Top WordPress blog posts from January 2020
With WordPress websites spanning over a third of the web, there’s a plethora of blog posts referencing the CMS in one way or another. We managed to comb through this sea of WordPress posts and compiled some of best ones written in January - have a look at our recap.
Is JAMstack antithetical to WordPress?
We’re kicking off this month’s list with a blog post on dev.to discussing the combination of WordPress and the JAMstack. It was written by Divya of Netlify and is part of her Jamuary series of posts.
Since WordPress websites are typically built on top of the LAMP stack, the popular CMS doesn’t seem to be a good fit with the more recently introduced JAMstack which is more static as opposed to dynamic.
Still, it is not impossible to use the JAMstack together with WordPress: this is enabled by WordPress’ REST API, which allows it to act like a headless CMS and makes for better security and easier maintainability.
What to Watch for in WordPress in 2020
In the next post we’d like to mention, Allie Nimmons breaks down all the major things we can expect for WordPress this year. From 3 major Core releases to a plethora of both online and on-site events, there are definitely a lot of things to be excited about in 2020.
That said - it is sad to see what was to be the inaugural WordCamp Asia get cancelled; we truly hope next year’s edition will be able to be executed smoothly and successfully. Luckily, there are numerous other events going on this year, such as the WordSesh and WooSesh virtual conferences, as well as things such as the Gatsby Source Plugin on the development end of the spectrum to look forward to.
5 Steps to a Winning WordPress Content Marketing Strategy
We continue with a blog post by Elaine Bennett of Bizzmark Blog published on WP Pluginsify, in which she shares five steps to crafting a successful content marketing strategy - although the post references WordPress, the tips that Elaine provides in it will come in handy for a content strategy regardless of the site’s platform.
The steps that she lists are: performing thorough content research; organizing your content schedule; creating content following SEO best practices; building up your mailing list; and, lastly, monitoring performance and making optimizations if and when needed. Due to the unwavering ubiquity of content marketing, having a well thought-out strategy truly pays off.
9 Best AMP WordPress Plugins for Speed, Search & Tracking
With more and more people browsing the web and accessing content via mobile, mobile-optimized websites and applications are becoming paramount, especially in terms of performance. In his post on Search Engine Journal, Ignite Visibility’s CEO John Lincoln lists 9 of the best AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) plugins for WordPress.
He begins, of course, with the official AMP plugin for WordPress (you can’t really go wrong with that one), but he also highlights, for instance, the AMP for WP plugin which may be even more suitable thanks to its rich feature set. Among others listed, some of the most interesting are also the AMP it up! and the AMP Stories plugins.
The Definitive PHP 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4 Benchmarks (2020)
This next post is one that we particularly enjoyed; it is a comprehensive look at PHP benchmarks across various platforms running on PHP, provided by Kinsta’s former Chief Marketing Officer Brian Jackson.
The frameworks and configurations used for the tests ranged from the giants in the CMS space - WordPress, Drupal and Joomla! - to less popular and/or more specific technologies, such as Magento, Symfony, PyroCMS, as well as a few other lesser known CMS.
Interestingly (but not surprisingly), the latest version of PHP, 7.4, was a clear winner in terms of performance in all the platforms that support this version, which shows just how important it is to be up-to-date with the latest software releases.
WordPress Leaders Nominated for CMX Awards
Next up, we have a post which is more a piece of news rather than a blog article. Still, we felt it definitely deserves to be included, as it is an announcement of Andrea Middleton and Josepha Haden being nominated for the first ever CMX Awards, published by Francesca Marano.
Spoiler alert for those who haven’t yet caught up with this piece of news: Andrea Middleton actually ended up receiving the award for “Executive Leader of a Community Team” for her long-standing dedication to the WordPress community which has no doubt greatly contributed to its growth. Congratulations to both for the nominations, and to Andrea for the award!
5 WordPress Development Trends for 2020 and Beyond
While a previously mentioned blog post looked at what to expect this year in the WordPress space, this one by Tom Rankin of WordCandy published on Torque discusses 5 trends that will be relevant to WordPress developers in 2020 and going forward.
Most of these are trends we’re already seeing across the digital space: chatbot integration (with Botsify and IBM’s Watson as viable WordPress plugins); voice search optimization fueled by the rise of voice shopping; blockchain technology introduced together with cryptocurrency but now finding other use cases; AR and VR’s potential to create interactive experiences; and progressive web apps (PWAs), a response to more and more frequent mobile usage.
Delving Further Into WordPress Website Accessibility
The last post we’d like to highlight this month is Claire Brotherton’s comprehensive look at accessibility in WordPress, a kind of sequel to an earlier post by Eric Karkovack (which we happened to include in last month’s recap, by the way).
As Claire points out, accessibility is the responsibility of both developers as well as content editors: the former must opt for accessibility-ready themes and accessibility-focused plugins as well as educate their clients on the importance of a11y, while the latter should take care to have a well-defined heading structure, include alt text for images when needed and be mindful of what colors they use to communicate certain information.
We hope you enjoyed revisiting some of the top WordPress-related blog posts from January. We frequently blog about open source and do these recaps every month, so, make sure to check out the rest of our blog if these topics interest you.
