WordPress veteran, Performance Specialist & Content Creator.
On a mission to make your WP + WooCommerce sites fast & so you can scale your business
Started WordCamp Europe, Ex Servebolt, Yoast.
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Within WordPress – WP Since, WordPress.com AI, UX Audit, and a whole lotta WordPress 6.8
Published 2 months ago • 7 min read
№ 154
WP Since, WordPress.com AI, UX Audit, and a whole lotta WordPress 6.8
No newsletter last week, huh? What's that about, I was asked. By quite a few of you. And I'm sorry for missing one, but this was a classic example what the great poet Mr. John Lennon once sang about: "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans".
So yeah...
At least I've got my entire first floor new carpets. I mean there is a silver lining. For me 😅. All this to say, Reader, thank you for being here, and prepare yourself for a long newsletter!
Hope you enjoy it!
Get in front of 1850+ dedicated WordPress friends and check out my sponsoring options and reach out to me if you think we can be a good fit!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
WP Engine's DE{CODE} 2025 event is around the corner. If you haven't signed up yet, it's an online event fully dedicated to all roles responsible for building digital experiences. This includes brand marketers and agency leaders, in addition to developers. The agenda has already been published, and looks great!
WordPress Multisite is a powerful mode for WordPress. I’ve been using this mode since it was called WordPress MU. But, what’s unknown is often times feared, right? To help you see its potential, my friends at Human Made wrote an article highlighting its features, benefits, and use cases. Check it out, it's a really good one.
WooCommerce 9.8 was released this week and offers huge Store API upgrades with it. There's now batching for all endpoints (which is a massive performance boost). There's now a new PUT /checkout for real-time updates, and Brands now finally fully supported in the Store API. Read up on a lot more details about this change.
I completed my annual WordPress Professionals Survey over at The Admin Bar. Have you?
On average, on Kinsta, a WordPress site running on their platform has 21.7 active plugins. Can you guess what the highest number of plugins they found? I'll give you a hint: it's in the hundreds.
ACF 6.4 is now available. This is a major release which brings WooCommerce HPOS support (🥳) to ACF PRO, with other fixes and improvements.
Switch to better email & SMS marketing with Omnisend. Get the top-rated email marketing platform to convert & keep more customers. Get started today!
This week’s newsletter is highlighting what you should know if you’re building on top of WordPress for 6.8:
More Secure Password Storage with bcrypt
WordPress core now uses bcrypt for password hashing, making your site’s security even stronger. If your site uses any kind of custom authentication, double-check that it’s compatible with this new algorithm.
A cool new feature called Speculative Loading uses the browser’s Speculation Rules API to preload pages users are likely to visit next. Want more control? There are new filters you can use to tweak or turn it off for certain URLs.
If you’re looking to keep things lightweight, the new should_load_block_assets_on_demand filter helps avoid loading unnecessary block assets on pages that don’t need them.
Good news for plugin developers: if your plugin is built for WordPress 4.6 or newer—even if it’s not in the WordPress.org directory—you don’t need to call load_plugin_textdomain() anymore.
From shortcode consistency to improvements in media handling, post type registration, and scheduling, WordPress 6.8 is packed with thoughtful updates that make developers’ lives a bit easier.
With NitroPack, you get everything you need for a fast website, in one place. Features like caching, image optimization, and a CDN are ready to go out of the box.
You’ve got enough exciting stuff to worry about. Let Omnisend be the reliable platform you can depend on. Make an average $68* for every $1 you spend.
Scanfully monitors your site’s health so you can focus on other things. Gain insight with our hosted WordPress Activity Log and Notifications.
Kinsta is a fast, secure, and feature-rich hosting that makes your work so much easier. Built for WordPress websites and agencies worldwide.
Expertly designed for high traffic and high-performance websites, Bluehost Cloud sets the new standard for WordPress speed, scalability, support, and reliability.
Please take a look at our wonderful Community Sponsors' offering ☝.
🚀 Performance & Security
Learn how common URL phishing techniques work. This article explains subdomain spoofing, various types of lookalike domains and typosquatting, homoglyph attacks, URL shortening, open redirects, and abuse of legitimate services.
Sometimes you have to highlight good work, don't you? Well, my site was a mess. It was a bad mix of newsletter, podcast, and blog posts. And that's not even mentioning the general design and UX mess. So, I needed clarity and help!
I reached out to Piccia Neri for a full audit, and I’ll be honest, it was one of the smartest moves I’ve made in a while. You might know Piccia as a UX and accessible design specialist. Her feedback was sharp, to the point, and immediately actionable. More importantly, it’s helped me make the site easier to use, and more effective at getting people to take action. Splitting off everything Within WordPress to a separate domain was one of the easy conclusions. If you're serious about making your WordPress site work better, converting more, reaching more users, being more inclusive, and easier to use, I highly recommend checking out Piccia's audits. She offers three options depending on how deep you want to go:
> Quick Wins – a fast video audit of one page or journey, focused on clear, easy fixes (€350)
> Accelerator – more in-depth, with a discovery session and report to improve UX and flow across key areas (€1975)
> Transformation – the full package: a deep audit that helps you overhaul your site (and your business) for long-term impact, compliance, and growth (€4475)
And, obviously, Scanfully for all my Site Health & Performance monitoring
💡 Interesting Finds
Found this nifty free tool called Holiday Optimizer that can turn 15 PTO into 53 days off! You put in the days of paid time off you get p;us preferred break strategy, and it plans out when you should go on vacation. Great example of a well-designed, useful side project.
Just found a seriously useful little tool from Microsoft: MarkItDown. It’s a lightweight Python script that converts all sorts of docs to clean, structured Markdown. I'm using it for Obsidian, but it's also perfect for devs, content folks, or anyone wrangling messy formats, especially if you're working with static sites or need Markdown for WordPress workflows.
The . Chrome 135 debuts CSS-styleable select elements, letting developers transform their look with the sleek appearance: base-select property. Now, you can unleash rich HTML content within option elements and tap into new internal styling parts!
I needed a solution that works with larger files than WeTransfer's 2GB limit and found Swiss Transfer. They let you share up to 50GB for free. No account needed, blazing fast, and your data stays, you guessed it, securely hosted in Switzerland.
Would you like me to cover more AI (MCP, LLM, etc) related to WordPress?
🎙️ For this week's podcast, I sat down with Tadas Pukas from Omnisend. I had met Tadas during the CloudFest Hackathon, and I wanted to learn more from him about email marketing, as he's Omnisend's Product Manager. What followed was a conversation full of email marketing tips, strategies, and insights. I'm sure you'll enjoy this one a lot:
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Whenever you're ready, there are three things I can do for you
Help you get your product or service in front of a high influence WordPress crowd. With an open rate consistently above 57% and a CTR rate of more than 20% you will be visible. Additionally, with 14,7K+ followers on Twitter, there's even more exposure.
Offer you WordPress Consultancy. From advice on how to tackle your next big (performance challenging) WordPress project to actually offering a helping hand. Just hit reply on this email
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WordPress veteran, Performance Specialist & Content Creator.
On a mission to make your WP + WooCommerce sites fast & so you can scale your business
Started WordCamp Europe, Ex Servebolt, Yoast.
№ 153 Get Ready for WordPress 6.8, Contributor Sprints + Future Tools in WordPress Read on: my website Hi Reader 👋🏻, As we're inching closer to WordPress 6.8 being released with the first Release Candidate published, it's good to start acquainting yourself with all the new and updated things 6.8 is going to ship with. And I've listed them all below. Hope you enjoy it! Get in front of 1825+ dedicated WordPress friends and check out my sponsoring options and reach out to me if you think we can...
№ 152 Meet the Hackathon Winner, ActivityPub Expands + WordPress 6.8 Resources Read on: my website Hi Reader 👋🏻, The CloudFest Hackathon, The WP Day, and CloudFest in general was a lot of fun this past week(end). If you've never been, I highly recommend it for next year. Or perhaps, if you're based in the Americas, the US-based version might be worth your consideration to visit. As should you be considering PressConf, btw. Just book already! WordPress, as you probably have already gathered by...
№ 150 Use Herd with WP, AI fixing Security + thanks.dev Read on: the website Hi Reader 👋🏻, There it is, number 150. This basically means I've done a weekly WordPress newsletter for about 3 years (it's been longer because I took long breaks 😅). To celebrate this milestone, I've moved over everything Within WordPress to a separate domain, as well as introduced a new branding and logo. Read all about it here on my blog. That’s a lot to take in already, I know, but there’s even more! This week is...
