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Saying goodbye to Marieke at Yoast
Last Friday (June 23rd 2023) we had Marieke‘s goodbye party from Yoast. With that, we’ve both completely stepped out at both Yoast and Newfold Digital, and can start to focus on new stuff. I wrote a speech for the occasion and thought it’d be a shame to not share it with the wider world: When…
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How to deal with plugin security issues
Dealing with security issues for your WordPress plugin can be hard and even a bit scary, certainly when it’s happening to you for the first time. In this post I try to outline all the steps you should take as a plugin developer. So, let’s dive in. This isn’t a short post, so here’s a…
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Gravity Forms notification routing with a lookup table
I had a need for complex routing of notification messages in Gravity Forms. The email could, depending on a dropdown field, go to some 50-60 different recipients. So I needed a custom lookup table with notification recipients and a way to look up the recipient based on that dropdown field, without exposing all those recipient…
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WordPress’ admin UI needs to be better
The WordPress’ admin UI needs to be drastically improved. It should be improved not just for WordPress core itself, but it should implement a simple and clearly defined open design system, so that plugins and themes can use it to build their own interfaces. Now that Yoast’s new Settings UI is out in the open…
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Social & Schema images: naming considerations
I’ve been playing a lot with Schema and Social images recently and one thing has become clear: we need better naming of these images and we should probably improve the Schema.org image standards a bit. In this post I want to briefly discuss the different needs and my proposed (very simple) naming scheme. As I…
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Optimize crawling: let’s turn things around!
I wrote about crawl optimization last week, mostly about getting stuff that you don’t want crawled to not be crawled. There’s more to say about that, and I will in follow up posts, but first we need to talk about how to get the stuff that you do want indexed, crawled and indexed by search…
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Optimize crawling, for the environment
Search engines rely on spiders / bots to crawl the web and find (new) content. Every time they find a URL, they crawl it and if it’s interesting to them, they’ll keep crawling it basically forever. The bigger your site, the more URLs you have, the more likely every individual URL is to be hit…
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WordPress’ market share is shrinking
There’s no more denying it: if you look at W3Techs CMS market share numbers, WordPress’ market share is shrinking, losing 0.4% market share since February. I don’t like to be or sound alarmist, so when I first noticed these numbers, I waited a bit to write about it. Shopify, the #2 CMS in my last…
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Transitioning to a new role at Yoast
At the end of this month, I will transition to a different role at Yoast. No, I will not leave Yoast. But, I am going to pursue some other dreams outside of Yoast. It’s time to spread my wings! Let me explain a bit on why I am making this transition and what it will look like! Why?…
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Elementor: WordPress’ secret growth driver?
Is Elementor the secret behind WordPress’ growth in the last years? We know from my CMS market share analysis that WordPress has been growing fast. Could it be that a lot of that growth is actually caused by Elementor’s popularity? After I published the sixth iteration of my CMS market share analysis last week, some…
