Siegfried, deploy!

Today Steffen and Dominik dive deep into the page speed factor of the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). You'll learn how to optimize your website to achieve a fast LCP and which strategies work for flexible components. But with all the details, don't forget the basics of page speed optimization... Highlights 00:00 Intro 00:10 What is LCP? 02:56 Typical largest elements 05:51 Reach fast LCP...

Is WordPress secure? We get asked this question over and over again. The answer: WordPress websites are just as secure or insecure as any other website. Because most of the time, mistakes in the absolute basics are the reason for a website being hacked. In this podcast episode, Steffen and Dominik discuss what the weak points of a WordPress website are and how you can protect yourself against a ha...

In today's episode, Steffen and Dominik explore the pros and cons of deployment strategies for websites. What's the difference between continuous deployment and continuous integration? Which strategy is worth trying and which one should you consider leaving alone? Highlights 00:00 Intro 00:13 What is continuous deployment 06:42 Buddy.works 08:46 Github Actions 10:50 Speed of Buddy 15:18...

In this episode, Steffen and Dominik discuss the concept of global and translatable options for WordPress websites. Components can have options that are either limited to where they are inserted, or that apply to all components of a certain type on the site, even for different languages. This concept makes it easier for developers and editors to maintain and manage websites. Highlights 00:00 Intro...

In today's episode, we discuss the latest update to Google's Lighthouse tool. Version 10 introduces significant changes to the way Page Speed scores are calculated. We discuss the key features of the update and how they might affect website owners and developers. Upon closer inspection, we spotted an important change that hasn't been announced. So stay tuned for the episode! Highlig...

This time Steffen and Dominik reflect on coding custom designs and the challenges faced with writing CSS. To create a solid base stylesheet in combination with minimal styles for a website is an important starting point. However, it is challenging to create things by hand, interlinking layout and design, and maintaining components. Frameworks could be a solution, but they have a big disadvantage....

Data modeling is the process of creating a conceptual representation of your data. It's a crucial step in building effective databases and applications. In this episode we discuss why it is important to look at both aspects of data modeling: how data is structured and how it is presented in the user interface for those who work on the website. Highlights 00:00 Intro 00:10 What is data modelin...

In this episode we discuss web components and their potential to revolutionize the web. Web components have been around for a while and aim to provide a standardized way of authoring front-end JavaScript, but they never really took off due to the missing parts of the spec. We explore various types of web components, the issues with JavaScript, and the challenges in picking the right approach to cr...

WordPress Starter Themes are important for custom WordPress web development. Above all, they put developer experience first and challenge the status quo of best practices. We discuss the differences between a developer starter theme and a multi-purpose theme, and why using a starter theme can give you a big head start in your custom theme development to achieve better results. Highlights 0:00 Intr...

It's still a complicated task to optimize images for different devices, screen sizes, and pixel densities. In this episode we discuss the challenges of creating perfect responsive images and explore various techniques that can help optimize images. Highlights 00:00 Intro 00:50 Why is it so hard? 03:56 What do you need? 05:04 The sizes attribute explained 09:39 Library: lazysizes 13:22 Couldn&...

Jared is the author of Timber, a powerful development library for WordPress with more than 1 million downloads. Jared started his career working at newspapers. He and his partners saw the importance of the backend user experience in digital publications and started using WordPress to develop custom built WordPress interfaces for large-scale websites. What does such an interface look like? And wher...

Let's dive into the hotly-anticipated arrival of container queries! We’ll discuss whether it’s worth jumping on them now, what strategies you can follow, and the potential pitfalls to watch out for, including limited browser support, increased design and development complexity, and the potential performance issues. That said, let’s not be afraid, but embrace the future! Highlights 00:00 Intro...

JavaScript can add significant weight to a website and is hard to optimize. JavaScript hydration concepts can significantly optimize JavaScript loading, parsing, and execution. We talk about the various techniques and how we implemented a custom islands architecture into Flynt, our WordPress Starter Theme for developers. Highlights 00:00 Intro 00:38 What is JavaScript Hydration? 02:58 Strategies o...

As a WordPress agency, we have decided not to use Gutenberg, the block editor for WordPress. When it was first introduced, we were excited about the potential improvements it offered over the classic editor, but after trying it out, we found that it had several major issues that prevent us from using it for our clients’ websites. The user interface is less intuitive and the development experience...

Everyone is talking about ChatGPT right now, just like us. What are our first experiences with the AI tool? How will it affect coding challenges in the developer application process? And how do we evaluate the relevance of AI tools for the future of coding? Highlights 00:00 Intro 00:38 First experiences 03:30 Where does ChatGPT get the data from? 04:50 AI tools transform essential skills 08:02 Eva...

When you're working with websites, you can't ignore the WebP image format. But what makes this format better than other image formats? And is it really practical and will stay? In this episode, Steffen and Dominik dive deep into image formats and discuss how to use WebP. Highlights 00:00 Intro 00:48 How do you optimize image loading? 01:22 The old image formats of the web 02:55 The newer...

How do you make sure every developer on a website project sees the same content across environments? How do we maintain stable development environments for very old websites? And on which environments do we present code changes to our clients? In this episode Dominik and Steffen give insights how they set up the deployment and cloning process and architecture at Bleech. Highlights 00:00 Intro 00:3...

With caching you can speed up the loading time of your website. In this episode Steffen and Dominik dig into types of caching and discuss different WordPress plugins. It seems popular caching plugins turn into huge optimization plugins, but they might not necessarily be the right choice. Highlights 00:00 Intro 00:29 What is caching? 01:32 Three big types of caching 06:57 It's not the browser...

In this episode, Steffen and Dominik discuss why the verdict on the use of Google Fonts is so absurd. Does this mean that for all other services that work similarly, a ruling has to happen first? Will courts decide on designs in the future? And what could the ruling mean for free and paid fonts? Highlights 00:00 Why do people get sued over Google Fonts? 03:44 How to load fonts from a local server?...

In this episode, you'll learn how to use visual regression tests in WordPress to track website changes. We explain the benefits of visual tests, how they'll help you detect critical issues and how you can set up visual regression tests with software libraries or WordPress plugins. VRTs WordPress Plugin https://vrts.app Highlights 00:00 Intro 00:22 What are visual regression tests (VRTs)?...

We've seen it many times: a cookie banner pops up on a website, but it's clearly not working as expected. External scripts are loaded right away and cookies are set without consent. What's okay to load, what isn't? How are necessary cookies defined? Who's responsible? And what would we like to of see consent management in the future? Highlights 00:00 Intro 00:48 What is co...

To start off the podcast, Dominik and Steffen dive deeper into the question: for what or for whom should PageSpeed be optimized? The user should be in the main focus of PageSpeed optimization, because a fast website contributes to a good UX. But should you consider users who come for the first time to the homepage or should you look at returning visitors? On the other hand a high PageSpeed score i...