Things like:

• You vibe-coded an app or a website in 24 hours, but have you thought about how you'll maintain and support it?

• Is the code something you’re going to have to refactor later?

• Have you followed through with your vibe-coded app to actually make money?

• If you’re handing it off to a client, do they know anything about how to use an AI tool?

It’s one thing for a developer with over a decade of experience in their field to use AI; it’s another for a regular user. That developer has years of understanding behind their prompts. When something goes wrong (and it will), or it hallucinates (which I’ve still seen AI do daily), they can quickly backtrack. 💭 A regular user won’t know they need to.

If I had blindly trusted everything Claude told me, I would have wasted hundreds of hours. And I’ve seen this firsthand with clients. Many now share what AI told them in support tickets, and it’s often flat-out false. Or they went down the wrong rabbit hole, which made things even worse.

I really enjoyed this article from Alex on why static sites and vibe coding are not a client strategy, and I agree with a lot of what he said. This is one reason why I think WordPress still has some time left. ⌛

And then there are things like OpenClaw. While a 24/7 AI agent is cool, I can’t think of a single thing in my life where it would increase my productivity or save me time (please prove me wrong!). I would love to see some more real-world use cases, rather than just fluff on social media. It honestly just feels like a big playground at the moment (not anything wrong with that). 🛝

With that being said, AI is insanely useful for certain things, and it would be naive to think we'll ever go back. I was definitely stubbornly resistant to AI at first. But now I use it daily in my work, as does my brother. Tools like Claude and Cursor never close on our computers. My last newsletter had examples of how I use AI to troubleshoot WordPress performance issues. ⚡

If you aren’t using AI yet, it’s just a matter of time. But be careful with what you read online. It’s hard to know exactly how much “productive work” is actually happening. AI has a tendency to make you think you’re smarter than you are (excellent video). 🫣 I think those with years of experience in their fields, combined with AI, are the ones making the most of it right now.

Updates ✍️

We pushed out an update for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• Updated PHP CSS Parser library to 9.3.0. This includes many improvements for our Remove Unused CSS feature (more accurate parsing and compatibility). ⚡

• Increased minimum required PHP version to 8.1 to allow for library updates and support for future code performance improvements.

• New perfmatters_rucss_logged_in filter that allows you to force used CSS to run when logged in (still front-end only) and create separate copies of used CSS for logged-in requests. This is experimental and only for advanced users; results may vary.

• Added additional logic to used CSS generation to better deal with layer elements that are declared without a content block.

• Added PHP Scoper to our plugin development workflow to be able to silo specific third-party libraries to prevent conflicts with other plugins. 👨‍🔧

  Removed built-in stylesheet exclusion for Bricks’ layer files. We recommend clearing used CSS after updating.

• Added new CSS helper method to rewrite relative URLs in stylesheets that will be printed inline using regex only to prevent having to pass them through the parser. This improves compatibility when using the perfmatters_rucss_inline_stylesheets filter. 👍

• Made some adjustments to clean_html regex pattern to avoid potential backtracking which could end up hitting a PCRE limit in some cases.

• Made plugin UI styles adjustments in preparation for WordPress 7. 🎨

• Made improvements to visual transitions during hard reloads in the plugin UI.

• Updated code snippets author column to use the user’s display name instead of nice name to match the single snippet layout.

• Updated disable RSS feeds function to return a 410 header instead of a 301 when requesting a feed URL.

• Made some changes to plugin UI nav JS to improve compatibility when wrapper elements are added in the HTML from another source.

• Fixed an issue that was causing certain attribute values to conflict with the HTML parent selector matching regex.

• Fixed an issue where specific WooCommerce product types were not getting the built-in product exclusion selector added to generated used CSS.

• Fixed an issue where HTML snippets with a condition mismatch were causing the original content to return blank.

• Fixed an issue where code snippet input preserved in the form after a failed save request was not properly unslashed.

• Fixed an issue where the code snippet code type was no longer visible and the selected value was lost after a failed save request.

• Fixed a possible PHP 8.2+ deprecation warning that could occur in specific server environments during PMCS initialization.

• Code snippet security updates to form submission handling. 🔒

We also pushed out an update for our Novashare WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• Updated Mastodon share link to use their new official share workflow. This streamlines things by remembering the instance you connected to in your browser’s local storage. 🧠

• Added new share and follow buttons for Gab.

• Added new novashare_share_link_target filter, which allows you to adjust the default target value (_blank or _self) for share button links. 🔗

• Made plugin UI styles adjustments in preparation for WordPress 7.

• Made improvements to visual transitions during hard reloads in the plugin UI.

• Fixed an issue in the post meta UI where images were expanding beyond their containers on some sites.

• Fixed multiple plugin UI HTML warnings for incorrect label target IDs. ⚠️

• Removed some old redundant tooltip styles from the admin stylesheet.

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

• Microsoft brings Xbox mode to Windows 11 PCs next month. And the new CEO is trying to reset Xbox’s brand image. If you’re a gamer, it will be interesting to see how this pans out.

• The FCC just banned the sale of new Wi-Fi router models made outside the US. Yikes! That is like all of them. 😅 Note that it’s only new ones, not existing ones or ones with deals already in place.

• When age verification moves into your operating system.

• Prime Video is about to take 4K streaming away from basic users, while Netflix is raising prices again (for those in the US).

WordPress

• WordPress is running an experiment to highlight newer plugins in the featured plugins section on the repository. Eight plugins are selected every two weeks. I think this is a great idea. There are many amazing plugin developers who deserve more eyeballs. 👀

• You can now log in to your WordPress sites with a single click in MyKinsta. Similar to how the magic login process works in InstaWP. 👏

• The awesome team at Roots has launched WP Packages: An independent, open source Composer repository for WordPress plugins and themes.

• Most users still don’t realize the Command Palette exists. It’s a great and sometimes quicker way to navigate a site without using the mouse. In WordPress 7.0, they are adding a shortcut in the Omnibar to make this more apparent.

• It looks like WordPress 7.0 might be getting delayed. Honestly, there is a lot going on with this release, and I would prefer they wait to get everything right.

• I’ve ignored the whole WordPress and WP Engine drama until now. But I finally spoke up regarding some of the behavior. I find name-calling from the main WordPress X account kind of childish. I don’t care what you do on your personal accounts. It’s just not a good look for the community.

• WordPress Jobs got a redesign. Looks much better!

• Developers can now create simple blocks using only PHP. This is meant for blocks that only need server-side rendering and aren’t meant to be highly interactive. Awesome to have this available now. Ryan put together a good example.

• Meet GT Link Manager, a free Pretty Links alternative built from the ground up with performance in mind. Worth checking out!

• The official WordPress Plugin Checker offers automated code review for security and best practices. Always a great way to check things you might have missed.

Marketing

• The internet’s most-read tech publications have lost 58% of their Google traffic since 2024. 😮 And other data shows that search referral traffic is down 60% for small publishers.

• 94% of AI citations come from non-paid sources. Gartner is telling CMOs to double their PR budgets by 2027.

Performance

• DebugHawk now has a free plan, no credit card needed! Definitely recommend giving it a try if you haven’t already.

• InstaWP got some great performance updates:

  • Static assets are now cached via Bunny CDN edge rules even for logged-in WordPress users.

  • PHP 8.5 is now available (although it seems it was temporarily pulled).

• Looks like client-side image optimization in WordPress core has been delayed until 7.1.

• Rapyd Cloud launched its Cloudflare Enterprise integration, including full page cache at the edge for fast response times and low TTFB. ⚡

• New Container Timing metric is being worked on. The Bloomberg Terminal uses this to measure human-perceived time to start apps and found it more useful than LCP. Will be interesting to see what happens with this.

• Enjoyed sitting down with Topher to discuss how Perfmatters can help make your WordPress site faster.

AI

• I really enjoyed this article on how the internet used to feel more human.

• A complete guide to CLAUDE.md, custom commands, skills, agents, and permissions, and how to set them up properly.

• Phota Studio and Phota API bring personalized photo editing and generation to developers, photographers, and creators. Here are some images I created of myself with it. Was really impressed! 😮

• Google has launched Stitch, think of it like an AI-powered Figma alternative.

• Had a great time talking about WordPress and AI with Kurt and Jonathan on the WP-Tonic podcast.

• OpenAI released GPT‑5.4 (as well as mini and nano), their most capable and efficient frontier models for professional work.

• Google Search Console MCP: step-by-step setup guide.

• Perplexity announced Personal Computer, a continuously running app (usually on a Mac mini) that gives Perplexity’s AI agents always-on local access to your files, apps, and sessions.

• Google employees have a new AI tool called Agent Smith. It builds on Antigravity, can interact with apps, and works asynchronously in the background.

• Tony wrote an interesting post on why he is ditching WordPress for static sites + AI, and what happened. Vikas also shared a similar thread from Reddit. However, I have yet to see a single post about this from a “non-developer.” I 100% believe AI is changing things. But none of my close friends even use AI much. As I mentioned earlier, let me see an “average” WordPress user try to do this and maintain it.

• As more Americans adopt AI tools, fewer say they can trust the results.

• Claude has released so many features, I can’t even keep up. Here is an excellent recap.

• Google is working on a native Gemini AI app for Mac. While OpenAI is planning a superapp.

If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋

Setup

For highly technical folks, I recommend looking into the Claude Code and Chrome DevTools (MCP) combo. However, something anyone can easily use is Claude (pro or higher plan) with their Chrome extension. It’s insanely powerful!

It’s that missing piece, giving Claude access to run PageSpeed Insights tests, click around, access the DOM, etc. Jonathan had a good post about this, and I liked how he phrased it. You are “cutting out the middleman” and are no longer just a translator for AI.

Tip: I recommend downloading Chrome Canary and setting up the Claude extension there. Two reasons:

• Claude kicks off an annoying debugger warning while it’s parsing a page. If you run a separate Chrome installation, it won’t impact your main install. So you can keep working on other things without the distraction.

• ⚠️ Security! I can’t stress this enough. I see so many users just blindly installing AI programs and giving access to their entire browser, OS, or other logins. I don’t want Claude to have access to my main Chrome profile or installation (#15125). Essentially, I use Chrome Canary only for AI debugging.

Site 1

On this first site, I actually just asked the following question.

Performance-wise, what are some of the worst problems on this site that could be improved?

It gave me a nice list of issues to look at, and sorted them by severity.

Something interesting is that it found a duplicate Elementor script that another plugin was enqueuing again. I work on so many Elementor sites that I see frontend.min.js and kind of ignore it. This caught something I would have missed. And I was able to easily disable the second script with our Script Manager in Perfmatters.

It’s also great at picking up images that are way oversized. In this case, it was a logo that simply needed to be scaled down.

Site 2

A client was having issues updating their site to a newer version of PHP. I asked Claude to scan the site (as I didn’t have access) and see what might be out of date. You can probably spot the offenders.

Site 3

On another site, they were encountering massive CLS on the desktop (0.266). And of course, we know that PageSpeed Insights isn’t always very helpful for debugging this. Many times, I’ll run a test through DebugBear to get more details or throttle locally to see if I can visually spot it based on the referenced divs. However, in this case, the div didn’t even exist.

It was actually a temporary placeholder that was added and then replaced.

Claude helped me pinpoint exactly where the CLS was coming from without any additional work.

Site 4

Troubleshooting JS dependency orders? Caude can do that too. Along with the load time from each script.

It can help you more easily track down the correct exclusions if you’re using a feature like Delay JS in Perfmatters.

Honestly, after diving into Claude (Code or Chrome Extension), I will never go back to troubleshooting performance issues the same way again. And those are just a few of the thousands of different ways you can use it.

• Multitasking is now taken to a whole new level, as you can let AI agents run these tasks in the background while you work on something else. I can resolve more client tickets faster and with even more detail. Although my brain might explode. 🧠

• I’m not a hardcore developer; my brother is. AI has already allowed me to resolve many of the highly technical support tickets that I might have handed off to him before. This enables him to spend more time on building new Perfmatters features.

Updates ✍️

We pushed out an update for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• Code Snippets is officially out of beta! 🎉 If you missed it yesterday, I did a live webinar with Kyle from The Admin Bar where we dove into the new feature. We appreciate all of you who took the time to test and provide feedback.

• Performance improvements: Refactored Utilities class, added a few functions from the previous combined file, combined regex passes for clean_html, added memoization to necessary functions to prevent multiple runs. ⚡

• Added new perfmatters_lazyload_data_src filter.

• Added nav selector support for functions that target elements inside parent containers. 👨‍🔧

• Added additional built-in CSS selector exclusion for Kadence active state class.

• Added is_admin check to disable dashicons function for certain edge cases in the admin UI.

• Added logic to prevent certain redundant options from showing up in the UI when parent disables are already toggled on.

• Added new General, License, and Analytics classes to separate out specific functionality.

• Fixed a code snippet issue where targeting the front or blog page of the site by page ID would not match correctly.

• Fixed an issue with certain attribute pair formats not being recognized when converting an element’s attribute string to an array.

• Fixed an issue where delaying certain duplicate scripts would cause a JavaScript error and prevent remaining delayed assets from loading in.

• Fixed multiple plugin UI HTML warnings for incorrect label target IDs.

• Made some lazy loading adjustments to let WordPress still add the auto size attribute value when necessary before the Perfmatters output buffer runs.

• Made changes to the way we handle images excluded from lazy loading to ensure they don’t have a loading attribute applied.

• Removed previous functions.php file, refactored and migrated the contents to new and existing classes.

• Minor update to disable self pingbacks function for better compatibility.

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

• I’ve been using a new Mac app called DeskMat, and now can’t live without it. I’ve always used my desktop as a trash bin, and sometimes it can be distracting in the background. This allows me to permanently hide everything. 😅

• The story of Blue (Da Ba Dee) by Eiffel 65. Wow, this brings back memories! 📻

• After backlash, Adobe cancels Adobe Animate shutdown and puts the app on maintenance mode.

• If you’re a Grammarly user and have been annoyed by a new blue bar on each paragraph, here’s how to turn it off. I kept clicking it by accident. 😖

• The number of DDoS attacks more than doubled in 2025. 😮

• Your browser’s extensions may be reading your passwords. It’s always good to check which permissions you’re granting extensions. And quality over quantity.

• X got rid of “Dim” mode, which is disappointing. However, you can easily have Gemini or Claude make you an extension to bring it back. There is also an X Dim Mode extension on the Chrome Web Store.

• For you Xbox gamers. After 38 years at Microsoft, Phil Spencer is retiring from his role as the CEO of Xbox. Crazy to think he started there as an intern in 1988.

WordPress

• WordPress 7.0 (ETA early April) has quite a few changes in the pipeline:

  • The admin is getting a new coat of paint. If you’re a plugin or theme developer, make sure to test beforehand.

  

  • In-editor visual revisions. This is pretty cool!

  • The font library is finally coming to classic themes. That means uploading fonts to serve locally for everyone, not just FSE themes.

  • Custom CSS for individual blocks. This is also a great addition.

  • There is a proposal to merge the WP AI client into WordPress core (trac ticket #64591).

  • Dropping support for PHP 7.2 and 7.3. I wish we could move everyone to at least PHP 8.0+. But not quite there yet.

Marketing

• Search isn’t just turning into AI, it’s being re-monetized.

• Fathom got a Google Search Console integration.

Performance

• Two awesome new features in Chrome 145 DevTools. ⚡

  • A render blocking column. Handy when optimizing sites.

  • Individual request throttling (enabled by default).

• We’ve updated our doc with some of the best cookie plugins when it comes to performance (based on CSS/JS sizes, jQuery dependency, etc.).

• Speaking of cookies, DebugBear published a web performance analysis of consent management platforms.

• Gaurav Tiwari published an impressive review of our Perfmatters plugin. Lots of great tidbits in it. 😉

• Divi 5 has added speculative prerendering to speed up load times.

• Looking to troubleshoot backend WordPress performance? The free HTTP Requests Manager can come in handy.

• Brett Atkin has launched both a speed checklist and a site launch checklist. Use for yourself or when working with clients.

• What 5.7 million pageviews reveal about WordPress performance. Loved this in-depth analysis from DebugHawk.

AI

• OpenAI released their Codex app for macOS, which allows you to run multiple agents at once.

• AI agents now have their own Reddit and MMO (no humans allowed). Things are getting crazy, and at a pace I can’t even keep up with.

• xAI released the Groke Imagine API.

• Google released Nano Banana 2, combining pro capabilities with lightning-fast speed.

• Claude Cowork can now complete recurring tasks at specific times automatically.

• Cursor agents can now control their own computers.

• Claude Code released a new remote control feature. You can now continue a session from your phone or tablet.

• OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger joins OpenAI.

If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋

According to the Robocall Index from YouMail, U.S. consumers received 52.5 billion robocalls in 2025. 😮 That’s up from 30 billion in 2016, and it’s been pretty steady at around 50 billion for the past five years.

If I turn off all screening, blocking, and don’t use any third-party apps, I get around 10-15 spam calls per day. I’m on the National Do Not Call Registry, but that’s pretty much worthless these days.

I have a few options. Either sign up for an app like Robokiller or silence all calls not in my contacts. The problem with silencing (even though it fixes 100% of the spam) is that you miss important calls. For example, I have a pest company that sprays around my house. But they use a random number each time they call. Adding all the businesses and services I use around town just doesn’t work well.

However, recently I started using Apple’s new screen-calling feature in iOS 26. I can say this works amazing! So much so that I dropped all silencing and third-party apps (some of which had this feature). Many Android users have had this feature for years.

For some reason, I guess spammers just don’t want to give Siri a reason for calling. 😅 The other handy feature is that it shows up on my laptop while I’m working, and I can choose to answer if it’s a legit call. The integration between iOS and macOS is very nice. On a sidenote, the new hold assist features also work great. Highly recommend trying them out if you haven’t already.

Updates ✍️

We pushed out an update for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• Updated our lazy loading class to no longer add <noscript> tags on images or iframes. This results in a ~18% decrease in HTML code per image and a ~2% decrease in total HTML page size across the board! ⚡

  • The perfmatters_lazyload_noscript filter can still be used to turn that behavior back on, although this shouldn’t be needed.

• Added the ability to completely disable Perfmatters code features using the new PERFMATTERS_DISABLE_CODE constant. ⛔

• Added separate used CSS generated files for different WooCommerce product types (product, variable, grouped, external). This drastically improves compatibility out of the box. Especially with products that use variable features like size and color selections. 👍

• Added new perfmatters_cdn_url filter along with new helper methods in the CDN class.

• Added additional logic to add an auto value to lazy loaded images sizes attributes when needed.

• Added host name to global settings and code snippet export files to easily identify which site it came from.

• Added confirmation message when turning on FastClick option.

• Added logic to remove the previous stored author ID when a code snippet is imported.

• Added dynamic request check in heartbeat function to prevent a possible PHP error.

• Updated get_atts_array utility method to use regex instead of wp_kses_hair for better compatibility.

• Reworked code snippet error handling class to work better with other exception handlers and existing error reporting.

• Turned off CSSLint in the code snippet editor, as it is outdated and was leading to false positives.

• Adjusted gutter column layout in the code snippet editor to be more consistent between different code types.

• Adjusted code snippet priority field to allow both negative and zero input values.

• Fixed an issue where CSS code snippets set to run in the footer were not having their conditions checked.

• Fixed an issue where CSS code snippets were not always printing where expected based on the set location and priority.

• Fixed an issue with certain code snippet input fields not being escaped properly in the UI leading to a broken layout in some cases.

• Fixed an issue where YouTube iframes rendered with a preview thumbnail that had autoplay forced off in their query string would require a double click.

• Fixed an issue where the referrerpolicy iframe attribute did not get applied to the generated iframe when using YouTube preview thumbnails.

We also pushed out an update for our Novashare WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• Added new share button for Mistral AI.

• Overhauled the meta box UI to be more consistent and improve selected image visibility. Many of you requested larger thumbnails to better reflect what will be shared on social, especially Pinterest.

• Changed the hidden Pinterest images to use image thumbnails for the src attribute instead of the full image to save on page load. ⚡

• Made some minor adjustments to various network SVG viewBox values to be more consistent throughout the plugin. 👨‍🎨

• Updated EDD plugin updater class to version 1.9.4.

• Fixed a PHP warning that would sometimes show up when checking for post short links.

On February 26th, we’re doing a deep dive into why we built a performance-first code snippet manager into Perfmatters and how you can take full advantage of it on your WordPress sites. ⚡

Shout-out to Kyle from The Admin Bar for putting this together. You can register in advance to watch live. Hope to see you there!

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

• Meet Mole. An open-source all-in-one toolkit to deep clean and optimize your Mac.

• The Astro web framework joins Cloudflare.

• Gmail says goodbye to Gmailify and POP3: what you need to know.

• Vertical tabs are coming to Google Chrome. You can enable them early with a flag. FYI, I hate vertical tabs. 😂 But I know a lot of people like them.

• Check out how to enable smoother 120Hz browsing in Safari on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• Here’s how long it really takes to form a new habit.

• VWO and AB Tasty join forces. I used both of these a lot back in my agency days.

• One of my favorite apps right now is SoundSource, and their new 6.0+ version is beautiful. It allows you to change the volume per app. I use it a lot while working with Brett on FaceTime. We each have music playing in the background. 🎵

WordPress

• The Accelerate plugin looks interesting. It’s A/B testing, but built for the block editor. So you get analytics on each block test.

• Amber Hinds dives into why they don’t use block libraries at Equalize Digital. An interesting read.

• The future of WooCommerce - a conversation with Matt Mullenweg. Brought to you by James Kemp & Katie Keith. 🛍️

• Check out these three surprises from Patrick on a migration from WooCommerce to Shopify.

• If you’re selling plugins using Easy Digital Downloads, you’ve most likely run into 403 errors when it comes to licensing. Cristian published an excellent walkthrough on how to get a proxy workaround up and running.

• Introducing Changelog as a Service (CaaS). A free WordPress plugin for publishing changelogs on your site, with an optional submission to ChangelogWP for discovery.

• Always worth running new audit tools on your site once in a while to see if you’ve missed something. This Quit Risk Audit tool is interesting!

• I don’t usually like to get into politics, but I found this response from WordPress.org to be very childish. 🤔 And I’m not the only one.

• View transitions are coming to the admin dashboard in WordPress 7.0. The frontend is also being considered (#64471).

Marketing

• Digg is back. Not that we need yet another social network, but it’s kind of nostalgic. I used Digg a lot back in the day.

Performance

• TTFB doesn’t mean what you think it means. This is probably one of the best articles I’ve ever read on the topic. ⚡

• Why would a browser pause rendering page content once it’s already started? A great share from Matt at DebugBear.

• The 2025 Web Almanac by HTTP Archive has been officially released! So many awesome datapoints, too many to list. Worth checking out. 🤓

• Barry dives into fixing the URL parameters performance penalty.

• Chrome DevTools now supports individual network request throttling! This is awesome, I have already started using it. Note: They pulled it from the default in Chrome 144, but you can still enable it. It’s coming back in Chrome 145.

• I’m still learning things every day, such as I didn’t know you could use filter commands like “larger-than” in Chrome DevTools. Tip from Web Weekly #180.

• WPBakery 9.0 introduces a smarter approach to CSS loading. The core analyzes which CSS is actually used and splits it accordingly. This prevents unused CSS and oversized files. In their internal testing, they saw up to 60% improvement in performance. Looks promising, coming later this year!

• The status of jQuery Migrate in WordPress 6.9 and beyond. This thing just won’t die. 🤦‍♂️

• Speaking of jQuery, 4.0 is out! If you compare the compressed/minified version to 3.7.1 in WordPress core, it’s 10.23% smaller. But I doubt we’ll see this in core anytime soon due to compatibility.

AI

• Apple picks Google’s Gemini AI for its big Siri upgrade. I use Gemini as my primary AI tool, so I’m all for this!

• Google increased the Gemini usage limit on its paid plans. I swear, half the messages on social media now are people talking about AI limits.

• ChatGPT will soon start showing ads, but they won’t affect its responses. Google has promised no ads, for now. 😜

• Anthropic released their Cowork preview. Basically, a visual tool for anyone not comfortable with Claude Code.

• The VS Code extension for Claude Code is now generally available.

• Stack Overflow’s forum is dead thanks to AI, but the company’s still kicking, thanks to AI.

• Kling Motion Control is pretty crazy! It’s basically AI for character swapping.

• Bandcamp takes a stand against AI music, banning it from the platform.

• Introducing Helix 02. OK, now things are getting interesting! That hip bump to close the drawer. 🤣

If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋

Well, two days before Christmas, things went downhill really fast. As in, even over-the-counter medication wasn’t battling the fever. And I was downing Fisherman’s Friend like candy just to breathe. I do have an autoimmune disease, so I have to take these things a little more seriously than others do.

Of course, having the horrible healthcare system we do in America, the first appointment available to see a primary care doctor was in February 2026. 🪦 And urgent care facilities send me straight to the hospital as they won’t touch patients with an autoimmune disease (that’s another fun story). So I packed up my backpack and headed to the ER.

Seven miserable hours later, I came out with a pneumonia diagnosis on top of a viral infection. As of today, my body is still fighting it, but I’m slowly getting better. I haven’t missed a newsletter deadline for over 50 issues, so I didn’t want to start now. But I only have so much energy. 🥱

Updates ✍️

We pushed out an update for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• New options to export code snippets globally and import them to another site. 🚛

• You can also export code snippets individually or using the bulk select method.

• New code snippets admin bar menu item that will show up if at least one snippet is present.

• New frontend footer and admin footer locations for CSS code snippets.

• New PMMU_PLUGIN_DIR constant to allow for manipulation of the MU plugin file location for specific setups where the standard WPMU_PLUGIN_DIR may be altered.

• Added support for relative path URLs inside stylesheets printed inline with our perfmatters_rucss_inline_stylesheets filter. ⚡

• Updated previous separate block styles option which will now show up as a block style behavior dropdown for sites running WordPress 6.9+.

• Added a REST API exception for Mollie.

• Added additional built-in CSS selector exclusions for Elementor’s background slideshow.

• Fixed an issue in the code snippets editor where lint markers were not always correctly displaying for HTML and CSS snippets. 👨‍💻

• Fixed an issue where HTML code snippets were not able to save a non-default location.

• Fixed an issue where the code snippet editor was pushing new lines off screen in some cases and not automatically scrolling to keep things in view. 💻

• Fixed an issue with general Perfmatters admin notices not displaying correctly.

• Fixed multiple duplicate ID warnings in the plugin UI.

• Fixed multiple jQuery deprecation warnings in plugin UI JavaScript.

Brett and I both want to thank everyone who voted for our Perfmatters plugin in both the Monster’s Award 2025 and The WP Awards 2025. 2nd and 3rd place ain’t too shabby! 🏆 We really appreciate it.

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

• Have you tried Chrome’s new split view feature yet? Not sure if I like it or hate it yet. 😅

• Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead.

• How Netflix and Paramount sparked a $108 billion media war for Warner Bros. Discovery.

• A post-mortem on the Cloudflare outage on December 5th.

WordPress

• In case you missed it, the annual State of the Word is up. I enjoy watching these, as most of the year I have my head down building. So it’s a good catch-up.

• Cloudflare released its annual Radar report, where it analyzed websites associated with the top 5,000 domains. For CMS, WordPress accounted for 47%.

• According to the State of Enterprise WordPress report, organizations using WordPress are increasing. 95% say they will continue to use the platform, up from 75% last year.

Marketing

• There is a new Kanban solution on the market called Fizzy. It’s from the same team that built Basecamp. Here is a good 17-minute walkthrough if you just want to see everything.

• I enjoyed this short post from BobWP on how he engages on social only when he wants to. I find myself much less vocal on social these days as well. Just so much noise, and I would rather focus on building.

Performance

• Kinsta has rolled out PHP 8.5, along with their annual benchmark report.

  • TLDR: Slight increase on regular WordPress sites, but with WooCommerce, PHP 8.5 reached 71.02 req/s, a ~33% increase over PHP 8.4. 🚀

  • We’re running PHP 8.5 on all of our sites now with no issues. But always thoroughly test first.

• BigScoots spent the last two years building a new solution, which will cache logged-in users. They give each authenticated visitor a private cache container. It’s stored on the edge. Personalized content is served from the user’s container, not the origin server. That means up to 97% faster load times for logged-in users. Pretty impressive! Worth checking out. 🔥

• WooCommerce 10.4 is out, and it comes with some performance improvements!

  • Interactivity API Mini Cart is the new default with smaller JS bundles.

  • The WooCommerce Admin and Analytics REST API namespaces are now lazy-loaded. Expect TTFB improvements of 30-60 ms when not needed. ⚡

  • HPOS (High-Performance Order Storage) Datastore caching feature moves out of experimental status and is now available as a standard option.

• The latest version of Safari now supports the Largest Contentful Paint and Interaction to Next Paint metrics.

• Highly recommend the HTML analyzer tool from Matt and the DebugBear team. It’s a quick way to spot issues. In this case, it was runaway inline SVG code from a few icons on a client’s site. 🐌

• Object Cache is now available for InstaWP sites on Plus plans and above. And smart image optimization (including WebP conversion) is now available on Pro plans and above. ⚡

• There was a change made with WP 6.9 in terms of when the WP-Cron is spawned (moving it from “init” to the “shutdown” hook). This resulted in a significant boost in performance. Give a shout-out to Prashant for reporting this.

• Did you know that Lighthouse has a Report Diff Tool? It’s actually pretty cool.

AI

• An interesting read. Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

• OpenAI declares “code red” as Google catches up in AI race. I can honestly say I don’t use ChatGPT anymore. I use Gemini and Claude.

• I talked a lot about Waymo in my last newsletter. They just crossed 450,000 weekly paid rides. That is up from 250,000 weekly rides back in April. Wow.

Wishing everyone a happy New Year! 🎉

Waymo launched its self-driving car program here in the Phoenix/Scottsdale area in 2018. Up until a few years ago, I would see maybe 1-2 Waymos per month. At that point, they were still a spectacle. People would drive very carefully when they got close, including me. The trust simply wasn’t there. But I also didn’t think much about it since I didn’t encounter them very often.

However, everything has changed recently. I can’t leave my home without seeing 2-3 Waymos per day. I’ve now driven alongside hundreds of Waymos. And they were just unleashed on the freeways this month. 🛣️ That’s right, we have self-driving cars here hopping on and off the freeway. The excitement and nervousness I used to get are now pretty much gone, and it’s becoming the new normal.

Next up is Tesla. They are launching their self-driving rental program here (they just got approval, first with a monitor). It’s like Turo, but the car comes to you. It seems like Arizona is one of the major testing grounds for these things, so I’ll let you know how it goes. 😅 Waymo is also launching in five new cities.

It’s still crazy to think how fast and far things have come. Growing up with dial-up internet and no cellphones, and now we have cars driving themselves around town, hopping on and off the freeway, and soon they will be leaving driveways on their own to pick people up. It’s like something out of a sci-fi movie.

Whether you like the idea of autonomous vehicles or not (I didn’t at first), they are probably coming to a city near you sooner than you think. Cities like mine are being used (as guinea pigs) to train the AI on thousands of data points every day, and this, in turn, makes it smarter and safer.

Black Friday deals on things I use 🏷️

Here are a few select deals on products and services I use and recommend checking out. 💥

• Kinsta: There has never been a better time to migrate to better hosting. Get 50% off all hosting plans and free migration (Nov. 17 – Dec. 2).

  • Annual billing: 50% off in the first year.

  • Monthly billing: 50% off for the first 6 months.

  • First month free for Single 35k and WP 2 plans.

  • Existing clients can get 25% off or 3 months free when upgrading a plan.

• Proton VPN: Up to 75% off, depending on the plan you choose (Oct. 27 – Nov. 30).

• Snagit: 50% off (Dec. 1 – Dec. 2). This is what I use to take all of my screenshots. Discount code: CYBER50

• InstaWP: 41% extra credits. Applies to purchases starting from $100 (Nov. 24 – Dec. 5). We utilize InstaWP every day for testing plugins/themes, sharing staging sites with clients to troubleshoot, etc. It’s an invaluable tool.

• GeneratePress One: Save up to $50! This includes GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks (through Dec. 1). There is no better combination for performance when it comes to building and designing WordPress sites. And that’s why I use it on all of my sites.

Want to convert your existing site to GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks, but don’t have the time? My friends at WP Boosters and OGAL Web Design can help.

• WS Form: 30% off (Nov. 24 – Dec. 5). An excellent choice if you need more advanced workflows for your forms. We use WS Form on our ecommerce sites. Discount code: BF30

• Mangools: 35% off all plans (Oct. 29 – Nov. 30). If you’re on a tight budget, Mangools is an excellent alternative to something like Ahrefs or Semrush.

• Namecheap: Up to 97% off on domains (Nov. 21 – Dec. 5).

• RightBlogger: 50% off the first year on new purchases and upgrades (Nov. 21 – Dec. 2).

If you’re bargain hunting, I compiled a larger list of Black Friday deals. Make sure to check it out.

You can also get 30% off new licenses and upgrades on our WordPress plugins (Perfmatters and Novashare) through Dec. 2nd. Discount code: BLACKFRIDAY

Updates ✍️

We pushed out a massive update this month for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin, something we’ve been working on behind the scenes for the past 6+ months.

You can now add code snippets in Perfmatters (PHP, CSS, JS, and HTML). We built it from the ground up with performance in mind. It uses a flat-file approach, which means it’s more secure and there are zero database calls on the front-end. In other words, it’s incredibly fast and won’t negatively impact page load times. ⚡

We took it a step further and made all the performance options you already use in Perfmatters available at the individual snippet level. Optimization features include loading snippets in a file or inline, minification, delay on user interaction, preloading, defer, async, and more. 🔥

Use our conditions builder to only load your code snippets where they are needed. 👷 There are an unlimited number of rules you can configure. Add includes, excludes, and even load by role or status (logged-in or logged-out).

It also has built-in error checking, meaning it’s not possible to break your site. If an error is detected with a snippet, it will automatically be deactivated. But we also have a robust Safe Mode just in case. 🦺 You can enable it via the settings, recovery URL, or a wp-config.php constant.

Note: This feature is currently in BETA. If you run into any issues, please reach out to us. We’re always eager to make improvements.

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

• Be careful with Amazon and Black Friday. Not everything is on sale, even though it might say 20-30% off. Use the free Keepa Chrome extension to view the price history for each product. You can even set notifications. It’s saved me quite a bit of money over the years.

• Behind the complaints: The investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today. An intriguing read.

• “Introducing iPhone pocket: a beautiful way to wear and carry iPhone.” I literally have no words. 😂 A $150 sock seems like a strange move in today’s economy.

• Brett and I use FaceTime a lot when we are working together. We both love using an app called SoundSource (highly recommend it). It’s basically an equalizer, so you can control the volume of music and apps separately. It has been really buggy since macOS Tahoe. But I can confirm their 5.8.10 update has resolved all the issues.

• Amazon’s Starlink competitor is launching with the world’s fastest satellite internet antenna. 🛰️ I’m all for more competition. I hate my ISP.

• Heads up, Spotify is planning a price increase for US subscribers.

WordPress

• WordPress 6.9 is slated to be released next week. Carlo put together an in-depth list of all the changes/improvements. Here are a few that stand out:

  • Six new blocks: Accordion, term query, time to read, math, comment count, and comment link.

  • Block visibility control. I’ve actually needed this a few times.

  • PHP 8.5 support.

  • Commenting blocks with notes: This brings asynchronous collaboration to the editor. Pretty cool and a good first step towards a Google Doc alternative! 📝

• Is an integration with WooCommerce and Wise coming soon? This would actually be pretty cool. Big fan of Wise.

• Kinsta pushed out some awesome updates this month:

  • You can now access phpMyAdmin with a single click from the MyKinsta dashboard! It no longer requires a username/password. Sometimes it’s the little things. 👏

  • Speaking of logins, organizations can now manage access to the MyKinsta dashboard using single sign-on (SSO). This is great if your team is using a provider like Google Workspace.

  • The direct database manager has also been released out of beta. If you don’t like phpMyAdmin, you can now browse, query, and edit database contents directly within MyKinsta.

Marketing

• Had a great chat with Lawrence on the WPBakery team! 🎙️ Some topics we discussed:

  • Content marketing and branding/visibility.

  • Is affiliate marketing more important now than ever?

  • How AI is shifting/changing the market.

• Adobe is acquiring Semrush. This was kind of out of the blue. Seems to be purely an SEO/AI play for Adobe.

Performance

• WordPress 6.9 to bring performance gains with fetchpriority support, increased inline CSS, and a new output buffer. Classic themes also benefit. For the first time, block styles will only be loaded when used. WP-Cron is also no longer spawned early, improving TTFB. ⚡

• Introducing the Cloudways lightning stack – Up to 65% faster performance for dynamic websites. We work with a lot of Cloudways clients, so we’re excited to see more performance-focused options. If you’re hosting there, you might want to consider updating (after testing).

• Check out this curated list of snippets to get web performance metrics as snippets on Chrome DevTools. 🔥 These are super handy, and now I’m obsessed with Chrome snippets.

• Cloudflare published a post-mortem of the major outage that occurred on November 18, 2025.

• Steve ran into a hosting issue when their plugin surpassed 5 MB. A friendly reminder that you usually get what you pay for when it comes to hosting. 🐌

• PHP 8.5 was released on November 20th. Check out what’s new in PHP 8.5 in terms of performance, debugging, and operations. Many hosting providers are likely working to make this available. But I wouldn’t rush into a new PHP version over the holidays.

• The European Commission wants browsers to manage cookie preferences instead of pop-ups on every website. I think everyone wants this to happen. Besides an instant UX improvement, this would also improve performance across the board. The cookie nightmare might be coming to an end. 🍪

• Mohan Raj has put together an impressive post with WordPress hosting benchmarks that run 24/7, 365 days a year. Some interesting data points!

• How quickly can Chrome parse HTML code? The difference between a MacBook and a mobile device is massive. This is why I’m always stressing the importance of HTML page size, and why it’s not always good to just inline everything.

• We always love to see folks who write reviews of our Perfmatters plugin. WPBakery also published some TTFB stats with different page builders.

• Why would a browser create a second connection to the same server, even though HTTP/2 can handle multiple requests on one connection? Matt answers it in this post.

• GenerateBlocks is launching a carousel block. Kyle did a great overview of it. However, I’m torn on this. While I think users utilizing GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks will have faster sites (and some might migrate for this), I tested it, and the JS and CSS for the carousel is over 37 KB. 🤔

AI

• Gemini 3 was released, and it’s amazing. 😮 My brother and I personally noticed some answers related to coding issues were significantly improved since the last model. ChatGPT 5.1 and Claude Opus 4.5 were also rolled out.

• In a time where AI can generate code, design ideas, and occasionally plausible answers on demand, the need for human critical thinking is greater than ever.

• Apple’s new Siri will be powered by Google Gemini. And just like that, Apple made up for years of lagging behind.

• It begins. Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign. 🚨

• How to use AI via the terminal. Worth a watch if you prefer this type of workflow.

• Replicate is joining Cloudflare. This will make tasks like running models on the edge much easier.

If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋

Whenever a big outage like this happens, it’s always a reminder that not everything needs to be “smart.” I’m glad AWS didn’t literally interrupt my sleep, since I’m still rocking a “dumb” boxspring mattress. And yet, sitting right next to me, I have an air purifier connected to my Wi-Fi. Does it really need this? No.

Second, Cloudflare had a major issue that many didn’t even realize. On October 24th (Friday morning, of course 😅), Cloudflare’s compression stopped working, and I started seeing this on dozens of sites across different hosting providers. This meant that the size of HTML pages suddenly went from ~60 KB to ~300 KB. You multiply this by 500 URLs, and it’s not good. It took them a while to acknowledge this, but they fixed it over the weekend.

Third, a major outage hit Microsoft Azure right before sending this newsletter. Taking down services like Microsoft 365, Xbox, creating network connectivity in Outlook, and even my mortgage company.

It’s alarming when you think about how fragile the internet still is in 2025. While everyone markets and claims to have multiple redundancies in place, the reality is that there are still single points of failure everywhere (from AWS to Cloudflare). We’re always one little DNS issue away from throwing the digital world into chaos. 🔥 Another reason why not everything we own needs to be smart.

Updates ✍️

We pushed out a couple of updates for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• New perfmatters_rucss_inline_stylesheets filter. This allows you to inline any stylesheet already excluded from used CSS. ⚡ See more on how to optimize used CSS exclusions.

• Reworked the Script Manager input change event listener for better compatibility with other JavaScript running while the Script Manager is being used.

• Added new delay JS quick exclusion for GenerateBlocks Pro.

• Added built-in CSS selector exclusion for GenerateBlocks mobile menu. 📱

• Added built-in stylesheet exclusion for GeneratePress local fonts.

• Updated WS Form Pro delay JS quick exclusion to fix a console error.

• Fixed some incorrect wording in the clear used CSS tooltip.

Stay tuned for our biggest Perfmatters feature update of the year coming in November! 😁🔥

We also pushed out an update for our Novashare WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• New AI share buttons for Claude and Google AI, which link to a prompt that will summarize the shared post’s content. 🤖

• New novashare_ai_network_text filter. Allows you to adjust the text that is passed through to an AI network prompt.

• New support to set the Novashare license key via wp-config.php using the NOVASHARE_LICENSE_KEY constant. 🔑 This has been highly requested from our agency clients.

• Removed Pocket share network from the plugin, as they have shut down.

Want to get notified of Perfmatters and Novashare changelog updates? You can now, thanks to a new project called ChangelogWP from Ryan Logan and Derek Ashauer.

• Subscribe to Perfmatters changelog notifications 📨

• Subscribe to Novashare changelog notifications 📨

We also need your help. If you’ve enjoyed using our Perfmatters or Novashare plugins, we would greatly appreciate a vote in the 2025 Monster’s Award (deadline is November 20).

• Vote for Perfmatters 🗳️

• Vote for Novashare 🗳️

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

• Thai commercials are hilarious. 😂

• I’m a big 80s movie buff, but somehow I had never seen the 1982 Tron. What a wild ride, I loved it!

• Brussels wants to fix Europe’s cookie law that messed up the internet. 🍪 Cookie banners are pretty pointless. You either accept everything or reject everything; nobody is reading them. It would be better to do something at the browser level.

WordPress

• FluentCart is officially here! If you are looking for an ecommerce alternative to WooCommerce, EDD, or SureCart, definitely one to check out.

• Is PHP dead in 2025? Check out the stats and market share.

• Freemius just lowered its fees for everyone. 👏 Their pricing makes a lot more sense now as you grow.

• Kinsta released two awesome updates this month:

  • You can now push a live or staging environment from one site to another. Handy when creating a new site based on an existing site’s configuration or moving a site to a different data center. 🚚

  • Bandwidth-based plans are now available. I know many clients who have been wanting this. Choose whatever works best for you, bandwidth or visits.

• Activity Log Pro version 1.0.2 is now available, and it comes with automated activity digest email reports. 📨

Marketing

• Trello finally got recurring due dates! 🎉 Sometimes it’s the little things.

Performance

• Gerard did a deep dive into the performance differences between FluentCart and WooCommerce. ⚡

• WebPageTest has had a complete redesign, and so far it’s looking great. Check out their blog post with more details about the changes.

• Firefox got two pretty big updates:

  • It now supports the Interaction to Next Paint (INP) metric.

  • View transitions are in every browser now. ✨

• Why does your site fail Core Web Vitals’ CLS, but shows a perfect score in PSI? 🤔 A great post from Joshua explaining why.

• DebugBear’s free INP Debugger tool now also reports what scripts delay user interactions, based on the Long Animation Frames API.

AI

• It begins. You can now preorder NEO, the home robot. Although I agree with Joanna Stern, “The next few years won’t be about owning a capable robot; they’ll be about raising one.” 🤖👦

• Kids are offloading their critical thinking to AI chatbots. Growing up in a world with AI has its negatives. I remember running out of the 10 free hours of dial-up internet for the month (NetZero), which meant I had to go outside and play. Parenting methods are going to be that much more important going forward.

• Imagine v0.9 is out, a new video generation model with massive upgrades from v0.1.

• AI browser Dia launches publicly on Mac, as well as ChatGPT Atlas. I’ve tried a few of these AI browsers and still keep going right back to Chrome. Maybe in time.

• Spam works. Repetition works. Recency works. Check out what Rand Fishkin learned about how to show up in LLM answers and AI tool results.

• Gemini 2.5 Flash rolls out to everyone, including more aspect ratios for social media. The improvements are pretty impressive. The image below was generated using AI from a photo on the beach. I’ll be honest, it’s almost to the point where I can’t tell the difference anymore.

If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋

I’ve been using Google AI Mode a lot over the past couple of months. It’s now a normal part of my daily work routine. So much so that I made Google AI mode my default search engine. I can open a new tab and query AI directly from the address bar. It’s crazy how fast things can change.

For example, I needed to find the endpoint a plugin was using for the REST API. The old way of doing this involved searching support docs, looking through Stack Overflow posts, or digging directly into the plugin’s code. But AI gave me the endpoint in less than 5 seconds.

I could probably give 100+ examples where I’m now working faster due to AI. Whether it’s rewriting a PHP filter or getting the answers I need without having to bounce around between different resources.

With that being said, I’ve also seen clients recently just blindly trusting AI. And sometimes this has caused problems. I shared this in my last newsletter, but I’m really glad I learned how to code before AI became a thing. Because you need to know when AI gives you something wrong, otherwise, it can send you down the wrong path and actually waste time.

The funny thing is, when you correct AI, it will then agree with you, apologize, and go on a lengthy explanation of why your way is now better. Why didn’t it just give me the correct answer to begin with? 🤔 That’s probably my biggest annoyance with it at the moment.

AI is definitely not perfect, but it’s improving day by day.

Updates ✍️

We pushed out a couple of updates for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• Added a fetchpriority high attribute on critically preloaded image tags to match the preload link attribute. This resolves a PSI warning in certain instances. ⚡

• Added new buffer function to check the viewport meta tag position and adjust it if needed when critical image preloads are being used. This drastically improves preload compatibility across the board with WordPress themes and page builders on mobile. 📱

• Added logic to populate the critical image preload href attribute with the fallback image src if the preload is for a responsive image srcset.

• Added built-in stylesheet exclusion for the GeneratePress offside menu.

• Updated delay JS quick exclusion for Elementor to include e-gallery.

• Fixed a PHP warning that could sometimes happen when calculating the root directory path in the utilities class. 🐛

• Fixed a trailing slash validation warning coming from critical image preload tags.

• Disabled the Remove Comment URLs toggle when Kadence is active due to an incompatibility.

We appreciate all the feedback from those of you who reported issues.

Stay tuned for an exciting new feature coming to Perfmatters in late October/November that we’ve been working on all summer! 😀

We also need your help. If you’ve enjoyed using our Perfmatters or Novashare plugins, we would greatly appreciate a vote in the 2025 Monster’s Award.

• Vote for Perfmatters 🗳️

• Vote for Novashare 🗳️

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

• Judge rules that Google can keep Chrome, but must share search data with qualified competitors.

• The Browser Company, maker of Arc and Dia, is being acquired by Atlassian.

• The new Google Finance dashboard (in beta) is beautiful! 🏦

• macOS Tahoe 26 and iOS 26 are out! I made the move already and am liking most of the changes. The Apple Music app finally feels more native to the OS. Although Liquid Glass is really throwing my eyes for a loop. Some icons (even those updated) look blurry to me. Maybe I’m just old. 😅

• Speaking of Apple, I had been saving money in my account for the last few years, just waiting for the new AirPods Pro 3 to come out. I can confirm they are amazing!

  • The active noise cancellation (ANC) improvements are noticeable compared to the Pro 2 models. I’m blown away by this, as I thought ANC was already good before.

  • My Pro 2 would only get around 5 hours of battery life. I’m easily squeezing out 8 hours of battery life with the Pro 3. And that’s with ANC enabled. 🔋

• Ookla launches Wi-Fi Speedtest Certified program to help prove network quality. It would be awesome to see if a hotel has a certain speed of internet before booking. I’m all for this and hope companies adopt it.

WordPress

• Subdomain delegation with NS records is now available in Kinsta DNS.

• InstaWP has added two new suffix options for domains (*.instawp.co and *.instawp.link).

• GenerateBlocks Pro 2.4 is expanding its conditional display features to work with any block (not just those from GenerateBlocks). This will be a great improvement.

• What’s coming in WordPress 6.9? Jamie did an awesome overview! And it’s very short, which I prefer.

• WordPress is finally going to get a native according block.

• In ACF’s annual 2025 survey, they discovered that 50% of respondents were using a hybrid WordPress theme.

Marketing

• I enjoyed this article from Emily on “you don’t need social media, social media needs you.” A lot of good points. Although I won’t be closing my X account anytime soon. 😅

• Google Search rank and position tracking is a mess right now after they removed the ability to see 100 search results per page. What does it mean for your website?

• How to select your preferred sources in Top Stories in Search.

• The Signal app has introduced secure backups.

• X is now offering me end-to-end encrypted chat — you probably shouldn’t trust it yet.

• Google says to go with a traditional TLD even if you need a hyphen in the domain name.

Performance

• I’m always on the lookout for better cookie solutions. I’ve published a new doc with some WordPress cookie plugins aimed at performance, including their base CSS/JS sizes. 🍪

• DebugHawk is now live! It’s like Query Monitor and an APM tool combined to monitor both front and backend performance, without all the crazy complexity. I played around with it in early access and love the direction it’s headed. Also check out what’s planned for 2026.

• A reminder that GTmetrix is removing its default Canada location on October 15th, 2025. A Seattle location will be the new default.

• Cloudflare is going to make nearly every feature they offer available to any customer who wants to buy it, regardless of whether they are an enterprise account. This is awesome!

• Cloudflare just got faster and more secure. According to their tests, websites are responding 10 ms faster at the median, a 25% performance boost.

• Rocket.net hosting has launched a data center location in Canada. 🇨🇦

• In Chrome 140, you can now click Debug with AI under Performance > Insights in DevTools for things like “Improve Image Delivery” and “Legacy JS.” It's great that they continue to improve this!

AI

• RIP to the em dash — you were my favorite punctuation mark until AI ruined you.

• You can now branch conversations in ChatGPT.

• Claude Sonnet 4.5 was just released, and they claim it is the best coding model in the world.

• AI recruiter Alex raises $17M to automate initial job interviews. I’m not sure about this one. 🫠

If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋

This wasn’t my first ER visit, but I always forget just how bad our healthcare system is here in the US. From the wait times, quality of care, and cost. One emergency room visit was a whopping $14,267.90. Thankfully, I have good health insurance (which isn’t cheap), but this is insane. 😮

To add insult to injury, my health insurance provider just pulled out of Arizona, leaving me and around 60,000 other Arizonians scrambling to find a new provider. To put it in perspective for those outside the US, the average annual cost of a family health insurance policy in 2024 was $25,572. 💰 It’s cheaper if you work for a big company with its own plans, but many small businesses and self-employed folks don’t have this luxury.

We also have this ridiculous system of PPO vs HMO plans. PPO plans are like flexing a Black American Express card. You can see any doctor you want right away, even out of network. HMO plans (the affordable ones) mean you have to get a referral first to see the doctor you want, and then they limit where you can go.

This isn’t about politics either. The healthcare system in the US has been broken for decades, and the cost of health insurance keeps going up regardless of who is in office. Something definitely needs to change, as this isn’t sustainable. We need a complete reset. 🙃

Updates ✍️

We pushed out a couple of updates for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• New WP-CLI subcommands: clear-minified-js, clear-minified-css, and clear-local-fonts.

• Added support to enable and disable the clean uninstall option in WP-CLI.

• Added support for targeting header element when using parent selector matching functions.

• Added built-in stylesheet exclusion for Bricks layer stylesheets.

• Added a built-in Script Manager rule to prevent dashicons from being dequeued when logged in.

• Adjusted emoji_svg_url filter to only return false outside the admin dashboard.

• Updated early hint attribute check to include sizes and media attributes. ⚡

• Updated delay JS quick exclusion for Bricks to include splide.

• Updated delay JS quick exclusion for CookieYes to be more compatible.

• Updated CSS parsing library to the latest version (8.9.0). New features, deprecation removals, and bug fixes.

• Updated deprecated function in CSS class to use current method.

• Updated minification library to the latest version (1.3.75).

• Updated minimum PHP version requirement to 7.2.

• Updated our staging site license key exception list with additional formats (.mystagingwebsite.com for Pressable hosting and stg.*). 🔑

• Fixed a WP-CLI issue where license activation and deactivation subcommands were not working correctly.

• Translation updates.

We also pushed out an update for our Novashare WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• New AI share buttons for ChatGPT, Grok, and Perplexity, which link to a prompt that will summarize the shared post’s content. 🤖

• New follow button for Nextdoor.

• Updated Nextdoor brand colors. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

• Adjusted copy button URL to work with the existing novashare_permalink filter when displayed on single posts.

• Fixed multiple PHP warnings coming from the follow widget class.

• Fixed an issue where floating bar icons were not centering properly when fill available space option was being used. 📏

• Reverted Facebook share button mobile URL to use web link to be more compatible with all platforms.

• Updated our staging site license key exception list with additional formats (*.mystagingwebsite.com for Pressable hosting and stg.*). 🔑

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

• I’m a fan of backup services like Backblaze, because iCloud is not technically an off-site backup; it’s a sync. A new Mac app called Parachute Backup was recently released. It automatically backs up iCloud Photos, iCloud Drive, and your Apple Music library to your own storage (external hard drive, SSD, or even another cloud). It’s a one-time purchase, no monthly subscription. Worth checking out!

• Proton has launched Proton Authenticator, a free, open-source 2FA app with multiple sync options: Proton account, iCloud, or local. It’s available on all platforms. 🔒

• How Apple AirPods work. The engineering behind these is mind-boggling!

• This infamous people search site is back after leaking 3 billion records. See how to remove your data from it ASAP.

• I never knew about this secondary time zone trick in Google Calendar. Definitely handy when traveling. 📅

• Snagit 2025.3.0 was released, and large .snagx files now save up to 2x faster.

• I’m not a huge gamer, but I grew up playing Battlefield. The last few have been flops. I recently tried the Battlefield 6 beta, and it was amazing. Excited for the release in October! Check out the trailer.

• If you like The Midnight, this new song, “Summers Ending Soon,” is an instant classic. They are coming back to their roots. 🎙️

WordPress

• Enjoyed this sitdown with WPLegends! We talk work-life balance, WordPress plugins, SEO landscape, and even Netflix recommendations. 😄

• Activity Log Pro has launched on the WordPress repository! It’s a new activity monitoring and audit log plugin for WordPress. Track user actions, system changes, and security events with a clean UI and GDPR-ready features like IP anonymization and retention controls.

• Ever wonder how themes and page builders stack up when it comes to accessibility? Check out this in-depth report from Equalize Digital.

• There is a new editorial experience coming to WordPress. Have you seen it? It looks interesting, but I don’t like it being mixed in with regular comments.

• Rocket.net joins hosting.com (previously A2 Hosting). Talk about an interesting and exciting combination. Definitely didn’t see this one coming. I personally love working with Rocket.net clients, as it makes my job much easier.

• Enjoyed this post from OpenChannels.fm on how to handle customer support as a growing WordPress plugin business.

• The Simple Cloudflare Turnstile plugin got hit with a trademark violation. 😢 Looks like he might have to rename the plugin.

• Patchstack found that 87.8% of vulnerability exploits bypassed hosting defenses.

• When folks ask me if they should use WordPress or another solution for their business. This is how I feel. 👇

Marketing

• Ever have a Gmail thread with a ton of responses, and it starts to slow down your browser almost to the point of crashing? 🐌 You can delete the trimmed content altogether. Simply press the arrow key down until it lands on the three dots. Then hit delete on your keyboard. You can’t click on it; otherwise, it will expand the trimmed content. And voila, super speedy again (minus the history)!

• Google is rolling out the August 2025 spam update.

Performance

• Heads up. Cloudflare Mirage is being deprecated and will be removed on September 15, 2025. 🪦

• I published a doc on our site with a bunch of image optimization tips. I’ll keep compiling things here, so perhaps a good one to bookmark.

• Kadence Blocks is currently beta testing some awesome new performance features! ⚡

  • Lazy load background images

  • Smart image optimization (show the right size based on the screen)

  • Lazy load HTML below the fold

• 2025 Core Web Vitals challenge: WordPress versus everyone else. 🫣

• You’re loading fonts wrong (and it’s crippling your performance).

AI

• Grammarly says its AI agent can predict an A paper. I can’t imagine what teachers must be going through these days. I grew up rewriting snippets from SparkNotes, hoping to get a good grade with the least amount of work. 😅

• OpenAI released GPT-5, featuring state-of-the-art performance across coding, math, writing, health, visual perception, and more.

• xAI released Grok Code Fast 1, a speedy and economical reasoning model that excels at agentic coding.

• See how leading AI models stack up across text, image, vision, and beyond.

• Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately.

• xAI’s Grok now lets users turn any image into a video.

• Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (Nano Banana) from Google was released. I had a little fun with it. 😂

If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋

Enter the amazing Logitech MX518, which I’ve been using since 2007. That’s a whopping 18 years using the same mouse. I’ve purchased a few of these after wear and tear, including the updated specs version that Logitech released in 2019. However, the form of the mouse itself remained unchanged. For some weird reason, it just always worked with my hand. I could use it for 16+ hours a day with no issues.

The problem? The mouse became increasingly difficult to find as Logitech discontinued its production. What was once a $39 mouse now goes for $150 due to its scarcity. And pretty soon it won’t be around at all. So I slowly started looking for a new mouse. The problem was that my wrist pain would return the moment I tried a different one. Here are a few I’ve tried recently:

• Razer Pro Click V2

• Keychron M3

• Logitech G PRO X Superlight 2 DEX

• Logitech G PRO X Superlight 2

• Logitech G703

• Logitech G603

• Logitech G305

• I also tried a few vertical ergonomic mice

I ended up returning these mice after trying them for about two weeks each. The wrist pain was almost instant and never went away. I would go back to my Logitech MX518, and I was fine. So either my hand had literally formed into an MX518 at this point 😅, or I had to keep searching.

I was chatting with my brother, and he mentioned I should check out a brand called ZOWIE. I had never heard of it. It’s a line of mice made by BenQ (or rather, they acquired ZOWIE). Honestly, BenQ isn’t the first brand that comes to my mind for mice. But ZOWIE is their gaming line.

I decided to give the new ZOWIE EC1-DW mouse a try. It’s not cheap by any means, but I view it as an investment, both for work and my health.

After using it for a couple of weeks, I was blown away. It was instantly a perfect fit, no wrist pain, and I love everything about the mouse. For me, this just goes to show that the form factor, size, etc. of a mouse can matter quite a bit. Especially if you’re on the computer a lot. Obviously, no mouse will probably ever be exactly the same. But it’s about finding one that’s close and feels good.

Also, during my research, I discovered this handy EloShapes tool. You can compare different mice by size, weight, shape, and other factors like thumb rest, hump placement, etc.

If you’ve been looking for a great ergonomic right-handed mouse, I highly recommend checking out the ZOWIE brand. They have 18+ different models depending on what you need. A few other things I like about their line as opposed to other brands:

• No fancy LED lights to figure out how to turn off. This means more battery life automatically.

• DPI buttons right on the mouse.

• No software. Means you don’t have to worry about Windows or Mac support.

• No complicated additional buttons, just two simple buttons on the side.

• Very high-quality build and extremely comfortable.

• Ironically, this is the first time I’ve ever owned a wireless mouse. I guess it’s better late than never. 😅

Updates ✍️

We pushed out an update for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• New support to set the Perfmatters license key via wp-config.php using the PERFMATTERS_LICENSE_KEY constant. 🔑 This has been highly requested from our agency clients.

• New perfmatters_fetch_priority filter.

• New integration to send an early hint header for used CSS file when both features are enabled.

• Added additional check for imagesrcset attribute when determining if an image should receive an early hint.

• Added crossorigin and fetchpriority attributes to early hint headers. ⚡

• Added additional parameters to excluded page builders array for Thrive Quiz Builder and Etch.

• Added built-in stylesheet exclusions for Elementor and Astra local fonts.

• Cleaned up leftover test file missed in previous update.

• Translation updates.

Sidenote: We've been working really hard behind the scenes this summer on a brand new feature. 👨‍💻 One of the biggest we've launched in years. We can't reveal it quite yet, but we think you'll like it! Stay tuned.

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

• Japan sets a new internet speed record that is 4 million times faster than average US broadband speeds. You could download the entire Netflix catalogue in 1 second. 😮

• Buying a house in the 1990’s. I thought this short was hilarious. 😂

WordPress

• The roadmap for WordPress 6.9 (ETA December 2025) has been published. A few things that caught my eye:

  • Hide individual blocks on the front-end.

  • Add comments to individual blocks.

  • Implementing instant page navigations from browser history via bfcache. ⚡

• GenerateBlocks Pro 2.3.0 alpha version is out with a lot of new features, things I’m sure many users will be happy about. While I tend to stay away from these, you can rest assured that they are at least built with performance in mind. Although I would wait for a stable release. Kyle also made a great video about the new features:

  • Advanced Overlay Panel system

  • Advanced conditions system for Overlay Panels

  • Create modals

  • Create mega menus

  • Create anchored overlays (popovers, etc.)

  • Create off-canvas panels

• The SureRank plugin is out of beta! I’m looking forward to testing this plugin, especially to see how valid their “without the bloat” claims are. 😅

• Kinsta has launched Database Studio (beta), where you can manage your site’s MySQL database right from the MyKinsta UI. No more clunky phpMyAdmin. Pretty cool!

• There is a proposal to add PHPStan (a static code analysis tool to fix bugs before they reach customers) as a development dependency to WordPress core.

• Was excited to take part in WPKitchen’s lunch giveaway, where Muhammad Hammad Rasheed was named the winner! 👨‍🍳

• Easy Digital Downloads has added EU/UK VAT handling to their core plugin. This is great news, as it streamlines our business even more. But a huge shout-out to Barn2 for their excellent VAT plugin over the years; we couldn’t have done it without them. 👋

• Bricks 2.0 has been released, and with it come 300+ changes. It’s their biggest full release update since 2021. I’m excited about the icon manager. Hopefully, you won’t need to load the entire Font Awesome library anymore.

Marketing

• SEO Rockstar proves you don’t need meta descriptions. Honestly, there have been times when I didn’t write them and Google figured it out just fine. Your content itself is always the most important factor.

• Fathom Analytics has been crushing it lately with the new features. 👏 Here are some of the things they launched in July:

  • City data for visitors.

  • Advanced bot blocking.

  • Advanced filters to more easily segment data.

  • RegEx support for advanced filters.

  • Favicons for referrers in the dashboard.

• Superhuman is being acquired by Grammarly to build the future of work.

Performance

• Heads up, Core Web Vitals is coming to iOS! 🔥 This includes LCP and INP. More details here.

• Font Awesome 7 is out. While they make beautiful icons, I’ve never been a fan due to how the entire libraries (mostly unused) are loaded on most sites. 🐌 The good news is they’ve streamlined them in this version (recommend updating if you haven’t already). I ran a few tests and here are some findings:

  • fa-solid-xx.woff2 159 KB down to 114 KB (28.3% decrease in size)

  • fa-regular-xx.woff2 26 KB 19.4 KB (25.38% decrease in size)

• Weston Ruter launched the new No-cache BFCache plugin, which enables instant back/forward navigations, particularly while logged in. Definitely worth checking out, but you might not want to run on a large production site yet. However, this does appear to be on the roadmap for core integration in WordPress 6.9.

• Last month, I shared the launch of Felix’s View Transitions plugin. However, just be aware that this might impact performance. I personally don’t like the feel of transitions.

• Pressidium has launched edge cache. ⚡ This is great news for Pressidium customers as it means much faster server response time (lower TTFB) around the globe.

• Microsoft says its Edge browser feels even faster. It now takes less than 300 milliseconds to start rendering the first parts of its user interface, including text and images.

• Speed Analyzer is a new plugin from Dalibor that gives you an in-dashboard speed audit of your website. It uses Cloudflare Workers and Google PSI API under the hood.

AI

• Cloudflare introduced pay per crawl, enabling content owners to charge AI crawlers for access. 🫰

  • On one hand, I tend to agree with Bill Hartzer on this topic. However, Jake Hawkes also shared an insightful video from Cloudflare’s CEO. I see both sides of this. But will Google cooperate? I think time will tell how this plays out.

• Last month, I mentioned Yoast’s new LLMS.txt feature. However, it had one issue. They’ve fixed this now by adding support for preventing specifically noindexed posts from getting into the file. They also added manual page inclusion.

• AI-generated content does not hurt your Google rankings (according to Ahrefs). But this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good.

• AI search currently drives less than 1% of traffic to most sites.

• LLM seeding: A new strategy to get mentioned and cited by LLMs. Here we go again. SEO round 2. 😅

• Perplexity, the startup behind the AI “answer” engine, has just launched its own web browser called Comet.

• xAI has launched Grok 4, claiming to be the most powerful AI model yet to date.

If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋

I've been blogging and doing SEO for 17+ years. My whole strategy (coming from an IT background) was that when encountering a problem at work, I share the fix on the web (in easy-to-follow steps), and rinse and repeat. 1️⃣2️⃣3️⃣ = 📈

That strategy worked extremely well for many years to grow traffic organically. But with the rise of AI, this will never really be the same.

As Andrew mentioned, I also find myself going to an AI tool 80-85% of the time to find my answers now. 🤖 Why waste time Googling or watching a video, if I can just immediately get the answer. 🕰️ Obviously, fact checking, hallucinations, etc., are still important to keep in mind. But AI has drastically increased my productivity and workflows (researching, troubleshooting, etc.), and it only continues to do so.

Take Stack Overflow, for example. Has it become completely irrelevant? Data from January 2025 suggested the answer is likely “yes.” Since then, things have gone from bad to worse. I used to visit Stack Overflow all the time, but now I rarely find myself hitting their site.

I sold one of my health niche blogs two years ago because it was becoming obvious that AI was just going to keep consuming everything. 💵 Looking back, that was the right choice (especially with my other time commitments outside of content production).

Honestly, I think we are still in a transition period, and I don't know what the future holds exactly. While many marketing strategies have changed, it's also exciting. It feels like the wild wild west of the early internet, where anything goes and everyone is experimenting. 🤠

I'm always going to keep producing content of some kind; it's in my blood. But I'm incorporating AI into every workflow I can to try and keep up. Adapt or die. 💪

Updates ✍️

We pushed out an update for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• New advanced preload option to enable Cloudflare Early Hints (BETA) for Perfmatters preloads, along with controls to limit which file types will have early hint link headers sent. This can help improve LCP by loading resources sooner (no waiting for HTML parsing). ⚡

• New WP-CLI import-settings subcommand to import a settings configuration from an exported .json file.

• New WP-CLI disable and enable subcommands to modify certain plugin options. Available options can be printed out with the new get-options subcommand. 👨‍💻

• New delay JS quick exclusion for SureCart.

• Added additional logic to disable speculative loading on WooCommerce cart and checkout URLs. 🛒

• Added additional logic to allow fallback deferral exclusions as part of an existing delay JS quick exclusion.

• Added built-in exclusion for Gravity Forms to prevent optimization features from running on AJAX form requests.

• Updated CSS parsing library to the latest version (8.8.0). Bug fixes and deprecations.

• Adjusted placement of perfmatters_preloads filter which was running too early and causing some filter snippets to be ignored. 🏁

• Increased default delay timeout from 10 to 15 seconds to improve compatibility.

• Fixed an issue with certain parent selector matching functions where a child element selector tag would also be replaced if it had the exact same selector tag HTML as the matched parent tag.

• Fixed multiple redundant calls to retrieve Script Manager settings row when loading the Script Manager UI. 🔽

We also pushed out an update for our Novashare WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• Refactored specific portions of the main frontend stylesheet. We were able to reduce the CSS file size by an additional 7.69% (now under 2.5 KB)! ⚡ We recommend that you clear all cache layers (Unused/Critical CSS, server cache, CDN cache) after updating to take advantage of the speed gains.

• Added new novashare_page_builders filter.

• Added new Pinterest image pin options for Image Placement to control which images get pin buttons added. The novashare_pinterest_image_excluded filter that was previously used for whitelisting will still work for the time being, but that will now be managed in the UI going forward.

• Started work on moving more universal style properties like button size and button margin to CSS variables.

• Cleaned up and removed redundant inline style overrides for inline content buttons.

• Fixed an issue where floating bar buttons were being added to the Bricks editor UI.

• Fixed an issue where Facebook share button was not working correctly on mobile.

Also, in case you missed it, I did a website performance AMA with Kyle earlier this month. We covered various topics and questions related to speeding up your WordPress sites.

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

• Elizabeth Holmes is back (sort of). You can't make this stuff up. 😂🤦‍♂️ For anyone not familiar with the original story of Theranos, the Hulu show was pretty good.

• Trying to grab a domain? The Notifydomain service notifies you when domains become available. You can track up to three domains in the free plan!

• Nintendo’s Switch 2 is the fastest-selling game console of all time. 😮

• I’ve been using Snagit for years, but CleanShot just added the option to automatically convert screenshots to sRGB color profile in version 4.8. I requested this back in 2020, as it was a dealbreaker for me. I might revisit CleanShot now to see how it stacks up again.

• This Robinhood founder might just revolutionize energy (if he succeeds) by beaming solar power back down to earth. ☀️

• I binged Squid Game season 3 this last weekend. 🦑 What a wild ride! Better than season 2. Although nothing will compare to watching season 1 for the first time.

• Windows is getting rid of the Blue Screen of Death after 40 years. Good memories. 😜

• Some personal thoughts on WWDC and things that stood out for my workflow. 

  • Pinning favorite music playlists will come in handy. 📌

  • Liquid glass looks cool, but not quite sure yet about those corners or transparency yet. 🤔

  • The Apple Music app getting a possible redesign has me excited. 🎵

  • Apple Notes markdown export. This is great if you're moving to other tools like Obsidian, Ulysses, Bear, etc.

  • Phone app on my Mac? This sounds awesome. If my airpods are already in, I don't need to grab my phone. 📱

  • Call screening and hold assist. If these work well, they could be a huge timesaver. I've had the silence unknown callers feature enabled for years on my phone due to spam. 🤦‍♂️

  • Improved audio quality for airpods. 🔈

  • Digital IDs for passports and boarding passes with links to terminal maps. 🪪✈️

  • Lots of new Spotlight features and shortcuts. But time will tell. Raycast ain't going anywhere yet.

  • Quite a few improvements are coming to Safari.

  • Journal app is coming to iPad and Mac. I think this is a promising app, just wasn’t very useful before being mobile only.

  • An easier way to run Linux containers in macOS (or rather, without Docker)? 😮 Here is another post about it.

  • Supposedly there are new cursors?

• On June 12th, Google Cloud brought half the internet down, including Cloudflare (post-mortem). That was a fun day. 😅

WordPress

• GenerateBlocks 2.2 brings the new Site Header and Navigation blocks! This release allows you to now create navigation and headers beyond the Customizer. They don’t have search option yet, but there is a way to make this work.

• Meet FluentCart, the newest WordPress ecommerce solution coming to town from the team behind Fluent Forms. 🛒 It’s an alternative for Easy Digital Downloads, WooCommerce, and SureCart. I’m all for more competition in this space, as it makes them all better in the longterm.

• Speaking of ecommerce, Easy Digital Downloads just released a much needed update for one-click payment updates (both Stripe and PayPal). This will definitely save me some time on billing tickets! You can add them to reminder emails, payment failure emails, etc.

• The SureRank Release Candidate is now live! A simple, lightweight SEO assistant. It’s from the same team that makes Astra. I’m all for more competition in the SEO space, especially those that are more performance focused. 📈

• Why WordPress keeps winning: What users love and how to avoid plugin fatigue.

• WooCommerce 9.9 has introduced a new Blueprint import and export feature to speed up configurations by copying settings across new installations.

• New FAIR project aims to decentralize WordPress.org services, backed by Linux Foundation and hundreds of contributors.

• InstaWP v3 is here with a lot of improvements and changes:

  • Moving to pay-as-you-go plans. Current customers are grandfathered in if you don’t want to change.

  • Each site now has its own plan, giving you fine-grained control.

  • New UI/dashboard for site management.

  • InstaWP Live will be wp.cloud in the coming weeks.

  • Free tier now requires credit card.

  • New data center in Australia (Sydney). 🇦🇺

• Activity Log Pro is a new plugin (in beta) that tracks user actions, security events, and system changes on your WordPress site. It’s also cheaper than some of the other alternatives. Worth checking out!

• Joost de Valk dives into some data around the state of innovation within the WordPress ecosystem. Core updates have slowed, and contributions from key players are either leveling or even declining. Should we be worried?

Performance

• DebugHawk for WordPress coming is soon. It’s like Query Monitor and an APM tool combined to monitor both front and backend performance, without all the crazy complexity! I’ve been playing around with it, very promising so far. ⚡

• Felix has launched the View Transitions plugin. It adds a fade when navigating the site, making transitions smooth and essentially hiding that hard reload behavior. It’s about improving “perceived performance.” However, after testing, I’m still on the fence. 😅 Probably going to be more of a personal preference.

• Chrome achieves highest score ever on Speedometer 3.1, saving users millions of hours.

• Cloudflare Containers are now available in beta. This is pretty massive news! It means a step closer to possibly hosting (not just caching/serving) your entire WordPress site at the edge. 🔥

• Speaking of Cloudflare. I’m a big fan of their services and have used them on all of our sites for years. However, their support is absolutely horrible. I have a paid account and opened a ticket on June 2nd. As of June 30th, they haven’t responded. Thankfully I resolved the issue myself, but talk about bad. 🤦‍♂️

• Are website INP scores getting worse or better? Check out some of the data from the Chrome User Experience Report.

• WooCommerce 9.9 is much faster! In testing, they measured up to 95% reductions in page load times across critical admin screens. 🚀

AI

• Meet Dia, a new AI focused Chromium based web browser. If you previously tried Arc, you can install it right now.

• LLMS.txt isn’t robots.txt: It’s a treasure map for AI. Yoast released a new feature to generate an llms.txt file your WordPress site. 🗃️

  • One issue I found with the new Yoast feature is they don’t yet support the automatic exclusion of individual posts set as noindex. Meaning it might grab things like your privacy policy or content you would rather exclude.

• ChatGPT and Perplexity indexes are now live in Ahrefs Brand Radar (Gemini and Microsoft Copilot coming soon). This is basically like Site Explorer for LLMs. Pretty cool!

• Google AI Mode traffic data comes to Search Console.

• Someone used Veo3 to make Moses as a YouTuber live-streaming the Exodus. 😂

If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋

Main benefits of AVIF ⚡

The first benefit is obviously faster load times due to the smaller file sizes. This is mainly on images above the fold that aren’t lazy loaded (meaning a positive impact on your LCP in terms of Core Web Vitals). I took a few images from my migration to compare the differences. I am seeing, on average, a 29% decrease in image sizes moving from WebP to AVIF. 🔥

• Image 1

  • PNG 56 KB

  • WebP 27 KB: ~52% decrease on PNG to WebP

  • AVIF 21 KB: ~22% decrease on WebP to AVIF, ~63% decrease on PNG to AVIF

• Image 2

  • PNG 11 KB

  • WebP 10 KB: ~9% decrease on PNG to WebP

  • AVIF 7 KB: ~30% decrease on WebP to AVIF, ~36% decrease on PNG to AVIF

• Image 3

  • PNG 42 KB

  • WebP 34 KB: ~19% decrease on PNG to WebP

  • AVIF 22 KB: ~35% decrease on WebP to AVIF, ~48% decrease on PNG to AVIF

Second, you should see increased crawl efficiency by Google and other tools due to the smaller file sizes and faster page rendering. 🤖

Can’t you just use AVIF images directly and skip the fallback?

In terms of browser support, it’s very similar now. WebP browser support is at ~95% while AVIF browser support is at ~93%. WordPress 6.5 and higher supports directly uploading AVIF images to the media library. However, ensure that your hosting provider has a newer version of ImageMagick running and the libavif library. Otherwise, you may encounter the following error. Most hosts shouldn’t have this issue.

Given the current state of support, you might think it would be better to just use AVIF images directly and save on disk space. The problem with that is social media (good post from Joost). For example, networks like X, LinkedIn, BlueSky, etc., don’t support AVIF yet. So if you want a preview image when sharing (which I personally do), you will still want to upload a WebP, PNG, or JPEG image. If you don’t care about this, you might be able to get away with it. 😅

What if you’re already using an image optimization plugin and using WebP?

It will likely vary slightly depending on what you are using and your approach. You could either enable AVIF and utilize WebP and PNG together, or revert back to your original backups (if you have them), and then do bulk optimizations again from the original images to AVIF. The latter is more time-consuming and perhaps more expensive, but would be smaller in terms of total disk space.

In my migrations, I actually decided to keep both WebP and AVIF. One reason is that I don’t know where I might have accidentally manually linked to a WebP image in a post, social meta tag, etc. This results in a little extra HTML on each page and disk space, but the gains from the image file reductions far outweigh that.

If you're curious, here's how much extra disk space was added, along with how long the bulk optimization took.

• Site 1

  • Media library consisted of 627 images.

  • 656 MB before, 679 MB after adding AVIF.

  • Bulk optimization took 45 minutes using Imagify.

• Site 2

  • Media library consisted of 1252 images.

  • 3.6 GB before, 3.64 GB after adding AVIF.

  • Bulk optimization took 1.5 hours using Imagify.

• Site 3

  • Media library consisted of 4,141 images.

  • 2.82 GB before, 2.88 GB after adding AVIF.

  • Bulk optimization took 2 hours using Imagify.

If you aren’t using AVIF images yet, it’s definitely something to consider if you want to shave off some additional weight across your WordPress sites. Hopefully, in a year or two, we’ll see social media catch up as well. It would be awesome if AVIF just worked everywhere.

Updates ✍️

We pushed out an update for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• New exclude leading option for lazy loading CSS background images. This allows you to more quickly and broadly target containers and then automatically exclude a hero CSS background image from lazy loading. ⚡

• New speculative loading mode option to disable the feature entirely. 🚫 Mainly for slower shared hosting providers.

• Reworked the critical_image_parent_exclusions and leading_image_parent_exclusions filters to no longer need to process the page HTML through DOMDocument for better stability, faster parsing, and 30% less code. 🔥

• New lazyload_parent_exclusions filter allows you to add selectors for parent containers that you want to target and exclude any images they contain from lazy loading. 👨‍🔧

• New css_background_selectors filter allows you to add CSS background selectors for containers for which you want to lazy load background images. 👨‍🔧

• Fixed an issue with parent selector matching for fetch priority and lazy loading where only the first image tag would match if it was inside a nested container element.

• Fixed an issue where the CSS background class would get added to child elements if they also contained a matching selector.

• Fixed a compatibility issue when using Perfmatters preloads alongside WP Rocket.

• Fixed a spacing issue with input row checkboxes in the plugin UI.

On June 19th, I'll be doing a website performance AMA! ⚡🚀 Got something you want to ask me? Submit your questions and sign up for the event here: https://theadminbar.com/events/website-performance-ama/

And a big thanks to Kyle Van Deusen for putting this together.

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

• Heads up, with Gemini now included in all business tiers, Google is increasing the price of Workspace plans in 2025. 💸

• The social sharing app Pocket is shutting down. Some good alternatives in this post.

• Watch this new Star Wars style speeder bike fly at almost 125 mph.

• I’ve been using Sublime for over a decade! It’s the best lightweight text editor out there, in my opinion. Build 4200 was just released.

• The Have I Been Pwned database/website from Troy Hunt got a complete makeover.

• The CSS if() function landed in Chrome 137! This is pretty crazy. 🤓 We’ll have to see if other browsers also add support.

WordPress

• A2 Hosting has rebranded and is now under the name hosting.com. Talk about an impressive domain name.

• Happy 22nd birthday to WordPress! I still can’t believe I launched my first WordPress site 17 years ago. 😮👴

• I use InstaWP on a daily basis. They just rolled out PHP 8.4 support, which will come in handy for testing.

• Anil Agarwal, of BloggersPassion, has acquired our WP Coupons plugin. There is a free version now available on the WordPress repository.

• Easy Digital Downloads version 3.3.8 includes new controls to customize checkout address fields. 🛒

• Ollie Pro 2.0 is a huge update that brings a revamped Ollie dashboard and three powerful new site-building tools: the setup wizard, starter sites, and a child theme creator. I’ve played around with it, and it’s impressive!

• FluentAffiliate is the newest WordPress affiliate plugin on the market from the team behind Fluent Forms.

Performance

• Big changes are coming to PageSpeed Insights. Lighthouse is moving to performance insight audits. 😮🔥

  • ETA is October 2025. 🗓️

  • There is a switcher in the meantime to get used to things.

  • Some audits are being renamed while others are being removed.

• Pascal built a CSS-only carousel block for WordPress (proof of concept). This is really cool, as it doesn't require any heavy JavaScript libraries.

• Elementor releases the alpha of editor V4, its biggest overhaul in eight years. They are moving towards CSS-first styling with minimal JS for better performance.

• Weston made a pull request to add low fetch priority to core modules and comments JS. This will be a great update to WordPress core.

• Kinsta’s PHP Performance add-on is now available to everyone. And you can fine-tune the CDN, edge cache, and PHP behavior via the Kinsta API.

• Great news! WooCommerce 9.9 will deliver massive admin performance gains. ⚡

  • “We’ve measured up to 95% reductions in page load times across critical admin screens." — Michael Pretty 😮

  • ETA is June 2nd.

• Felix Arntz shares how Speculative Loading made it into WordPress core.

AI

• WordPress has launched an AI team, focused on accelerating and coordinating artificial intelligence projects across the WordPress ecosystem. 🤖

• The number of plugins submitted to the WordPress Repository has grown by 87% compared to last year, mostly thanks to AI.

• Is AI killing the business model of the web? Search clicks fell 30% in the last year.

• Are AI chatbots replacing search engines? An informative case study with lots of data.

• Gael put out a great tweet about AI traffic using the new Cloudflare audit. Are the days of SEO officially over? As he said, the case for publishing free content on your website makes less and less sense. 🪦

• Grok can now generate charts and graphs. 👏 In fact, I used it for the graph at the top of this newsletter. They also added the ability to draw sketches and use them in prompts.

• Gemini 2.5 pro preview has been released. It has significantly improved capabilities for coding, especially building compelling interactive web apps.

• Google also launched a lot of new features and updates at I/O 2025.

• The Tesla Optimus robot has come a pretty far way in a short amount of time! Check out this comparison of 2022 versus 2025.

• Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 were released.

If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋

It was early in the morning, and I woke up to my doorbell ringing and banging on my door. I was still in bed, so I was out of it. My phone then started going off as well. I was getting texts from my neighbors saying, “Get out now, gas leak!”

I immediately rush outside, still in my PJs, and am met with a bunch of my neighbors and firetrucks pulling up. 🚒 You could smell the gas and the landscaping crew had alerted our HOA person. 📣

Fast forward a couple of hours (standing on the curb), and we were let back into our homes. Evidently, gas had been leaking from a pipe (something to do with an old valve, which they immediately replaced). Let’s just say, I’m thankful for the landscaping crew, my lovely neighbors, the HOA, and the fire department! 😄

The next week, I woke up to one of our ecommerce websites crawling. It was still up (barely), but the performance had tanked (both front-end and backend). After looking at the server logs/analytics, I immediately knew we were under a DDoS attack. 💥 There were millions of requests coming in from thousands of different IPs.

Most DDoS attacks aren’t usually someone intentionally coming after your specific website or brand (especially if you're small). It could be, but that’s quite rare. Most of the time, you simply get caught up in a massive attack based on your IP block.

We have our sites behind Cloudflare, and 98% of the time, it does an excellent job at mitigating attacks on its own. However, in the first quarter of 2025, Cloudflare saw a 358% year-over-year increase in DDoS attacks, which is massive. And this time, Cloudflare’s automated mitigation rules didn’t help us. 😨

The attackers were sneaking in just under our already in place rate-limiting rules, and when I went to update them, they would immediately change them. I’ve been in the middle of a few DDoS attacks before, but never one that was constantly evolving as fast as this one. I’m pretty sure it was an algorithm based on how rapidly it was adapting.

It actually took me the better part of a day to get it under control, and then I was closely monitoring things and making slight adjustments over the following days. I thought it might be helpful to share a few things I learned, including some resources. I’m not a security expert by any means, so some of this was trial and error. But you can see in the image below where I finally got Cloudflare to mitigate the attack successfully. 💪

One of the first things is that if you ever run into security issues, the Cloudflare Pro plan or higher is definitely worth the money. We actually learned this the hard way a few years ago during a much smaller DDoS attack.

On the Pro plan, you get an additional rate-limiting rule with more expressions, counting periods, and mitigation timeout periods. While these might sound trivial, they make all the difference (see the comparison). You can even stagger multiple rules and change the order in which they fire.

Another huge difference is that you get 20 custom rules instead of 5, which come in super handy if you need to block different IPs, ASNs, etc.

You also get way more analytical data, around 20+ more filterable data points in the Pro plan versus the free plan. This was invaluable in hunting down the sources of the attack. Especially when it comes to where they are attacking, such as your homepage, login page, random string in search results, etc.

And finally, you get a more robust WAF with customizable rulesets and Super Bot Fight Mode. However, for the most part, these didn’t help much. Honestly, the best part of the Cloudflare Pro plan is the additional rate-limiting rules, extra custom rules, and a lot more filterable analytics data. 🛡️

Here are some resources that were extremely helpful:

• Mitigating an HTTP DDoS Attack manually with Cloudflare

  • Each group of IP networks (data centers, ISPs, etc.) has a unique identifier called an ASN. In this instance, we were getting attacked by 4-5 different ASNs. Adding a managed challenge rule along with rate limiting based on the ASN helped us mitigate the attack faster (see how to block ASN).

• Both AbuseIPDB and ipgeolocation come in very handy when dealing with individual IPs. You can see past threats and activity around the IP, security scores, etc. If you’re getting hammered from a single IP, these tools can help confirm that they are most likely malicious. I utilized Cloudflare rules to then block IPs, as well as blocking them at the host level with MyKinsta’s IP Deny Tool.

Here is a snapshot of our Cloudflare dashboard, where you can see the requests drop off almost completely after finally mitigating everything successfully. I appreciate Cloudflare’s product even more after this! It’s pretty incredible what you can do. 👍

Updates ✍️

We pushed out an update for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• New Speculative Loading options for sites running WordPress 6.8 or higher. You can change the mode and eagerness. ⚡ We use “Prerender” and “Moderate” on our sites.

• We are deprecating Instant Page for anyone running WordPress 6.8 or higher. Speculative Loading is ~78% less JS code, and no additional HTTP request. 🚀

• Added a REST API exception for Slider Revolution.

• Updated delay JS quick exclusions for ShortPixel and Slider Revolution to be more compatible.

• Fixed an issue where mobile event handlers were sometimes preventing the delayed click from firing.

We also pushed out an update for our Novashare WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• New share button support for the Nextdoor network. 🏠

• New total share count and network share count options for the share button section with additional frontend styles to display the total share count at the top of the share window.

• Adjusted total share count calculations to display the combined total regardless of network selection if the share button is being used. 🔢

• Deployed a secondary API that can be used when the client has issues communicating with our licensing server (usually due to firewalls).

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

• Apple TV+ is starting to earn its new HBO reputation. I would agree with this post. I’ve really enjoyed many of the Apple shows. Severance, Silo, Slow Horses, Dark Matter, For All Mankind, Foundation, and Black Bird are a few of my favorites. Apple shows feel more like Netflix content in the early days. 🍿

• You can now use Cash App on the web.

• If you like stand-up comedy, this sketch about a crazy Facebook marketplace deal is hilarious.

• Support for text-wrap: pretty just shipped in Safari Technology Preview. This is pretty cool!

WordPress

• Manage a lot of WordPress sites? I had an insightful chat with Phil over at Get Glow. Think of it like a ManageWP alternative on steroids. If you manage a lot of sites, it's worth checking out.

• Newsletter Glue has been sold to Tyler Channell of PaywallProject, and aThemes is joining the Awesome Motive family.

• How to get great with GenerateBlocks 2.0. Kyle does an excellent overview of some of the newer features. I definitely learned a few things, as even I can’t keep up with all the changes. 😅

• Gravatar got some updates: card customization, email signature generator, smart redirects, and a private messages feature.

• Kyle surveyed 1,233 WordPress professionals, and I thought some of the results were interesting. For example, 57.3% said they are embracing AI.

• Imagify has removed the UI option to hide its admin bar menu. This is a very odd change and one I’m not happy about. Developers, please don’t do this! 😫

• Automattic is laying off approximately 16% of its workforce.

• WordPress 6.8 is the last major WordPress core update for 2025. Note: There will still be minor releases for bug fixes/security.

• Had fun chatting with Roger from Kinsta about some of my background. From NetZero dial-up internet to WordPress. ☎️⚡ Once my family bought our first computer (Compaq Presario), I was hooked when I discovered you could make money online.

• SSL/TLS certificate lifespans will be reduced to 47 days by 2029, from their current 398-day lifespan. This will create a lot more overhead for providers. Note: Let’s Encrypt certificates are already at 90 days (and probably mostly automated already), so the bigger change is really for custom SSL certificates.

• I’m subscribed to very few WordPress newsletters, as I don’t have much time. But I always read Loop WP from Simon Harper. I love his short summary approach, unlike mine, where I’m just rambling. 😅

• Kinsta has added a new feature that allows you to add additional SFTP users in MyKinsta. Change permissions, root directory, etc.

Performance

• There are a lot of awesome performance improvements in WordPress 6.8 (released this month):

  • Speculative loading API. ⚡

  • Interactivity API push for asynchronous handlers to reduce INP. 🔥

  • Warning for devs overusing useSelect. 🐌

  • Multiple block type registration.

  • Improve cache generation in WP_Query class.

• GTmetrix is moving its default testing location from Vancouver, Canada, to Seattle, USA. 🗺️

• Purging cache just got a little faster for everyone at Cloudflare.

• Need to warm your cache? There’s a new plugin on the block called Warmer. 🔥 We’ve actually been using it on a couple of our sites. The developer is great!

• Advanced Custom Fields version 6.4 is now available and supports WooCommerce’s High-Performance Order Storage.

• Andy put together a great overview with some tips on how to make photos load faster on your website.

• Microsoft Edge 134 is now up to 9% faster as measured by the Speedometer 3.0 benchmark.

• Squeeze is a newer image optimization plugin that might be worth checking out. It utilizes the same libraries as the Google Squoosh app (which I use often). ⚡

• The Insights sidebar in Chrome DevTools Performance panel is getting a lot of improvements to better analyze metrics like LCP, INP, image delivery, etc.

• The performance plateau is the point at which changes to your website’s rendering metrics cease to matter. Great post from Tammy at SpeedCurve.

Marketing

• If you’re an avid Confluence and Trello user like me, they are in the middle of a massive overhaul to the design, and I like the changes so far!

  • In Confluence, they’ve changed the fonts, menu navigation, and are adding live doc collaboration.

  • In Trello, they are moving the comments box to the right-hand side instead of below. At first, I didn’t like this. But after a week or two of using it, I realized it’s much faster with less scrolling. The beta version is also snappier. Although I hope they make the floating switcher optional (or have a way to hide it).

• Bluesky has added a blue checkmark verification feature.

• Google won’t ditch third-party cookies in Chrome after all.

• Threads has moved to a new domain: from threads.net → threads.com.

AI

• I'm late to the party, but did the whole Ghibli thing. 😄

• ChatGPT will now remember your old conversations. Grok also added this.

• ChatGPT also rolled out an image library. This is actually pretty handy to grab old image creations.

• Grok released Grok Studio, adding code execution and Google Drive support. Although I would be careful about just hooking up Google Drive to Grok. 😅

• AI has taken over customer service, but consumers want humans back. 👨‍💻 Some interesting data points in a survey from Kinsta. The results aren’t really surprising. I really dislike AI support bots and always prefer a human. Will this change in the future? Perhaps. But nothing wrong with a hybrid approach at the moment.

• Midjourney 7 is out, and the results are insanely impressive!

• Geoffrey Hinton, the "Godfather of AI," shares his prediction for the future of AI.

• AI-assisted development is transforming how we build software, but it’s not a free pass to abandon rigor, review, or craftsmanship.

If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋

First, there was my blog at webguystricks.com (started by myself, brother, and another developer). 👨‍💻 Our goal was to push out regular web developer tutorials. It lasted maybe 6 months.

Next, there was learnwp.io, learnseo.io, learnsmm.io, and learnppc.io. 📚 My thought was that I would share everything I learned over the years. Let’s just say I never got the time to do anything with these and sold a few of the domains and let the rest expire.

Next, there was themewood.com. This was actually going to be a performance-focused WordPress theme/builder. 👨‍🔧 I’m kind of glad I never started this, as I think solutions like GeneratePress/GenerateBlocks are already great. And with things moving to FSE, it would have been a nightmare.

Next, there was bestlisty.com. ✅ For some crazy idea, I thought a list-type site would be a brilliant idea. Kind of like ranker.com for tech and software tools. Thankfully, I didn’t spend too much time on this.

Next, there was synthwave.io. 🎷 I used to have a website up for this. I listen to a lot of synthwave music; it’s pretty much all I stream all day, every day. I’m obsessed. But as of right now, the domain is just redirected to my playlists (Spotify, Apple), which I do keep updated.

Next, there was pennybros.com. 💰 My brother and I were going to share personal finance tips. We both love to talk about investing, money hacks, etc. It lasted for a bit, but then we sold the site.

And those are just a few examples that I found. Do any of you have ideas that simply never evolved into anything? Or, looking back, might seem silly? Sometimes, being an entrepreneur, it’s hard for me to stop thinking of new projects and things to build (that’s the fun part!). But I’ve learned over the years that consistency is everything, and there is only so much time in the day. 🕰️

Updates ✍️

We pushed an update for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• We spent some time refactoring our delay JS inline script, including removing the pageshow event listener and more aggressively uglifying the code. This resulted in a 15%+ decrease in the script size (32% uncompressed). 🔥 It's in addition to the 8% reduction back in 2.3.7. ⚡

• Added built-in JS deferral exclusion for Cloudflare Turnstile.

• Added new delay JS quick exclusion for Plausible Analytics.

• Updated delay JS quick exclusions for Fluent Forms and Kadence Blocks to be more compatible.

• Adjusted document.write built-in delay exclusion to prevent false positives.

• Adjusted MU Mode documentation links in the Script Manager to go to specific anchor link sections.

• Fixed an issue where encoded data attribute values weren't being preserved correctly when converting an elements attribute string to an array.

• Fixed a multisite issue where the root directory path was not determined correctly when using a custom content directory setup.

• Deployed a secondary API that can be used when the client has issues communicating with our licensing server (usually due to firewalls). 🛡️

• Removed deprecated SVG duotone filter removal actions from global styles toggle and updated the tooltip to reflect the changes.

We’ve also published a few docs on our Perfmatters site:

• Real user data versus lab data in PageSpeed Insights. This comes up all the time with clients.

• How to fix the enable text compression warning and some info about the new Zstandard compression method.

• How to add PHP to WordPress, quick and easy.

We also pushed out an update for our Novashare WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• Added a new location follow button (great for Google/Apple maps, location pages, etc.) 🗺️ Remember, you can also add your own custom buttons, meaning unlimited possibilities.

• Added support for image pin buttons to appear on images inside Bricks editor content.

• Added dynamic label font size for follow buttons relative to the overall size set for the buttons. 📐

• Fixed an issue where the follow block height would not always display correctly in the editor.

• Fixed a display error that could sometimes happen with certain follow block networks.

• Fixed an issue where Pinterest image content was returning blank when no global post data was available.

• Moved the show on scroll load event to an event listener to prevent conflicts with other onload events. 🖱️

• Fixed multiple display issues with highlight buttons that could happen with specific setups.

• Updated our staging site license key exception list with additional formats for WP Engine (*.wpenginepowered.com) and stage.* 🔑

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

• I really enjoyed this blog post from Andrej on digital hygiene. It’s important to update your tech stack regularly to ensure you’re using the best in terms of security, data privacy, etc. But there are usually tradeoffs, too.

• Skype is finally shutting down. Feels like the end of an era. I’ve got a lot of Skype hours under my belt. 👴

• Troy Hunt’s Mailchimp list was stolen through a phishing attempt. Just a reminder: you should never click on buttons in emails. Always go to the website directly.

• The new Dell Ultrasharp U2725QE monitor looks promising! 120Hz, 4k, enhanced IPS panel, 140W power delivery with Thunderbolt 4, and a built-in KVM.

• Andrew used four cameras to capture the ultimate HDR view of the lunar eclipse. Probably one of the coolest moon shots I’ve ever seen!

• Klarna lands buy now, pay later deal with DoorDash. You can now pay the ridiculous DoorDash fee and finance your fast food. 🤦‍♂️ What a world.

• Stripe is now starting to charge a $15.00 fee when you counter a dispute. This isn’t going over well for their brand.

• Stumbled across Mintlify; it looks like a Linear but for documentation.

• Did you know that you can create shortcut keys for almost anything in macOS? If there is a menu, you can shortcut it. For example, I have shortcut keys for the window snapping in Sequoia. Here are some other examples.

Also, if you’re on a Mac, I highly recommend the SoundSource app. It allows you to change the volume of separate applications. Brett and I work on FaceTime a lot together, and this allows us to still play our music in the background.

WordPress

• The WooCommerce database notification is finally going away. We need more of these types of improvements!

• Have you started using clamp functions for scaling? I’m starting to dive into this and should have sooner. 📏 Very cool. Kyle has two great videos: clamp for fonts and clamp for spacing. You can even do it for line heights. And here is another tutorial.

• If you’re using the Easy Digital Downloads EU VAT plugin, you’ll need to register with the UK to get an official API for checking and validating VAT going forward.

• I’m always trying to make improvements regarding accessibility on our sites. This Link Contrast Checker tool came in handy.

• Kinsta has launched an automatic updates add-on that includes visual regression tests. If anything big changes/breaks (you can tweak the thresholds), you can have it rollback automatically. Pretty cool!

• Jonathan Jernigan put together a great overview of the big changes with GenerateBlocks 2.0. Definitely a channel to subscribe to if you’re using GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks on a regular basis.

Performance

• DevTools in Chrome 135 is getting some performance improvements.

• As of Chrome 135, the <select> element can now be customized with CSS. Long-term, it might mean less JS. Also, functions in CSS?

• I’m always looking for cookie plugins that are better in terms of performance. Awesome Motive launched WPConsent. 4 KB overhead and no jQuery dependency. Looks promising! Lightweight Cookie Notice is probably still my first choice.

• An excellent overview of why we have a cache-control header.

• The core team has released more details about how the new Speculative Loading API will work in WordPress 6.8 (ETA April 15th). We’ll be hooking into this with Perfmatters.

• Kyle tested 150+ real agency sites to see which page builders actually perform best. No surprise, GenerateBlocks came out on top! That’s why I recommend it.

• Cloudflare has increased the CPU limit of their Workers from 30 seconds to 5 minutes.

Marketing

• Google explains why indexed pages may not appear in search.

• Not all sites will fully recover with future core algorithm updates, according to Google.

• LinkedIn has partnered with Calendly. Users can now schedule appointments directly from your LinkedIn profile. This will be handy for a lot of folks!

AI

• Should we be polite to our AI tools? 🙏 This YouTube short is hilarious.

• OpenAI has released a research preview of GPT‑4.5, the strongest model yet.

• Microsoft has launched a Copilot app for Mac.

• Google has released Gemini 2.5 Pro, designed to tackle increasingly complex problems.

• What if Interstellar was a Ghibli animation?

• ChatGPT for macOS can now edit code directly in IDEs.

• Pika 2.2 is here, with 10s generations, 1080p resolution, and Pikaframes.

• The new Grok image editing is pretty fun to play with. 😂 Here is my car, Mad Max style, during the apocalypse. ChatGPT is also rolling out 4o image generation.

If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋

I just wanted to share a little friendly reminder to always take a moment and reflect (reread) before you hit that post or share button on social media. Whether you’re religious or not, I think the golden rule is one of the best principles to live by:

Treat others how you would want to be treated.

Changing how you act online versus offline has never made sense to me. If you can’t respectfully disagree on a topic, you really shouldn’t be on social media. It also sets a bad example for the younger generation (remember, anything you post online will probably live forever). Words matter.

I’ve always admired the quote below from Charles Swindoll, it's all about how we react to both the positive and negative things that come our way.

Updates ✍️

We pushed two updates for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• Added new perfmatters_rucss_async_stylesheets filter. You can now async any stylesheet that you want.

• Added built-in async settings for dashicons and animation stylesheets. Improves Elementor performance. ⚡

• Added additional logic to better handle stylesheets with media query attributes when including them in used CSS (no longer render-blocking). Speeds up WooCommerce. 🚀

• Made some changes to be able to start our main output buffer earlier for better compatibility with other plugins (example, our preload features now work with LiteSpeed Cache WebP replacement).

• Added new perfmatters_preloads_array filter. Gives you access to the preloads data array for use in custom integrations. 👨‍🔧

• Added new perfmatters_minify_threshold filter. Turn off the size threshold check when dealing with a lot of encoded inline images in your stylesheets.

• Added new perfmatters_after_local_analytics action hook.

• Updated our staging site license key exception list with additional format for WP Engine (*.wpenginepowered.com) and stage.* 🔑

• Added additional compatibility styles to the Script Manager. 🖼️

• Added additional swiper JavaScript file to Elementor quick exclusion.

• Added new built-in stylesheet exclusion for Bricks post-specific CSS.

• Added new Delay JS quick exclusion for WPBakery.

• Added additional built-in CSS selector exclusion for WP Armour.

• Added a REST API exception for SureCart.

• Added a string check to login URL filter function to prevent a possible PHP error. ↪️

• Updated clean uninstall function with current post meta options.

• Fixed an issue where new user email requests were not being allowed through the redirect block when using a custom login URL.

• Fixed an issue where the Clear Used CSS meta button was not working correctly for certain URL types.

• Fixed a PHP warning coming from certain rewrite rule formats when MU Mode was turned on. 🐛

• Minor adjustment to CDN rewrite regex to fix an issue that was happening when the home URL was different from the site URL.

• Removed Ezoic quick exclusion and moved to built-in deferral and delay exclusions.

We’ve also published a few docs on our Perfmatters site when running our plugin alongside other cache solutions (we’ll be publishing more):

• Settings for Perfmatters and WP Fastest Cache

• Settings for Perfmatters and LiteSpeed Cache

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

• Apple just built a robot lamp. All they need to do is figure out how to make it hop, and we have our childhood Pixar mascot brought to life. 😄

• Apple pulls end-to-end encryption feature from UK over government spying demands. This is crazy! Encryption is still there, but Apple now holds the key.

• Snagit released version 2025 with some new features such as smart redact, 1-2-3 step capture, removing background noise, and more.

• Affinity Designer 2.6 came out. I’m liking the color picker improvements.

• Obsidian is now free for work. The commercial license is now optional.

WordPress

• GenerateBlocks 2.0 is here! Honestly, this is probably going to be the most exciting update of the entire year for me. A few changes/improvements:

  • Builds production-ready code as you build your pages. Amazing for performance!

  • Dynamic tags (display site content anywhere inside block HTML code).

  • Streamlined HTML and CSS in block design (decoupled from blocks).

  • The Query block can now query and loop anything. You can now Query post meta and data in your options table.

  • Style indicators and intuitive settings search.

  • Full styling control for numerous breakpoints, and you can create your own custom media queries as well as @container queries for maximum flexibility.

  • Four new starter sites to get up and running fast (service 2.0 pictured below).

• WooCommerce (or Woo) introduced the overhaul of their new branding.

• Based on customer feedback, Kinsta reworked the MyKinsta menu navigation to include a more functional breadcrumb navigation system, cleaner search, and the “jump to” features still work, which I love.

• Austin was able to take advantage of unlimited storage by offloading WordPress uploads with B2 and Rclone. Very clever.

• With the introduced complexities of Full Site Editing (FSE), WordPress themes are facing a significant crisis. I still prefer the hybrid approach with GeneratePress One, but I also like what is being done with Ollie.

• WordPress 6.8 will use bcrypt for password hashing.

• The way the plugin author information is displayed on WordPress.org has changed; it’s now linked to the plugin owner’s public profile.

• The “WordPress in 2025” report highlights why it should be a cornerstone of your long-term strategy.

• The team behind Astra, SureCart, etc., has launched SureMail. It’s a 100% free and open-source SMTP plugin (with lots of features) for WordPress. Looks promising!

• Divi 5 launched their public alpha 8 version, including 60+ fixes and a new feature. I’ve seen a few barebones Divi 5 sites and can say it looks a lot better in terms of modular design. Everything isn’t just lumped into one big JS file.

Performance

• Great news! As expected, Speculative Loading is coming to WordPress core. Even sooner than I thought. ⚡ They will most likely default to "prefetch/conservative." So we might add a toggle in Perfmatters to easily swap that to "prerender/moderate." 👍

• The performance panel in Chrome DevTools now highlights images whose file size you can optimize. They’ve also updated CPU throttling settings.

• If you’re not technical, using Chrome DevTools can be a little overwhelming. Check out this in-depth guide on how to start using it.

• How fast are typical website page load times in 2025? DebugBear put together some interesting data using CrUX.

• Speaking of DebugBear, they just launched a new free tool to measure your time to first byte (TTFB) from 10 different locations. It works great!

• WooCommerce 9.7 got some pretty big performance improvements. 75% faster block editor and 99% fewer callbacks.

AI

• Gemini 2.0 is now available to everyone. They also launched a free version of Gemini Code Assist.

• Grok 3 was released. I’m definitely having some fun playing around with it. A standalone app for MacOS and Windows is also coming.

• Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code were released. Hard to keep up with all these new AI versions.

• Introducing NEO Gamma. Another step closer to robots in your home. 🤖

If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋

The Sawtooth Range is a mountain range of the Rocky Mountains in central Idaho, rising to more than 10,000 ft and spanning 678 square miles. If you like remote hiking, it has some of the most beautiful trails in the US.

I attended a small private Christian school in Eagle, Idaho, where pretty much our entire class (15 kids or so) was in Pathfinders (another version of Boy/Girl Scouts). Every few years, they did a backpacking trip where you would hike up into the mountains, camp overnight, and have school outdoors (while earning some badges).

The trip itself went great; it was on the way back that some bad decisions were made. When we were a few hours from base camp, my teacher offered the first five kids down the mountain a free soda. Let’s just say after that, all pandemonium broke loose, and everyone started running running down the trail. Who knew a bunch of 5th and 6th graders wanted soda so bad? 😅🥤

My teacher, a classmate, and I decided to walk instead, as we were already pretty tired from all the hiking. However, after 10-15 minutes, we gained a second wind, and we thought we might be able to catch up to the group if we went off the trail, cutting across the nearest ridge. Let’s just say this was a bad idea.

It was around 6 pm, and the sun was already starting to dip below the peak of the mountains. We were now hiking completely off-trail, and the three of us didn’t have any flashlights. After about 30 minutes, we realized we were lost. My teacher did his very best to keep me and my other classmate calm. But deep down, I was panicking. 😨 We had almost no water left, no flashlights, and no phones (this was before cell phones were really a thing).

We started hiking in one direction. You have to realize how remote this area is; there are no visible signs of life in any direction (no cities, buildings, anything). We went for around three hours and finally stumbled across a dirt road. However, we still had no clue where we were. By now, it was pitch dark; we had no light, and wolves had started howling. My teacher made the wise decision that we should stay put near the road and start a fire. 🔥 Fortunately, he had a flint with him.

So there we were, sitting in the middle of nowhere around a fire, wolves howling. It was around midnight, and all we could do was hope and pray that the rest of our party was looking for us or had sent for help.

Thankfully, around 1 am, we saw some headlights coming down the road. My teacher ran to the road to flag them down. It turned out to be a couple of the other parents who had been out looking for us. We were saved! Ironically, my Mom was one of the parents back at base camp, and let’s just say we’ve never been so happy to see each other. 🤗

I’m sure all of you have had similiar experiences as a kid that have stuck with you. It’s funny because when I think back, nothing really bad happened (thankfully). We were lost for maybe 7 hours, but that experience has always stuck with me for some reason (probably due to my young age). For the most part, I just remember how scared I was as the sun went down and the subtle fear in my teacher’s face.

Long story short, don’t go off the trail! 😅🥾

Updates ✍️

We pushed out two updates for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• Removed unnecessary documentWrite handling function from delay JS inline script to reduce the size by over 8%. ⚡

• Updated admin bar menu UI to show clear all used CSS everywhere, instead of just in the backend.

• Updated CSS parsing library to the latest version (8.7.0). Improves support for PHP 8.4. 🚀 Also updated background processing library to version (1.4.0).

• Added additional CSS background image inline styles to account for backgrounds set on pseudo-elements of children inside the targeted container.

• Removed older changelog entries in readme.txt file and added link to web version. This decreases stored row size. ⬇️

• Added WP Rocket filter to disable their critical image optimization when preload critical images is active to prevent conflicts.

• Added new Delay JS quick exclusion for Ezoic, and REST API exception for SureForms.

• Added built-in minify JS exclusion for WP Recipe Maker. 🧈

• Updated network default function to preserve the CDN URL if already set on the target subsite.

• Added a UI button to cancel the current database optimization process.

• Updated minify exclusion functions to check the entire attribute string of the script or stylesheet instead of just the source URL.

• Updated login URL feature with additional check to prevent access to the hidden login slug via an authentication request redirected from a query string. 🔒

• Updated buffer class to prevent running on Bricks template URLs.

• Fixed an issue where the Used CSS file was sometimes getting falsely flagged as completely unused on certain speed tests. 🧮

We also pushed out an update for our Novashare WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• Added new show labels control to the follow buttons block.

• Updated all blocks to API version 3 to support rendering the block inside the post editor iframe. 💻

• Fixed multiple deprecated UI element warnings showing up in the block editor.

• Minor code refactoring and style cleanup. ⚡

• Fixed a missing anchor link pointing to the license tab in our plugin settings UI.

• Fixed an issue where additional CSS classes set in the advanced section of the share buttons block were not added to the HTML output.

• Fixed an encoding issue with certain Pinterest descriptions when added to page images for the image grid via JS. 🖼️

• Removed trailing empty block style in the main stylesheet that was previously used to fix a block editor enqueuing issue.

WP Coupons 📣

I can confirm that WP Coupons has now been acquired! Appreciate everyone who shared it around on social media, included it in their newsletters, etc.

I'll let the new owner make their own announcement, but it is someone very active in the WordPress and blogging space for well over a decade. It's in good hands. 😊

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

• Curious about how much you've spent on Amazon over the past year, or throughout your entire account's history? Here’s how to find out.

• Discover five hilarious (and brutally honest) reasons why developers might come off as jerks — and why it’s not entirely their fault.

• Doing hard things: staying motivated when everything sucks.

• Woolly Mammoth, Dodo gets another shot as startup raises $200 million. I think I’ve seen this movie before. 😅🦖

• FDA bans the use of Red Dye No. 3 in foods. It’s about time! The United States is so far behind in terms of healthy food.

• Netflix announces price increases for all three of its plans. I’m pretty sure we’ve almost come full circle where people will go back to cable instead of paying for all the separate streaming services.

• Chinese researchers achieved a temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius for a whopping 18 minutes! 😎 This is breaking the previous record of a little under 7 minutes. A nuclear fusion race is on.

WordPress

• Who really owns WordPress? I thought this diagram from Jono Alderson was quite interesting.

• WordPress ticket #30465 was opened 10 years ago – is 2025 going to be the year it gets resolved?

• Meet Disembark, yet another way to easily package up your WordPress site for a new web host. 🚚

• Elementor has introduced a new WordPress theme: Hello Biz.

• I had fun with Jonathan and Kurt on the WP-Tonic podcast. We talked a little about how I got into WordPress, performance, etc.

• GenerateBlocks 2.0 Release Candidate is out! So excited for the final release in early February. It will be one of the best updates of the year.

Performance

• Remember that using inline SVG icons are usually easier, but they aren't the best approach performance-wise. Check out how to decrease your LCP. ⚡

• Arjen Karel published a great little workaround on how to load your Elementor background hero images as regular images in HTML. This means optimization plugins can do all their magic on them.

• I really enjoyed this post from DebugBear on how to fix your LCP score by improving render delay. So much, in fact, that I added a link to it in our LCP doc.

• If you have Cloudflare Pro or BunnyCDN, you might want to check out this new free Edge Images plugin from Jono Alderson. 😮

• There was a small update to the data collection period UI in PageSpeed Insights. Very much needed!

• A friendly reminder that the prior cache benefits of using popular third-party libraries are no longer there. It’s always better to host them yourself or from your own CDN.

• You might not have a web performance problem. Remember, the real-user data scores are what you want to monitor, not necessarily the lab data. 👍

• group.one expands its SaaS product portfolio with the acquisition of GTmetrix.

• Chrome DevTools is getting a “Copy console” option. This will make it easier to debug console warnings and errors.

• Field/CrUX data is now available in GTmetrix. This will come in very handy!

Marketing

• Google search ranking volatility tools cool down. 2024 was a whirlwind for many website owners when it came to SEO fluctuations.

• X has been rolling out profile labels for parody accounts to clearly distinguish these types of accounts. This was definitely needed!

• Brett and I have been using the new card mirroring feature in Trello. It works awesome, and now I don’t think we could live without it.

AI

• DeepSeek. Wow, where to begin? CNBC did a pretty lengthy video on the topic, which is a good way to catch up.

• Speaking of DeepSeek, there have already been apparent security leaks.

• Have you seen this? It’s a self-driving fridge hit by a self-driving Waymo recorded by a self-driving Tesla. 😂 You can’t make this stuff up.

• Grok standalone AI app comes to the US App Store, not just an X feature.

• WEF jobs report warns that 39% of skills may be obsolete by 2030. I definitely see a hybrid situation happening at the moment.

If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋

On the advice of a few close friends, I’ve decided to rip up my deck myself (already started) and put some new tiles down. For many of you, this is probably really basic stuff, but it makes me really nervous (even with just snap-in-place tiles). 😅 I solve unknown problems in the digital world every day, but unknowns in the physical world stress me out.

I’ll be renting a jigsaw to cut the corner pieces. 🪚 The last time I cut a piece of wood was back in high school shop class, so let’s just say it’s been a while. I’ll try to post back a picture once I’ve got something new installed. I’ll most likely be using this decking from IKEA.

Updates ✍️

We pushed out a small update for our Novashare WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• Improvement: Added conditional inline JavaScript to dynamically add Pinterest descriptions to content images (only added when using the image grid). 🖼️

• Made some adjustments to content marker function to share between different features.

• Removed older changelog entries in readme.txt file and added link to web version. This decreases stored row size. ⚡

• Fixed an issue with WordPress 6.7.1 where the text domain for translations was loading too early.

• Fixed an issue where percentage dimension values were flagging as below the minimum threshold for a Pinterest image pin button. 📏

Pricing updates 📣

Another friendly reminder. We will be raising prices on our single and business licenses for Perfmatters come January 1st, 2025.

This is to better handle our one-on-one support approach. We love helping clients optimize their sites and always go the extra mile, and we want to continue to do this. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Many times, we will answer any performance questions clients have, assist in configuring our plugins, etc. And all of this takes a significant amount of time.

• Current single license: $24.95 → New single license: $29.95

• Current business license: $54.95 → New business license: $59.95

All customers before 2025 will be grandfathered in at the old pricing as long as an active subscription is maintained. 👍 Pricing for our Novashare plugin is not changing.

Digital assets for sale 🏷️

• WP Coupons is officially for sale! We stopped development on this plugin almost two years ago now (see timeline). We’ve decided now is a good time to let go of this. If you’re interested, please reach out to us. Here is what is included:

  • All code for the plugin.

  • WP Coupons brand (SVG files, logo, etc.).

  • wpcoupons.io domain name

  • Website itself if you want it for SEO reasons (backlinks, content, etc.)

  • No customer data or subscriptions are included.

• We have a domain name for sale: editwp.com We were previously using this as a live testing/dev site, but now use InstaWP for testing things. If you’re interested, please reach out to us.

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

• Does anyone else find the Google Lens stuff annoying in Google Chrome? Thankfully, you can turn it off.

• Speaking of Google, they start tracking all your devices in 8 weeks.

• CISA, FBI urge Americans to use encrypted messaging apps to combat Chinese telco hackers. 🔒

• Backblaze is a great way to backup your computer offsite. FYI, iCloud is not a backup (it’s a sync). Use promo code YULESAVE20 to save 20% through 12/31.

WordPress

• Twenty CMS and website-building platforms were ranked by accessibility. WordPress came in 10th place.

• WooCommerce in 2025: Building a platform for the future.

• I don’t want to get too far deep into the WordPress drama, 😅 but I do recommend these two WordPress newsletters if you want to follow along: The Repository and The WordPress Weekly.

• Also, Joost de Valk wrote probably one of the most thought-provoking posts on the topic of WordPress leadership.

• There is a new block site builder: Blockera. They aren’t adding blocks but rather giving advanced controls to existing core blocks. In terms of performance/bloat, I like this approach. It might be worth giving a try.

• Speaking of Matt, he did a WordPress speed build challenge versus Jessica Lyschik. I always find these interesting!

• Make WordPress gets a refresh! Check it out at make.wordpress.org. 🧑‍🎨

• WPAI, an AI startup for WordPress, has been acquired by Automattic.

• BigScoots has partnered up with Mediavine/Journey. I’ve worked with a lot of food bloggers on the BigScoots platform. They are doing a great job.

Performance

• In Lighthouse v12.2.3, the CPU throttling on mobile changed from 4x to 1.2x. That means processing-heavy websites will see better TBT scores. A Christmas miracle. 🎉

• Why is web.dev’s LCP so bad?! Really enjoyed this video about a page having some weird LCP issues and how Harry diagnosed it.

• PerfPlanet puts out amazing content every December. I enjoyed these articles:

  • Top 8 things I want in the Devtools Network Panel The UI changes (showing preloads, fetch, LCP element, defer, etc.)... 💯

  • The curious (performance) case of CSS @import (stop using this!)

  • Speculative loading and the Speculation Rules API

  • Understanding the main thread in the browser

  • Unattributed Navigation Overhead (UNO)

  • What is an AnimationFrame and what can it tell you?

• The Web Almanac is a comprehensive report on the state of the web. I always like to check out their year-in-review performance section. Lots of great data.

• Felix Arntz gave an excellent presentation on WordPress performance: 2024 CWV Impact Retrospective. He mentions that TTFB continues to be a major bottleneck going into 2025 regarding LCP. I agree.

• I’m a big fan of Google’s Squoosh tool. Addy Osmani just released Squish for free batch image compression in the browser (100% client-side). 🚀

• PHP 8.4 is now live at Kinsta. I’ve already updated all of our sites after testing. No issues so far. But looking forward to seeing some benchmarks.

• Kinsta also rolled out a new PHP Performance tool. This is great for those who need to more closely fine-tune the amount of memory behind PHP.

• Slava shared a nice little WordPress performance hack for disabling additional translation logic if your site is only in English.

Marketing

• Google Search changes are killing websites in an age of AI spam.

• You can now verify your Bluesky account on Gravatar.

• Ahrefs has released a lightweight and privacy-friendly (no cookies) Google Analytics alternative. It’s even available on the free plans. 🍪

AI

• My favorite use of AI is obviously things that speed up my daily workflow. Here’s a great example of using AI in Chrome DevTools. 🤖

• Grok has released its new image generation capabilities. My first “Draw me as a Pixar character” prompt was a girl with glasses. Now, it seems to be much more accurate.

• Also, Grok is now available for free on all X accounts. So everyone can play around with it.

• You can tailor Claude’s responses to your personal style.

• Meet Willow, Google’s new state-of-the-art quantum chip. However, we are a ways off until quantum can break any current encryption technology.

• Sora, OpenAI’s video generation model, is out of research preview.

I hope everyone had an amazing and restful holiday! Here’s to a happy new year. 🥂

Here are a few of the changes I’ve made recently.

• I moved from Mimestream back to Gmail on the web. Mimestream would still be my first recommendation to anyone who wants a dedicated email client. But for me, I’ve found that the web version works just fine. And honestly, keeping my personal email closed throughout the day to focus on business emails works better for me.

• I moved away from Ulysses to Apple Notes. I’ve been using Ulysses for years to write all of my blog posts and keep track of my personal notes. However, I finally just forced myself to start writing again in the WordPress Block Editor. And while I still think it has its quirks, it’s getting there. Because of this, I realized that Apple Notes is actually pretty awesome for everything else. It just works. 📒

• I’ve been paying for the Pro+ plan of Feedly for years. It was really great back when Twitter (now X) had an API. I could follow tweets in Feedly. But that went away. The other feature I utilized is the ability to follow newsletters. However, I realized I could use the free Kill the Newsletter! tool to port the newsletters into it. So, while I still utilize Feedly, the free version seems to work fine for me. 📧

• I moved from the Alfred app over to the free version of Raycast. I utilize this for snippets, emojis, quicklinks, and for converting case.

• In my last newsletter, I mentioned I was trying out Zen Browser. Well, it didn’t last very long. 😅 I just can’t get used to a sidebar for my tabs.

Black Friday deals on things I use 🏷️

Ironically, now it’s time to share some of those juicy Black Friday subscriptions with you! 😆💥 Here are a few select deals on products and services I use and recommend checking out.

• Kinsta: There has never been a better time to migrate to better hosting. Get 50% off all hosting plans and free migration (Nov. 5 – Dec. 3). They also boosted resource limits for everyone.

  • Annual billing: 50% off in the first year.

  • Monthly billing: 50% off for the first 6 months.

  • First month free for Single 35k and WP 2 plans.

• InstaWP: 50% off yearly plans (Nov. 22 – Dec. 6). I utilize InstaWP every day for testing plugins/themes, sharing staging sites with clients to troubleshoot, etc. It’s an invaluable tool, which I’m happy to pay for!

• Proton VPN: Up to 70% off, depending on the plan you choose.

• Imagify: 40% off on the Infinite plan (Nov.19 – Dec. 4). Discount code: BFCM24AFFI

• Snagit: 25% off (Nov. 29 – Dec. 6). This is what I use to take all of my screenshots.

• GTmetrix: 35% off on yearly PRO plans (Nov. 18 – Nov. 29). Discount code: BF2024 I use this tool daily to help optimize client’s WordPress sites.

• Mangools: 35% off all plans (Nov. 18 – Dec. 1). If you’re on a tight budget, Mangools is an excellent alternative to something like Ahrefs or Semrush.

• RightBlogger: 50% off the first year on new purchases and upgrades (Nov. 21 – Dec. 2). Discount code: BF2024

• Namecheap: Up to 97% off on domains (Nov. 29 – Dec. 6).

If you're bargain hunting, I compiled a larger list of Black Friday deals. Make sure to check it out.

You can also get 30% off new licenses and upgrades on our WordPress plugins (Perfmatters and Novashare) through Dec. 2nd. Discount code: BLACKFRIDAY

Updates ✍️

We pushed out an update for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• Added new local Google Font option to Limit Subsets that are downloaded and included in the stylesheet. In our tests, we saw an 80% decrease in the font CSS size when selecting one specific subset. 🔥

• Added new local Google font option to change the Print Method with options for file and inline.

• Added new priority option to manual preloads which can be used to add a specific fetchpriority attribute (auto, high, low) value to individual preload tags. ⚡

• Added new perfmatters_lazy_element_selectors filter.

• Removed unnecessary trailing link tag from delayed stylesheets when using remove unused CSS.

• Removed crossorigin option for manual preloads. The attribute is now automatically added to fetch and font preload tags.

• Increased action button response message timeout to 10 seconds in plugin UI.

• Fixed a PHP warning coming from Disable Google Maps function if a post ID was not found on a single post URL.

• Fixed an issue with WordPress 6.7.1 where the text domain for translations was loading too early.

• Removed deprecated plugin option to load Google fonts asynchronously.

• Translation updates.

📣 Heads up. We will be raising prices on our single and business licenses for Perfmatters come January 1st, 2025.

This is to better handle our one-on-one support approach. We love helping clients optimize their sites and always go the extra mile, and we want to continue to do this. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Many times, we will answer any performance questions clients have, assist in configuring our plugins, etc. And all of this takes a significant amount of time.

• Current single license: $24.95 → New single license: $29.95

• Current business license: $54.95 → New business license: $59.95

All customers before 2025 will be grandfathered in at the old pricing as long as an active subscription is maintained. 👍 Pricing for our Novashare plugin is not changing.

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

• I still enjoy a good almond milk latte from time to time (I can’t do dairy). Happy to see Starbucks no longer charges extra for this. Almond milk is mainstream. ☕

• While I’m not into politics, the data junkie in me loves the deep dive from Cloudflare into internet traffic shifts and cyber attacks during the election.

• Is Apple about to enter the smart home camera market? The more competition, the better, in my opinion.

WordPress

• GeneratePress 2.0 is on the horizon! I couldn’t be more excited about this.

• WordPress 6.7 is here with a lot of changes. I always enjoy Carlo’s in-depth summaries of all the changes.

• Dumitru Brinzan analyzed the data from the 729,000+ leaked WordPress sites from the controversial WP Engine Tracker. Some of the findings are interesting. 🤔

Performance

• I had a fun time chatting with Mike and Marcel on the Do the Woo podcast about WordPress and WooCommerce optimization. 🎙️

• Kinsta has launched Google’s C3D VMs in Taiwan! These things are blazing fast.

• Robert DeVore launched BenchPress, a free WordPress plugin designed to help developers identify performance bottlenecks in their code and optimize for speed.

• PHP 8.4 is here! I’m sure many hosting providers will start adding this over the next couple of months. Looking forward to seeing more benchmarks.

• Elementor keeps pushing out performance updates, which is always awesome to see!

• I don’t usually like to call products or solutions out, but this has to change. On this client’s site, they had 637 KB from font libraries alone, and less than 1% of them were used. 🤦 Developers need to take performance more seriously.

  

Marketing

• Google Calendar finally got dark mode! I tend to use Apple Calendar more these days, but happy to see they rolled this out.

AI

• OpenAI has introduced ChatGPT Search, enabling real-time web searching within its chatbot. Free users will also be getting access in a few months.

• Bluesky says it won’t train AI on your posts. However, I think it’s safe to assume that if you’re using any social media network, your data is out there for grabs these days.

• Most have reported that Apple Intelligence notification summaries are pretty bad. I’m more worried about the data privacy issues with this. 🔒

For those of you in the states, have a Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃

Also, being a night owl, having the flexibility to wake up a little later and run errands during the middle of the day is something I don’t take for granted. I’m one of those people who tends to get a second wind right around 10 pm and dives back into another work session. However, I don’t recommend this if you like sleep. 🥱

If you're contemplating working remotely and your employer allows it, I strongly encourage at least trying it. It's one of those things I will always look back on and know that I made the right decision, both for my mental health and productivity. Also, being a strong introvert probably helped. 😅

Updates ✍️

We pushed out a big quality-of-life update for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. We appreciate all those who provided feedback. 👏 Here are a few of the changes:

• New filters: perfmatters_lazy_elements + perfmatters_is_woocommerce. 🔧

• Added additional built-in stylesheet and selector exclusions for better compatibility with Elementor animations.

• Added WP Rocket filter to disable lazy render when lazy elements feature is active to prevent conflicts.

• Added additional parameter to excluded page builders array for tagDiv Composer.

• Added built-in delay JS exclusion for lazy elements inline script.

• Moved plugin settings logo SVG back to inline to prevent file_get_contents errors in certain environments. 🐛

• Adjusted built-in CSS dynamic selector exclusions to fix some minor visual issues with a few page builders.

• Fixed a JavaScript error that would sometimes show up in the console when using Delay JS with click delay enabled.

• Fixed an issue where a used stylesheet path would still attempt to load even if no used styles had been picked up for the URL.

• Fixed an issue where browser-specific stylesheets inside HTML comments were getting parsed by our used CSS library. 👨‍💻

• Fixed a MU Mode issue where exceptions would not be applied correctly if a query string was present on the home URL if set to show the latest posts.

• Fixed an issue where preloading a JS file by the handle was not loading the minified version when necessary.

We also pushed out an update for our Novashare WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• Added a new feature that lets you highlight text and easily share it to supported social networks. 🔥

• Adjusted aria-label attributes to be more specific to element actions for accessibility.

• Fixed an issue where the inline JavaScript wasn’t printing correctly if only the floating bar was being used.

• Fixed the missing plugin UI color for the Hacker News network. 🖌️

• Fixed an issue where Pinterest image buttons were displaying incorrectly if there was another pinit.js script loading.

• Fixed an issue with the logo scaling in the plugin UI on smaller devices. 📐

• Translation updates.

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

• Please ban data caps, internet users tell FCC. I 100% agree that data caps are ridiculous in 2024.

• Are .io domains going away? Some big changes are happening. However, we won’t know more until the treaty between the UK and Mauritius is drafted. Most likely, a deal will be struck.

• The Internet Archive didn’t have a good month, from multiple DDoS attacks and a data breach revealing info for 31 million accounts.

• OK, pairing the SpaceX Super Heavy catch with Interstellar music makes it even better. 😅🚀

• If you’re into trading/investing, Robinhood is launching some cool stuff! Legend (dedicated desktop trading app on the web), Futures, and Index Options.

• If you own the AirPods Pro 2, you can now take a five-minute hearing test right on your iPhone.

• Speaking of Apple products, they just released a bunch of updated products this week. The Mac mini commercial is quite funny.

• I always like trying new things. I’m giving the open-source Zen Browser a spin. Promising so far. Although it’s hard for me to adjust to sidebar tabs. Here’s an in-depth review.

WordPress

• Latest WordPress drama? Sorry, not touching this topic with a ten-foot pole. 🤦 Elections + WordPress drama = me ignoring all social media.

• If you're new to FSE, one of the design obstacles you may come across is the lack of responsive block settings. I thought this thread from Mike Oliver was insightful.

• WPGraphQL to become a canonical plugin as Jason Bahl joins Automattic.

• Webflow has acquired GSAP. I know a lot of WordPress folks utilize GSAP for animations. They said it will continue to be publicly available for everyone.

• Ryan has launched InfluenceWP which is aimed at helping entities that influence the WordPress ecosystem.

• Have you seen the new WooCommerce logo coming in 2025?

Performance

• Pascal Birchler posted another update about client-side media processing in WordPress. Love seeing the progress being made.

• New block type registration APIs help improve performance in WordPress 6.7. If you develop a WordPress block plugin, make sure to check it out.

• Kinsta has released the blazing fast C3D machines in Mumbai and Las Vegas data centers. ⚡ Check out the speed differences of C3D, C2, and N2 machines.

• Why does Lighthouse not include the INP metric? Great thread from Barry Pollard! I also covered a lot of this in my INP presentation with Kyle.

• The Chrome team is ramping up its support of bfcache for Cache-Control: no-store pages. I’ll take free performance improvements any day!

• Good write-up on long frames and INP: understanding post-load performance.

• Excellent post from Felix Arntz for developers about autoloading WordPress options efficiently and responsibly.

• Massive performance improvements arrived with Elementor 3.25. I’ve said publically in a few presentations lately that it’s awesome to see the focus on optimization their team has had over the past year.

• Cookie banner slop has to stop. I couldn’t agree more! This has quickly become one of the worst offenders on sites I work on. 🐌

• Analysis of the EPYC 145% performance gain in Cloudflare Gen 12 servers.

• Google launched a new Core Web Vitals tool called CrUX Vis, which is pretty cool! DebugBear published a good overview of the tool.

• Speaking of DebugBear, they also wrote up some helpful tips on how to improve your LCP render delay.

• They’ve decluttered DevTools in Chrome 130 even more by moving hide-, block-, and third-party-related checkboxes under a drop-down list.

Marketing

• Businesses must now have a matching Google Business Profile to run Local Service Ads with unverified or mismatched profiles leading to ad pauses.

• Semrush has acquired Search Engine Land. Wondering if this will be another Backlinko situation.

• If you’re a small business owner in the United States, just a friendly reminder to file your BOI report if you haven’t already. Fines start on January 1st, 2025.

• As of November 21st, the sitelinks search box in Google Search results will be no more.

AI

• ChatGPT introduced Canvas (early beta), a more in-depth collaboration tool for coding and writing.

• Tesla Bot (Optimus) is getting smarter by the day. It’s crazy to think we might actually see robots in households doing chores in our lifetimes. 🤖

• Apple internally believes that it’s at least two years behind in AI development. Honestly, this doesn’t surprise me. However, AI doesn’t motivate my Apple purchases whatsoever.

• Anthropic has introduced the Claude 3.5 Sonnet model, which can now interact with computer interfaces by controlling mouse and keyboard actions.

If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋

We kept pretty busy, but I very much needed a mental break from my daily routine of tickets, troubleshooting, documentation, and development. Sometimes, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut without even knowing it. The saying “go touch grass” also comes to mind.

I’m thankful for the time I got to spend with my family, and not going to let it go this long again without taking a break. Also, being an Uncle is the best! 😄

Updates ✍️

Even with vacation, we managed to push out an exciting update for our Novashare plugin this month. Here are a few of the changes:

• *Optimized* share button functionality to open in a new browser tab instead of popup. This allows us to completely remove the frontend JS file. One less request and 1.2 KB smaller. 🔥 Pinterest-specific JS to manage image grid will now be printed inline only when needed.

• *Optimized* plugin logo and inline SVG network icons. Icon sizes decreased on average by 5%! ⚡

• *New* share and follow button support for Bluesky network.

• Fixed an issue where the license tab was showing up at the subsite level if the plugin was not network activated in multisite.

• Fixed an issue where X share button was not handing off to the native app when on a mobile device. 📲

• Fixed an issue where a blank tab would sometimes be left behind in the browser on mobile when handing off to a native app.

• Removed deprecated API calls for TwitCount and OpenShareCount.

• Updated Grow references to Hubbub in the Novashare migrator. 🚚

In case you missed them, we just finished our fifth and final video in the Vitality series with Kyle from The Admin Bar. In all, we covered Time to First Byte (TTFB), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Contentful Paint (FCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Interaction to Next Paint (INP) and Total Blocking Time (TBT). ⚡ Presentation slides are included in the video descriptions. These were a lot of work, so I hope they were helpful.

And if you aren’t a Perfmatters customer yet, we partnered up with EWWW for a birthday giveaway. Enter now for your chance to win an EWWW IO license or a full year of Perfmatters. 🎁

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

• The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is now integrated into Google Search. However, with this change, the previous cache feature is now dead.

• US online passport renewal is now fully open for business. This will be handy!

• United Airlines is installing Starlink on their planes. Honestly, it will be really cool when this is just the new standard everywhere.

• Speaking of internet, it’s crazy that I live in the 10th largest metropolitan area in the US and still only have one ISP available. And because of this, they have ridiculous data cap overage charges.

• iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia were released this month! I already took the plunge. Here are a few of my personal thoughts:

  • iPhone mirroring is awesome. Great for developers to test things.

  • The calculator is too small now.

  • The integrated window management works really well.

  • The Notes highlight feature is very handy.

WordPress

• Most of you probably already know about the drama happening this week between Automattic and WP Engine. It was hard to miss. If not, I recommend you catch up with Eric Karkovack’s timeline of events or Brian Coord’s post. I actually agree with a lot of what Brian said.

  • In my opinion, the whole situation is just downright embarrassing and could have been handled so much better.

  • The folks suffering now are the hardworking WordPress users and businesses hosted at WP Engine that had nothing to do with this mess.

  • On a funny note. We had never run ads before and decided to give it a try due to some free credits. Whoever took the screenshots at Automattic included our ad in their cease-and-desist letter. As Clive on X said, our Perfmatters ad is now cemented in history. 😅 The one time we run ads. 🤦

• Automattic is migrating Tumblr to WordPress, a move described as “one of the largest technical migrations in internet history.” Would love to see case study on this.

• WPLift was acquired by E2M Solutions. Manish Dudharejia, the CEO of E2M, says WPLift isn’t going away and it will help them expand their reach.

• Elementor has launched the Site Mailer plugin for those needing to send transactional emails.

Performance

• Cloudflare released a lot of amazing new features this week! Here’s a quick summary:

  • They rolled out Speed Brain, 🧠 which is essentially deploying the Speculation Rules API. They are only doing prefetch at the moment, but the good news is that prerender is coming. But for the time being, I’ve disabled the feature on my Cloudflare sites and am using prerender in the Speculative Loading plugin. I’ll probably offload this to Cloudflare once they add prerender.

    • Be careful when turning this on or off, as they try to enable RUM on your site. If you don’t need the analytics, I recommend keeping RUM off for now.

  • Stand aside GZIP and Brotli, Zstandard compression is in the house. It looks like it might be a really good middle ground in terms of compression ratio and speed. ⚡

  • Cloudflare has upgraded its servers, which they claim are 145% more performant and 63% more efficient.

  • They’ve drastically reduced the time to invalidate cache when purging. It’s now under 150 ms. 🔥

  • Workers KV are up to 3x faster. This includes improvements for things like tiered cache.

• If our Perfmatters plugin has ever helped you, we would love a vote in the Monster's Award 2024.

• Paul Calvano has released a new tool called Third Party Explorer. It allows you to more easily analyze the data from WebPageTest. Pretty cool!

• As of September 24th, fetch priority is now supported by all three major browsers. This is a big win. ⚡

• The new Performance panel updates in Chrome DevTools are awesome.

• AVIF, WebP Converter is a new free WordPress image optimization plugin on the block. It might be worth checking out.

• Chrome officially ends support for First Input Delay (FID). This was replaced by INP.

• Elementor keeps pushing out performance updates, which is exciting to see! I commend them for spending a lot of time on this over the past year.

• PerfLab is a new tool that allows you to more easily digest and understand Chrome trace data. Backstory in this thread.

Marketing

• Fathom released an update so that event completions now use the first referrer/UTM seen. This is a great improvement! I actually had a problem with this before.

• Are you seeing Forbes everywhere in Google search results? Check out this in-depth case study on why.

AI

• Is AI content worth it? John Doherty shared an insightful post about this on LinkedIn.

• While I was on vacation with the family, we saw multiple Waymo cars picking folks up. I still can’t get used to a car without a driver as my Uber.

• Ahrefs has released a new AI Content Helper tool. It’s free for all customers while it’s in beta.

• Cloudflare has released a new AI audit tool. This allows you to better understand how AI is using your site and even eventually charge them to crawl your content.

When you live in the desert, you have to deal with an occasional scorpion. 🦂 How’s this for one? Yikes!

If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋

I’ve come to accept that I’m pretty good at troubleshooting WordPress problems, helping customers track down issues, etc. While it isn’t always the most fun aspect of my job and can be stressful at times, it seems this is where our business and users need me the most. I’m focusing more on embracing it. 💪

This newsletter has been a great outlet for me, as it’s one of the few times I get to jot down my thoughts consistently. It’s also an excellent way to keep up with everything going on and not get completely lost in the day-to-day business side of things. If you’re a subscriber, I appreciate you following along! 👏

Updates ✍️

We pushed out a rather big update for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

• We separated out built-in CSS selector exclusions by URL type for increased performance on single and front pages when using the Remove Unused CSS feature. On a large WooCommerce site, we saw a 32% decrease in overall CSS size. 🔥

• We added a new advanced Lazy Load Elements feature (beta), which will allow for element chains in the DOM to be lazy-loaded until they enter the viewport. You can add selectors or add our custom class using your page builder or theme.

• Optimized plugin logo and other SVG image files.

• Fixed an issue where smaller size files were sometimes not being replaced with the minified version for increased performance. ⚡

• Added fetchpriority high attribute automatically on critically preloaded image links to help decrease LCP.

• Made adjustments to option management to prevent autoloading of certain options going forward where it is not needed.

• Added support for delaying script modules.

• Added additional jQuery sticky JavaScript file to Elementor quick exclusion.

• Added new Delay JS quick exclusions for Fluent Forms and Fluent Forms Pro.

• Integrated get_atts_array utility function into lazyload class to prevent redundancy.

• Fixed an issue where the preload location label was overlapping the input field for certain languages.

• Removed various manual preload types that are no longer supported by most major browsers.

We also pushed out a small update for our Novashare WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes.

• X broke/deprecated some of its old Twitter code. 🐦 We've pushed out a quick fix where the old Twitter domain link was redirecting and duplicating the query string parameters passed through. If you're using X, we recommend updating.

• Added an additional post object check to prevent a PHP warning in certain cases.

• Updated our staging site license key exception list with additional formats for Rocket.net (*.onrocket.site) and Pantheon (*.pantheonsite.io). 🔑

• Minor style adjustments to the plugin UI.

In case you missed them, check out our videos in the Vitality series with Kyle from The Admin Bar on Time to First Byte (TTFB), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Contentful Paint (FCP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). ⚡ Presentation slides are included in the video descriptions.

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

• Troy Hunt did an excellent breakdown of the 3 billion people National Public Data breach.

• Adam has been releasing a ton of updates and improvements to the Screen Studio app on Mac. Up to 4 times faster exports. 🔥 Still my favorite video recording tool.

• Samsung just showed a 600-mile solid-state EV battery, and it charges in only 9 minutes! I’m more excited about where EV technology might be in 5-10 years. Until then, I’ll be driving my paid-off gas-powered car into the ground.

• I’m a big fan of Backblaze for offsite backup (not sync) of my computer. Through September 30, new customers can get 20% off using this discount code: B2S2024

• Not a fan of Google Lens now showing up in your search bar in newer Chrome versions? I’ve disabled this.

WordPress

• I’ve said this before, but Gravatar keeps adding nice improvements. I like the “Add to contacts” feature for WordPress networking events. Check out my profile.

• There has been a new issue opened to track adding support for the new Font Library for classic themes. This would be great news! There are some doing workarounds already.

• InstaWP has launched multisite support and a new data center location in Singapore.

• I had fun chatting with folks on the WP-Tonic podcast. We discussed Kevin’s upcoming Etch product and Jamie’s new role as head of YouTube at WordPress (Jamie chimed in).

Performance

• I published a doc with some tips on how to speed up your WordPress admin dashboard (back-end and editor). ⚡ Not everything is about the front-end.

• The newest version of GeneratePress now has a local font library feature! This is an amazing update in terms of performance.

• DebugBear put out an excellent post on debunking five myths about Interaction to Next Paint (INP). They also published a video.

• Kinsta rolled out the new C3D machines in Frankfurt, Germany, and Sydney, Australia. Typical response time improvements of between 20-50%!

• The new performance panel updates coming in Chrome DevTools are some of the best I’ve seen in a long time! Definitely worth taking some time to try them out. You can enable them under Experiments. Here is a good overview.

• SolidWP (StellarWP) has launched a new free standalone cache plugin called Solid Performance. Looks very promising!

• The Super Page Cache for Cloudflare plugin has rebranded to Super Page Cache, removing the Cloudflare dependency if you don’t want it. It now also works standalone as a cache plugin.

• Ever wonder why your site’s HTML doc size is so big? This HTML analyzer tool comes in really handy! Definitely one to add to your toolbench.

• AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search.

Marketing

• X has rolled out a new feature where you can sort replies on any post by most relevant, recent, or liked. I like this improvement!

• Google Sheets adds a one-click way to easily create tables. I use Sheets a lot, and will be taking advantage of this.

• Katie Keith and Zack Katz talk to WordPress and marketing expert Patrick Rauland about how to diagnose and tackle marketing problems.

• The August core update from Google is shaking things up in SERPs. I’ve seen folks both recovering and losing a lot of traffic.

• The FTC is cracking down harder on fake reviews and testimonials. This is a good thing!

• Instagram is adding a song on profile feature. I don’t use Instagram much, but it was fun to add a clip of my favorite song. Definitely having Myspace flashbacks.

• Google may now use your OG title for title links in search engine results.

• X is testing a video conferencing tool. As someone who uses X quite a bit, I’m all for alternatives to Zoom, Google Meet, etc.

AI

• I’ve been using Grok-2 a lot lately. I stopped using Bard, Copilot, and ChatGPT. It’s excellent for what I use it for, along with image generation. In fact, the image at the top of this newsletter was created using Grok. However, a premium account is required.

• The improvement in AI-generated videos over the past 15-16 months is remarkable. Check out this comparison, just one year apart.

• After seeing massive improvements in AI, you then have an entire parking lot of Waymo cars honking at each other at 4 am. So not everything is smooth sailing.

• I thought this was an interesting thread. Have you ever had a great experience with an AI chatbot? 🤔 I still haven’t. “Give me human.”

If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋