Tips Tuesday – Kadence Conversions, Holiday Deals, Web Stories, WordPress 5.9

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• BlogAid Holiday Deals are here with big discounts on all courses
• Update on the Ecomm Coalition and our new meeting space
• Update on what’s happening with the WP Performance team
• Update on Code Name Ida and the fantastic progress we’re making
• Update with the ongoing UpdraftPlus issues and a possible fix
• Issues with Web Stories and Caching and a possible fix
• Why the WordPress 5.9 release has been delayed and when we can expect it
• LiquidWeb acquired Modern Tribe and what all these buyouts mean for our future
• The new Full Site Editing theme.json file explained
• A new block based theme builder plugin
• Kadence releases the Conversions plugin for building your own optins and pop ups

Listen to the Podcast

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Spill the Beans Livestream tonight

Do join us live tonight at 8pm ET / 5pm PT on the BlogAid Facebook Page. We spill the beans on this week’s news, breaking stories for the day too, and special info just for those who watch. And the replay is available here on this Tips Tuesday post later too. But the live party is so much more fun.

Replay

Who I Help

All BlogAid posts and tutorials are intended to assist business-minded, hands-on bloggers and webmaster designers who are serious about making money and who want to stay up-to-date with site changes. And our BB Hub is a private member site and Facebook group for my site audit clients that has lots of extra perks and support, and some of that you’ll be hearing about today.

BlogAid Happenings

What a wild week it has been around here!!! 

I’ve been doing a ton of research for what’s coming next for us in the Metaverse and how that will affect everything about how we run our sites and get traffic.

Y’all won’t believe what I’ve found!!! That’s especially true with your images and how you’re going to get traffic. 

I’ll have more on all of this in a big post next month with a huge peek into our future. Just let me say that this is the most excited I have been about something in years and I can hardly wait for us to make this journey together.

Get Your BlogAid Holiday Specials

Big deals on all BlogAid courses 

• Gutenberg Ninja – $20 off 
• DIY SEO Courses and Workshops – $50 off 
• Video SEO Booster – $20 off 
• Webmaster Training – get $80 off 

Flip in tutorials schedule

There’s also been a delay in the release of WP 5.9, which I’ll tell you about more in a moment. But that means I need to shift my plans for when I had new Gutenberg tutorials scheduled. We likely won’t be doing those until the Jan/Feb timeframe.

So, I’m starting work early on the DIY SEO tutorial updates as well as the live workshop updates. And there are several new things coming to both for Yoast SEO, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, plus bonus info before we start the live workshops on why you may want to hold off on doing updates to existing content.

It also means that I will likely be able to slip in even more new tutorials for the Webmaster Training ahead of schedule too.

Site Services Update

So, that means I’ll also have more time for client service work over the next month, and I’m already onboarding folks that I thought that we would not be able to start their projects until December.

So, we’re going to be running about 3 weeks ahead of schedule for a bit and we’ll see how that plays out.

Best as I can tell, we are still holding at February for new requests.

Holiday Schedule

In the US, many of us will be celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday.

My plans for Thursday are to eat, sleep, repeat.

I’ll be working a half day on Friday. And then Saturday is normally a half day. And then off on Sunday, as usual.

I’ve got projects open with folks in Europe and Australia who do not take this holiday, so it’s fine if my US clients with projects are not available, as I have others to keep me busy.

Ecomm Coalition Update

We currently have a Facebook group that we are going to keep. But we also have a new Slack channel that we’ll be using for most of our communication.

I’ll be sending everyone an invite soon so we can at least get established there.

But I don’t expect us to get deep into too much until at least January.

However, we can all share any news we come across, or ask questions, or such in Slack.

And I will likely still do livestreams in the Facebook group, just because it’s faster, and then pinging you through Slack when those post.

This way we won’t need an email list or such and everyone can easily ping everyone else in the group.

So, if you are a site owner and thinking about getting into selling digital products or doing member sites or such, you may want to wait just a couple of months or so and hear about all the vetted options we have in the works for you. If you can’t wait, I totally get that, as I can’t tell you right now when these offers will become available.

All I can say is that we will be working as hard and fast as we can come January to get things out to you.

WP Performance Update

As you know, I joined 4 of the 6 active areas in the new WP Performance group. We meet on Slack, and I’m still trying to acclimate to how things work in these groups.

I’m going to be honest. I think it’s a chaotic mess.

So, I’ll be lurking until I can find my way in how this world is run and jump in where I can help. That will most likely just be in the performance testing group.

My main goal with the other groups is to see what’s coming down the pike for us so I can ensure those changes don’t goof the tweaks and methods we already have in use to make our sites faster.

And you can see some of the stuff we’re looking into with the speed testing section of the WP Performance team by seeing this deep study of speed per WP version. Basically, we’re looking into how the improvements applied to WP are actually working in the wild at scale.

One of the big things they discovered is that overuse of lazy loading is bad for a site. That’s specifically why I told you to keep using the JS lazy loading way of doing it via your caching/optimization plugin, which overrides the way both WP and browsers do it.

They will be fixing the way lazy load is applied by WP soon, because of this report, and what else we’re looking at in the Performance group.

But, the way I’ve suggested that you do it is still going to work better for you. 

We also won’t be using the WebP support that is natively in WP now either. First off, you would have to convert all of your existing images to WebP for this to work. We ain’t doing that.

Just keep using Squoosh and saving as MozJPEG or OmniPNG prior to upload.

FYI, if you have not had a site audit yet and you are using an optimization plugin still, do not use Squoosh. You will not want your images compressed twice by 2 different methods. And I’ll explain more about why you don’t want to use a plugin for this during your audit. Actually, I’ll show you the proof.

BB Hub Happenings

Code Name Ida project update

Last week I met live with my Ida partners and we had a VERY productive session.

In case you missed it, I did a livestream later that day about it in our BB Hub Facebook group.

We’ll be putting the power of the village to work for us with tests and such to help us find issues and get fixes for you.

Look for an email soon with more instructions.

And thank you to everyone who is helping with the tests!!!!

UpdraftPlus Issues Update

Also thanks to everyone in the BB Hub for your continued patience with ongoing UDP issues.

Their latest update seemed to have fixed the issues for most folks who were initially hit with problems. And most all of them had super large Uploads folders with tons of images.

But, that same update suddenly broke backups on sites that previously had no issues.

BlogAid is one of them.

I’ve been wasting a ton of time with support and blatantly refusing to do most of their suggestions, as the issue is not on my site. It’s with their plugin.

And they have kept insisting that I ask the 100s of my followers still having issues to each open a ticket.

I told them hell no!!! And I am not going to have y’all poking in places you have no business being, or cleaning up the mess all of those changes leave behind.

At this point I’ve literally resorted to screaming at them to have this sent up the chain.

They finally did that and they may have found something in the plugin.

On Monday they sent a potential fix for it and I sent that out to all BB Hub members in our Facebook group. I was able to run a manual backup and I’ll test for an auto backup tonight and keep everyone posted.

BB Hub members, please report how your tests went in our Facebook group.

Web Stories and Caching

One of my site audit clients reported that all of her Web Stories have become invalid and we found that all caching plugins can make them go stupid. 

I’m working with Emre, the dev of WP Fastest Cache, because that’s the one most of us use, and we have a way to exclude them. So, me and my client will be doing a live session this week to try it and I’ll update my WP Fastest Cache tutorial with that info once we know all is working.

This is one more example of the power of our BB Hub village at work to help all of us.

That’s all the happenings around here. Let’s jump into this week’s tips.

WordPress Tips

WordPress 5.9 Release Delayed

You may recall in last week’s Tips Tuesday that I mentioned my surprise that the WP 5.9 beta had not been released.

It was super ambitious of WP to try to release all of the new Full Site Editing features in just 2 version updates. The first part came in WP 5.8. And the rest was supposed to come in 5.9.

But the fact is, they just don’t feel like some of those massive core code changes have been tested as thoroughly as they should.

So, they are delaying the release from mid December to end of January.

I’m so glad to hear it.

We all had the release of Gutenberg shoved on us too early. And nobody on the dev team wants a repeat of that, especially when these changes could actually break current themes.

The newly proposed schedule is:

• Nov 30 – Beta 1 
• Dec 7 – Beta 2
• Dec 14 – Beta 3
• Dec 21 – Beta 4 (optional)
• Jan 4 – RC 1 (5 weeks from Beta)
• Jan 11 – RC2
• Jan 18 – RC 3
• Jan 25 – Release date

We don’t have confirmation on these proposed dates.

But, it’s enough of a delay for me to go ahead and flip my schedule around, as I mentioned earlier.

So, if you’re in the Gutenberg Ninja course, don’t expect new WP 5.9 related tutorials until at least first of February.

But that doesn’t mean I won’t slip in something else between now and then.

LiquidWeb Acquires Modern Tribe

LiquidWeb seems to be buying up everything these days, at least everything that WP itself, or WPEngine are not buying. 

After purchasing The Events Calendar off Modern Tribe back in January, they recently went back and grabbed up the rest of what’s left.

David at PostStatus had this to say about all of the huge acquisitions this year:

“As a WordCamp organizer, I can’t help but wonder how many sponsors will be available at tables during in-person WordPress events in the years ahead. Corporate sponsors offer the most support to WordCamps after the WordPress Foundation. Acquisitions and mergers mean fewer deep pockets from corporate sponsors.

We still need to wait and see how this acquisition plays out. I don’t think “harmful” is the right term to use to describe the drive to consolidate that has been so strong this year. The space is definitely changing and growing. When change is happening, opportunities open up.”

To me, this is just a sign of the WP ecosystem maturing, and moving away from “everything is free” into a more profitable and sustainable setup for the devs who are creating everything for us. They gotta eat too, you know.

And to be honest, this is a bit of a peek into our future and how we will all stop creating so much free content and instead get paid directly for our creations.

Webmaster Designer Tips

theme.json file explained

A huge part of the change with Full Site Editing for themes is where all of the styling info will be held.

There is a new theme.json file that all designers should familiarize themselves with.

Ellen Bauer has a super nice tutorial on her site with a deep look into this file and how you’ll be working with it in the future.

Block Based Theme Builder Plugin

Designers may also want to have a look at the new plugin Automattic, the makers of WP, just released that allows you to easily build your own Block-based theme.

A fully block-based theme is required for Full Site Editing (FSE).

Now, site owners, this is not something I would recommend you use. It’s WAY too early in the FSE game, and we need to stick to the popular theme frameworks.

But this will give designers a way to play with FSE and building themes.

Plugin Tips

Kadence Conversions – optin and pop-up builder

Y’all are going to want to check this out.

Kadence has a standalone plugin to help you create your own optin, including pop-ups and banners.

As far as I can tell it works on all themes.

And they have starter templates so you don’t have to style from scratch.

Plus, you can integrate it directly with your Google Analytics or use the native analytics in the plugin. Now, that last way of doing it will track in your database, I think, and that could add to bloat. So, I’d opt for doing it through GA.

It is a Gutenberg block. And innovation like this is just one more reason you want to get into my Gutenberg Ninja course and get your site switched over.

They say it’s fast loading. And honestly, just about anything well coded is going to beat the insanely slow load of MailerLite and a few other popular optins.

And it has a ton of conditional settings for how and who to show the optin to.

The tutorial didn’t address how to connect this plugin to your list service provider, so I can’t tell you what it natively integrates with. And nothing on their sales page addresses this issue.

They do have a 40% off sale for Black Friday, but you will want to ask them about their integrations before you purchase. If you find that info, please share it with us here.

Wrap Up

That’s a wrap for this week’s Tips Tuesday.

Enjoy your holiday weekend, if you’re celebrating.

And I’ll see you online!