complement each other. Artists are experimenting with these two mediums and offering experiences together. For example, the show we’re co-curating at Gazelli Art House in London has artists using Verisart to certify their prints, and the prints are certified as NFTs. We’re constantly looking for better ways to provide merchants and creators with tools for certifying their objects, whether physical, digital, or mapping the relationship between the two.

Dave:
I guess there’s a double-edged sword of this potentially being a tool artists can use to build and engage with their community, but not all artists. There’s nuance and unpacking to do around that for individual artists as they try to get that balance right. One thing you hinted at is that you might buy the digital token first, which gives you the right to buy a physical print or redeem it for some sort of experience later on. That fundamentally changes how art can be paid for. Instead of the artist creating art and hoping they can sell it, they can pre-sell it or fund the collection through pre-selling. Is that what the CryptoVenetians did?

Robert:
Yeah, we work with Bright Moments. We did the finale with them in Venice earlier this year. That’s exactly what we did. We had a poster only available to the holders of tokens from that last city, which was a thousand tokens minted during Venice, Italy, just after the Biennale this year.

Dave:
That was such a good documentary. I can’t find it online yet, but I watched it at a screening. It was really good fun, very heartwarming. I’ve got two more questions for you, one a bit of a double-barrel. What’s the difference between a receipt and a certificate of authenticity? They both have similar attributes, right? A receipt can improve the secondary resale value of something. It has some element of proof of authenticity. I think it’s stupid we haven’t created digital infrastructure for receipts. We can spend, but we don’t get digital receipts back automatically. For example, the best way to know how healthy you’re eating is to analyze all the receipts you get from takeaways and supermarket shops. What’s the difference between a receipt and a certificate of authenticity, both in terms of the nature and what that offers in onward value?

Robert:
In the case of token-gated prints, we incorporate the order number as part of the certificate of authenticity and the token ID used along with that order number. We have patents at Verisart for handling certification. On one end, you’ve got an unverified record, where I’ve said something about an object, but no one knows who I am or if what I’ve said is true or false. It’s the lowest amount of waiting. Then we have an issuer certificate, similar to a receipt. The retailer of the object says that this thing is true. When you’ve got an artwork where the retailer is not the creator, the certificate of authenticity is where the creator has authorized that statement. Finally, we have a certificate of authenticity plus, where there’s a physical identifier on the work like a QR tag or an NFC tag.

The core part of Verisart is that the certification can change state depending on the consensus, most importantly the creator. The problem in the past has been that the receipt is often the last thing the creator hears about. The collector gets it, but the creator might be told, “Oh, that receipt didn’t quite happen until maybe a year later, so we don’t owe you any money.” Verisart puts the creator more in control because they know when their certificates are transferred, there is a transaction out there. That’s helpful from a creator perspective. While there are similarities between receipts and certificates of authenticity, they are fundamentally different. Receipts require the issuer to be present in the future, and the issuer must remain trustworthy. One of the inspirations for Verisart was that issuers of these receipts were actually sending out fake works. The receipt was fine, but what it pointed to was fake. There are still challenges in the Web3 world with how NFTs have been construed. Transactions are correct, but what they point to may be incorrect. Verisart is actively trying to address this by building more trust at the time of transaction and ensuring the creator is present in terms of their authentication of the work.

NFTs as COAs is interesting because even if Verisart goes away, you’ve got an on-chain record that Verisart verified and can go along with the transaction. It future-proofs your investment when those intermediaries are no longer around. A lot of merchants don’t make it past 10, 20 years, so who will determine whether that receipt is valid if the merchant can’t authorize it?

Dave:
Yeah, interesting. Last question, around NFT market sentiment. We went through a big boom cycle. NFTs alongside DeFi were one of the two big trends driving a lot of narrative, volumes, and arguably innovation in crypto last cycle. This cycle, while we’ve seen some things emerge and become clearer, we’ve also seen the floor prices drop significantly across many blue-chip NFTs, and there’s a lot of uncertainty in the market. How do you think about that? You’re using NFTs very specifically and deliberately, rather than the popular conception of a monkey picture, but nevertheless, the broader context for NFTs must be impactful. Do you think in a year’s time we’ll be like “NFTs are so back,” or will it continue to be murky for a while longer? How do you see this sentiment resolving?

Robert:
Early internet, we had titles like Director of E-Commerce and Chief Multi-Webmaster. These terms fell by the wayside and became incorporated into tech or marketing. No one thought of online as an option; it became a must. We’ll get there with tokens and digital assets. The term NFT has been tarnished, and even Web3 has become caught up in that. When people used Facebook, they didn’t think they were on a Web2 platform; they just had a better online experience. I think we’ll get there with Web3 as well. Having a token will allow you to move more seamlessly between platforms, making the experience of being in a community or having a loyalty scheme smoother. We’re at the early stages of building that infrastructure. From an authentication standpoint, it makes sense. Token gating was complicated, but now a token allows you to do things more fluidly. Digital assets are here to stay. The language is still up in the air, whether we’ll use the term NFT in five years or just digital art or digital assets.

We’re still big believers. It’s been a rough ride, and floor prices have dropped, but there’s a more mature understanding of the market now. Some NFTs are surpassing their auction highs from the height of the market, particularly those artists who have crossed over into the fine art community. Generative art is here to stay, and tokens among merchants are becoming more common. We’d love your merchants to try our app on the WooCommerce store and get in touch with us directly. We do custom development for merchants but also put as much in our core product as possible. Right now, on WooCommerce, we support minting and certification. We’ll be adding additional functionality as the app evolves.

Dave:
Perfect. Thank you for letting people know where they can get ahold of you. Last question: as someone with insight into the brave new world of luxury consumerism, what’s the most unexpected luxury thing you’ve had a certificate of authentication for through Verisart?

Robert:
We have two things that were surprising. One is a very high-end watchmaker based in the Middle East. These watches are real works of art, costing more than most works of art, starting at $50,000. That was unusual for me to see such a high

-end product being certified on Verisart. The other is amazing calligraphy designs, carved in wood and highly intricate, also from that part of the world. We also have a Maori arts collective doing art from New Zealand. That’s the great thing about my job—we’re always seeing new ways creators and merchants find to certify their creations.

Dave:
It must be wonderful to live at that intersection between technology and art. It’s been wonderful talking to you, Robert. I’m very grateful for your time and insights.

Robert:
Likewise. Thank you for having me on your show.

Dave:
Take care.

Katie:
Hello and welcome to Biz Chat at Do the Woo. I’m Katie Keith from Barn2 Plugins, and today we’re going to be talking about onboarding, whether you are a freelancer wanting to improve the onboarding for new clients or whether you are an e-commerce store owner, needing to onboard customers who buy your products. To help us with this, we’ve got special guest Laura Elizabeth. Welcome, Laura.

Laura:
Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Katie:
So can you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do to start?

Laura:
Yeah, sure. So as of right now, I have a WordPress plugin called Client Portal, but my background is actually in web design. I worked at an agency for a year or so and then I branched out and did freelancing for about 10 years. Client Portal was made out of the work I was doing with my freelancing clients. So it was sort of like a mix between a project management tool and really having nothing at all. I started that back in 2016. I still take on the occasional freelancing project, but it’s pretty rare these days.

Katie:
And tell us about onboarding. Why do you think it’s so important and what got you into that as an area particularly?

Laura:
Yeah, I’ve always loved what onboarding can do for you. I was quite insecure back when I was a freelancer and I felt that having a really good onboarding process really set the stage for how the project was going to go. You can make it really repeatable and reuse it with all your clients. It just helped me because I didn’t want to go into the full agency route. I wanted to stay just as a solo freelancer. It helped me juggle multiple clients. If I had a really solid onboarding process in place, it helped my clients trust me a little bit more. When you start a project with somebody, really the beginning sets the tone for how everything’s going to go. So if I had a really solid onboarding process, it just started the project off, and by having a system in place, things started going a lot more smoothly. My clients were happier, I was happier. It just worked out a lot better.

Katie:
That makes a lot of sense because when people hire a freelancer or even an agency for their website, they’ve made the decision based on lots of things like your portfolio, the quality of your website, possibly a recommendation. But ultimately, it’s not like hiring a doctor where there’s a specific qualification. You have to prove your credibility in the early stages of the project. And I suppose if you’re kind of all over the place at the beginning and you’re not providing clear onboarding, then that might make them doubt the decision they’ve made to hire you.

Laura:
I even find that now. So now I’m more on the other side of things where I’m the client and I hire freelancers. It really does make such a difference if I hire someone and I can see they’ve got some kind of process in place. It doesn’t need to be elaborate, but if they have things they can give me where they tell me how they work, answer maybe commonly asked questions, or things like that, it just feels like they’ve done this before. Nobody wants to feel like a guinea pig or a test subject when you’re doing a client project. If I’m hiring someone, I want to feel like they do this all the time, they know how to handle the entire project no matter what it is. It could be a website project, it could be consulting, marketing, whatever. I just feel like onboarding throughout the course of the project really helps gain that trust and it just sets the whole project off from the start.

Katie:
Since we are talking about the freelancer and agency side of onboarding, let’s focus on that a bit more first, and then later on we can talk about onboarding for e-commerce store owners. So can you walk me through an optimal onboarding experience for a new client project? What should that include?

Laura:
Yeah, so it kind of starts slightly before the onboarding when you are qualifying the client. I like to put quite a lot of effort into qualifying my clients because I’m sure everyone’s experienced this: you get on calls with a potential client, you give them a ton of advice, things are going really well, and then you send your proposal and they say, “Oh wait, I have a budget of $500.” And it’s just completely wasted. I feel like everyone has to learn that the hard way. So it starts with qualifying the client, and you can do that with things like intake questionnaires, the discovery call, the proposal. I actually did a lot of paid discovery sessions with my clients. I was doing it before a website redesign project. So, paid discovery is where you do essentially the whole proposal stage as a productized service. So your clients will pay you to do a proposal, which might sound a little crazy because you can imagine what client would want to pay for a proposal. But it’s kind of a consulting thing. You work with them to figure out everything they need in their business, you deliver them a report where they can take it, implement it themselves, get someone else to do it, or ideally get you to do it.

I found that had a ton of benefits overall, both for me and my clients, but specifically with the onboarding, it really helped because almost every client went through that same process. So it was really easy for me to create reusable assets that I would use with them. I would have a VA who would help me send the right things at the right time. It would be things like a contract, like an NDA or something like that, and then we would send different questionnaires for their business, gathering all the data, send them a getting started guide, what to expect, the payment, everything was a lot more automated. So I always think with onboarding, if you can have some kind of fixed scope project that you do at the start, it makes your job a lot easier. But even if you can’t do that, what I tend to recommend is there’s no one size fits all with onboarding. It’s really a case of laying out your process and figuring out what your client needs, what problems your clients tend to have.

A lot of people have issues with clients maybe micromanaging projects or scope creep or things like that that crop up during the project. Are there ways in your onboarding to help solve those? So could you say something like, it’s quite likely with big custom projects that the scope is going to change? That’s absolutely fine and we expect that. Here’s how that will work. And that’s just an example of something you could include in your onboarding to help you later down the road. I know for me, scope creep was a particularly difficult one, but I also liked to set them up in a system where they could access everything at one time, and this is kind of where Client Portal came about. I tried onboarding them into different project management tools and I would find that they were really useful for me, particularly if I was working with contractors on their project or if you’re an agency, project management tools are pretty great. But then when I’d add my client to it, they didn’t want to learn a new system, they didn’t use it, they didn’t log in. And actually, like I was saying earlier, now I’m more on the client side. I also hate being added to a project management tool because I don’t want to change anything or post anything in it because I don’t want to mess up their already perfect-looking system and I just can’t be bothered. So you end up resorting back to email.

Katie:
Yeah, I totally agree. I hate it when I hire someone like, I don’t know, an SEO agency or something like that and they put me on their project management system. There are so many, it’s probably one I’ve never used before. I don’t care what their internal systems are as the client. Things like notifications become a nightmare. You don’t know how it works. You’ll ask for an update and they’ll say, “Oh, it was on this card here.” Well, I didn’t know that. And also, alternatively, you get a notification for everything. And I feel that generally adding clients to your internal project management tool is not in the client’s interest. So yeah, it’s good to have an alternative.

Laura:
And you also get that if your team is quite big, your client won’t really know who they’re supposed to be talking to. They won’t know, “Am I supposed to be replying to this? Are they not?” It just gets really overwhelming for them. And I’m similar to you, I hate being added to different project management tools, it’s just hard. I felt like project management tools weren’t really working for me. They were working for me internally. I didn’t want clients to see the kind of things I was talking about with contractors. And I’ve heard loads of horror stories as well of people who have accidentally posted something that the client can see that they maybe shouldn’t have posted. Maybe it’s about the client, I don’t really know, but there’s always the risk that’s going to happen. You’ll post something that they shouldn’t see.

So I thought, well, I’m not going to bother adding clients to my project management tool. But then when you take that away, if you have all these onboarding documents that you’ve created, so these getting started guides, these questionnaires, the contract invoices, whatever it might be, if you take the project management tool away, you don’t really have anything. So you tend to send these files through email. You have these really long email threads, but that really didn’t feel polished and professional enough either. And I also had the problem where clients would come back to me and say, “Where’s this file? I can’t find it. I didn’t save it, blah, blah, blah.” And that would be really complicated. So I created a portal where they could sign up on my website, log in, and just have everything there available to them. And it was totally separate from the project management tool. So it would only have the very few things

that a client actually needs to see and would need to access on a regular basis. And that really helped because it was sort of the middle ground between nothing and a project management tool. And I just created that in WordPress with private pages and all that kind of thing. I did eventually turn it into a product. It can be just something, a private area on your website that they can log into. And I found that was super useful for my clients.

Katie:
Is that more work for the freelancer or agency because they have to populate that with, do they do things like project updates in it or simply the onboarding information?

Laura:
You can do either really. I personally prefer to keep it very simple and repeatable. So I would set up a template and it would have all their onboarding documents that were the same for every single client doing that particular project. So it would be an onboarding template or a project template for a paid discovery, for example. And then I would have a separate one if I was doing a website redesign or I would have a separate one, maybe, I don’t know, copywriting or whatever services you offer, and you just put in the stuff that is common to pretty much every client as a template. So you don’t have to recreate all that. And then however you store your deliverables, you would just link to what you’re already using. So I wouldn’t spend a lot of time uploading things to the portal. The way I thought of it at the time was like a bookmarks bar that was in a branded portal on your website that your clients could log into. So at the time I was doing websites and I would use Envision for my prototype, so I would just link to Envision. So it didn’t really take an awful lot of time, but it is something that if you do have a VA, which I pretty much recommend almost all freelancers have one if they can because it just makes life a lot easier. It’s something that they can just go in and add the odd link to it. But I always recommend keeping it as simple as possible, actually having as little in there as possible, but making sure that what’s in there are the things that your client needs to access time and time again.

Katie:
That makes sense. So you’ve referred to VAs a couple of times. It’s slightly off topic, but virtual assistants can be really useful. Do you have any tips on where to find one? Because a lot of freelancers can’t afford to hire somebody freelance, and so what are the different ways you can find somebody to help with those tasks?

Laura:
I’ve hired VAs from a few different places. The best one I had was from a website called Hawkey Handbook. I don’t actually know if it’s still around. I haven’t checked, but I think that’s what it was called. Gina taught people how to become virtual assistants and then she had a pool of people where you could post a job, and I had a virtual assistant there for years and she was really great. I’ve also tried hiring just from people I know because they’re kind of tasks that really anyone can do as long as you’ve got good processes in place. But yeah, my favorite one was the Hawkey Handbook place where I hired a VA. It can take a little bit of trial and error and hiring a VA is actually a lot of work upfront because if you don’t have systems and processes and things documented, it takes a long time to get that in place and it can take a long time to train a VA. But once you’ve found that rhythm and they work with you, they’re really invaluable, especially when working with clients. Because if you are like me, I was mostly solo but would just work with contractors. It was really hard doing the actual work, which is the bit I loved, and then dealing with new lead inquiries, keeping up to date with current clients, or even following up with leads that didn’t work out, or doing outreach, all that kind of stuff that you need to do constantly. It just takes that off your plate to have somebody as a middleman managing. For me, it was mostly email and client communication. So yeah, I think VAs are really, really important, but a big investment both time and money upfront.

Katie:
Definitely. I used to use a company called Remote Staff for a VA for years because as a plugin company, I have a support team and one of my support engineers spends half her time doing VA tasks, which might be finance or marketing or general admin or whatever. So I found that good. They were already trained in our products from doing support. They do VA tasks as well and it gives them more insights into different parts of the business and things. So there’s lots of ways you can get them without doing a traditional job advert to hire someone if that’s not in budget.

Laura:
And you don’t even need to hire full-time as well. I only ever had one full-time VA, and I found it was actually a bit much. At the minute, I’m similar to you. I have a support person who does some VA tasks and I think they only do a couple of hours a day and really that’s enough to just get through your inbox and do whatever recurring tasks need to be done. I think two hours a day minimum will get you through most client communication things that you might need to do.

Katie:
Yeah, I find it really helpful to write a list of what I actually do before hiring somebody, because sometimes when you group your tasks, it’s not what you think. So when I do it, actually I need a finance assistant and a marketing assistant and very little general admin. So I might go for a general VA when that’s not the skillset I need. So it is useful to actually write down what you do. You may not have an understanding of that.

Laura:
Yeah, that’s a good point actually. Time track maybe.

Katie:
Yeah, exactly. All of that.

Laura:
Yeah.

Katie:
So let’s get back to onboarding. We went on a useful tangent then. We’ve talked about onboarding for clients who you are providing services for. So let’s move on and talk a bit about onboarding for e-commerce stores. And it’s something you may not really think of because let’s say if someone buys a pair of shoes or something on a website, they probably don’t need any onboarding, but there are e-commerce products that do need some kind of support and communication from that company after making a purchase. An example might be a membership site where they’re joining some kind of a club with an ongoing relationship. It might be that they’ve booked an event and they need information in the run-up to that event and the date of it or any kind of product that needs some kind of special advice or instructions for the customer to use it, which aren’t shipped with the product, which happens in various industries. So do you have any advice about the email side of things? I know you and I have previously talked on a different podcast about your expertise in email marketing. Do you have any advice about how email might play a part in onboarding for e-commerce store owners?

Laura:
Funnily enough, I recently bought some shoes and their onboarding was pretty good. They were running trainers or sneakers.

Katie:
You needed onboarding for shoes, fine.

Laura:
Yeah, it’s funny because you say they didn’t need onboarding for shoes, but these were specifically running shoes, so it kind of makes sense if they were just regular shoes, probably not. But it was quite nice because they sent a follow-up sequence of just different things about how to care for running shoes, how often to replace them, and tips on running as well because presumably if you’re buying running shoes, you’re probably a runner. And so I thought that was quite helpful. But I think with onboarding for emails, it’s actually a really difficult thing to get right, because as you know, inboxes are just full right now and everything you buy, there’s a lot of emails that come after you always get added to the newsletter. It’s quite overwhelming. So the first thing I would say about that is to make sure you’re not sending a newsletter at the same time you’re sending onboarding. But with onboarding emails, I think one thing I really like that I’ve seen, this is more for SaaS software, are people who send the odd email. I think it’s maybe once a week I would say getting the timing right is important and it’s very, very short and it’s one very small tip that I could read in a few seconds about using whatever software that I’ve just signed up for.

And I think that’s really great. That’s actually something I want to put into my own onboarding because I have, for Client Portal, I have a getting started guide and a few little things like that. I have a new customer survey because it’s always good to try if you can, to learn about people who have just bought. So it’s finding that balance between things that you would find useful as the business owner, plus what your customers would find useful. But yeah, I really like these new SaaS companies who are just sending these little tips specifically in software that are probably really obvious to the founder or people who use it regularly. It could be like a keyboard shortcut or just some really basic feature that just makes your life a lot easier. I think that’s really nice because I don’t think people are reading emails, they’re getting so many and I don’t think they’re reading them. They’re as focused when they’re reading them as they maybe were a few years ago, at least in my experience. So yeah, that’s something I would try, but I haven’t tested it, so I don’t actually know.

Katie:
I really like that. Keeping it short, as you say, people do get email overwhelmed, but it is an opportunity still. With our plugins, we’ve created a unique sequence in MailChimp for each of our plugins, similar to what you said, but probably not as brief. So I will look at that. For example, if someone buys our WooCommerce product options plugin, then we’ll send an automated email straight away with instructions on how to set it up. After three days, we send a check

-in email, how are you getting on? Here’s a video, here’s some extra links to resources in case you’re stuck, how to contact us, those kinds of things. With running shoes, if you’re happy with them pretty quickly, you’re going to keep using them and when they wear out, hopefully buy from the same company. But with WordPress, we have an annual subscription, so we need the customer to renew after one year and two years, which means that to encourage renewals, we want to have an ongoing relationship with the customer, which is largely automated of course. So our emails after the first couple of weeks slow down and there might be one every two or three months, and then they might speed up a bit shortly before each renewal. And like you mentioned, we provide tips. So for WooCommerce product options, an email after four months might talk about lesser-used features. You know, you could set a maximum quantity of how many pizza toppings the customer can buy or something like that, or did you know about this extra way of pricing your product options and things that they might not know to help them get more value out of it? And then we might sneak in a marketing email every now and then recommending a related product, but that shouldn’t be the main thing of course.

Laura:
Yeah, I do something similar. I actually have found it quite hard to time emails up to renewal time because people could maybe upgrade their license or do different things throughout that process, and I found it quite hard from a technical perspective to set that up. So I tend to have an onboarding sequence that’s the same for everybody. It’s fortunate for me because I only have one plugin as opposed to multiple, and it’s all serving a similar audience. After the onboarding sequence, it just goes into my general monthly, or it’s not always monthly, newsletter where I’ll share a new example or a new case study or something like that. But I really want to have something in place that’s more akin to when it’s getting close to their renewal date. I just haven’t found a way to actually implement that yet.

But I do also do a little bit of upselling as well because I created a sister company from Client Portal. One thing I found was people loved the portal, but they were having trouble putting together these getting started guides and these intake questionnaires, they didn’t know what to put in them. Whereas I did create portal templates, the portal templates didn’t include content. So I created a sister company that has these templates that have all the exact wording that I would use with my clients. They’re nicely designed but easily editable, that kind of thing. So after, I think it’s about six weeks or so, I do a little mini promotion for that and then give customers a discount if they want to buy that. But it is kind of a separate company, it’s still mine. So I think there’s room to upsell people. I think it’s just important to upsell them for something that they genuinely would be interested in rather than just whatever you have. Have you identified another problem that these customers tend to have that you could solve with a different product and upsell them on that? I think that’s quite a good way, and I’ve never had any backlash about doing that because, like I say, it’s something people genuinely want, so they’re quite happy to receive those emails.

Katie:
Absolutely. I’ve got, I think, 19 premium plugins now, and we only upsell closely related ones. So say someone’s bought a WooCommerce restaurant plugin, a lot of them sell things like pizzas or burgers that need extra toppings, which you can do with our product options plugin. So we’ll email the restaurant customers not saying, have you heard about WooCommerce product options? It’s great. We will say, do you want to sell extra toppings and charge for them for your pizzas and burgers and so on, and be really, really specific. And those emails get quite a good conversion rate. In fact, we have an email that we send about a week after purchase, which recommend handpicked products based on what they bought, and that does quite well at getting that second purchase in.

But let’s talk a bit about tools. So I’ve mentioned that we use MailChimp to send that, but there are other things as well. Obviously, there are many competitors to MailChimp, and whichever email marketing platform you use, you can integrate with your WooCommerce website. There’s also a WooCommerce plugin that I really like. It used to be called follow-ups, and then it got merged into a plugin called Automate Woo. It’s on WooCommerce.com, and you can use that to send different emails to your customers based on what products they bought. So if you have running shoes, for example, then instead of doing it through your email platform, you could do it through your WooCommerce store and have a different product as the trigger for each email. So that’s quite good. We actually do ours through Recapture because we sell through Easy Digital Downloads rather than WooCommerce and hardly anything integrates with that, which is really frustrating. So we use Recapture for our abandoned cart software and also for our follow-up emails that recommend related products and things. So there’s lots of tools. What do you use, Laura?

Laura:
My tooling has changed a little bit. I use ConvertKit for my emails, and then I did use Easy Digital Downloads, but I’ve actually just migrated completely over to Freemius, and that’s really nice because it has all the abandoned cart features built in. It’s actually got a lot of the email built in as well. So I’m putting a pause on my ConvertKit onboarding to just test out what they have out of the box because they say they do a lot of testing with the emails and try to time them quite well and do all that kind of stuff. So I’m just having a look at that at the minute. Talking about personalization. One tool I really like, and I have to say I’m a bit biased, this is my husband’s company, but he runs a company called Right Message, and that’s really nice because what it allows you to do is if you have, say, so I would have for Client Portal, maybe I’d have agencies or freelancers, we have law firms, accountants, all those different industries,

I can learn about different subscribers in ConvertKit and then change content on my website based on what I know about them. So for example, if I had a landing page and I was talking to an accountant via email, if they clicked through to my website, I could change the wording to speak more to accountants. And that’s been really fun to play around with just to make the whole experience more personal. One really easy example actually is if someone’s already on your email list and they go to your website, instead of seeing a popup to join your email list, which is annoying for a customer, but also annoying for you because you can end up with duplicate subscribers, they’ll see something else, so they might see nothing at all, or you could change it to be a popup for them to leave a review or join your affiliate program or something like that. So you can change what they’re seeing on your website based on what you know about them and where they are in your funnel, which is pretty nice. But other than that, I keep my tooling pretty simple. It’s mostly just Freemius, ConvertKit, Right Message, and that’s about it, I think.

Katie:
Yeah, makes sense. About two months ago, I think we had Paul Halfpenny from the PersonalizeWP plugin on this show, and we talked about different personalization strategies and there’s a lot you can do, but we talked mostly about pre-sales, but that is a good point about onboarding as well, so that when customers log in, you can show them different information based on various factors. So there’s a lot you can do with that, which is quite a kind of modern approach that WordPress is just kind of starting to discover fairly recently, I would say.

Laura:
Yeah, it’s kind of crazy what you can do now. It’s a bit scary sometimes, but it’s fun to play around with. I think the thing that you can get caught up on is sometimes you can go a little bit deep on it and do a little bit too much, and the more complexity you add, I’ve learned this the hard way, eventually something’s probably going to break or go wrong and it can be really hard to untangle it. So I really try my hardest to keep things as simple as possible, but stuff like that is just really fun to play around with and it does really work as well. So yeah, it’s good.

Katie:
Yeah, I’d suggest focusing on the biggest wins there. So not every possible customer’s use case needs to have personalized content. Maybe pick out your biggest use cases that you get the most sales from and create targeted content for those that’s going to have the most impact without being ridiculously complex.

Laura:
Yeah, exactly. And just testing it as well, just making sure it works. It should work. Anything that’s more personalized should work. But yeah, it’s always good to test as much as you can,

Katie:
Which is kind of hard because you have to replicate the environment it’s targeted for, don’t you?

Laura:
Yeah, it’s really hard. I find testing it is a lot easier. The higher volume of everything you have, the easier testing becomes just because you get to see trends. If you don’t have a ton of traffic or you don’t have a ton of customers, it can be really hard to know why certain things happen. Is it a seasonal lull, for example? It’s like July right now, so it’s historically not a great month for, well, really a lot of people, everyone’s on holiday. It’s just so hard to know unless you’ve got a really big company to easily see those trends. But it’s still good to try and keep an eye on it if you can, but just not get too focused on the details, not looking every day, looking at trends maybe across months or even years sometimes.

Katie:
Absolutely. It’s easy to panic if you have a drop in sales over the short term and you need to wait until it’s statistically significant, if I can say that.

Laura:
It’s hard because unless you track this data every year, so I’ve recently started keeping a spreadsheet of, and I’ve only done it for the last three years, but it is really useful. January is a particularly good month for me. Obviously, November is good, the summer is less good, and it’s interesting to see, and I know that every year I’ve probably had the same level of panic during the lower months that if I’d have just kept an eye on these trends, I might not have needed to panic so much. It just kind of happens.

Katie:
Definitely. Last month we had Bryce Adams from Metorik on talking about reporting and how to get better data out of your online store because people often are having to create spreadsheets and things like that, whereas you should just have it at the click of a button. It’s kind of crazy how bad the reporting and things like WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads is straight out of the box, so you do need extra plugins and SaaS and so on to give you what you need or build it yourself.

Laura:
Yeah, exactly. I find it hard with Easy Digital Downloads. I felt like they changed things quite a lot and I was never sure if the numbers were the same, but I do actually find no matter how good the reporting is, I do find something really useful about putting it into a spreadsheet each month because it forces me to really look at it and see where it’s changed. That might just be a me thing though.

Katie:
Everyone works with data in different ways and so on. We ended up building our own custom system for Easy Digital Downloads to give us the data we needed because it was just so difficult. And then we found out this week that they changed something a few months ago that had broken all of our data, so we thought we had a massive drop in sales and a massive increase in renewals, but they had just changed internally how they classified sales and renewals. So it was a definition change, and we spent ages trying to work out why this would have happened. So again, never easy.

Laura:
Yeah, that’s a nightmare.

Katie:
Another aspect of onboarding, which I think people often forget about is the sequence that happens when the customer places an order and immediately afterwards. Since this is Do the Woo, I’ll use WooCommerce as an example. With WooCommerce, you have built-in emails and order statuses, and then when you change the order status, it triggers an email. I often find the default ones really unhelpful. I know Woo is actually working on this at the moment and thinking about how to improve the order statuses and the corresponding emails, but I ordered, I think it was a Woo T-shirt actually customized with the logo. So I received the email saying, thank you for your order. Fine. It said when it would ship. Fine. Then I received it, and then about a week later I received an order completed email from them. I’m like, hang on, I’ve already got it. I don’t care that you’ve marked it as complete on your system. And it wasn’t about me as the customer. I think that all store owners should think about things like these statuses. Another one is when you order a digital product in WooCommerce, it will set it to processing and send an email, and then you have to manually set it to completed, which sends another email. But of course, a digital product has been served automatically at the time they place the order, and so they don’t need another email. So you have to use a plugin order status manager to disable the completed email and all that stuff. So I’d say test it and think about your customer. Would you add anything to that, Laura?

Laura:
Just that it’s always a good idea to periodically go through and buy your own product, just do a test purchase or something and just see what happens because things do change a lot. Even like you said, with the Easy Digital Downloads changing something, you never know what’s going to change. I recently did that and I found that all my images in the emails were coming out really massive. I guess ConvertKit had changed something or something had happened, but you just don’t know until you’ve gone through it as the customer. And that’s where you can really easily find those things where you’re getting these emails where orders are being set from process to complete and then they’re getting a notification you can go in and just hopefully turn that off. But yeah, that’s probably the best way to do it. I would say, maybe every six months, just go in and do a test purchase.

Katie:
You’ll probably be surprised at how many emails your poor customers are receiving because they get one from PayPal if they use PayPal and all the ones from your website. And you might have a per-product email with instructions for that particular product all at the same time. So you need to think how annoying is that for people as well?

Laura:
Yeah, exactly. You get five emails at once that hopefully you can condense into just one email, which would be perfect.

Katie:
You mentioned earlier about the subsequent emails and making sure, say, your newsletter doesn’t go out at the same time as onboarding emails. I think that’s good advice on an ongoing basis too.

Laura:
Yeah, exactly. There’s a lot you can optimize, and it can, like I say, get messy. Even simple systems can get messy really quickly depending on different customers if they use a different email address. I know you can’t account for every edge case, but I went down the rabbit hole years ago of doing some really cool things with email marketing, but I’ve drastically cut it back now just to make sure that everyone’s getting a similar experience and that I have a bit more control over what they’re seeing. So I’m not sending any emails out by mistake or anything like that.

Katie:
It can be a lot of work to keep all your emails up to date. We’ve got hundreds of automated emails because we have a sequence for each product, and I know they’re not as up to date as they should be.

Laura:
I think a lot of people document, they have a master document of all of their sequences, and I started putting that together for mine as well, just to keep somewhere completely separate, just in a Google Doc or something, to just write down the process. This is similar to the client onboarding as well. It’s how I got started with it. Just bullet point every single touch point with either the client or the customer in as minute detail as possible, as many different edge cases as possible, and then just try to figure out what the ideal most smooth process would look like, whether that’s creating email sequences, whether it’s creating templates or even just templated emails using text expand or something like that just for these commonly repeatable tasks that happen within your process. I think it’s really useful. Just spending, it can take an hour, maybe if that, and it’s super, super valuable.

Katie:
I have a Google Doc with a list of all our emails and when they’re sent so that we can see it in one place, but that doesn’t have the content of the emails, so it’s still a big job to update them.

Laura:
And you have to remember to update when I make an update somewhere, update it elsewhere as well, which can be hard.

Katie:
Before we finish, let’s talk about measuring the success of your onboarding. Do you have any advice on how to track the effectiveness of your onboarding efforts and what you might look at to judge what you’re doing?

Laura:
On the WordPress plugin side, I mostly look at refund rates. I think if I do a good job of onboarding, my refund rates go down. I have actually found recently my refund rates have decreased by quite a lot. In part, it’s due to the fact that we did completely overhaul the product, and it now uses the block editor and it’s really, really nice. But another thing that I did was I put an awful lot of effort into the getting started video, and I used feedback that we’ve had from customers, common questions where customers have got stuck, things that seem really obvious to me as the creator of the product that weren’t clearly obvious to the customers. I’ve then included it in the video, and I spent a long time making this video as good as it can be and just improving that onboarding process.

And now, I don’t know, unfortunately, whether the refund rate has reduced because of the new product or the onboarding or a combination of both. But I have noticed anecdotally that we are getting far fewer support requests from people who are just struggling to get started with the product. So I don’t handle support myself, but I do keep an eye on it. Most days. I try and just see what people are asking, and I get my support person to do a weekly report with any issues, common themes of issues people had, and virtually none since we released it. I think in, I want to say April are how do I get started? And we actually did used to get that quite commonly before then. So that’s kind of how I measure it. Like I said, it’s quite a small company, it’s not a massive company, so I can’t do a ton with analytics and stuff. But yeah, I just keep an eye on refund rates and then just my general support in that respect. And then for client onboarding, it’s similar to that, but even more extreme.

You could have hundreds of customers, but maybe a dozen clients or something. So it’s harder to manage and to really know, but generally you’re talking to clients, so you’re getting a feel for, are there any assumptions that they had that were perhaps wrong? If so, maybe you could fix that in your onboarding. Do they say, “Wow, I’m really enjoying working with you. This is really great.” That’s something that can give you an indication as to whether it’s done correctly. One other thing I do with clients actually is I tend to send out a

questionnaire when the project’s only just started, and it’s similar to the questionnaire that you’d send at the end to get their feedback, but I do it more towards the beginning and find out how it’s going so far. Generally, clients are pretty excited, and that gives me a really good indication of how did they find the onboarding experience? Was it good? Was it great? Was there any improvements? That kind of thing’s helpful. So yeah, I just track it really, I guess anecdotally is the best way to say it.

Katie:
I think that works for clients in particular. If they’re asking questions that you should have told them, if they’re asking really basic questions about the process, expectations, anything like that, then that’s a problem with your onboarding, isn’t it?

Laura:
Yeah, exactly. And there’s always ways you can fix that, especially if it’s common things. I think I mentioned earlier scope creep for me was always the biggest one. It always happened, and I hadn’t set that expectation. I put together a proposal and it was fairly detailed, but something had changed. It may not have been the client’s fault, it may not have been my fault, but something has changed. Well, who’s responsible for taking on that extra cost? Is it me? Is it the client? And if you have these conversations in the early stages, it just makes things a lot easier further down the road when you’re inevitably going to hit these roadblocks that everyone experiences when working with clients.

Katie:
Yeah, scope creeps a good one because everybody deals with it. I find the best way to handle it is one, to make it clear what was included, as you say, through clear documentation and proposal and all of that. And then when the customer does ask for something that wasn’t in the scope, I think it’s nice to be kind of positive. Well, that’s a great idea. I think that’s a really big improvement to what we have planned. Let me cost it out for you. You haven’t said no, that’s not included, have you as a positive? No.

Laura:
Yeah, that’s exactly what I would do as well is I would say I would always start with yes. So I talk in a lot of Facebook groups with freelancers and agencies, and it’s really interesting to see it as a third party where a client, there’s a bit of scope route going on, a client needs something else, and the freelancer is already assuming that the client is going to be really annoyed if you charge them any more for it. But the client has not indicated that they’re annoyed. I’ve worked with people and the scope increased, and I have, in my head, I’m thinking, of course the price is going to go up. I shouldn’t need to say that’s obviously going to happen, but the freelancer could then go into this spiral of this is going to be a massive conflict. And they start with, I did say in the proposal it was going to include this, this and this. This wasn’t included. I’m not going to do it. Whereas if you just say, oh, great idea, yeah, it’ll be an extra blah or Let me cost it out, or whatever you say, but I think that’s a great thing to do. I think I’ve never had pushback when I just said it like that, or if I have, it would be not a conflict, but more just like, actually, let’s just wait on that and maybe do that later, or something like that.

Katie:
Yeah, the time you get pushback is when you don’t tell them straight away. So if you send them a higher bill than expected at the end of the project, that can be a disaster. And I’ve made that mistake and lost a lot of money and had very unhappy customers in the past through when we were doing web design work. So you need to be clear before there are extra costs, but matter of fact about it, they probably assumed you would charge extra anyway.

Laura:
Yeah, it’s actually very similar to how I deal with my three-year-old. I’ve noticed that if she wants something, and if I say no, if it’s a, if I say no, the second she asks for it, there tends to be not really much of a meltdown. Whereas if I dance around the subject and I sort of maybe give excuses or reasons and then eventually say no further down the line, that’s when full on meltdown happens that I think it’s kind of similar when just dealing with anyone, if it’s don’t string people along, get their hopes up or whatever. And then even if you’re in the right, dump something on them at the last minute, just be really upfront, professional, positive, calm, and just not defensive. And then things just generally, in my experience anyway, seem to just work out a lot better.

Katie:
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for this, Laura. It’s been great, and I think we’ve covered a lot of really concrete advice that people can hopefully go away and implement in their own businesses. So where can people find you online?

Laura:
I am mostly around on Twitter, so it’s @LauraLizDunn. If you want to check out Client Portal, the website’s clientportal.io. That’s pretty much where I’m at. Not on LinkedIn yet, but I am probably about to sign up. Apparently that’s the place to be.

Katie:
Everyone’s talking about it, but I just can’t bear the idea of another social media.

Laura:
I know. I do have an account. I just haven’t logged in since I was in university.

Katie:
Same. Yeah. Yeah, neglecting account. Well, thank you so much. You’ve been an amazing guest and thanks to everybody who’s watching as well or listening.

Laura:
Lovely. Thank you so much. Bye.

Katie:
Bye.

BobWP:
Hey, BobWP, yes, it’s me. You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here on The WordPress Way, DEIB. We decided to do something a little bit different this month. That doesn’t mean that you are going to be missing our wonderful host that is usually here, Birgit, but we thought this time let’s learn about Birgit. I mean, I’ve had a few hosts on different shows, and we’ve learned more about their journey, and it’s always fun, and I’ll probably even learn things I don’t know. So I am looking forward to it. So yeah, Birgit is here. Hello, Birgit, how you doing?

Birgit:
Hello, Bob. I’m doing fine, thanks, and thanks for sharing the idea or turning tables. It’s interesting.

BobWP:
It’s fun. It’s always fun. I did that in the very early years when we had three co-hosts. I did a kind of highlight. I called it Unplugged. Each one of them unplugged, and we just went through their own story and learned a little bit more about them. So I’m excited for it. And I think the best way to start is everybody’s always curious, especially some people because you’ve heard it so many times, but I don’t even know if I have heard how you got into WordPress or what drove you to WordPress. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about that?

Birgit:
Well, that is kind of funny, but also interesting for those who don’t know me yet, especially or didn’t see, I am a white woman almost 50 years now, and I’m a mom of five almost grown-up children, and I also have already two grandchildren. My ex-husband back in the day was a truck driver, so I was over the weekdays alone with all our children. And when my children went to bed, I had a lot of time to spend, and I was always a curious person. I learned about computers back in school, and I went to a business school and learned about Word, Excel, bookkeeping, all the stuff. And when we got our first personal computer, I was always in. And then when we got the internet, I was sucked in. I opened a new reel to my perception. So I need to preface this a little bit because it’s kind of funny.

Imagine a woman breastfeeding one of the children, sitting next to a computer in a chat room, and talking about stuff, and someone shared a link to a personal website. I was so stoked about that. I was so curious. Oh, I want to build websites myself. How does it function? I’m always a person who wants to look behind the curtains and how things work. And then I went down this rabbit hole, learning about HTML, how to build websites with iframes and tables. So crazy. And no, none of those websites are live anymore, so I can’t share them with the world today. But yeah, pivoting from HTML, and then you have to change everything. When you want to change, you have to change the navigation on every page when you build it in classic HTML and so on. And I was tired of that. So how can I get dynamic data too? So I learned about PHP and some frameworks and how to do that, and somehow I stumbled upon Typeform and B2/cafelog back in the day, and I was like, interesting. You can publish something and put it in the world without worrying about changing any hardcoded links to something. So I played with that, and then I learned that B2/cafelog would be discontinued, and it was forked by someone and called it WordPress. And I was one of the persons who installed WordPress on their web servers from this first release. I played around, but I wasn’t really serious about it yet back in the day. But in 2005, I was asked to build a website for someone. I didn’t use WordPress for building websites, just playing and fiddling around with my personal projects.

But it meant I started to get self-employed as a side hustle to be more legal and serious about it. And since then, oh wow, always as a side hustle, I learned more about website building, and I didn’t have the chance to go to some form of professional training. Everything I know today I taught myself scrolling through the internet. Selfhtml.de was one of my plates. I learned a lot about just asking questions and checking other blog posts. And then when YouTube started to be a thing, I learned about that. I also experimented with Joomla, Drupal, Typo3, which is more popular in Germany, and so on. I also managed one time I was working with a primary direct marketing with call center and address data management and so on. I went to my boss one day and told him, our website sucks, it doesn’t look very good. And he told me, okay, come up with a new concept. I did it in one week, and then I founded the web design department in that company. Wow. I pivoted from a mom with five children learning HTML and designing websites in the afternoon and when the kids are asleep or something to running a web design department in a small business company, we had around 150 employees back in the day. So building websites and also later building apps and using WordPress as a data management backend. When REST API became a thing, I’m more of a generalist because I have multiple interests. Maybe my divergent traits come into play on that. But on the other hand, it’s ongoing consistency in my life building websites and fiddling around with new stuff and maybe sometimes running after the new shiny objects. So I’m kind of weak for these shiny objects, but on the other hand, it’s always sparking new ideas and so on.

And that is how I came to WordPress. And then I was building websites. And then I found a theme framework called the Extreme theme, which was utilizing back in the day the YAML CSS framework. It’s like today, the Bootstrap or Tailwind CSS framework. But YAML was the other part, and it’s kind of a page builder theme back in the day. I was really interested and founded by a German workforce engineer. He unfortunately passed away too early back in the years, but I was part of the forum members. We grew friendship over that. And someday he talked about, oh, I’m going to a WordCamp in Berlin, and you need to come. And I was, Ooh, I am a girl in a rural area in western Germany, and I have five children. I don’t go to a big city like Berlin. But somehow I managed to go to the WordCamp.

I met with the people I adored back in the day, people who ran blogs like Frank Bültge, co-founder of Inpsyde. I learned that those people are normal people like you and me. But somehow back in the day, I put people on a pedestal because I looked up to them. But on the other hand, it was really good. This stoked me with the WordPress community. It was my first encounter, and this was 2010, and I was infected by the WordPress event virus. I needed to go to WordCamp. Then I learned about, oh, you can contribute to WordPress, to the project, and you can help with that. And so we grew, and then 2011 was my next WordCamp in Cologne, which is more nearby in my hometown. But also 2011, a big pivot year in my personal life because I finally separated from my then-husband living in a toxic marriage.

I lost a good friend of mine to cancer in the same year. Two years earlier, my mom died. So there was so much going on in my life, but WordPress and building websites were always a consistent pillar in my life. Then I met Robert Windisch, you know him, the man with the hat, the other hat. Robert was also one of the founding partners of a site back in the day called Inpsyde. In 2009, I specialized in training WordPress instead of just building websites, and I ran individual training for small business owners and small companies and so on. I joined forces with them in 2012, first as a self-employed contract trainer, and later they took the leap and employed me on a part-time job. One of the first tasks when I’m not training, I should have maintained the translations for WordPress in German.

For those who don’t know how that works, I need to go into that because it’s really important. The agency site was founded because of some people who joined forces and translating WordPress back in the day was translating in the code. Can you imagine translating and changing the original code? It’s a no-go today. So for everyone who doesn’t know, don’t work and edit core software. They started a community forum, and over that, they grew and got asked for contracts and so on. They built a company. That is a long time ago, but over the years, they always maintained the German translation for WordPress in two variants. One is the informal, it’s the default version, but also the formal translation for formal speech. In Germany, we have two different forms of that. So it means you need to maintain two language sets.

Back in the day, we also needed to alter some files of the core software before we could release a German language pack and the German compiled version. When I started translating WordPress as an employee of Inpsyde or outside, I learned how to compile WordPress. Imagine, a tired Birgit. The kids are asleep, and I’m sitting there waiting in the IRC chat room for the WordPress core to get the announcement that a new version was released because then I needed to go to compile the translation files. I prepared and tested beforehand with the original file, and then go to the backend of WordPress.org and compile a package and then push the button for release. So imagine this kind

of sweating, dripping experience in the middle of the night because the majority of the developers were sitting in the US, based more in San Francisco.

So the time zone shift to Germany was something. So it’s gotten easier over the years, but this experience and my natural curiosity, which comes with my larger divergent trait, was always leading the path where I am currently now. So contributing to WordPress and building communities, fostering relationships. So in 2013, when Remkus de Vries and Zé Fontainhas founded the WordCamp Europe, this was my first international WordCamp. So in 2013, 11 years ago, that opened another gate. In 2013, I was privileged with the travel assistance program, or I learned about the travel assistance program for the community summit, and I traveled to WordCamp San Francisco and Community Summit in 2014. This was my first touchdown on US soil. That’s crazy. It’s so crazy. Given the fact that I, as a mom of five children, divorced back in 2014, I was just joining a new partnership after three years of being a single parent and leaving my children.

The majority were already older now, but my youngest was eight and a half years old, my youngest, back in 2014. Also, being a person with mobility issues, it is kind of challenging to travel internationally. But this is a backstory of how I got involved with WordPress and how I started contributing to WordPress and fell in love with the community. I really fell because I care a lot about the people. And that brings me to today, why I am so advocating for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Because I come from a position where I had to think about how I can feed my children the next day. So low income because of different circumstances, having a part-time job over all the years, not filling the fridge and dealing with a toxic marriage and so on, getting no child support and all the stuff. I know how it feels to be not that privileged.

Even if I’m living in a privileged country, I live in Germany, I’m in a pretty safe space. We have a decent healthcare system. But still, given all that, I see a lot of injustice, and where I see injustice, I am going to fight for that. I try to be the voice for those who can’t raise their voices, even if it’s someone who’s introverted or doesn’t know where to speak or who to speak with to change things. A good friend of mine phrased it. I’m some kind of an overarching glue to all within the community because as someone who’s a generalist and not a specialist in a certain area, I know a lot, but on the surface, only in certain areas, I’m more likely to dive deep. But yeah, so that is helping to connect. I’m more the person who connects others, and that is why I’m advocating so much.

And I’m also not shy to speak out when I see there’s injustice. But I also try to consider and not to dive into some kind of drama. Even if I see drama unfold on social media like Twitter or X now or whatever it’s called today, I try to find all voices within this drama and see, okay, what is this side? What is this side? Where do we have some kind of overlap? And then I try to be constructive with my feedback. So I don’t want to fuel the fire, but not shutting down the fire but giving it direction in a productive way. And that is why I’m always asking to have some kind of an overview above the organization of the WordPress open source ecosystem, how we can make sure that everyone is treated equally, that everyone gets the same chance even if they don’t have the same starting point.

So especially WordPress as an open-source system. And when you see I am with WordPress since its first release, I saw a lot of progress, but still, we have so many areas where you don’t have to know how to code and that is not that obvious. But on the other hand, it’s also not so attractive for some companies to put money on those areas of the WordPress ecosystem where there’s also a lot of work to do. And since I’m thinking about this accessibility team, which makes sure that the software project and everything issues like needing to raise assistive technology, but also for someone with neurodivergence is the UX and so on. The next part is documentation. How many contributors do we have which are sponsored to document our fast-pacing software development, but also community and making sure that areas like the DEIB within WordPress so that the DEIB principles can be applied in the daily work of the majority of people who are volunteers so they don’t get some formal training on how to behave, even if it might be common sense in certain areas of the world to treat people nicely and kindly.

We have a worldwide project which also has a lot of different cultures and histories and sees the diversity not only in the color of the skin, diversity also the diverse range of age, the diverse range of knowledge where people are coming from. So when I compare myself with a core developer who got some formal training at MIT, for instance, so I can’t compare myself, it’s because I’m self-educated, but on the other hand, I have traits and knowledge in other areas where we can combine those and create a better experience for everyone. So yeah, it’s a long story to share.

BobWP:
A lot to unpack there. Yeah, and one of the interesting things, you went through a lot of different phases, you touched on a lot of different things there. No wonder we connected so well. You and I have so many similarities, just not in the timeline, but in attitude and how we feel about things. I think you started with the first release, and I started like you, just dabbling in 2006. The interesting thing with me was I’d already been doing marketing, running a marketing company for 17 years prior to WordPress. In the, I believe it was, I don’t know if it was the mid or late eighties, I took a year of computer programming. I thought I needed to learn this. So I spent a year learning Cobol, Assembly Language, FORTRAN, and Basic, and it was absolutely a nightmare to me. I mean, I was fascinated by computers.

I loved doing what I could do, but getting inside of them, opposite of you, was fearful. It was like, whoa. But having done that got me very comfortable with computers too, which I don’t regret spending that year because it just felt like I got it more than some people. And unlike you, I went in kicking and screaming into any kind of building sites, doing HTML, just horrible flash sites for a couple of clients. I knew I had to get into it owning a marketing and design business. I’d been doing print design for so many years, but when I found WordPress in 2006 and started playing with it, it was mostly around the blogging part that fascinated me. I was already into content. My wife was already doing stuff on Typepad, and she had an award-winning blog way back in the days. I discovered WordPress as a rescue for me.

It was like, wow, I can build a site using one of these themes. I got a theme from iThemes, one of their early themes, shortly after they started, and I built our own little brochure site. I thought, wow, this thing actually looks professional now and I can make changes. So I was forced into it, not so much ever really wanting to dive in. I was curious about the code, but not so curious as wanting to do it yet. I’ll leave that to the other people that want to do that and are good at it. But just all the things. My first WordCamp was in 2010, San Francisco. A lot of similarities. It’s amazing. Just how you got into contributing. I did kind of the different side of things. It wasn’t like official contributions, but it was educating, consulting, writing, being more of a teacher and trainer in WordPress all those years. So we both went on similar paths. We’ve been privileged, but in the sense that we went through some very rough times in our business and stuff, and some really tense times, and you have more empathy. I feel like I have it because I am always thinking of the other person and how they feel versus just what I’m thinking.

Birgit:
Yeah, it’s really interesting and you mentioned something about this empathy part, but also caring a lot about other people. And when I had some rough times, I mentioned I went from a toxic marriage to being a single parent and fighting for the rights of my children, et cetera. I’m very vocal about my history and sometimes I was so hard struggling with my mental health and also all the stuff going on in my life. But as I mentioned, WordPress and the community are always some of the stable pillars in my life, and I’ve spoken about that already. I shared it in some talks at a WordCamp. WordPress literally saved my life at some point in my life where maybe I said a trigger warning. I had moments in my life where I was questioning if it’s worthwhile to stay alive and then I just vented it out and spoke to someone and I reached out to someone and they immediately jumped in and supported me.

That is a moment in my life where I always tear up when I’m sharing that, even in the darkest moments, when you have the courage to reach out to someone, even if it’s a stranger on the internet, you may have built a relationship over the internet. But so many people in this community jumped in supporting me. The recent example was collecting funds so that I could afford to travel to WordCamp Europe and to Sweden this year. The WordPress community has my back all the time when I reach out and am vocal about and share my vulnerability. So to be vulnerable is not a bad thing. As long as we turn our

vulnerability into something we can grow and build upon, and create more empathy for someone else who may have a similar struggle. I learned about that my crowdfunding campaign this year to go to WordCamp Europe inspired someone to take action in another similar direction and also see their initiatives like the WP Community Collective.

They got inspired by the crowdfunding campaign to fund contributors to travel to WordCamps. We have great initiatives that support speakers to travel to WordCamps, but someone who is contributing to WordPress and doesn’t have, maybe due to several facts, the ability to afford to travel, but to be accepted as the speaker at a WordCamp. That is something I learned about, even if I shared my vulnerability, not to earn empathy, but just to share, Hey, I feel this way now. So if someone has something to spare, I’m really appreciative of this. But thinking about looking back on that, how much this might have positively affected someone else. So in retrospect, everything I touched in my life had somehow affected someone else’s life. That is how I always also try to be alert to everything I do, how someone else’s life may be influenced by that. I’m not forcing that, but I try to consider every decision I make, does this affect someone else negatively? That is what you say about empathy.

BobWP:
Yeah, exactly. Let’s step back and put ourselves in this person’s shoe or from this person’s view or whatever, because a lot of times what’s being said or what’s being told, we’ve all been there. And that’s the thing a lot of people lose is the ability to go back and say, oh, I remember when I was in that spot. Like you said, traveling between costs of just traveling, especially if you’re traveling internationally, you’re taking a day or two on each end just to get there. And then you’ve got the actual event and you’re away for a week. So not only are you spending money for a lot of these people, they’re not making money during that time. They don’t have the luxury of being given the time off for something. They have to close down shop and do that thing, even though that may be productive and helpful to their business.

Birgit:
Exactly. And thinking of traveling, especially for someone with mobility issues, I need to plan ahead every move because walking distances is still kind of challenging. Even if I now have two hip replacements,
Mechanically, I can walk, but my body isn’t used yet to this kind of movement. So it takes a while to get on board. Again, as someone with neurodivergent traits, I like to know where I’m going and what kind of obstacles I may face and how to get from A to B in the most effective way so it doesn’t drain my energy too much so I can be alert when I’m there. But it’s still also overwhelming meeting new people and a lot of people at events like WordCamp Europe, WordCamp US, or WordCamp Asia. These are the flagship events with 2,000 or 3,000 attendees. And also traveling abroad internationally, it’s always challenging to the body, even if someone is healthy and fit.
It’s draining.

BobWP:
Yeah, it’s brutal, is what it is. Yeah.

Birgit:
So thinking of someone who has more mobility issues or someone who has more weight on their bones than someone else, finding a good safe spot to sit. I experienced entering some chairs with very unfortunate positions of armrests and so on, which my butt didn’t fit in really well.

It’s kind of difficult to sit down, but on the other hand, I can’t assume that everyone can acknowledge that beforehand, but I can share my experience. For instance, I tend to speak to WordCamp organizers, especially WordCamp Europe and WordCamp US, to make sure that there are enough seating positions also in the hallways so that people who might need to take a rest, especially for someone we are barely out of the pandemic, and the pandemic showed up that someone who was infected with this viral infection can suffer from syndromes like chronic fatigue. You don’t see that when someone is challenged with chronic fatigue syndrome. So you have to take a rest because you are going out of breath when you are walking 20 meters or 30 meters, so you may need to take a rest. So to make sure that the WordCamp event or the WordPress event venue accommodates the situation, not only do we need accessible restrooms, and hopefully the cleaning staff doesn’t put any cleaning supplies within the accessible restrooms so that someone with a wheelchair can’t navigate.

That is also an example when you see something where you see, okay, this might affect someone else. Going back to the empathy part, if you see something, maybe the instance I experienced at WordCamp Europe on the first conference day and I went to the restroom as someone with mobility issues, I prefer accessible restrooms because they’re more convenient to use, even if I don’t have a wheelchair. But not having a wheelchair is not an excuse not to use accessible restrooms for everyone who wants to judge why someone is using an accessible restroom. Even if they can walk, there may have other reasons to use an accessible restroom, just to note. But I imagine I witnessed that the cleaning staff had their cart with all the cleaning supplies and if someone with a wheelchair would have accessed the room, they wouldn’t have had any chance to navigate through that because the washing thing was blocked. I reported that immediately to the organizing team, and they went to the venue facility manager and it was solved the next day because it was the end of the event. But yeah.

BobWP:
Yeah, I was just thinking those wet floor signs that they put out too could be a real issue because they have to try to put it somewhere where you can see it, but that could be right in the way too.

Birgit:
Yeah, exactly. And that is something when you see, and that is why I urge everyone to first use common sense, then ask yourself, does this affect someone else negatively? I can’t expect that everyone knows everything, but if you have someone in your family or friend surroundings who may have faced some issues, try to be advocating for their convenience if possible. We can’t please everyone to be fair, so we can do as much as possible even if we can’t accommodate everything and include everyone and everything. But to be in a balance and make it, because there’s a saying, talking about also WordPress websites, having accessible WordPress websites, it’s not only benefiting those who need it but benefits everyone. Accessibility benefits everyone. And that is also true for venue traveling, et cetera.

BobWP:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, this has been great because this has not only been learning about everything you do or have done and then how you got into your passion around what you’re doing on this show but also a conversation about it. So it was just a very nice rounded chat we had. And we can see why you do this once a month on here at Do the Woo. So this is very cool and I appreciate being able to turn the table and I think everybody likes to learn a little bit more about our hosts. And I’m just going to throw this out. It’s a little bit of an opportunity. I haven’t had a chance to talk about it regarding our news site. So for those of you that listen to various shows, we do have a way now we have our sponsors, which I adore, and they make this whole thing possible.

But there is another way of giving back to this show and that is supporting each specific show. And what that means is you can go in and you can give a one-time gift or you can subscribe for a couple of different amounts, but that money actually will go to the host of the show. It doesn’t go into running the show or anything. And as Birgit mentioned, she’s been lucky to have the support of the community. And that’s what this is going to be. It will either help the hosts themselves with their contributions, the time they spend on that, their travel. And for some of our hosts, maybe they don’t feel they need that because of their position and where they are at this time in their life. And they’ll say, Hey, let’s give it to one of these related WordPress organizations that do help speakers and contributor travel.

So if you’ve been listening to a show and you’re really getting into it and you want to give something back to that show’s host, we’ll pull that together, figure out what to do with it, and you’re actually supporting them because they’re driving all the shows and they’re doing all the front face work and stuff. I’m just running behind the scenes doing all the other stuff, except occasionally I come in and have the opportunity to do great interviews and chats with my friends like this. So I appreciate it. And yeah, this has been absolutely wonderful. Anything you want to say before we sign off?

Birgit:
Yeah, on the first end, I really want to thank you again, Bob first for creating this kind of great show and place to learn, but also offering the spot for people like me to talk about topics we care about a lot, but also giving someone else a voice where they can share also their story and learnings so that everyone can benefit from that. I am also very appreciative of all the work you are doing in the backend, which is not seen by everyone. So a special shout out again to you, but for the listeners, I want to say if you want to go and make a difference, there are several ways you can join the WordPress community and you don’t need to know how to code. There are certain areas where you can contribute your time and knowledge. And if you have any questions, please reach out to me. I’m Coach Birgit on all the socials on the Make WordPress Slack. Also, you can reach out to Bob if you have any questions. We are really happy to guide you in the right direction where you can contribute your passion to the project.

BobWP:
Well, thank you and thank everyone for listening. If you’re not subscribed, you can subscribe to the

old channel, or you can just subscribe to your favorite show. And we are trying to push more people back to commenting. This is my own little mission. I would love for you to come in on the post and comment and share your thoughts on anything we talked about. Of course, Birgit is always looking for wonderful guests that want to come in and talk around the issue of DEIB. So please consider that as well. And my final thank you to Birgit for being a wonderful guest.

Birgit:
Thank you for being a wonderful host.

Karim:
Well, hello, welcome to Scaling Enterprise WordPress and Open Source Software. This is the Buyer’s View. As you might remember from our last episode, we are going to be doing two podcasts a month: one that is closer to the buyer’s view and helps the enterprise see how to engage and work with WordPress and open source software, and the other side will be more of a community-focused WordPress project podcast around how the project and WordPress can focus on the enterprise in certain areas. My name is Karim from the Scale Consortium. I’m also CEO of Crowd Favorite. With me is Tom Willmot. Tom?

Tom:
Hello. Great to be here. Excited to be kicking this off, what I hope becomes a regular thing for us. I’m also a founding member of the Scale Consortium and the CEO and co-founder of Human Made. Yeah, excited to get into this.

Karim:
Me too. Me too. So let’s jump right in. We at the Scale Consortium figured that it was time to have a group that unified and had a singular voice around helping the enterprise navigate open source software and WordPress specifically and its options. Tom, how do you see how we do that?

Tom:
Yeah, I mean, good to probably just step back and talk about that a little bit. The challenge we have in the enterprise WordPress space, and I think the challenge buyers face is compared to the single vendor options that are out there where they can talk to the buyer with a unified message and simplified positioning. The strength of the WordPress ecosystem is it’s really broad and deep and that brings lots of benefits. There’s lots of choice and flexibility, but it does mean that as a buyer you can look at all of that and it can be a bit overwhelming. It can be a bit confusing. Where do you go? At Scale Consortium, we come together and we work together across vendors within the space to give that clear view.

Karim:
Well, one of the things I hear most is if an enterprise wants to approach WordPress, where do they go? Do they go to a host?

Tom:
Right? Who’s the vendor? Maybe they turn up to a host, maybe they find an agency. But yeah, it’s not so simple.

Karim:
And then on the community side, folks argue that if you go to one vendor or one host, you’re going to get their flavor of WordPress. One of the things that I’m hoping that we’re going to dive into is that really you can customize WordPress to do almost anything, but the point here is that there are no flavors of WordPress. There are flavors of Linux that are forks. This is all the same WordPress, right? It’s just the special sauce that any one team might bring to it or the special sauce that any one host or any other one product might bring to it. But WordPress is not the same type of complex ecosystem that operating systems were for the last 40 years. So let’s dive right into the introduction to why WordPress. Its current market share is 43% of the internet. So it has very strong strengths, right?

Tom:
Yes. Even amongst the kind of enterprise tier, it’s pretty dominant depending on how you’re talking about measuring it. It’s certainly true that the vast majority of enterprises, the vast majority of businesses, have got WordPress somewhere, even if they’re not using it as their primary CMS, they’re using WordPress somewhere in their organization. And actually there’s plenty that are using it as their primary, but I think that’s secondary. The CMS kind of narrative is the WordPress history is quite relevant, I suppose, to how WordPress started to break into business and how that’s evolved over time.

Karim:
But if it’s a generalist platform and it’s being used as that secondary system, is it just vanilla is the problem we run into all the time? We have a hard time explaining to folks that what ends up happening is this isn’t just a generalist system that can’t help you with your specific need because the WordPress project is so general, you can actually bring it and customize it for your specific needs without having to use the technical term fork, without having to fork the code, without having to move away from it. You can adapt it to your needs. It’s so adaptable, which is what I think some of the successes out there are, right?

Tom:
Sure, yeah, a hundred percent. That means that the barrier to entry actually is quite low. It’s quite easy to get going with WordPress and then you can customize it and it’ll flex with you and scale with you. There’s WordPress out of the box. Of course, if you’re an enterprise user of WordPress, you do need some stuff on top of that, right? You have specific common needs across enterprise or workflows or governance or digital asset management or whatnot. And so there’s this layer of stuff that exists in the ecosystem that does make WordPress meet the needs of enterprise. And then of course you get the vertical-specific needs too, whether that’s higher education, financial institutions, or publishing.

Karim:
But I want to jump into this question of the first choice versus second choice, because I remember the way I approached WordPress when we first came into the space was automatically assuming it was going to be a first choice. One of our larger projects that we started now 14 years ago, it was the first choice. So I came to the WordPress larger enterprise community thinking, oh, let’s do that. And then I was shocked to find out that more than one of the managed hosts, their marketing was all targeted towards WordPress as a secondary enterprise. They had one of those monolithic enterprise systems as their .com, and then the host was saying, we’re never going to get that .com, so we’re actually going to market as put your .com out there with this monolithic system and then after that, or proprietary system. And then after that, all these smaller sites that you don’t want to invest so much time in those ones can actually be on WordPress. And that shocked me. I mean, how did you find that back then?

Tom:
Yeah, I mean, I think to some degree that reflects how WordPress usually comes to be used by an organization, which is usually bottom up. It’s usually people in the organization who are on the front lines using these tools and they want to use WordPress. Maybe they’re familiar with it, maybe they’ve used it somewhere else, and then they’ll fight internally to get WordPress. And so maybe it comes into one specific team or one department rather than those large rollouts, which are usually top down run by IT or something. I think what we’ve seen over the last decade, it started out like that actually.

Now there are plenty of organizations where that the WordPress gets its foot in the door and then it works its way through the organization and unseats the primary CMS. And so I think that’s great. WordPress is definitely validated as a great primary option. And if anything, I think that’s the biggest gap now to close because we are, how do we make the jump from people inside organizations fighting the fight to get WordPress? How do we make that jump to the top down the IT rollouts or digital strategy rollouts?

Karim:
And that’s interesting because I’ve always tried to address it specifically as how do we head to head compare ourselves to these monolithic proprietary systems and how do we show that we can feature for feature or more importantly business need by business need actually come up to that level? Because people still think of WordPress as this, oh, it’s just a CMS. Oh, it’s just to push pages and articles not necessarily can help me integrate data from many different sources or so forth or so on. So it’s interesting to see that there’s part of the market that is still thinking of it this way as second choice.

And then there’s the other part of the market that’s saying, how do we actually show that we can do this? And more and more case studies are coming up that way. You’ve worked on a giant major European bank as WordPress being the first open source. We’ve worked on one of the largest media companies with WordPress being the first choice, the .com, so to speak, of all their major sites. So it works that way. But how do we get that message out? And I guess that falls down to the enterprise needs. What do you think about that? What are the enterprise needs?

Tom:
I think that’s the opportunity here, right? Because actually the enterprise needs, I think particularly these days, the trends that we’re seeing in the industry actually I think pair very well with WordPress around total cost of ownership, the need for a lot of flexibility that just increases and increases. We’ve seen this kind of trend of all-in-one DXP, which feels like it’s peaked and now, and actually we want to own more of our stack and be able to swap pieces out, and we need it to integrate with the long tail of things that we are using across the enterprise. And so actually that really starts to, WordPress actually been a particularly good fit for a lot of those needs. And again, it’s like we’ve got to form clear messaging around that so that enterprises are aware and they’re being told that they can discover that for themselves. It doesn’t need to come up through this backdoor, secondary route.

Karim:
So the general WordPress project as an open source project needs to stay communicating that we can be all things to all people. And because most of the internet are smaller sites in the enterprise space, we’re a very small subset of clients by volume. What ends up happening is it’s a very small voice. So then it becomes up to the Scale Consortium podcasts like this one, the agencies, and products that want to work with the enterprise to try and communicate that. What we need to do is try to bring together some

sort of unified messaging because those needs aren’t being met. If a particular host or product or an agency is saying, oh, well let me show you how I do it in this one exact example, they get pigeonholed right away. Most people are very surprised to find out that WordPress can be used as the central hub of an ERP system. There are large medium enterprises, not necessarily the Fortune 100, but right below that, that are using WordPress to manage content on what could be classified as an ERP system, not just a CMS or a marketing solution. You’d say, why would you do that? Why wouldn’t you use one of those other applications? And I feel that the bottom line of the need of the enterprise is not what is the name of the package, what is the technology? What programming language am I going to use? What’s going to solve the business need? And in this particular case, going back to quoting Matt Mullenweg from WordCamp San Francisco, 2010 or 2012, it takes five minutes to learn how to publish a page. Bottom line.

Tom:
That time to publish and the flexibility of that, again, it is something actually we can often take for granted. I think within the community, we often have this experience when we are demoing to clients and actually it’s the stuff that we forget is actually quite groundbreaking already. The fact that you can log in and edit a page and publish it, have it live within five, 10 minutes, and those things are not actually true across the rest of the competitors.

Karim:
Exactly, exactly.

Tom:
Yeah. This kind of central hub piece, I wonder if that’s something we certainly see a lot. I imagine it’s similar in the work you are doing where actually customers are building DXPs, they do end up with a DXP, but they’ve put it together themselves with WordPress at the center and all of these other pieces. And so it’s true that the world has the needs of enterprise that have evolved beyond just CMS. Absolutely. There’s a bunch of other pieces now, but WordPress doesn’t need to be all those things. What WordPress needs to do is integrate really well with them.

Karim:
That’s the key. That’s the key, right? Because both of us have done presentations on how you’ve built a DXP centered on WordPress and it’s an amazing product, and we’ve done this composable direction, which we’re going to talk about a little bit later, but this composable direction. But the key is integrating. The key is for all these folks, all the folks who might be listening who have been around the block a few times, old school, 1990s, system integration of middleware. If you think of it in those terms, WordPress is a great connector.

Tom:
Yeah. That’s usually where we find clients end up in actually. They’ve got WordPress as that central hub.

Karim:
So how do you address when you end up going to an enterprise client and you have the technical team of the enterprise, the client goes, but it’s WordPress, it’s a blog. How do you address that?

Tom:
Yeah, I think that is something that’s improved quite a lot, certainly over the last five years. I think the number one thing is just that the WordPress, there are so many examples now of WordPress being used really for the very biggest stuff on the internet across almost all verticals. And so you can usually rely on just a lot of direct evidence. Actually, that’s not the case. So usually it’s a mix of lots of case studies, lots of references, and lots of demos that you can show and demonstrate. And perhaps five or 10 years ago, you perhaps were on the cutting edge if you were trying to use work with the scale. Actually that’s just completely normal now. And the concern is just out of date. And so you can just show all of the evidence. And actually there are many more examples. There are many more high scale WordPress sites than most of these other platforms actually.

Karim:
No, exactly. Exactly. So I think we’ve reached the part where it’s time for a small break and when we come back, Tom, I think you’re going to head us off with talking about the evolution of content management and how we got here. See everybody in a minute. Thank you.

Tom:
Okay, welcome back. So Karim, we touched a little bit in that previous section on the evolution of the enterprise CMS and the evolution of content management and how WordPress fits into them. And so I think that’d be good to just dive in on a bit and expand on. One of the things I often reflect on is that the narratives out in the industry, the buzzwords, the framing, the structure of how we think about enterprise CMS has actually historically mostly been set by the competitors to WordPress. So I think this is an opportunity, right, for WordPress to start actually putting its vision for enterprise CMS forward and more that maybe you can do as a bit of an explainer on that.

Karim:
Well, yeah, because if you look at the history, content management systems started out what we used to call OnPrem, right, on premises. And then with the evolution of SaaS and the evolution of not just software as a service, but just thinking of things being not within your own system but putting together lots of other systems. You ended up with just this expectation that it was out there in somebody else’s system. But there’s a lot of Fortune customers and there’s a lot of mid-market enterprise companies that say, we need our data internally.

And one thing that’s vastly overlooked is that if you’re using open source and specifically WordPress as this hub that we were talking about, that lets you literally own your data and actually keep solid control over what’s being shared outside. It’s not about points of failure necessarily, although it can be. It’s not about having things across 12 or 15 different SaaS’s out there and different companies having access to your data. You solve all of those things if you are centralizing saying that your source of truth is your content management system. And that is an evolutionary piece that’s been lost in the last 10 years of the MarTech stack explosion of SaaS products, I feel.

Tom:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. A common occurrence for us, which I’m sure you’ll run into too, it will be working with a new client who are wanting to move to WordPress and a driver of that move is that they have bought into a legacy CMS or a CMS that is now legacy in which the company behind it actually are no longer around or they’re no longer supporting it. Maybe they’ve built a new product and the cost to move to that new product is the same as the cost to move to WordPress. Actually, that’s a pretty dominant frame for the industry. A lot of enterprises make the decisions over a five to 10-year cycle because actually that’s the cycle. That’s the lifetime of a lot of these platforms that in five to 10 years they’re going to be legacy and you’re going to want to move to something new. A lot of the education we are doing as part of a WordPress installation is that’s actually not true in open source. We’ve got a much longer time horizon ahead and you’re not going to need to move off in five years because WordPress is still going to be around and innovating.

Karim:
I’m actually going to challenge that, Tom. I’m going to say I don’t see clients that are spending in a total of five years on a platform before saying they want to move.

Tom:
Like you’re seeing it come down.

Karim:
I’m seeing it come down because of their marketing so hard against each other. Sure. If you look at the market leaders in the DXP area, they’re marketing so hard against each other that they’re innovative and the others aren’t.

Tom:
It’s true.

Karim:
They’re marketing so hard against each other about how they’re better that CMOs and CIOs are saying, well, maybe it’s worth the cost of migration and they’re bouncing. Or if it is a longer-term thing, it’s because they created a bespoke dead end of their own that the cost of owning it is so high that they’re like, okay, now what do we do? And coming back to your point, doing something with a platform like WordPress that doesn’t have major migrations,

Tom:
No, sure.

Karim:
It’s not free. You actually need to maintain it, right? Which is another misconception.

Tom:
I mean it’s actually a big difference even between WordPress and Drupal, which are the two open source platforms, but Drupal actually does have this cadence of major backwards compatibility breaking releases, which we see from the WordPress side whereas a user of Drupal seven, you’ve got to make the decision, okay, I’m going to spend a bunch of money moving to Drupal 10, or actually maybe I’ll move to something else.

Karim:
And another nod to Matt and the way he’s thought of the WordPress project, Matt Mullenweg, in the sense that he has been really steadfast about not breaking backwards compatibility sometimes even to the point where you and I are frustrated in thinking how can we move the platform forward? But it’s really helped us in that long-term future. So as I’ve seen the SaaS companies market harder and clients have more and more choices and flip even more, the more I’ve seen the total cost of ownership come down for staying on something like WordPress, the more I’ve seen the cost of migration be not just money, but also the time aspect and the retraining of your employee base. So it’s been very hard to understand exactly how to relate this back to customers because they’ve only seen the last 10 years of marketing that again, these marketing budgets on these major platforms are huge and all these individual companies that are trying to help enterprises with WordPress are going, we can’t match that marketing of that major platform. That brings me to the one word that I

think has started to take over from just digital experience or digital transformation. There’s a lot around the word composable these days, and I know a lot of people assume that means, oh, I’m just going to compose three or four SaaS platforms, I’m going to compose my own system. We’ve come to realize that when they do that, they end up with a mess of the poor marketing staff that has 18 tabs open in a browser and to get one workflow done for marketing tasks, they’ve got quite literally six to seven different interfaces with six to seven different products that are trying to swap information back into each other, sometimes in real-time, sometimes not. Is there a way that this general tool of WordPress helps? We feel it does. How does your team deal with that with the vertical of the enterprise? How does your team try to address how can we not have customers do this?

Tom:
Yeah, I think we went through this phase with the kind of all-in-ones, whereas kind of this bundling phase and the dream there that was being sold was if everything’s all in one place, you’re not going to have to worry about it. You’ll get everything you ever need here. And usually that doesn’t work out right, because actually they’re too limiting and the stuff you need to do, they can’t innovate fast enough to keep up with the pace of change in the ecosystem. As then we’ve kind of swung the other way, okay, now it’s completely composable all of your tools just talk to each other. You can swap any of them out at any time. But again, that brings a bunch of challenges, right? Actually it ends up with a pretty brittle system. How do you do governance across 20, 30 different SaaS tools that you lose track of what you are being billed for? The person who set that SaaS tool up is left now and you can no longer log in. A bunch of challenges there.

I feel like you go through those cycles and you come back to meet a little bit in the middle where actually this hybrid CMS that sits at the center that absolutely can plug in to the stuff you want to use externally but is still providing a significant portion of your functionality and acts as that hub. The compromise between composability and all-in-one, I think the fully composable platforms inevitably will need to trend in that direction where actually there ends up being some hub or the management platform that ends up needing to be developed to just manage all those different SaaS tools becomes that hub over time probably. And same thing, we’re seeing the all-in-one DXPs trying to become as composable as possible as quickly as possible because realizing the limitations of all-in-one, and again, I think it’s that trend just plays really nicely for WordPress.

Karim:
But can an all-in-one solution be the best tool for every job?

Tom:
No, I think that’s the fundamental failure. Ultimately, they’re attractive to begin with and I think we’ve just seen that play out in the market where the pitch is very attractive and very compelling, and then the reality doesn’t deliver on that for a variety of reasons. And I think we just, we’ve seen that play out in the market. We’re past the peak of that. There are now plenty of organizations who’ve bought into that and either they’ve been paying for a bunch of tools they haven’t really got the value from, or they need to do stuff more quickly than the platform that they’re bought into is innovating and they’re starting to look around and want to use other stuff. And the bunch of those end up moving to something like WordPress. That’s part of the inflow we see into the WordPress market.

Karim:
Absolutely. Exactly. Well, so I feel like episode zero, our first episode with Brad gave us the concept of what the entire show’s about, and today we’ve laid out what the differences are between the two different shows and introduced the concepts of what we’re going to talk about. And with that, we agree completely as you were saying in talking to our friend Remkus from this community. I’m sure that the upcoming episodes where we’re going to talk about procurement, we’re going to have to talk about how to approach customers, we’re going to talk about how to service those customers. We’re going to talk about what the solutions are for the enterprise.

It’s going to be a little bit more of showing how we have a little bit of a different take on these things. But just from this conversation, I can see conversations around, like I said, speaking with a procurement specialist, speaking quite literally with somebody from some of these other monolithic platforms about what they feel they do best and having these conversations, talking about how to integrate well with SaaS and what that looks like, customized workflows. These are some of the topics that I feel like are coming down the pipeline in our next episodes that are really going to start asking and answering questions on how can we do better as a WordPress community in communicating this and give some information out to enterprise buyers on how they can approach any of the vendors who work with WordPress.

Tom:
It’s a nerdy thing to say, but I think it’s a pretty exciting time in the enterprise CMS space, right? There is actually a lot happening. There are some trends peaking. There are some new trends coming. There’s a lot of players in the space scrambling to figure out what that is. The analysts have all got their takes. Are we agile CMS? Are we composable? Is it composable content? There’s so many of these things. As a buyer, it’s pretty confusing. And a lot of these platforms at the moment you’re kind of like, okay, I’m going math, I’m all in on this, or I’m going with an all-in-one. And you’re kind of all in on that. So they’re pretty consequential decisions as well, I think, as a buyer. And so I think there’s a ton of scope for us to get into all of that debate, all of that. What’s the WordPress answer to a lot of these things? Again, that’s not really discussed much.

Karim:
I’d like to invite literally an analyst from one of the companies to come on and ask them why, besides the fact that it’s pay for play, why can’t we get any attention?

Tom:
Yeah, I think that would be great.

Karim:
As an open source.

Tom:
Yeah, I would love to do an episode on analysts and their place. I think there’s tons to say there. Yeah, well exciting stuff. Okay, good first episode and more to come.

Karim:
Absolutely. So Tom, tell us about Scaling Enterprise WordPress and Open Source.

Tom:
We are the buyer’s view, but we’ll be in the same feed as the sister cast that we’re going to be doing with Brad Williams, which is, as Karim said, the Enterprise WordPress community-focused version. And so we’ll be in the same feed. So you can listen to both of those. I think both are going to be interesting to everyone inside enterprise WordPress. If you’re a buyer, maybe you’re more interested in this buyer’s view one, add us to your favorite podcast subscription. Come along on this journey. And I think most of all, we are just starting out and so we really want to hear from people. What are you seeing out in the space? What are the questions people have got? What would they hope to get from a show like this? I think we’ll lead a lot on that as well as we go. Do people have questions that we can answer? Are there topics people would like us to cover? Are there people that it would be great to get on? Let us know and we’ll endeavor to do so.

Karim:
So go over to Do the Woo and check on our feeds and whichever podcast platform you’re using, and also feel free to go to scalecms.org and get in touch with us and ask us to do a particular topic or dive into something. We’d be happy to talk to you. We are really looking forward to bringing back some informative and useful information to help enterprises really understand how to better engage with WordPress and open source.

Tom:
Alright, a good place to finish. Thanks very much, Karim.

Karim:
Thank you Tom, it’s been awesome. Talk to you soon.

BobWP:
So here’s the deal. The other day I was thinking about the three Cs: community, commenting, and coding. Okay, I lied. I wasn’t thinking about coding at all. Coding, I don’t think about it much. It’s never in my face. I know it’s there. I know people do great stuff with it. I hear people talk about it. So the only reason I put that in there is it just sounded better. I really wanted to talk about community, commenting, and blogging, but it just didn’t sound as good. But that is what has been on my mind lately. Well, actually I lied again because that wasn’t on my mind lately. It’s always on my mind. That’s all I think about is this stuff. So I got to quit lying about things and just get to the point here that it’s really something I am thinking about.

Like I said, a lot, those three things. And as a result, I got into some conversations. I had a conversation actually with Bryce from Metorik. I don’t know if any of you know him, but he was on the podcast lately. We were talking about community, the builder community where they can connect and talk. We threw a few ideas around. Then it moved into another whole thing because of some stuff going on. And of course, I had to have a conversation with Ronald, one of our hosts here, Ronald Gijsel, and we always have great conversations and we started talking about this stuff and we thought, why don’t we just take it live and talk about it? So, I twisted Ronald’s arm and he’s popping back in to actually, he called it, what did you call this? Do you remember what you called this?

Ronald:
Different ideas. I think my latest is almost like unpacking blogging with Bob or was there another reference to that? It’ll come to me. But yeah, I’m really excited actually just to discuss it live and ask you a few questions, what the goals are and bring it back to me and be very lengthy. And maybe at the end of this call, or this recording, we will come up with a final solution, a way you’ll have to give it direction and go for it.

BobWP:
Yeah. Yeah. I was actually looking back, you called it a BlogStorm.

Ronald:
BlogStorm. Yeah. We were doing a brainstorm about everything around blogging. It’s a BlogStorm. Yeah.

BobWP:
So we’re just going to go for it here. And I hope Ronald said we’ll put some ideas together, thoughts, just what’s on our mind. I’ll set the stage. There was a point where I took the blog off because some part of my brain said, oh, I wanted to focus on audio and have everybody focus on the audio when they get there. And of course, I started to look at the site and thought it felt, I think I wrote this somewhere, it felt naked. It was like, where’s a blog? This is conversational. This is community. This is what it’s all about. So in turn, we’re working on bringing back the blog to Do the Woo, and that’s where this came because I had another idea. I had an idea about a newsletter and all this stuff kind of meshed together and Ronald deals with my crazy thinking and my train of thoughts and stuff. I brought up this newsletter idea and only because I keep hacking away at that thing. I’ve done that for so many years and never really progressed. What are your thoughts? I mean, you gave me some feedback. We won’t go into a lot of the details there, but just give me a thought.

Ronald:
Yeah. The thought that came to mind is newsletters are great, but newsletters or anything, email notification of something that’s bigger. And so if you write a newsletter with long form, I dunno what is long form these days, but something that gives you everything in the newsletter, you don’t need to do anything other than read the newsletter. That’s great if you’re in the moment and in the moment of reading a particular topic, but also on a device that makes it pleasant to read it. And once it’s buried in your inbox, it’s kind of gone, difficult to get back and that moment when you send out hundreds of thousands of newsletters, what you see in the status within the first couple of minutes, you see a really high spike of the opening rate and then it sort of diminishes pretty quickly after that, even within the same 24 hours. Even if you have an intelligent system that sends the emails at the best time or thinks it’s the best time with the highest opening rate, I do always wonder what the engagement rate is. So in other words, you send a newsletter, you think I have a huge post, but how engaged are people who read your newsletter? If it’s a call to action to click through to something, that’s really easy, but maybe it’s like, oh, it’s an email from Bob. Okay, great. It’s quite long. I’m doing something else. I’m switching between 15 different tabs and different windows and other things are happening at the same time. Are you really absorbing the content and engaging it? It’s really difficult to do that. And so it’s great to have a notification, but maybe that notification should be, hey, there’s much more content in the blog and here’s your weekly reminder to explore and here are the things that have been happening, have been fed by our presenters and guests. And guess what? If you’re interested in coding, here’s a category, everything around coding, or here’s a category, everything around community and thought. And that got me thinking like, hey, how much content? We’re coming up to 500 podcasts now?

BobWP:
Yeah, yeah. This will probably be, I’m not exactly sure the number, but we’re at around 500 in the 530 somethings.

Ronald:
Oh, so we passed that. Yeah. Amazing. So apart from me, all the other super interesting guests, some of them I’ve interviewed as well in the past, they all have really interesting things to say that it would be great to have quotes, snippets, or even get them to write something on your blog. Anyway, that got me really quite excited about the opportunity and bringing back blogging, which is the core of WordPress.

BobWP:
Yeah. And that’s what I mean. Like I said, I have Ronald there to smack me alongside the head. Every once in a while I get these little ideas and I’m doing them for maybe one specific reason or I’m thinking, how can I make this part better? And then I realize I have things inside there that are already bubbling on the site. One of the things you brought up, I’m going to flip back here, is you had brought up what Matt Mullenweg said and on his, I think he said it on his blog post about WordPress turning 21. And then I said it again in his talk at WordCamp Europe just a couple of months ago, and let’s say I pulled up the blog post and he gave 11 things that he’s just been thinking about. He says people should be thinking about one of them was blogging, commenting, and ping backs need to be fun. Static websites are fine, but dynamic ones are better. Almost every site would be improved by having a blog or a great blog. So when I looked at that, it was like I thought, man, back what, 2010 or so when I was blogging, that was kind of the heyday of blogging and everybody was commenting and it keeps nagging at me, this thing he said, and it’s not just what he said then, it was reaffirmation is what it was to me, what’s been on my mind when we started the new site, when we did the redesign to do the Woo. When we launched that in March and then officially at WordCamp Europe, we decided to open up comments again. And of course, that’s always a challenge. And I think there’s this thing inside of me that just, I won’t give up on it. Comments are there, there’s got to be something happening. So I’ve been publishing ping backs and stuff and some different things and it is true. It’s like there’s so many ideas and thoughts going through my head.

Ronald:
Yeah, I think you touched on something really important and that referencing to Matt, but it just occurred to me that WordPress is 21 years old and WordPress, not everybody started 21 years ago, but for 15 years we’ve had a number of new publishing platforms, mostly social media come, I mean they’re still here, they didn’t go away, but your audience might have moved to different platforms over time and definitely many, many, many more. And when you think of the next 15 years, are any of them still going to be there and relevant? But your blog will always be there. So you build up your diary, your journaling in a way over all those years and that’s owning that content as an asset is huge. So even if you don’t blog for the sake of SEO, it’s still within your own control that you can reuse on purpose and people can search for it and find different things. And I think that’s something that really, the longer we do this stuff, the more valuable it is that you really own that.

BobWP:
Yeah, exactly. And for me, I think one of my challenges lately was my site BobWP.

Ronald:
That was huge by the way, wasn’t it?

BobWP:
Yeah. And we were talking about that because I had my initial thoughts were kind of going back and forth between the two. So I would repurpose some of the content on Do the Woo over at BobWP.com, and as much as I thought that was a good strategy, it didn’t really play out as I thought. And of course, Ronald, when we talked, he hinted maybe that content should be under Do the Woo.

Ronald:
Can you describe a little bit of your first thought of the content strategy when you were doing BobWP

? What were you publishing and how was engagement? I know some of it was testing plugins and so on, and probably old versions that are totally irrelevant. That’s why you don’t feel it’s feasible anymore. But yeah, maybe you could share a little bit of it.

BobWP:
So the whole thing with BobWP, what it’s always been, it’s always been a piece of something. And back in the day I would do tutorials and stuff, and that’s why a lot of this content no longer exists because it was really mostly about stuff that was at the time. And that stuff became outdated very quickly unless I went in and updated it, which I did. And when I actually separated the podcast that was originally started on BobWP, it was for that reason because I knew that I wanted to focus on Do the Woo. I wanted to build a brand more around that or build the buzz or get people directed to that. And so my strategy was always, I always had BobWP there and I did a little bit of blogging here and there, and then I came to the point where, like I said, I started thinking, well, should I start cross-promoting the two? Because a BobWP brand is known out there, which seemed like a good idea. My thought was that yeah, I could do a lot of back and forth because some people will go to BobWP and then I can send them over to Do the Woo, give them a snippet of that. Actually, it didn’t work as I strategically planned because there wasn’t as much traffic going to BobWP anymore because I let it mellow out, which was on purpose because I wanted my focus on Do the Woo. So that was how I kept looking at this and kept looking at this and I’ve actually made a decision going through all this. I’m at a point in life people can kind of say you’re at a certain age or you’re at a point in life where, okay, what’s going to be the next thing? Well, mine is really Do the Woo. It’s my focus. So I thought this is where I need to be all the time on Do the Woo because it’s always going to be, even the experiences I can share doing my own thing over however many years can always fit somewhere there. And as a result, I just recently made the decision to take down BobWP as a site and use my Gravatar profile, BobWP, basically as my website now for BobWP.

Ronald:
Your business card.

BobWP:
And that was a long process and a lot of people have done that and I feel like that’s going to be the best thing I can now focus directly on Do the Woo. I moved some of the content back over from BobWP over on Do the Woo because it fits there and stuff. I just done some of the old posts and stuff. So that was that whole thinking through process. And in the middle of that we talked about it and stuff and we had, oh, I’m drawing a blank, Ronnie from Gravita and listening to him even occurred to me, this is such a great thing because it’s just I can send people where they want to go.

Ronald:
Yeah, it’s like a massive signpost that’s attached to on top of your head, isn’t it? Are you business? You have a pleasure, are you sending money or are you just curious who I am? And then there you go. Just go wherever you need to go. Yeah, just one thing.
Nice. Do you question for you then is do you feel that BobWP might have served a different audience to where you are now with Woo? I know you’ve moved some of the content, so there’s a little bit of an overlap, but I wonder if there’s even a strategy where you say, Hey, there’s some probably personal stuff that might not always be suitable for the Woo audience and even if I write this one blog post per year, it doesn’t matter. It’s just there. So I have a space that can run it that can publish and that’s okay. And for everything else there is Do the Woo.

BobWP:
Yeah, I thought about that and I want the BobWP brand now to be the gateway to Do the Woo. So that’s why I kept thinking when I looked at the site, it’s like I had people, you can go to do the Woo, you can see where I do this and all this stuff, but I felt like it was its own little piece there and honestly I started to realize that I was trying to force myself, it felt like the right move something in my gut and that’s kind of how I’ve always done things and maybe sometimes I regretted or something, but for now I just feel like because I basically have some content somewhere still on my WordPress dot com blog and I can always revive that sometime.

Ronald:
Yeah, it probably makes a great archive that even 10 years looks like I did that is a photo of me and whatever and then it’s still there. I think that becomes really a nice way your own tool of bringing back something that might be relevant even later, even if the minute on something. I also have another question then. When you think about the content for Do the Woo, how do you think about that? So do you want to write for your audience or how do you want them to engage and bring them in and get them to engage with to Do the Woo brand?

BobWP:
That is the fun part to think about, but the challenge I think for me, the site where I’ve moved my whole mindset is that blog becomes an arm of what Do the Woo stands for. And that is having hosts that have already shown interest come in and write guest posts and they can or having even a guest come in and do it. But as you and I talked about before and I think you alluded to a little bit is how that conversation can be carried from a audio podcast or somebody that talks about something in a podcast and says, I’m doing this five months later they do it. Do they want to come in and write a little bit about it

Ronald:
Or what came out of it? What’s the outcome of that initial podcast?

BobWP:
It can tie in really easy and make this circle back and forth between the content and how to get people there and engaged. Aside from thinking of creating a forum or some membership or all the crazy stuff that’s available to us that I don’t even want to touch on It is it’s all through that commenting and how to get people, how to drive them there. And that’s through social, it’s different ways. There’s different things that I’ve discovered are Jetpack now that we’ve used that we’re using that for a lot of our stuff that there are things I want to test with that and try to drive people back to leaving comments and having conversation. There’s some stuff I even talked with somebody from Jetpack at WordCamp Europe and we can do a couple ideas back and forth and we’re continue that conversation. So I’m thinking of some different things. I’ve had a few other people suggest things or actually ask for things that this might be an interesting way to leave a comment and how that can without giving any of a way, I don’t want to say I’m going to do it and then I don’t do it, but getting people to go between the podcasts and the blog and keeping that conversation flowing in some way and somehow interjecting the comments in all of that. And it’s not going to be an easy task

Ronald:
Different ways, isn’t it? Because you have on one hand you really want to engage with the podcast, you want to listen to every word that’s being said, but there are times when you might also just want read the LDR of that podcast and I’d like to say, okay, that podcast probably is not for me, but I’m glad I’ve read the headline into it. Are you going to commit yourself to a soccer match for 90 minutes or almost two hours, which is probably a lot of kicking balls back and forth. Or you’re going to say, no, give me the five minute highlight, that’s enough and if the match absolutely fantastic with quality soccer football, I’m going to go in and watch the full thing. Or if it’s a team or a category that you support, I’m definitely want to listen them know what the whole thing.
So I think the block is also a little bit of a bridge between the full commitment or just a really short version of that or if you have been intrigued by the podcast, a blog could be a way to express your gratitude, your follow up question, sharing it with somebody else because from there you have to learn the links to the podcast. I mean there’s so many different ideas to really use the podcast as the center of it all that again, Gravatar, it’s signposting to everything and everything around that particular topic and maybe write about references of other speakers or podcast made in the past, which you may not have discussed in the podcast itself. So I get really excited about this though.

BobWP:
You’re right because when I go through any transcript and it’s kind of what I was doing with BobWP a little bit is it’s like one question is a post in itself. Somebody has given you a direct answer to one specific problem or one specific challenge, but within those transcripts there is tons of information that can be pulled out and be very in themselves are little nuggets I call ’em gathered throughout that are standalone because they really tell you something right there, maybe even something you can take action on or something. And by itself sometimes you miss those things because like you said, you’re listening to this long podcast for 45 minutes and that little piece comes in there and then it’s gone

Ronald:
And you want to maybe reference that to somebody else. It’s like, oh, was that 23 minutes or 28 minutes and then it’s kind of lost. You’re going to listen to the whole thing, maybe busy, but if the highlights are set of reference, quote that into a blog post. Yeah, that’s a good way to share that though. I was going to ask probably two questions. I know one of the biggest reservations to start

a blog is your time commitment and I think in our discussion I’ve touched a little bit on that’s like don’t commit yourself to a weekly or a daily something just whenever it’s right, whenever you feel like it. And quite often a newsletter when you say, Hey, I have a weekly newsletter. That’s pretty tough to always fill a newsletter with something inside for every single week to the point that people actually might even be turned off by it because it’s the same stuff you read five times over everywhere you in the WordPress ecosystem. So on one hand you have the time commitment, which is really tough, especially if you have busy schedule and you have five recordings in one day. How can you commit yourself to writing these blog posts? Maybe there are hack tools and then the second part is publishing, and I know you alluded to that earlier. How do you get people then to read it and how do you get to publish it? I’m glad that you mentioned Jetpack. They have some publishing tools across many different networks.

BobWP:
And I think that is the challenge because nothing absolutely drives me more nuts than going to read a post and at the end of the post they say, we would love for you to leave a comment over on X and they give you a link about this post and I’m like, now you’re making me go back over there. But everybody tends to do that because that’s where they feel all the conversations. But also it’s a huge mess of stuff that just goes by quickly. I mean you need to do it, but the commitment I think some people spend on social is way beyond. I mean even though they feel there’s a lot of engagement, they’re looking at their views, this is viewed by 10,000 people, this is great. Well how did that all play out? What did you really get out of those 10,000 views? What engagement was there?

Ronald:
When you publish something to Twitter to X to Facebook and Instagram, it would be nice to have a link to those particular posts but also a little counter of what the engagement is on those or whether like 15 comments or 200 comments, it could be quite intriguing to actually go and discover that or even have some of that be reposted into the comments section of the blog to sort of bridge that data. I dunno how easy that is, but that really good truth for thought, what you just shared

BobWP:
And somebody just shared recently a person that is using the Fediverse pulling in content and stuff, but on their site they’re pulling in all basically their feed of everything they say out there and it’s all living on their site as a one page is a long feed. I know that next time anybody’s at a WordCamp and you want to have a nice lengthy conversation about all of this kind of social stuff, I’m find Robert Windish from side, he’s thinking, how can we make WordPress a social platform and that means your blog and stuff like that. And he has a lot of really, I mean he will talk your ear off about it, but he has a lot of interesting ideas and he’s kind of on the mission himself and that kind of brings it in, how do you tie this all together? How do you still make your site the place where people will go to? And I think we’ve gotten out of that habit, the

Ronald:
Data liberation project, probably not excelling as far as we want. It’s not always about moving side to a different platform, but it’s also pulling in information from other platform into your own side, whether it’s private or in case of WooCommerce, it could be moving data from shipping platforms or accounting platforms but also public comments, relevant comment from social media into your own play. And I think again, what I said earlier that if everything you did or published is on WordPress that you can totally control with your own tools and what it looks like, how amazing is that? How many issues would would’ve prevent it? I think people will start to realize that as things mature, WordPress is always there and will always be there, even selling a hundred year plan. So I’m pretty confident that that’s going to be the case

BobWP:
And I think is there’s, even though some people really dedicate themselves to maybe a certain platform or feel that even though they still have a site that more and more people are starting to think just can’t go on or continue this way, there’s a bit of frustration I think on some people’s level and a bit, I mean I’ve even cut down my time on social just because I feel like I’m just, yeah, it’s, it’s too much anymore. I still depend on RSS, that’s how I keep up on everything is my R SS feed and that I go in and check all the time. That’s the easiest way for me to do it and still the best way

Ronald:
Controlling what comes into your inbox, what you read, what newsletter you subscribed, which block do you want to get into your feed. It’s super important that you take control over your own life. I noticed that with my own certain social media profile, how destructive it can be and we dunno quite what the result is going to be in 10, 20 years time and how their attention is going to be. But these are all challenges that we start to see the tip of the iceberg. I just want to go back because we brush over that creating the content, like writing the content and I know AI tools are big and they’ve been around for quite a few years and blogging you could almost just do it with a couple of prompts. What are your thoughts on that using AI tools in the broadest way?

BobWP:
For me personally, I don’t use it to create any original content. I’ve sometimes asked for a few ideas and even then it, it’s very rarely where I use it the most is repurposing content and that means existing content and I have exactly that through the transcripts. So when I mean my transcripts to give you an idea of my workflow with the transcripts, which makes sense, that leads into other content is when I get a transcript, I have it done through rev.com through their AI and I go through and I correct some of the names brands and then I take that same transcript and I run it through chat GPT and I tell it to just find any spelling errors or small grammatical errors. Sometimes you have to be careful with the prompt or it’ll actually start eliminating parts of the transcript. So I try to keep it to just really small things, which that usually fixes quite well and from that I’ll ask it to give me one or two paragraph intro to it and it’s never written exactly like I want, so I use it as a basis to just do something and then I’ll ask it for some key takeaways, which is where I think it is a lot better at and that’s the best use of it is on existing content, not on creating original content.
And then I would go through and make sure it reads and take out the word delve, which AI seems to love so much. Everybody delves into everything and it just drives me. But that’s where personally and I think where it works best, I’m at an advantage because I basically have original content through the audio. I just need to have that transcribed and then work with that content. But original stuff still for me personally has to come from my brain.

Ronald:
You could teach the LMS to be more like Bob and if you keep teaching it with your prompts probably can get much better in weeks and months to come, but that does take time. It needs to learn that as well. But that’s really interesting. I mean even just a few years back I recall you would send off your recording to be transcribed by somebody and it would be quite an expensive server and compare that now with these A alarms it’s an amazing value and so much faster and almost instant.

BobWP:
Oh yeah, and it’s something, yeah, for years and years I paid Rev to do human transcripts and that budget became higher and higher as I did more content obviously and more podcasts.

Ronald:
Right. Then a little bit unpacking the part of publishing to where your audiences are, where your tribe is at, but I know in your case you have so many new audiences and communities across the globe speaking different languages. Do you track that? Do you analyze that or you don’t even go that fast right here it is. There are a few ways to find it.

BobWP:
Yeah, I’ve tried to do it and there’s never a rhyme or reason for whatever happens with any content. I mean a certain spike in listen and sometimes you try to track it and you think was there somebody that just happened to share? It’s out there somewhere that you don’t know about and there’s no way you can track it because suddenly it’s just out of the blue you’ll have five, six times as many listens one day as you did for the last five days or something and you can go and look at that topic and often the topic doesn’t make sense either what made this happen or was it shared internally somewhere? How do you

Ronald:
Feel about others writing on your blog or for you, is that something, I know you talked about a little bit, but what are your thoughts around that? How far do you want to extend it? You want to keep it only within co-host or anybody that’s been on the podcast and even to the point where it’s almost could monetize the way because of anybody that publish on your platform with the audience that this build up there is some value to that.

BobWP:
Yeah, one of the wonderful things I have is I have a group of co-hosts. If I have an idea and this is how the newsletter thing is exactly what I did with that and I can bounce an idea off and when I bounce the idea of bringing a blog back right away, several of them were like, oh, I’d love to guess both. Which it’s not easy to get people to guess posts because it’s tough enough for them to write content for themselves. So for sure the hosts to me a no-br

ainer, especially if they want to follow up or write about one of the shows they’ve recently done. The guests almost are a second no-brainer because the opportunity to give them to follow up on something or to add to the conversation say, wow, after the conversation I thought about this one piece or I thought maybe they want to elaborate on one thing they were asked, they answered it one minute, but they have a lot more to say. So those kinds of things, I think it’s ideal. The podcast is run by the community. I mean I do all the grunt work, but I host you. I bring in guest hosts and all these guests and I want the blog to be that too as far as open guest spots, but I’m going to be very selective. I don’t want tutorials, I don’t want them writing about their product. It’s not

Ronald:
The audience that you’ve built up. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And get the feedback as well in the bottom of the blog have some sort of rating tool that’s used for how would you rate this content? And so they kind of use that as a way of working where depending on the number of readers and the feedback that you get is better provide the content that readers are interested in. The other thing I saw that crossed my mind working with user levels within WordPress publisher and editor admin, whether certain speakers who might want to follow up on things or even add a supportive blog post, whether they have some sort of levels that they can add and own that piece of content.

BobWP:
Yeah, I guess I could say get in the groove of how I do this with the post and I still want it to be that community oriented piece and I want them to feel like they have a bit of control over that. So it’s an interesting thing to think about because I think that’s an important part.

Ronald:
Yeah, it’s that community that you build up and it’s also back to the comments and empowering some writers to control and manage the comments and the conversation and that’s like bringing that back. It then becomes not quite a forum, but it is that engagement not just between the author and a few comments and that probably brings in more folks to then want to comment because they can get the audience with the speaker, with the writer and leave some nice words or ask for the question, what did you mean we did quote or does also apply to X, Y and Z. The other cool thing I found with the Jetpack tool, creating the social media images, so when you publish that something did you see that you add your featured image and a bit of text and within the post itself it generates a social media image that’s formatted for the different platform. Again, it’s one of those little hacks that just make so much easier to create a content, publish it and not be dragged down like, oh, I need to do this, I need to do that. And then weeks past you still haven’t published it because having that threshold as lowest as possible direct from public I think is key to just keep going. It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect, even if it’s a light mistake, update it. Yours.

BobWP:
Exactly. And

Ronald:
Just going back on the newsletters, because we have to bring that back in because that was the original idea is like I’m going to start with a newsletter and now we, instead of really focusing on blog, blog block and all the advantages, there’s still a place for newsletters. Where do you see that sort of fall into place?

BobWP:
When I visualize in my head for a newsletter and ideally what I like is I want to keep as much of this content on the site and drive people and have it as a teaser. And of course as it has been, or I guess you don’t call it newsletter, but when people get notified of a post, I mean just knowing this is a content and you can go back through and listen to what you want to read, what you want, but also is how to have that content go out automatically but also be able to add a little custom content to it to make sure that people, this is how you can more easily comment or by doing this and make it a little bit more visible. Add little snippets of something in there that

Ronald:
Quotes from the community like, oh, Ron said this on X and that followed up in a comment here and that’ve got some great conversation going, get engaged in this if you care about this stuff or here’s a quote, I got the community talking and it was relevant here and there. And yeah, it also a good way to introduce other platforms within the own ecosystem. If you have a guest speaker from a Woo ecosystem or from a third party developer, it’s nice to be able to reference that in a newsletter I get.

BobWP:
And I think there’s a lot of potential, but I don’t want to make the newsletter, like you said, this is kind of more of a prompt the newsletter. And what I really want to do is when I get this all in place and things moving along, my next endeavor is to get Matt Mullenweg on. I’d love to just talk with him about blogging, comment and ping backs

Ronald:
And did you now who is also fantastic, I know if that he should bring in a guest Tim Ferris and I know he and Matt have shared so many ideas around blogging, like long form short form. Also Seth Godin and I’ve written to some podcasts around how easy it is to share something or not at all really the thought process behind blogging and I think Matt is pretty good at that. He can share something very short, one paragraph and it’s out there or some really long bits of tech, but it’s the short ones that I’m going to take way more time to think that through. Very easy to talk and write paragraphs and paragraphs. At some point people will disengage and you kind of lost them, but keeping it super short and to the point that’s real.

BobWP:
And I think that’s kind of what I’m thinking about too is a lot of this and I think the site is ripe for that because there’s a lot of content we can share that is short and to the point rather than just going on and on and giving 11 tips of whatever. I mean those have its place.

Ronald:
Yeah. Here’s another thing, you’re building up international communities and having the content of tribe or even the blog post, but having it with Google now, it’s so easy to have your full page translated as well. It’s almost instant. Well, it is instant. Which is a great way to repurpose content.

BobWP:
It is.

Ronald:
And both ways, if you have somebody writing in a lanugage that it also accessible to English speakers or to German speaker and yeah, that’s probably something that’s not talked about a lot, but super easy.

BobWP:
That would be really interesting, like to open that up. We’ve done that to some effect with the one podcast where we have the community come in and talk about their own WordPress community and their locale and in their native language, and so they’re actually talking to their community. That’s another whole piece of it. And I think it is, you’re right, I know there’s podcasts in the space that does the podcast in several different languages. They actually have somebody do it in four or five languages. A little bit of the news, WordPress news, and I think there’s something there to be looked at for sure because we’re a huge community.

Ronald:
I haven’t checked the figures, but I would sort of maybe 60, 75% of Woo users don’t live in a country where English is the first language. So maybe two thirds who don’t have English foreign language, they speak English, but to truly engage with them anyway, I guess we’ve come to the conclusion that blogging is pretty cool. I think there is blogging for anybody for yourself, whether it’s a personal diary that you have public and then you have your personal one that you keep private, whether it’s for yourself or for your business, for your ecommerce site. I think blogging for the sake of SEO definitely has value, but I don’t think that should be the prime goal to block call because then you end up in not very pretty or very well organized content to hit certain keywords and I think that puts people off. But write it for your, like you do with social media, keep it short to the point with a link to your product, to your podcast, wherever you want people to go to or the call to action. I think that probably has a good reason to consider it again.

BobWP:
Yeah, for sure. And definitely I think we’ve touched on enough different thing given our thoughts. Some of the direction Do the Woo might go. So if there is not a perfect post to come in and comment, anybody listening to this, this is a post because we’ve talked about a lot of things and I’m sure everybody that’s listened to it has actually thought, well, yeah, that makes sense, or nope, this is the way I would do it or this is how it works for me.

Ronald:
And maybe that’s the comment, call out what are the forms of blog posts or good examples of other forms of blog posts like rich content, whether it snippet the codes or a gallery photos or sound snippets or maybe a poll to get voting. That all can all be part of a blog pro. It doesn’t always have to be just paragraph or words.

BobWP:
Right, exactly. So we’re going to encourage everybody listening now to come and leave a comment.

Ronald:
I’m inspired now. I’m going to revisit my own site. I haven’t touched since I started working at quite a few years now. It’s all very well preaching about it, but maybe we should all get back to blogging. I think it’s a good way.

BobWP:
Well this has been great and yeah, everybody hope you enjoyed it and let us know your thoughts. You’ll go into the post, leave a comment.

Ronald:
It’s been a great Blogstorm, Bob

. Yeah,

BobWP:
I’m sure you’ll be right alongside there, at least in spirit one way or another.

Ronald:
Yeah, I need to write one of the first posts or co-write to see what.

BobWP:
Alright, Ronald, thanks everyone for listening and yeah, let us know what you think about all this stuff we were talking about. Alright, thank you all.

Ronald:
Thanks Bob.

Robert:
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to another Do the Woo AgencyChat. It is my great pleasure to have Darko here from IntellRocket. Darko, welcome to the show.

Darko:
Hi Robert. Thank you for having me.

Robert:
Darko, tell us more about IntellRocket and yourself please.

Darko:
Yeah, thank you. So I am Darko Svetolikovic, which is hard to pronounce even in Serbian. I come from Serbia and I’m the founder of IntellRocket, which is a WordPress agency specializing in WordPress and WooCommerce development for more than a decade. Currently, we’re certified web experts and have extensive experience in building custom WordPress websites and WooCommerce stores. I can say that we’re trying to build beautiful websites, but that’s not something you can be objective about. What’s nice and what’s beautiful is subjective. However, where you can be objective is that we build websites that are really fast. So, high-performance website projects where we guarantee that our custom builds will pass core web vitals. Why is that important? Because Core Web Vitals is a ranking signal. It means that your website is fast and produces a good user experience. Clients come to us asking for some crazy implementations, so we do that, create implementations from the technical side, and usually, those kinds of projects come with custom API integration.

Robert:
Don’t spoil it yet, don’t spoil it yet because we’re going to get to it. Before we jump into the next sort of little bit here, I have to say there is a huge Serbian WordPress community and it’s very impressive.

Darko:
Well, I see some people only at WordCamps. We live in the same city, but if there’s no WordPress meetup or something like that, we don’t see each other. And then I see them only at WordCamps, WordCamp Europe, or WordCamps across Europe. So yeah, there is a huge, huge community here. We hosted WordCamp 2018. I think it was WordCamp Europe in Belgrade, 2018 or 2019, I’m not sure.

Robert:
Yeah, so that’s very impressive.

Darko:
We have a huge community here, and I suppose that is something that is driving WordPress. So it’s not only the Serbian community; it’s communities across the globe.

Robert:
I completely agree. It was actually really nice to see the Serbian community specifically having their little side meetups and things going on at WordCamps Europe. Nice group of folks. To get back to all the agency-important information, of course. You’ve mentioned performance as a key metric, not only for Core Web Vitals but for other, I guess, experience-related issues or experiences, period. What has IntellRocket done differently than other agencies around that performance question?

Darko:
Well, it’s not that we’re doing something different. We’re focused on building websites that are fast and performant. We really dive deep into how WordPress operates, how everything functions, how everything works. So we try to optimize and make it better. And because of that, I can say those are performance-related things. I think I’m passionate about performance since I started my business and my agency work. I’m not a developer, so I don’t have that experience related to technical things, but I can say I have some good people on my team who are willing to do what I ask them to do.

Robert:
So I want to dig into why that’s important for you, but also why it’s important for agencies as a whole to be looking at performance as a metric and specifically beyond hosting. Because every host is going to say they’re the fastest, the best. We know the story. So why should agencies specifically be looking to target performance? How can they do that better?

Darko:
So about performance, of course, hosting is important, but if you have a well-coded website, then the hosting will be important but not that much. If you have a huge website that’s not optimized well, you’ll spend a fortune on hosting for that website to have good performance. So I would say everything is important: good code, good structure, good hosting. I’m passionate about performance. So because of that, I started working on performance. But 10 years ago, technologies were different. That’s when that passion started. And then we started working on improving websites. So why should agencies care, or why should businesses care? Because that helps user experience. A fast website helps with conversion rates. Then that helps with revenue, that helps with profit margins. So I have a case where we worked on a client who was paying for Google Ads but didn’t have an optimized website. So we started optimizing that website, and they were investing in PPC at that moment. Their website was, for example, let’s say third in Google, first, second, third ad is like the third place. And then when we optimized the website for the same budget, this client had, let’s say, a second position, and the cost per click reduced, for example, just for this case from $1 to 0.8. So they had 20% more traffic for the same budget. So that improved their Google Ads score. They got like 20% more clicks for the same money, but then that traffic landed on their website. And because the website was faster, they had a 20% better conversion rate. So 20% more traffic multiplied by 20% better conversion rate. They ended up increasing their profit by about 35%. That is why it’s important. It’s affecting your revenue in a short period. So it’s easy to test. With SEO, it’s harder because it takes more time to see what’s affecting your website. I would say agencies that are doing SEO or marketing should care about performance. Even though I know what is happening in real life because it’s not possible for most companies to achieve that. Of course, other work is important, but if you isolate all of this, I would say it can make a significant difference.

Robert:
That’s a really interesting and good point about Google AdWords being affected by performance. When you tackle performance issues, are you tackling them at the front end, the backend? Where is that really making the biggest difference?

Darko:
We’re trying everything. So, of course, we analyze the backend use. I don’t know how the tools are called, but we analyze every query monitor, I think. So we analyze everything in the backend and how everything is working, but also we use code that is optimized. So even without caching, without anything, we tend to make fast websites. And then on top of that, we add caching, JavaScript, minification, all those things. But we make websites that are fast without any caching. We add caching in order to reduce resource spending and all of that. We try to make it fast from scratch. We try everything that we see from the backend, we will resolve it. Everything that puts me on the front end, we will try to resolve. Some things are possible, some things are hard, some things are not possible because you have some scripts you cannot handle. External scripts like Google Analytics and those kinds of things. And then those sometimes appear in the report. But we have also websites where we were adding 200 different Google events and those websites passed Core Web Vitals. So it’s not about Google Analytics slowing down the website.

Robert:
And you mentioned building, I’ll say it, custom front ends, and obviously you do a lot of work with WooCommerce. So I have to say it’s something unique I haven’t seen in any of our regular Do the Woo AgencyChats. Let’s dive into what you’re calling headless WooCommerce.

Darko:
So as I said, the passion about SEO, the passion about performance, and also API in the backend, all that was a solid foundation for starting something that is called headless WordPress or headless WooCommerce. How it explains headless, but in essence, that is JAMstack or headless, WordPress, headless website, headless WooCommerce, JAMstack e-commerce. Those are the terms. So it represents that you separate the front end from the backend. The backend is running on its own server. You use the API from the backend to send all the necessary information. And then the frontend is independently hosted. This simplifies the frontend and the backend because you don’t have in the traditional stacks, you visit the website, the visitor comes to your website, you ask the backend, then it asks the database, it responds with something, and you get the front end. With a headless setup, you have most of the time everything pre-rendered, so the content is ready, and you instantly get the response of the page you’re trying to get, which then reduces the time to get the information, and you get it much faster. So it just helps you build a super fast website, so you can have an instantly loading website across the globe. So it’s not about your local market. It’s possible to target a global market and have this instant website loading across the globe, which is good for international businesses. For example, startups, SaaS companies that don’t know where they will sell. As a SaaS company, you don’t know where your customers can come from. So you need to have a website that is loading fast in different markets. If you’re targeting specifically, you can have a host server in that state or country. Of course, you can have CloudFlare on top, you can have caching, you can have everything with a traditional type, which will help you, but it won’t help for the first visitor. So again, if you have different users from different markets, and for example, we’re in Serbia, but our clients are in the US, and we host a website in Serbia, then our client from, let’s say, California will get our website loading the first time slower than the second client or the second time he visits our website. He’ll get it faster, but will he visit our website a second time if the first visit was like

ten seconds? Probably not. And then if you’re targeting California, then the second visit is okay, but what if you have a visitor from Washington or New York? You cannot be ready for all that. And then on top of that caching, you should have some pinging servers, something like that. And you cannot be sure completely what is possible with a headless setup. It’s possible to have instant loading across the globe. I can say we recently did some tests for our client, and we had the results. So they had a custom-coded website, so their website on 4G was loading something around three seconds, which is good on average, across five continents. So the website was on average loading within three seconds, something like 2.98. But then we tested on our other client that is using headless, and they have results which are 1.4 seconds average across the same locations.

Robert:
So twice as fast.

Darko:
Yeah. So 1.4 seconds is super fast.

Robert:
So my question is, and I’ve had this conversation about just regular, regular and both headless WordPress, I assume budgets are a little higher and time to develop is a little higher than just spinning up a regular WooCommerce. Would that be fair to say, or have you guys optimized it?

Darko:
There are challenges like that. If we are talking about standard e-commerce, standard WooCommerce, I don’t think that costs too much. But usually, businesses that go to a headless setup have custom API integrations, have ERP in the backend, have CRM, and have several other marketing tools integrated into their setup currently, and they want to make a switch to headless. So they’re like big businesses. They’re not starting from scratch. Initially, you need a lot of things to be integrated and tailored to their needs, and that is why it usually costs a lot. But even with a traditional stack, that still costs a lot because you have a lot of different things that need to be connected, and that is something that affects the price. But what is positive about the headless is that if they go into a headless setup, they can save money on hosting, they can improve user experience, they can improve scalability. The flexibility is huge. You can adjust your website to do whatever you imagine it to do. So there are no limitations.

Robert:
And that website can be a mobile app as well.

Darko:
And yeah, you can use WooCommerce as a database, but usually in those setups, WooCommerce is not a database. ERP is a database, but you have WooCommerce to control the content. You can control that content, which can go to e-commerce. For example, we have a client who asked us to do something with categories in WooCommerce. They have a product page, and they want to have dynamically generated content. So they go and click some product filters, let’s say it’s a clothing e-commerce website. They go to categories, click outdoor, and then go to sneakers, and select under $100. They click all that in filters and get a dynamically generated page that says sneakers up to 100. Under that, they have “check our sneakers offering that is perfect for outdoor activities and less than $100.” That can be the product page title and subtitle. When you change from outdoor to indoor, you get a different URL with sneakers for up to 100 for indoor activities. All those URLs for Google are indexable from one setup. You can have hundreds of pages that all get indexed in Google and get you real traffic. You’re offering a great user experience to your users because they see the title, the description, it’s in the meta description. So everything is done on an advanced level, which is not possible with a traditional stack. It’s not about WordPress WooCommerce, it’s not possible on any technology. With headless, you can do this. The time you save in content population or administrating those pages is where you save a lot of money, and your return on investment is bigger, the bigger the brand you are.

Robert:
I guess tying it to the original question, this isn’t for everyone, it’s not going to be for a freelancer selling their own t-shirts necessarily. It’s really for, I’ll use enterprise loosely, but a business where revenue and performance really do matter. Would that be fair to say?

Darko:
Yeah. In the e-commerce space, it’s important for businesses that are across one country or one state that do business across one continent, I would say. They can have a bigger return on investment. Also, businesses that are entering the e-commerce space and want to compete with bigger players. Bigger players are hard to make that switch. It’s expensive, it’s time-consuming, and they don’t know if that will work. But smaller players who want a piece of the cake can get that piece much faster if they go into some technology like this. They can win some positions in Google, they can win more clicks on Google ads for the same money. I would say it’s important, but with smaller businesses, the budget can be smaller. You can build a good solution and then scale faster because it’s scalable. You can add more. The backend can be independent of the front end, so you can add more things in the front end, but also you can scale your backend while the front end is the same.

Robert:
One point I want to make sure we don’t miss is obviously we’ve mentioned performance, SEO, SEM, all the acronyms, security.

Darko:
Well, security with this setup is on another level. This is like, as I said, you have this decoupled architecture. Your front end and backend are completely separated, and because of that, you have a front end that is more secure by just, most of the time, having only read-only access. So you get the API and show the data and details. It’s not possible to write something in. The front end is on a completely different server, and you pull the data from the API from some ERP, so everything is shown on the website. Because of this architecture, it’s more secure. The backend can be hidden from users and accessed only by some security protocols. Because of that, users or malicious users cannot access your backend. This is just one layer on top. You still need to protect your WordPress and your WooCommerce, but this is one layer on top which prevents users from getting access to your backend.

Robert:
I’ve seen that in WordPress where you’re drafting more static pages and obviously security is greatly improved by that, by having fewer vectors of attack.

Darko:
Yeah, the attack surface is reduced, so it’s not impossible, but it’s harder. Nothing is impossible. If someone invests a lot of time in something, they can do it from the application side or the hosting side. So nothing can be 100% sure and secure. Working on improvements all the time is important. For example, for all our backend activities, we have by default enabled two-factor authentication for all our users. We have two-factor authentication for every password that is shared. So we take care of security internally and even on the website level. Customers need to take care of their security too. Keep passwords in their password manager, have their users use two-factor authentication, force them to use a mobile app where they have two-factor authentication set up, not just in the password manager. But in the end, it’s the responsibility of all parties involved.

Robert:
Without a doubt. As we all know, security is always more and more important because there’s more money, there’s more personally identifiable information, all the problems that occur, and that’ll always improve at both ends. I’m more curious, of course, I have to say the AI word. What does the future of headless WooCommerce or WooCommerce in general with AI look like?

Darko:
Well, I think if you use it to do some things better, if you write… sometimes I play with AI, so sometimes…

Robert:
Oh, we all do, right?

Darko:
It’s so annoying chatting with ChatGPT or anything. It’s not AI yet, they’re trying to sell us that as AI. But I think if you use it for some, there’s some good applications, and it depends on how you set up your store to improve your operations. You can use it for data entry or some operational things, freeing up people to do more complex tasks. AI currently isn’t capable of doing some super-advanced things, so we still need people. What’s the future of WooCommerce with AI? This doesn’t have too much to do with WooCommerce. Headless WooCommerce is the same. I would say that you can, for example, probably, the thing that I explained about product categories, you could generate content on those pages based on some filters. If you get personal details about users, it’s more likely for them to like that content in order to click the product they want to buy, let’s say something like that.

Robert:
No, that’s fantastic. I know everyone’s looking at figuring out how they can use AI. I like how you actually very much said LLMs are not AIs. That’s a really good point. I think people forget that. I’m curious how upgrades in translations will affect especially multinational WooCommerce sites. I think that’ll be interesting to see how that comes to pass, since I know that’s sort of on Matt Mullenweg’s WordPress timeline.

Darko:
I think if you reach some limits inside your WooCommerce, it’s important to know that there is an option to go with headless because then you don’t have those limitations. I haven’t reached those limitations with the headless websites we’ve built so far.

Robert:
That’s fantastic. Darko, how can folks connect with you and learn more about getting started with headless WordPress?

Darko:
For those interested in headless WordPress or headless WooCommerce, they can find our website at IntellRocket.com. They can find us on LinkedIn, they can find me on LinkedIn, and they can just reach out, ask what they’re curious about, and we can provide them with a consultation or anything they need.

Robert:
Darko, thank you so much. It was great to learn about your perspectives, especially about headless WooCommerce.

Darko:
Thank you, Robert. Thank you for having me on this podcast, and I hope we’ll see each other at some WordCamps.

Robert:
Absolutely. And that’s another Do the Woo AgencyChat. Thank you. Thank you.

Mike:
Yeah, I think having adequate resources for the site is super important. So there’s enough CPU and RAM, using fast SSD drives. There’s room for growth. A lot of the time I see not enough resources being allocated for the database, for example. It’s like having a big enough engine to power that database. Having access for developers like SSH analytics tools, being able to access the logs and scrape those properly for little nuggets of information. Having some sort of application performance monitor (APM) like New Relic is the one that I use the most. It’s pretty popular because you want to be ideally alerted and proactive about performance issues rather than reactive. You don’t want to find out customers are emailing you or blasting you on social media that, oh, you’re trying to check out on this thing again and it’s crashing or slow or whatever. It’s better if you get an alert from your own systems that you have set up for monitoring, etc., to go out and put that fire out and be able to pinpoint the issue very, very quickly instead of trying to play detective with discovering all the clues instead of having the clues handed to you.

Having some sort of CDN integration I think is quite important as well. There are a lot of Cloudflare enterprise partners now with hosting companies, which I think is, if you wanted to build your own Cloudflare network, good luck. That’s a lot of resources, a lot of money. So I think it’s easier to just get a host that already leverages their network for the DDoS protection and the security because sometimes the performance issues I see on WooCommerce sites are actually security related. The site is constantly getting attacked on the login page or good old XML-RPC, which has been around since the dawn of computing and is used but can still be a very common attack vector. And fraudulent orders was one that I saw come up recently. This client had a bot network that was attacking them, making a bunch of fraudulent orders, just taking up resources from real people who are actually buying stuff. So yeah, those are the things I think off the top of my head.

Marcel:
And I obviously think that the very basic part of it, of the hosting, is if you have an audience or a market that is more US-based or European-based or whatever region you’re selling to or providing your services to, that also plays a very important role in deciding which area of the world you’re selling to and then choosing a hosting company that has good data centers or good resources in that specific area. The region of the world is, I guess, the number one thing we should look for when we’re going to choose a hosting company because they all say they are very fast everywhere, but if you dig a little deeper, you will see that they are probably more US-based. So whenever you go to a hosting company and you search for their data centers and where they’re located, some of them, even when you spin up a hosting service, they will ask which area do you want to cover.

I think some of them are more US-based, some of them are more European-based, and we have Asian ones. For example, if you want to go to the Asian market and sell in China, Japan, and other countries, it’s far more challenging to choose the right hosting company than it would be to sell in Europe or in the US. So that would be probably my advice: choose a hosting company that has all the services you talked about and all the little details that they care about, specific for WooCommerce, but also where they are really strong when it comes to providing the fastest services in the region of the world you want to sell. Number two, I would say, is the theme. When we talk about the theme, do your clients go more with existing themes and then change that, or do they have custom themes?

Mike:
It depends on the size of the client. I work with a range of small businesses to enterprise clients. One of the Shark Tank clients I’m working with, they were using a very popular commercial theme that had a lot of extra bloat and unnecessary stuff they didn’t need. I told them, you have the budget and the resources, go custom. It’s hard to compete with the performance of a custom-built theme, and if you have resources available to maintain it going forward, absolutely it’s the way to go. I generally find that smaller businesses, when they’re just starting out, they don’t know if what they’re going to build and try is going to have legs, is it going to work, is it going to make money?

So they will tend to pick a theme that is pretty, has predefined templates that will work with WooCommerce, and has a bunch of features. As time goes on, they probably also use a page builder or two or three I’m sure we’ve all seen, and other components. That will tend to, of course, slow things down. I tell them during consultations that if you’re using a certain combination of theme and a page builder, I would start with removing that and then if you’re still not happy, we can look further at what’s slowing things down. So I’d say it’s a mixture. Whenever I see a custom-built theme with a cart, I’m like, oh good. This means that I don’t have to have that difficult conversation of if they’re really in love with their theme or the design that the theme provides, and you tell them, hey, you have to get rid of this. It’s like taking a toy away from a child that they’re very, very happy with. Then I tell them, no, no, no, you can have the same design and features, just rebuild it with lighter components.

Marcel:
And usually as a developer, when you have a client that is using an existing theme and they start having these ideas about, oh, what if we could change this page and make the image appear on the right side instead of the left side, or we need the description to have a bigger place now let’s move it down, or now we need an extra tab for this or for that. And then you suddenly end up having so much customization on top of an existing theme that you start asking yourself or challenging the client, this is becoming so cumbersome to maintain all of these changes. It would make more sense to build a custom theme. I would say if you have the resources and if your client has the resources, a custom theme may seem like very hard work at the beginning because you have to do all of those standard pages, the 404s, the search page and all of that, but it will compensate in the end because if you have full control of everything that is being loaded on a theme and usually when you go with an existing theme, you don’t need all of the features that they offer, you have a lot more control over performance.

So if you’re starting out, fine, but if you want to invest in something that is very important to the performance, I would say the theme is the number one category where you should put some resources because we’re talking about web performance and we’re talking about key metrics that we can measure. The theme part is one of the most important components because it is responsible for the front-end part. When we talk about key metrics, we talk about LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), we talk about the First Input Delay (FID), we talk about Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which is when the page loads and things start moving up and down because the images are loading or different parts of the page are loading and they’re shifting up and down, which makes it very confusing for a user to follow. That is all the theme, or mostly the theme’s responsibility. From the key metrics, what is the most important one in your view?

Mike:
I think Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a big one. So related to conversion rates, time to first byte as well. I know it’s not a core web vital, but…

Marcel:
I forgot to mention that. It’s an important key metric as well.

Mike:
Everything else, the Largest Contentful Paint can only be as fast as the time to first byte. And there’s also Interaction to Next Paint (INP), which you mentioned in the introduction, right? That I think replaced FID, the transition because when you click the button or whatever and you don’t see something happening within a few milliseconds, we get confused or frustrated and keep clicking the button faster. That’s a common human thing where we think clicking the button harder and more intensely will make it work. Maybe you press your mouse button extra hard or…

Marcel:
Multiple times.

Mike:
Yeah, like clicking the elevator button faster and faster…

Marcel:
It’s not coming. Let’s press again.

Mike:
I think that one is really important for stores because of the add-to-cart checkout flow. It’s important to signal to the user that they’re making progress towards their end goal and with their journey of trying to get this product or service that you’re selling. That one is more difficult to measure in, not in the wild, but to pinpoint where the INP issue is coming from is not as difficult as Largest Contentful Paint, for example, which is well established for being very related to the revenue conversion rates. There’s a cool calculator that Google put out a long time ago that they deprecated for some reason. I don’t know why, but we took the code and put it on my website. I think I’ve sent you the link before too with this LCP Premier calculator.

Marcel:
And I would recommend everybody to take a look at that because it’s very interesting how much you can estimate the increase in terms of conversions just by tweaking some of these key metrics in more performance.

Mike:
It can help a lot to put things into perspective for the clients. It’s not based on a specific niche. It’s aggregated data that people and Google Analytics opted in to allow Google to track. So it’s from all niches across all different industries, and it gives us the best idea of if we can improve the LCP from X to Y, and if you know your average order value, the amount of customers that come

per month, and one other piece I can’t remember, you can see how much more revenue you will get if you make that improvement in the LCP. It can help shortcut some of the conversations about price. If you’re saying, oh, it’s going to cost $10,000 or $20,000 to do this reworking of the site or whatever, and they can see, oh, that sounds expensive, but if you use the calculator they can see, oh, that’s going to mean half a million extra in potential profit from a business perspective, it becomes a much easier decision.

Marcel:
And clients do have sort of the first impression that they get when we present them these numbers and we talk about this specific calculator you’re talking about and they go, oh, that sounds too much or that sounds too good to be true and all of that. But you’ve done that. You actually have some cases on a website where you improve some clients’ websites and it really turned into more profit. So that’s something that clients will notice after you do performance tweaks and it’s something that is absolutely incredible how they suddenly start believing in you and suddenly start seeing how important performance is to their funnel and to the sales and conversions and all of that. It sort of makes you feel a little bit like a magician or a special god of some sorts when you get to that point and then that client is hooked to you forever, I would say.

Mike:
Yeah, it’s a very effective way to establish trust for the long-term because a lot of this stuff when it comes to performance is unknown for a client. We all know technology is unreliable, unpredictable, we can have the best intentions, we can make all these plans and then something that we didn’t anticipate can mess things up. And so I think even if you have these case studies and you have lots of proof and stories, clients are still a little bit like, ah, but maybe that won’t work for us. So when it does, I can see the struggle in their faces and that hesitation like, ah, they’re taking that leap, jumping off the cliff and spending the money where things could not get any better. That’s one of their main concerns, that it’s not going to provide the return on investment. Fortunately, when you follow a specific methodology, and I’m sure this is true for anyone who’s worked with performance, if the client is getting enough traffic, if the user experience of the site is otherwise good, their business model is sound. When you’re improving the performance, it always makes sense within reason. Of course, once you get to a certain point, unless you’re Amazon or Walmart or a very large client, spending an extra $500,000 to improve performance is not necessarily going to make sense. But for smaller clients, the initial performance tuning is pretty much always worth it.

Marcel:
I guess being aware that it is an important factor when you go online and do sell products is step one to admit regardless of your size. And I’ve seen other big brands in Portugal and the companies who were selling online who initially didn’t give that much of a thought about performance and their websites were being slow and inconsistent and they were difficult to navigate. And since some time back, a couple of them have been actually working on their performance side and worrying about all these different key metrics we just talked about. And guess what? They’re selling better. And you usually think big companies and big brands, oh, they must for sure know about this. And you probably also think, oh, my client has been online selling this product for more than 10 years now. He heard about performance, he’s done everything that he can. Surprisingly, many people do not know about it in a way that affects immediately their conversion rate.

I wanted to talk also about plugins and the importance of plugins and especially the number of plugins that people install. They think they’re essential and they’re not. So my experience is more in terms of whenever I get hands on a website, it is performing very slowly. 30, 40 plus plugins are installed. Oh, when we start doing the audit and ask, do you need this plugin? What is this for? We certainly get rid of 10 immediately just by talking two minutes into the list of the plugins. And just that alone already cuts down the time considerably. And all the other plugins that are installed there are usually because there’s something missing on the e-commerce out-of-the-box features that people don’t have. And we’ve also seen WooCommerce iterating and adding some of those missing features into the core installation. But the number of plugins is also another thing that is very important to talk about, and that means also you need to update them and the more you have, the more security issues you have. You certainly also have multiple plugins that do the same function, or at least in their feature list they offer the same things and you just add things to the website that are absolutely not necessary.

So when it comes to choosing a plugin, it’s also important to know about their performance and how they affect performance and if they are built in a way that shows the concern of the author of the plugin was performance or not. We usually use plugins to do image optimizations, maybe to do caching as well. We’re going to talk about caching next. We use plugins basically to change features and to add features to WooCommerce. So plugins are very important. What is your experience with plugins? And you mentioned page builders. Page builders are plugins, but there are other nightmares that we can talk about when it comes to plugins and performance, right?

Mike:
Yeah, I mean my approach is similar to yours. It’s remarkable how frequently you ask just simple questions, why do you have three forms plugins or what is this for? And they say, oh, well we haven’t used that in six months or a year, or we don’t use that plugin or feature anymore. And I tell them what you said, every plugin is a security liability and a performance liability. So as soon as you don’t need it, treat your website like an F1 car. There’s nothing on an F1 car that doesn’t need to be there. If it has a specific purpose and provides some value in some way, it should be there, otherwise, there’s no reason to have it. But otherwise, I would say the plugin quality is much more important than the plugin quantity. So I have seen websites that have 90 plugins and perform very, very well.

It’s absolutely possible, but it’s usually these heavier plugins that have lots of bundled features, 80% of which you don’t use, and then you do that 10 times and you can see them in the profiling, code profiling, tools, plugins that are just finding out, do I need to run or running unnecessarily on pages. For example, a client I mentioned earlier, Bingbot. Bingbot was crawling a product archive page and it was triggering the membership plugin to see if the Bingbot had access to the particular pages of products on that product category page because the way the plugin was configured was to grant access based on categories and I was like, it’s ridiculous. First of all, a bot isn’t going to log in and take any courses or download any products, but there was literally no reason for the membership plugin to execute. So that was down to code quality in my experience and making sure that plugins, pretty much most plugins I see, do not have the logic to find out, do I need to execute here? Do I need to do anything here before it starts to process its own code? And I think that’s why when people complain about WooCommerce being slow or WordPress being slow, it’s not the core of WordPress being slow, it’s all the other extra stuff that you added usually that is causing those kinds of experiences.

Marcel:
And when it comes to choosing a particular plugin that has a particular feature, you obviously have a bunch of different plugins out there, and usually what I tell people is, well, you could hire a developer to make a more informed decision about how the code quality is and how the plugin works and how it performs, but if you don’t have the resources to hire an expert when you buy these plugins, basically, I guess looking at the plugin’s reviews and seeing what other people are saying or maybe just trying to get a feel of if you see a plugin that is promoting bundled features that are 30, 40, 50 and they are expanding way beyond whatever the core function of the plugin is, it usually means that they are bloated and they’re not very specifically oriented to the feature that they were talking about. When we did plugins for other companies here at our agency, some of them wanted to expand to other areas that were not the core focus of their plugin initially.

So for a developer, it’s very hard to keep consistency and keep the code in a shape that is solely focused on the core feature it was intended to be in the first place. So if you start doing other features and start adding other elements to the plugin, for the developer or developer team who is responsible for making it perform well, it’s going to be very hard for them to just focus on that particular feature, so that is very important. Next on the list is caching. We talked about caching. There are three main techniques of caching I think we can say. There is page caching, which are static versions of pages that are stored usually on the hosting side. We have object caching, which caches database queries so that they do not need to be executed every time somebody gets into a page. And we also have browser caching, which is telling the browser to store certain resources locally and not have them transmitted all over again. Caching is probably one of the hardest things to manage and to talk about because most of the hosting companies already say, we have the best caching solution and technique, just come with your website and host with us, and you’re going to have the latest caching technology. Then when you dive in and want to control some aspect of the caching, you usually have no idea what they’re doing behind the scenes and they don’t tell you what resources and what techniques they’re using behind the

scenes. So this is a very important topic. It’s a very difficult topic as well from a developer’s perspective because usually people think, oh, we just throw in a bunch of plugins like WPRocket or WP Total Cache or whatever other plugins there are, and the site will be faster, and then you hire a developer and the developer goes in and starts thinking about what is going on. We have all this caching going on, and what do you think about caching? Is it up in earliest as an important part? And also it’s important to talk about the different pages that we have within WooCommerce. We have the checkout, the cart, we have a catalog, we have the first page, so not all of these pages are treated equally when it comes to caching. Right?

Mike:
There’s also two other little pieces of caching too. There’s fragment caching, which is rarely used but handy to cache partial pieces of the page and CDN caching, edge caching, I would argue. Yeah, but I know that those are typically not considered under the umbrella in the same way. It’s not the ones that pop up first in mind, and I think with object caching too, you can also cache the results of API calls. I think we’ve done that before for clients with really slow calls that need to fetch something from some API that takes a couple of minutes, and instead of doing that every page load, we store it in a transient. But yes, caching is very, very important. I think in terms of the order that we discuss things, the hosting, the theme, plugins, caching, they’re all really, really the first points of call when it comes to doing audits and making sure things are running well. I think page caching is probably the most important one to get right because everything else will, like you said, the LCP will depend on your time to first byte, which is tremendously improved once you get page caching working, and if you again can leverage edge caching on top of that, you can save usually another 100, 200, 300 milliseconds, which can speed up the other components.

Marcel:
Especially the initial page. The homepage is probably one of the easiest pages to cache, and because it is the point of entry to the website, it just gives you the first impression that we’re looking for it to be fast and clicky and all of the links that go from the first page to specific products and maybe category pages and all of that, those are very easily cacheable pages, right?

Mike:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like the pieces where there aren’t dynamic components that need to do post requests or fetch something from the database particular to that visitor, that kind of stuff. I certainly encourage people to build their homepages like that so that they’re very cache-friendly and we don’t have to worry about users seeing something they’re not supposed to or those kinds of things compared to if you have product category pages where you have something with facets where you can filter and drill down, you’re fetching a lot of information straight from the database, which I noticed…

Marcel:
Even with those pages, you can still cache them. Usually filtering options that you have on the website, in the cases where the number of combinations are not in the millions, if they’re in the hundreds, it’s not difficult to cache all the different variations when it comes to filtering and having fast filtering is one of the biggest challenges in a WooCommerce store. But if you’re small and if you have the knowledge and if you can hire a developer to do that, we developers have the resources to cache those filtered pages as well, right?

Mike:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think you even built something for, I forgot the name of it, but you built a filter plugin for a client that is actually selling it.

Marcel:
Well, in that particular version we did a little, the client had this awesome idea to just provide the browser with the initial results of the filtered products, but it wasn’t directly related to the caching part, but here’s the deal, it benefits greatly from page caching because the information that comes with the page source is already enough for people to feel the filtering to be very fast. It’s the perceived part that we talked about at the beginning, but it’s not caching everything, but it’s caching just enough for people to think this is super fast. And yes, that was one of the techniques that they used, but even if you don’t have that, even if you have a page caching system where the first customer goes in is the one who generates the HTML for that particular cache, and then the second one that does the same, the same filtering options will be served the cached version of it, and that’s…

Mike:
Possible, and I think with filtering too, you get, so you can do both page caching and basically object caching is what I would call it when you are storing them in the database or if you can cache the query string, get parameters from, if that’s how the facet plugin is working, then you get to leverage Varnish or Nginx or whatever other caching plugin you might be using, and that’s one cool way to do it. But then if that isn’t cached, it fetches it straight from a transient inside the database is the next best thing. So I know some people don’t like having layers of cache because you can have stale cache and you don’t want the user to be delivered expired data, but I think if you get things configured correctly, everything helps boost one another. It’s the same thing with page caching locally on the host and page cache on the edge with Cloudflare or a similar solution.

It’s always better if Cloudflare wants to cache your homepage that when you deliver the page to Cloudflare, if you can give a cached version that’s way faster than taking two to three seconds for time to first byte to then deliver it to Cloudflare. So I think it’s important to consider these aspects in the performance strategy and get things, there might be some little fine-tuning or issues to iron out as you’re rolling out caching, and a lot of planning is usually a good idea with clients asking them what’s the typical user journey? What different types of users and avatars do we have on the site? How do they navigate through the site so that we can make sure we’re considering all types of users? Also for employees, the customers are the ones giving money to the WooCommerce store, but the people who need to work on the backend processing orders, support tickets, that kind of stuff, I think it’s important they have a good experience as well, and you won’t be able to use page caching as much for them, but there’s certain object caching and similar techniques you can use for their tasks daily that can make it a better experience.

They get more productive, store owners are happier and all of that stuff.

Marcel:
And then you have the cart pages and the checkout pages, which obviously cannot be page cached. Maybe parts of it can be object cached because there are elements in there that are repetitive for all customers, but then it goes back to what we were saying before about hosting, right? For those pages, you need to rely on the quality of the CPU, memory, SSD and all of that to render those pages fast enough because it’s not just enough to do a fast homepage and category pages and product pages. If people get to the cart and then to the checkout and the page takes 10 seconds to load, you just basically lost the client right there.

Mike:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it’s something to really get nailed down. I think it’s okay for the final checkout when people press after they’ve added their billing details, credit card number, all of that, pressing that final button, it needs to communicate with the payment gateway or API calls back and forth. I think people accept and understand that that could take a bit of time…

Marcel:
Like that everywhere in every single site,

Mike:
But getting to that stage shouldn’t take long. I think especially with mobile browsers nowadays, you can autofill pretty much all of the fields and WooCommerce is so popular and widespread that unless you’ve done a lot of customization to the fields or whatever like the Google Chrome Safari or whatever, I think we’ll be able to figure it out. We can’t cache those pages, but it’s still, so maybe you might be able to do some fragment caching if you still have the menu in there and it’s a mega menu, super complicated. We could cache that, so that’s not taking up unnecessary time. I don’t think that many users are going into the menu at…

Marcel:
That point. Yeah,

Mike:
Or you might have a footer, I’ve seen this before. We have a footer widget or some piece that is contacting Instagram or doing something else blocking the right page and the user isn’t even going to see it, but it still is preventing the checkout flow from progressing…

Marcel:
Quickly. Yeah, I was going to take the last minutes that we have for this episode. Just to sum quickly, so we have chosen our hosting company, we have chosen our theme and we have a set of plugins that we chose. We learned about caching and what the different caching versions are, and now we’ve installed everything and we run the website and it’s slow. The website is not moving at all. Then we need to talk about, and we’ve already talked about core web vitals, so we have different diagnosing tools that we can use to understand why the site is slow, because if we followed all of the advice that we’re given, we’ve chosen the right hosting, the theme is not big, the number of plugins is reduced, and we only have the ones that we really need. We’ve tweaked, we spent hours tweaking the caching and the site is still taking two seconds to load the homepage. For example, core web vitals are the first thing to go to and to measure. How do you do that? How do you measure core web vitals?

Mike:
Yeah, there’s definitely using a front-end tool like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, WebPageTest. We’ve seen those at the perf now

conference…

Marcel:
PerfNow Conference. Yes,

Mike:
They all run some piece of Lighthouse nowadays. You used to have to use Google PageSpeed Insights, it’s called I think something else now. Anyway, web.dev/measure. So they all just have different ways of running Lighthouse and then presenting the data to you differently. So I like WebPageTest the most. It’s the geekiest, so it could be quite overwhelming for people. I think GTmetrix does a really good job of presenting the data in a more digestible way that isn’t overwhelming and it gives you a good amount of insights and Google PageSpeed. I think because it’s the official Google tool, people like to use that and it feels like it’s more credible, trustworthy…

Marcel:
And it will tell you also about SEO because you want to appear on Google results and at the top eventually, and that particular tool will give you more information about that specific part of the performance.

Mike:
It tells you if you’re failing the core web vitals for that particular page or for your entire website, depending on how much traffic you’re getting. I believe WebPageTest does that as well. It has the crux Google Chrome user experience metrics, but that’s only Chrome data, which is important to remember. It’s the same thing on PageSpeed Insights that it’s not collecting that information from other non-Google Chrome browsers. But yeah, those tools, I mean we can do a whole workshop on those. There’s a bunch of courses on them, so advanced and rich in what they can do. But yeah, that’s why a lot of people, they come to me and they say, Hey, I ran this and it’s slow. I don’t understand this report. Sometimes those reports are oversimplified where there’s a lot of pieces that they miss or that they say, oh, the LCP element is this, and it’s like, well, why is it taking eight seconds? Usually it’s JavaScript related or something else, but it could also be the time the first byte was six seconds, so that takes someone who has experience and to decrypt, I think, or understand things more.

Marcel:
Do you have a favorite tool?

Mike:
Well, no, it’s basically just the ones that you talked about, but what I think is the most important one, I don’t want to say there’s a most important one, but I do feel like the Google’s tool is a good starting point for people to understand a little bit what’s going on because they also give, I don’t want to say simple instructions on how to fix those because they’re not, probably not simple when they say to reduce image sizes or when they say to lazy load some scripts and all of that stuff. Usually as a store owner, you don’t really know what to do, and even as a developer, you suddenly think, oh, so if I just lazy load all this stuff and I just delay all the loading of the JavaScript, that will fix it. But then I start thinking, oh, how do I determine which ones are not necessary and how do I determine which ones the clients need if they change something on a homepage? Suddenly it’s the script that does this funny animation or has this slider going on. So it’s very hard for people to understand, and I think Google’s tool is the one that gives you a starting point to start figuring out what’s going on. They do this coloring with red, yellow, and I think that’s all the colors, the important colors they use to pinpoint all the most important parts of it, and if you manage to figure out some of those points, you’re already in a good starting point and then you can use all the other tools you mentioned to just fine tune specific parts of it. But once you have the results and once you have some indications on the website specifically what’s going on, being it a section of the website, an image problem, JavaScript problem, whatever it is, then it basically comes back to the theme setup and how to properly set up the theme.

Usually if you go with an existing theme, there are options that you can turn on and off and by those on and off, you will then obviously maybe not load some of the scripts if the theme is done properly, if they have taken care of just not loading scripts they don’t need for that particular page. This is where page builders come in very handy, and that’s why I’m a huge, huge fan of Gutenberg and all the Gutenberg experience because it’s very performance-focused. But then again, you will optimize the heavy scripts, the styles, you will disable some theme features. As we talked about, mobile performance is also something that you will fine tune and then you suddenly… Let’s move on to the story and end with this. Then suddenly you realize, okay, I’ve fixed all of these problems. I have a faster website. I have fixed most of the problems they were told to me to fix. How do you keep record of the website’s performance and how do you go about making sure that this first initial tweak that you did is going to keep up with your website and you’re going to maintain all of that performance throughout the whole existence of the website? What is your tip as a final tip on how developers or clients can diagnose the performance throughout the whole time that it exists?

Mike:
Yeah, I’ll make it short. I think it’s important to focus on both lab tests, which are these synthetic tests you run through GTmetrix and other tools, and then also look at the real user metrics, which is what actual people are experiencing, and then diagnose as much as you can using those tools and having some kind of performance budget in mind in terms of what kind of space do we have for, what are we going to allow for the LCP to be? What are we going to allow for the time to first byte to be? How much JavaScript, what’s the overall payload for the entire front page that we’re going to allow to be not larger than 500 kilobytes, for example, would be great. Sometimes it might be way larger and sort of tracking with a spreadsheet or screenshots or whatever you can, and sort of dating those to make sure that things are staying within your thresholds that you’ve defined, I think is a good starting point unless you have a whole performance team dedicated.

What we’ve seen at the conference, these big companies like IKEA, they have dedicated performance teams whose job is to make sure everything is running smoothly and they interface with the departments. I don’t think that’s realistic for a lot of companies, but we can still take some of the ideas and sort of track things. I think that most importantly is don’t just assume that once you’ve made a change performance-wise or whatever, that it’s going to persist indefinitely forever because the website is usually a living, breathing thing. You do updates to the plugins, etc. People tend to add more features and sometimes a plugin update can introduce a new performance bottleneck and it’s important to match that…

Marcel:
Or changing the homepage, or you have a different hero section, you have something different in your homepage and you suddenly think it looks way better. I’m going to sell a lot more, and then it suddenly affects one of the key metrics, for example.

Mike:
Yeah, exactly. If someone has hired a designer to implement something and you’re like, oh, this is beautiful, but the page has increased to five megabytes and all your metrics are way, way off, now aesthetically it might be better, but you’re going to end up losing money. In my experience, so I think having it in your workflow, whatever size company you are, to do some kind of testing to make sure that the performance is still good after you’ve made major changes or even minor ones. I think it’s important because people, business owners, will always check the money side of things and when they notice all of a sudden that conversion rates are down or have been trending downwards over a few months and they feel it in their wallet, that’s a very frustrating position to be in and it’s nicer to catch…

Marcel:
And they usually probably think, oh, it’s something with my marketing or advertisement, or there’s something with the products or reviews and they usually don’t think it might be the performance part of the website that is damaging their sales.

Mike:
Yeah, exactly.

Marcel:
So regularly monitoring the site performance is our advice as a last piece of advice for today’s episode. New Relic, it doesn’t store information that much, but it is a tool that you can use to just analyze regularly your website’s performance. Google PageSpeed Insights is something that some of the hosting providers have embedded in their system and some of them can also give you some notifications if you reach certain values that are not recommended. And I think GTmetrix, I’m not sure, is the one that you can also buy a subscription and have it regularly measure and analyze your website and send you insights to your inbox for you to be aware of…

Mike:
Yeah, GTmetrix actually even lets you, if you pay them a subscription, you can have it alert you if certain metrics have exceeded. If you say, I don’t want LCP larger than 2.5 for your product category page or whatever, it will actually send you an email and alert. And that goes back to the proactivity aspect, right? Where it’s better to find that out and do something about it immediately rather than finding out three months later. And revenue is down, morale…

Marcel:
And it also provides actionable recommendations as well. All right, so we talked about a bunch of stuff today. CDN, database optimization, image optimization, lazy loading, plugins, themes, performance key metrics, all of that could be potentially a bunch of other episodes that we’ll talk about. And actually it would be cool to bring somebody else as a guest to talk specifically about some of these key aspects. As a last recommendation, I think we can also talk about the PerfNow conference that happens in November in Amsterdam. You’ve been going to the conference before and you’ve recommended that conference to me last year and I went there last year with you. And

although within WordPress and WooCommerce we’re only used to go to the WordCamps and the different versions of those, PerfNow has… I haven’t seen the word WordPress ever in their website, but it has so much to do with our work and it has so much to do with the development work we do for WordPress. So I definitely recommend people checking out PerfNow. It happens in Amsterdam in November, it’s a conference that is not as big as any WordCamp, Europe or US or Asia that we’ve seen. And you get out of there with the will to just go back to your clients and say, hey, I’m going to make your website a lot faster now because I understand performance there. Would you recommend PerfNow as well?

Mike:
Oh, absolutely. The people who build the tools that we use and they’re pioneers of front-end performance and are sharing these incredible stories, a lot of them work for big companies and they give you real case studies where we’re talking millions of dollars at stake from making certain changes. And it always reinvigorates me every time I go where I’m like, oh, I need to build this now and we’re going to introduce this to clients and make everything better for them. If you’re a real performance enthusiast and love this stuff. I haven’t found a conference that’s more exhilarating than PerfNow and the people are super friendly. The vibe is really, really cool there. When we were there last…

Marcel:
And just being able to talk to the people who built all of these tools, they actually have something to say about what’s coming next and give advice on the evolution of all of this. So it seems also like you go to that conference and you’re in the future for the next one or two years and see what’s going to happen, what’s important. And the fact that you as a developer can offer that to the client and make money out of it and sort of turn yourself into their magician and do stuff that nobody else can do, that is super important.

Mike:
Yeah. It sets you apart for sure.

Marcel:
All right, this is it for our episode. Thank you so much for listening in and I hope to meet you guys in the next one.

Jonathan:
Welcome to another episode of Do the Woo. I’m your co-host, Jonathan Wold, and with me today is your other co-host, Tammie Lister. Tammie, how are you?

Tammie:
I’m good, thank you. How are you?

Jonathan:
I am excellent. Excited to be doing the Woo once again. We are joined today by Nate Stewart. He is the VP of Platform Strategy at BigCommerce. Nate, welcome.

Nate:
Hi. Happy to be here.

Jonathan:
And where in the world are you joining us from today?

Nate:
In Puerto Rico.

Jonathan:
How is the climate in Puerto Rico this time of year?

Nate:
It’s great. You know, we just had a hurricane pass through and push a little bit of the humidity out. Now it’s back to normal, everything’s fine here. Other than that, it’s nice and beautiful.

Jonathan:
Excellent. So Nate, you are not a stranger to the show. It’s just over four years ago, episode 64, you were a guest on Do the Woo. A lot has happened since. What are you working on at BigCommerce these days?

Nate:
I’m working on, believe it or not, some of the same things we talked about, just in more elevated forms. Like, I think a lot of what we talked about last time was more of an ambition to support openness and bring open into the core of BigCommerce. Around that time, we talked a lot about how we’re open SaaS, like we want to be the open SaaS commerce platform, the leader. And that was more of a future-focused vision of where we wanted to sit in the market, what we wanted to support. Now, a lot of that is reality. We’ve invested multiple years into making that true and that changes a lot, I think, in a good way, of how we work with the WordPress ecosystem, how we work with pretty much everybody’s way of working. We want to feel like you enjoy and love and cherish a lot of different platforms and technologies and ways of working. And we want to be the platform that makes you feel at home because we trust that you have good taste and you like what you like because it has value. So yeah, all that has kind of become true. I’m really just making sure we get the most value ourselves and everyone else with that strategy.

Jonathan:
I recall. It’s been great to watch over the years too, that you were talking about that then and there were some hints of it, but BigCommerce’s public position, because you’re of course a public company, that’s a whole other game to be talking publicly about this open SaaS strategy. It takes time to carry this out. So it’s interesting to see that it’s like we had that four years ago, you were talking about it. Now you have a lot more evidence that you can point to. Your investment in the WordPress ecosystem is how many, like, is it five plus years now that you’ve been in this space? Before we had you on the show, you’d already been at it for a while.

Nate:
Yeah, I think definitely in terms of when the first couple of WordCamps, big and small, we were doing research and meeting the community. That was like six, seven years ago. It took some time to build the plugin, but a lot of that was just coming from, at the time, we had hundreds and hundreds of merchants that already had WordPress running alongside their BigCommerce store. It was like, wait a minute, where does this data take us if we keep going? So that led us into the community. And then, I mean, myself, I kind of fell in love with just how it felt almost like what it felt like as I learned the web and grew into the person I am. I was like, oh, this feels true to who I am as well. And I think that’s just part of why I really fight to stick in any ecosystem where there’s that truth there and that it resonates with people. It’s not just a bunch of corporate marketing. There’s value beyond it. So yeah, that’s like six, seven years ago. It feels like a totally different world than six, seven years ago. But a lot of what stayed the same is kind of what I’m talking about, you know, at work and in the communities I’m focused on.

Jonathan:
This is a WooCommerce-focused podcast, right? And one of the things that I’ve liked about BigCommerce from the beginning is that you didn’t have this anti-WooCommerce stance, but perception and reality are two different things. And I think early on, a lot of folks, like you had a product, your first plugin, for instance, was focused on more of this small business use case where BigCommerce… Well, let’s start with this. How do you think about the WooCommerce ecosystem? Because you have competitors in the space. You compete with Shopify and other proprietary platforms, but with this open SaaS strategy, how is it that you think about WooCommerce?

Nate:
Yeah, I think about it as a major part of the journey for decision merchants looking to easily make their vision a reality. You don’t start by coming onto a platform like BigCommerce and using every feature. You start many times with your marketing presence, with what you know. Some people are already blogging in WordPress and want to create a business, and it makes perfect sense to start there. So Woo is the first place that I feel most people should look because it’s so well supported. It’s just the default for that space. But then it’s a journey, right? So at which part of the journey does either WordPress or WooCommerce hit a little bit of a snag, where at that point you’re like, wait a minute, I need to get out of WordPress, get out of Woo. I don’t think that’s a positive decision. It shouldn’t be binary. It should be, hey, what part is it working and how do you retain everything you put into it and add on for the next level of your growth? That’s kind of the way I feel about Woo. I have a lot of respect for Woo. I feel a lot of really smart agencies and developers are creating really cool experiences in Woo. I like seeing that. I like seeing innovation in the space because it’s open source, you can do that.

Jonathan:
And I think the key for me lies in that open SaaS strategy because we’re no strangers to proprietary platforms that work within our space, like Jetpack and other products like it are proprietary and there’s the SaaS component, but they’re all in on the WordPress ecosystem. Whereas other platforms, like Shopify, it’s zero-sum, right? They want everything there. It’s like you’re choosing Shopify, you’re also doing the CMS and everything. And that’s what stood out to me the most about the approach you guys have taken, embracing the choice. You want to use WordPress, you want to use WooCommerce, that’s fantastic. We’re here to support you. What’s made it clearer, and you tell me Nate, is, as the years have gone on, your emphasis on the enterprise has made a lot more straightforward. Whereas early on, it was more of an overlay because you started out as a small business-focused platform. That enterprise shift has taken a number of years to get to this point.

Nate:
Yeah, I mean, I believe we’re on the 15th year of BigCommerce being the name of the company. The backstory is a couple of years before that it was actually like you got the code and you ran it yourself back in the day. And it evolved into a SaaS platform, right? That was because early days, e-comm, it was much harder to scale and support by, you know, much greater, like, let’s say 10X. I don’t know the exact thing, but it just, you wanted, people were reaching out, going, I love this, but I want it hosted for me. And now hosting and other tech has made it to where it’s less of a, it’s more fuzzy between open and SaaS. And I think it’s part of our journey. So we went from the code to SaaS. It was SMB only because in the beginning, e-comm days, we didn’t have all the advanced features we have now. You built a cart, you built a catalog, you built all those pieces. But over the years, you get to where the people that need the most help with their architecture and functionality, they need way more complex features. You naturally get into mid-market and then enterprise. So we’ve kind of been on that journey, and because we’ve invested in the open strategy a while ago, it bodes well for enterprise, really well. Typically, that’s what you see in any software platform landscape. The more enterprise, the more APIs they have, the more ecosystem. Whether you want to get locked into, I would almost say, closed suite versus open suite, you see a lot of those strategies in different ways play out. We are more of the open suite, you know, we want to make it easy to package. And that includes you want to use WordPress and you want to use WooCommerce in a different part of our product catalog, if you will, like our suite. We want to open up pathways to that for the enterprise, and even before that to where it’s not a binary decision. It’s what’s best for you as you are growing.

Jonathan:
And I think a good example of that to me, and we can touch on it more later, is you have products that people don’t know about, like Feedonomics, that have WooCommerce support built into it. It’s a product that’s focused on your product feeds out to various endpoints. And you could use WooCommerce in that. It’s a BigCommerce

product. The last question I have for you on this topic before we switch gears: WooCommerce has a mission to democratize commerce, which is connected to the WordPress mission to democratize publishing, right? I’d love to hear your thoughts on what role you see BigCommerce playing in supporting that mission. How do you think about that mission?

Nate:
Yeah, one that kind of echoes six, seven years ago when I was kind of indoctrinated in the community, the whole 51% I think is maybe the clearest way we help to get to 51% of the web, which much of that is commerce. When you actually look at the longstanding site, I think right now what happens, the trend I’ve seen is when you start in WordPress, you layer on WooCommerce, and then when you hit that decision point of, well, maybe it’s not as fast as I wanted, or it’s getting complex for the different plugins and the agencies I’m working with are quoting that I should migrate off to something else. It’s at that point where if we make it easier to just uplevel the pieces of your WordPress stack to keep you on WordPress as you evolve, then both WordPress and many times Woo benefit from that. That’s how you get to the 51% and more. You find those strategies in the WordPress community where there are partners like us that go, hey, let’s keep that stat. Let’s keep building it together. I want to see a world where WordPress goes beyond 51% and we are a part of that journey and celebrating together, knowing that we’re talking about a journey here, not a one-off decision you make when you have a new problem.

Tammie:
I’d really like to move us from that. You mentioned the toolkit, the suite, and we looked at how we have this kind of blue. I want to consider the space for commerce and builders. You mentioned this suite. What has been the most exciting thing to explore and experiment with product-wise lately? You mentioned layers and complexities, but what does that feel like building in, and how have you been exploring and building in that? What have you been exploring and building in that even? That’s a big question.

Nate:
Yeah. One of the things that I mentioned earlier, we had hundreds of merchants back in the day, which led us in the direction that were using WordPress on the side, meaning they had their site and then a shop dot. Now because of the plugin, but also because of things like headless and composability, it’s more nuanced than that. And now with the Gutenberg editor, it’s been this way for a while. You have blocks and whatnot. You can go, wait, if you already have your marketing site up there and you want to layer on commerce and you’re already closer to the mid-market enterprise, right? Because you maybe have a big B2B business and you’re going to B2C. So you’re already at scale with complexity. Well, I’ve been plugging with a team a little bit around how would we integrate Gutenberg and existing stuff that you have, you made a decision like your theme and your blocks, into our open-source storefront framework that we built called Catalyst. That way, you get to retain what you built on WordPress and via the Gutenberg kind of standard blocks. So to me, one of the interesting things here is how, and this is an area I’d like to work more with people to solve. Blocks are almost there. The API, it feels in any like the WP GraphQL and REST, you can get to the point where it feels like it should work 100%, but you run into issues in actual live implementations where, okay, there’s not really a standard where you can go from WordPress React into static or into now with like Next.js and the newest app router, React server components, how you transition from, I get this block, it’s a form plugin, I have this type of React running on my headless instance. How do I make it work to where on the front end of the editor it works and then WordPress? I want that to look and feel the same way. That actually gets very complex very quickly. And I think whoever works in solving that problem where we can get there together will radically improve how people are using Gutenberg, how we work through these migration strategies that don’t push you off of WordPress and off of Woo, but go, hey, this block works well for you here, this block is not performant, should we go headless? Should we just replace that block? Anyway, I’ve been plugging away with the team about that, working with several different agencies in this space to go, what’s your opinion? And yeah, there’s a lot there. I think Gutenberg is really cool, and personally, even on the weekend I’m hacking around occasionally, you might see me going like, what’s the new thing? But it’s funny how, I mean, it’s been years since it was released and some of those pain points are still there, right? We have to ask ourselves why. If they’re migrating out because we don’t know how to use blocks, that’s not even a core commerce thing. That’s just in general, I think that more could be done there.

Tammie:
I like how you’re kind of touching on it by what you are saying, which is you never, you don’t find those, I always call them stress cases, not edge cases because they cause you stress when you hit them rather than them being edge cases because they might only be for one person, but it could be really important that that one person hits them by the experimentation. So I think one of the answers, and it’s one of many, is people haven’t maybe explored some of these combinations. So that’s what really, for me personally, and I think a lot of people, is curious about these experiments that you’re doing. But I’d love, in what you’ve been creating in your own experiments, how have you discovered this to be uniquely different to building this space? Because it is a little bit uniquely different, these stacks, like you’ve shared about the complexities and the layers, but it kind of is shifting sands a little bit in places. What are some of the other differences that you’ve thought about as you are creating these spaces?

Nate:
I think one that, again, this is more of a background thought the whole time. One decision we made early on was to do it 100% the WordPress way. And we, everything being in the community and the research and all the agencies and builders we talked to, they’re like, there’s the WordPress way, you build the template, it’s PHP, all of that. Gutenberg was happening as that. But no one really, it’s almost like people didn’t want it to succeed. It was a very weird feeling, but we got over that hump overall as a community. But during that early, you’re talking like six years ago plus, that WordPress way kind of limited us in terms of what Gutenberg was really trying to accomplish, which is being more modular, being more JavaScript-forward, React-forward. So now I have this, again, it’s a background thought of instead of, you know, the plugin being like the WordPress way templates, being more components by default, it’s really just React as the page loads reading out from an API. And yes, there’s a downside to, you know, you don’t have things in the table in the options table and other aspects. There’s maybe a loading artifact a little bit there where the page loads and then it reads the data. But the benefit is you are fully compatible with the static hosting trend that’s happening in the WordPress space and overall web development in general. It actually forces you to polish your API on your other end a lot better, making sure that caching and just performance in general is better at the API level. So I feel as a platform that is integrating that mode makes your product better for everyone by integrating that way. So I’ve had that thought come up a lot. The downside is there’s effort there to change, and there’s also feedback from the community where there are millions of people that love the WordPress way. And there’s the thought there, and what does the WordPress way even mean anymore? I’ve had this thought of it, isn’t it Gutenberg? Isn’t it blocks? So yeah, all that.

Tammie:
I think it’s fascinating that the WordPress way, maybe it should be adapting. Maybe the whole point about the WordPress way is that it isn’t a fixed way, and we maybe thought it was like chiseled, and it wasn’t chiseled. I think this is such a fascinating discussion. I want to skip back a couple of steps to something you were saying because you very clearly have an understanding of builders and you very clearly have an understanding both from your own tinkering, I love that word, and exploring. So that translates into what is being created. And I think that is incredibly important when you are creating these suites and trying to also create tools. Can you explain a little bit more how that translates into the products that you are offering as well? Because I think there’s something in there as well that we’ve been talking about and getting super excited about the API and the experiments. But how does that then translate into the products?

Nate:
So I think we’re really in this multi-product territory now. You can’t be truly open if the only way to get value is to combine everything the same way every time. That’s not open. That becomes closed in general, like entering the walled garden. And so I think what we’ve evolved over the years is formally, we’ve made acquisitions as a company. You mentioned Feedonomics, they’re doing very well outside of the BC ecosystem as well as in. They actively support all of our competitors, all our commerce competitors. When you go to feedonomics.com, it’s very hard to find any mention of BigCommerce. It’s very much its own product offering. Because we’re underneath the same umbrella, we work under the same constraints of, okay, when we need to ship a

feature and it’s using their technology, we build like a partner would, right? We don’t have internal things that are cheating. That helps everyone and helps us keep an honest open strategy. That’s why Woo fits into their strategy in a big way. They have many large WooCommerce customers and they have kept them on Woo and WordPress, and that’s okay because that product still grows their business. Let’s be honest, it’s easier to keep people happy if you don’t go into their house and say everything’s terrible. You can make comments, you know, they might not like the couch, but you don’t tell them to move. They like their community, right? Another example of this is Makeswift. They’re a recent acquisition, again, an independent company still like Feedonomics. They are a visual editor for Catalyst and our next-gen storefront. However, if you want to use Makeswift with WordPress, with WooCommerce, with any of our commerce competitors, they don’t become a competitor. If you like Makeswift, you’re not ready for BigCommerce, you’ve invested a lot in your current stack, that’s fine. There are interesting things with Makeswift because it is composable by nature. It is built from the ground up to support the latest in React and React server components, all that where Gutenberg is more of the default. It is React and the new way, but its APIs and all aren’t in the same ecosystem. You could technically use the Gutenberg API in the Makeswift visual editor and get the development flow you want while still retaining WordPress. It’s almost like WordPress as I know Jonathan you said in the past as the operating system. It has the API. There are all these interesting things that can happen when we’re multi-product. We’re not single platform where you buy it as a product. I think that’s one of the ways that we enable builders in a different way, and each of those separate products have different APIs and ways you can utilize them.

Jonathan:
One of the big switches over the past couple of years has been this increasing emphasis on enterprise, right? That’s the transition that you’ve been making. Multi-product is a good example of how you carry out that promise. You’re giving flexibility, especially in the enterprise, where that flexibility matters. They may have policies for using this or that, or they want just a piece of it. That’s a good example. Let’s talk about enterprise more and start with this: how do you define enterprise? What is that definition within the BigCommerce context?

Nate:
Yeah, for us, the way we define enterprise, it’s more like the size of their annual revenue, their employee count, it’s a blend, and they’re opting into being a part of our enterprise plan. It’s nuanced because typically you have a lot of platforms like products out there that are like, we’re enterprise or not. They come in and it’s like, okay, they have to be at a hundred million in annual revenue, they have to be XYZ. What we’ve found is you could have someone with a tremendous amount of revenue and they are very efficient because of the type of product they sell. There are DIYs and a lot of owner-operators, if you will. I believe there are a lot of those in the WordPress ecosystem. It’s known for that. People say, I’ll do it myself and I actually know how to code, design, and operate it. But that means why should they always pay the price for all the complexity of enterprise when they can handle a lot themselves? They might pay us a little bit less, where they’re not super enterprise, but they’re paying more in other ways that other people might not be able to pay, which means they’re putting in the blood, sweat, and tears to code and design themselves. But that persona, while they might appear more mid-market in terms of how they’re using it, they are an enterprise in revenue. We like to make it a real conversation with the brands we serve and everyone involved, where do you want the complexity to be? At the upper level, we handle a lot. Once you get to enterprise and you’re on an enterprise plan, we handhold a lot more, we’re a lot more with you building, helping you build, up to the point where you have dedicated people at certain levels of building your business. Some people might look at that and say, yeah, I know I’m generating a lot of revenue, but I don’t need that level. My personal opinion is everybody needs help and it’s going to make you sleep better at night when you have someone in your corner. But that openness goes into, well, let’s have a conversation. It’s a fuzzy line for mid-market and enterprise. High level, you’re talking like 50 million GMV, 25, around that territory, very clearly enterprise. It’s very rare for someone to opt out of that.

Jonathan:
This is where I get excited, looking at this through the WooCommerce lens. One of the risks we’ve seen over the past couple of years is people grow in WooCommerce, they like WooCommerce, they like WordPress, and then they start to hit the edges. There have been some great agencies, many of them coming onto the show, who’ve pushed the edges of WooCommerce and have innovated and figured out ways to make it scale further. And there’s also this feeling like it wasn’t designed for that. It’s an SMB-focused tool. While there’s a lot of room for growth, one of the things I’ve been intrigued about and been hoping to see more of is what it looks like to bring that enterprise capability from other players into the WooCommerce space. I think Feedonomics is a good example of that and would love to hear more about how you think about that. How can we, in the WooCommerce space, more successfully bring in enterprise capability? My hypothesis is that we can’t do it by just changing the core product because we have millions of store owners that count on that SMB approach that WooCommerce has taken. That’s the question. Right now, when people hit a certain point on WooCommerce and start to feel the edges, I think there’s a churn risk where people feel like they just have to leave entirely. My hypothesis is that doesn’t have to be the case. That’s where I see this opportunity with partners like BigCommerce being able to augment. How do you think about that? What would that look like practically?

Nate:
Practically, this is one case where being multi-product and having these independent companies that think about each ecosystem, they understand the APIs and aren’t filtering it through the BigCommerce lens. It means the Feedonomics team, the product knows how WooCommerce works, has a dedicated integration with them, and has been through this process day in and day out. Someone calls up going, hey, my sync, I have these plugins that are for my sales channels or advertising channels, and I’m getting to the point where it’s slowing down my site, or I don’t know how to support adding any more. I want to add five more channels. Keep in mind Feedonomics supports like 300 plus, maybe 400 plus, hundreds of sales channels. When things happen, like Target has a marketplace, you’ll hear our competitors make big announcements about it. But the reality is because Feedonomics is wholly dedicated to that, they’re working with Target and other marketplaces as the alpha of when they release functionality. There’s a huge benefit to going, all right, I don’t need to change WooCommerce at all. I’m already selling on sales channels. Let me get an easier-to-maintain site and way more sales channels. But again, you have to make that choice yourself, or an agency or developer working with a merchant. There is a cost, of course. It’s an open SaaS platform, but it is a SaaS platform. It’s a transition from a free plugin that I just have to pay someone to maintain or keep up with updates. It’s that cost transitioning to dollar cost, but you get the time back and peace of mind. It’s really that type of process. That’s why enterprise comes in. People coming in from, let’s say, they have half a million, a million in GMV, annual revenue, that’s probably not something that Feedonomics power is necessary for. You can just optimize Woo and the sales channels. But if you have questions like, I have 3 million in revenue, I’m growing faster than I can update, I have ideas and ambition to go into 10 more channels. Even if your site is working, if you can’t rapidly add 5, 10, 50 advertising, sales, and whatnot channels, and that’s your ambition, that’s when the right time is to talk. Again, it’s the journey. We talk a lot about the right journey and the merchant journey, having the right time, right place, rather than going, there’s one solution that fits everyone.

Tammie:
I’m going to pivot towards the end and imagine we’re kind of dreaming a little bit. We spoke about the past four years, but it’s panning away from products. There’s so much going on in this space, so many emerging trends, technologies. Let’s think initially for commerce builders, what should you be keeping an eye on if you’re building in this space now and in the next year? Then we can kind of get a bit dreamy after that.

Nate:
I’ve actually seen a lot of different podcasts and articles about this topic in this space recently. Static, and again, I talked about how does Gutenberg in the WordPress ecosystem play with that. Not static as just the end goal because why not? It’s fast and we should do it more. I think that will improve WordPress as a platform and other platforms integrating with it. If you think about the right separation of concerns and how the technology enables both approaches cleanly. As a builder, going, I’m building in a way that works for WordPress and its out-of-the-box state and WooCommerce’s out-of-the-box state. What happens next? Someone wants to go static, they want to use

Next.js, what do you do? Is what you built cleanly able to support that? As we think about our architecture and design of APIs, supporting both is better for everyone. It’ll create more opportunity for you as a builder, better for the end user. They’re more likely to stay in the WordPress ecosystem with what they built before because it can be translated into what’s next. A lot of what I’m talking about, we think deeply about composability and it’s almost a part of everything strategically that we’ve worked on recently and will work on in the future because of that reason.

Tammie:
I definitely align to that. All too often, before it was generally just like commerce, what does the front look like, and how do the transactions happen there? But now it’s kind of flipped in that sense. I’m going to flip that question though as well, segue. What buzzwords or tech should commerce creators avoid? Because I think there’s so much, as you were saying, there’s like podcasts and it can be really easy to be distracted or pile your feature set too high so that you then get problems. What makes your eye roll when you hear about someone adding and you’re like, you don’t need to add that, it’s not going to work, it’s not going to help someone?

Nate:
Yeah, I definitely think my eye rolls a bit when it’s AI without purpose. I think that’s kind of a softball question because a lot of people might say that. But what I mean with AI without purpose is if you’re chasing a perceptual win where it’s like, hey, I can have a chat interface here or look, you could ask it to do a theme and it does it. I feel like that’s removing research and analysis and understanding of the user from it. That’s just trying to achieve an end goal. Almost like what I said about static, don’t do static just because you hear a podcast about static. Do it because you understand the value of being able to transfer from one type of architecture to another. That changes how you build your thing. AI that has a purpose, like, okay, we’ve researched exactly how people are using our themes or integrating different APIs and we have a focused use of AI that’s tailor-made to accomplish that task or series of tasks faster. That’s awesome. I see a lot of people just layering it on. Especially in business, a merchant layering on random AI chat stuff, is it better than ChatGPT? Are you just trying to get a brand for yourself as a builder? I’m not discounting, some people that’s great early in your career, write up something and create and be like, hey, look at me. I know how to hit APIs for AI. But the reality is, does it make someone’s life better? And if it’s just a cool toy but it doesn’t make it better. That’s the difference. I’m not saying I know the answer perfectly. I had to look in the mirror and eye roll myself if I’m heading down. But if we just layered AI on top of that, we’re all capable of running into that peril of all I need to do is layer x feature or tech and it will solve my entire business.

Tammie:
I would plus one that so much. I think it is so easy to AI, is it a workflow or is it AI as well as also that thing? Does it get a hurdle? Okay, the last question I’m going to ask here though is kind of, it kind of segues the end of this. Four years from now, you come back on the podcast, what do you hope you have seen? It feels an inevitable one if we’re talking about the future to give my last question. If we’re talking about the future, I would say there are a million viewers or listeners of this podcast and you invite me back for some tropical villa special edition thing. I know that has nothing to do with technology. I’m just trying to put out some optimism and let the universe make it happen.

Jonathan:
I think Bob’s been talking about that, starting to take the hosts and putting us up. I think we’re going to get there.

Tammie:
Thank you, Bob. If you do it a year, Bob, I’d like some puppies if we’re doing that, that’s fine.

Nate:
I am trying to think about four. I feel kind of echo back on being able to celebrate together, getting WordPress. I don’t want to say modernize WordPress because I think WordPress is, people don’t give enough credit for modernizing as it goes. I actually think a lot of people have learned from Gutenberg without admitting it in other ecosystems. Modernize is the wrong word. It’s more perceptual. I think switching what people feel in the community and an internal perception of, hey, we have modernized, we’ve been through the pain of bleeding edge, trying to learn this stuff and into the rest of the planet by default going, okay, WordPress is in your stack, that’s great for these areas. Having a real conversation around it. Leveling the playing field with headless CMS where a lot of people had for years been using WordPress as a headless CMS. We’re not talking about the full journey, it’s like, which way are you using it with other parts of technology to get the most out of WordPress, out of WooCommerce at that stage. If in four years we’re having real conversations around that and we’ve done the technology work, everyone is better. That’s how you get to over 51% and beyond. It almost becomes like we’re, it’s not like WordPress, it could be, and again, I’m ripping off Jonathan, the WordPress as an OS. You think about Windows, Mac, iOS, all those different things. It’s close there now, but these things have to be solved to know how you interoperate and have all the standards where it doesn’t have to be like every use case is in WordPress. WordPress has to win at every stage of the journey. It has to be where you can hook in and out and get the most out of WordPress. It almost becomes a utility like an operating system long term. In four years, that’s happening. There will be so many more people using WordPress actively that we probably will be on a tropical villa for that episode because there will be so many new ideas and innovation there. I hope to be a little bit part of that journey.

Jonathan:
It’s interesting because we’ve been on this trajectory for a long time. Gutenberg, it is interesting to look back now. At the time, there was a lot of, I would argue that the work that Tammie and many others have done on that transition was in fact the WordPress way. What we see today with themes, we added all this complexity to themes in the WordPress space and now we’re getting back to how it was originally and things are getting simpler again. It takes a long time though. This vision of WordPress as an operating system for creating on the open web, I think we’re seeing it play out more and more. E-commerce is a great example of people building and saying, hey, I can create on the web, I want to add business into this context. I really appreciate the work that you guys have been doing at BigCommerce to recognize and be a part of that. That open SaaS strategy fits really well into that. What we see in the future is WordPress just being a ubiquitous part of a stack and a foundation that people can feel like, hey, I own this. It takes a long time though to catch up and bring that parity, features, and ways of doing things that builders need to be able to create confidently on it. Right now, it’s the people who really believe that are making it happen. That includes folks like yourselves investing into the space. Thank you for that. I look forward to seeing what the next four years bring. Nate, if anyone wants to connect with you further or learn more about what you guys are working on, what’s the best way to get in touch?

Nate:
On LinkedIn, Nate Stewart, search for that. Also Nate.stewart@bigcommerce.com. Feel free to email me. I’m not really on Instagram randomly taking pictures. I missed that whole thing. Definitely missed TikTok. I have an account on now X but I probably won’t actively respond. So LinkedIn and email. We also have our developer community. If you are a builder and you go in there and ping me, it’s a private community that anybody’s free to join. You go to developer.bigcommerce.com and go to the community section. We actually have a WordPress channel there that you could join in. I would love to see more people talking about how they’re using WordPress in our community. Or you could just reach out personally. Like I said, we’re working with a couple of agencies and leaders in the space just to think about what the future is here. The more voices we have that are stress testing that, the better it is.

Jonathan:
Excellent. We’ll also look forward to seeing you at future WordCamps as well. Nate, thanks for coming on and talk to you soon.

Tammie:
Thank you.

Nate:
Thank you.