Sessions

Why you should forget about the scores if you want to speed up your website? What is TTFB and why you should care about it? Why using CDN might not help you improve the site speed? Why Twitter with all that funny GIFs loads lightning fast and your visitors have to wait for ages while one single kitten gets loaded? How do you get to know your hosting is fast enough?

During this session we will learn:

• how to measure website load times and interpret the results
• what should you do after all possible caching is already on but your website is still awfully slow
• how to define bottlenecks and fix them without making significant changes to the theme.

Let’s make websites load faster together!

WordPress is an open source project. But what does that really mean, and is there a way to use the principles of open source to improve society as we know it? What is next for this open source success story?

In this talk, the audience will look beyond the bubble of an open source project and receives guidelines on how to take the learnings of open source with them to other communities – society at large.

Public speaking: myths to dispel and tips for success

In this talk we will face the false myths that discourage many people to apply as a speaker and some technique to overcome stage anxiety.

Speaker: Simona Simionato

Collaboration vs Competition

Are you collaborative enough? In this session, I will be talking about the importance of small business collaboration in a saturated market place. I’ve been in business as a designer for nearly two decades and one thing I’ve learned along the way is that collaboration is key to progressing in business, reaching more clients and establishing a solid reputation. But how can you achieve this effectively and without losing your competitive edge? I will be sharing some tried and tested ways collaboration can help your business stand out from the crowd.

Speaker: Meg Fenn

Using WordPress to do_action

Can one day’s work benefit thousands of people in the local community? Yes. For every do_action there is a positive and empowering re_action.

Hear the inside scoop about the first do_action day to take place in Europe, a one-day hackathon where we created WordPress sites for 5 non-profits and charities in the South West.

This talk provides a transparent account of why Bristol chose to do_action, what successes and challenges we faced, who it helped and how it made an impact.

Speaker: Tess Coughlan-Allen

On 28 April 2012, my life changed forever and I could not do much about it. I lost my companion, had to give away my 14 year old daughter to a children’s home and in the end also lost my job. I spent 16 weeks on rehab in a trauma clinic where doctors told me that I am mentally ill: Depression, Borderline, PTSD, etc. and disabled for work.

This talk is about the lessons I have learnt to change my way from “I am mentally ill, can not work any more and have no perspectives” to “I am mentally ill; despite this I shape my life and run a business”.

Do not let others define who you are: change your perspective and new opportunities arise. No matter how bad your situation may look.

WordPress is a good way to start: not only as a software for your business website but the community around it.

How we get and interact with data in WordPress is changing dramatically as of WordPress 5.0 and the release of the new Data API. The Data API is built with the Redux state management library (although no experience with Redux is necessary). The Data API allows developers to get data from WordPress and dispatch actions using JavaScript in ways that were not possible before.

The Data API is the future of how to interact with data in WordPress using JavaScript and React and is an essential skill for any serious WordPress Developer.

In this talk, educator Zac Gordon, will cover how the Data API works, what options are available and some important things to know. We will also look at how you can use the Data API to manage state for your own WordPress plugins.

Think that the UX process is only for big agencies with big clients and big budgets? Think again! UX research and methodology can, and even must, be part of *any* web project, no matter the size. It’s possible, and I’ll show you how. In fact, you’re probably doing UX research already in some form, and you don’t even know it.

This talk demystifies UX and shows you how to make it an integral part of your web design process. The improvement is guaranteed: for you, your clients, and your clients’ clients.

Everyone should be a little bit worried about the security of their site, and at conferences, lots of security talks focus on practical steps people can take.

In this talk, Tim will flip the norms and instead focus on several real examples of sites being hacked but from the attackers perspective. We will see the whole attacks from the bad actors view identifying targets, analysing vulnerable sites, adding payload, exploiting in doing so showing how sites are infected, how some tools do prevent certain attacks and how clever and indeed not so clever bad actors can circumvent lots of hardening done.

Each step we can analyse what could have been put in place to prevent and frustrate the attack and then look at how this can be implemented on your site.

While the notion of mindfulness has had a resurgence as a buzz word, its profound and most deep meaning goes beyond light meditation and coloring books: mindfulness is a state of being, an approach to life (and to our work, regardless of its genre) that calls for presence and awareness, care and purpose.

Living mindfully, designing mindfully, coding mindfully can be extremely rewarding, for us and for the beneficiaries of our work.

Are you getting all itchy just by thinking of something faintly resembling a sales funnel? Because it makes you feel like you need to push your leads through a sausage maker? Let me introduce you to an alternative that is much easier on our sensitive souls.

• Discover a different concept. One that magnetically pulls people closer instead of the need to push hard.
• Learn how to use this tool to persuade a visitor that looks like your ideal client to take that obvious next step. Because they feel ready. Because they are getting to know, like and trust you. And not because the sausage maker needs to keep churning.
• Take a handy set of templates, planners and checklists home. So that you will be ready to get started on Monday.

eCommerce is evolving and brands can do a lot to move the needle for their businesses if they know the right strategies to use.

Learn about the most relevant trends in ecommerce right now and how you can put them into practice immediately.

How do you teach a computer to design a website?

You may have heard that robots are coming to steal our jobs. But the end isn’t nigh! I’m here to tell you why that may not be such a bad thing – and share some of my own adventures trying to automate away my own job.

We will investigate how automation isn’t that different from other technological leaps of the past – as well as ways it is vastly different. We will touch on how emerging technologies can be an equaliser and the real world application of machine learning. Along the way, we will talk about ethics, universal basic income, and how soon ‘Judgement Day’ will be upon us.

Finally, we will touch on how Gutenberg opens up new possibilities within the WordPress space, and how to take advantage of those opportunities.

GraphQL is a query language for requesting data from APIs. In this talk we will look at how we can use GraphQL to request data from an API and use it in our client applications. We will also look at how to set up WordPress to provide a GraphQL based API, how to ensure that our Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies will respond to GraphQL requests, how to add post meta to the API schema, and also look at how we can examine API schemas using the GraphiQL tool.

In addition we will compare GraphQL with the WordPress REST-API and examine the benefits and drawbacks of each.

Open source matters to the future of design and design matters to open source. Open source matters to the future of us all. Designing in open source isn’t always easy and in this talk I will draw on my background along with experiences in the WordPress project.

What are the challenges and why does it matter to have designers in open source? How can we create spaces that encourage, nurture and let designers thrive in our projects. How can we bridge across roles to unite in an open source future?

Psychological safety is a term that’s often used when discussing issues with team dynamics. Often we get broad thoughts that mostly amount to “be nicer”, but what do you do when you’re getting started and “be nice” isn’t exactly a measurable goal.

Join Josepha for an interactive conversation about how we as leaders can make small changes that result in building a culture of safety.

Have you ever had a situation where you needed the same content on multiple websites, with just one place to edit it? Maybe in a network of WordPress sites?

In this talk I will outline how we built a content syndication system for a network of WordPress sites, meaning that content required on all sites could be edited once and deployed out to one or all of the thousands of sites in the network.

I will talk about the technologies we used to accomplish the task, the development challenges that were involved and how we overcame them.

These systems are great for businesses which have lots of divisions, regions or franchises which need the same default content on each site.

The future of workplace diversity is not what you think, but how you think. Four years ago, the BBC’s neurodiversity initiative was created to improve awareness and understanding of hidden conditions such as Autism, Dyspraxia, Dyslexia, ADHD, to highlight not just the talents of neurodivergent people as part of a diverse workforce, but to emphasise that Diversity of Thought is a crucial part to the future success of any inclusive culture.

Move on four years and the BBC Cape team is now involved in researching a concept they call Cognitive Design, a new framework that will support different thinking and new perspectives. Join us on this intriguing journey from accessibility initiative to design research programme.

Eight years ago I was a one Gal Band running my WordPress business on lots of coffee and late nights and systems held together by a wing and a prayer and a bit of sellotape. This had to stop. Since then I’ve scaled my business with people, policies and systems, so I work with more clients in a less stressful way, and enjoy life an awful lot more!

In my session I will focus on:

• making your first hires – considering off-shore? I’ll share my experiences, good and bad!
• when to grow your team – spot when you are ready!
• cutting down on confusion – developing robust communication and planning systems for your team and clients to minimise miscommunication as you expand.
• creating your business manual – sounds dull but is the lifeblood of your business – I will show you how to create a living document that grows with you.

Learn from my mistakes while I share my own short cuts to avoiding burnout and loving your WordPress business more.

If you have worked with JavaScript over the years, chances are high you have used some kind of component system before to define how a larger piece of content renders in HTML and how it can be interacted with.

Popular frameworks such as React and Vue both rely on such concepts. Unfortunately frameworks have typically invented their own mechanisms for that purpose, which work in different ways.

Web Components is a set of features that introduces similar mechanisms natively to the browser. Having a standardised layer for these so-called leaf components can aid interoperability between different paradigms significantly – imagine a future where you can just reuse a leaf component you wrote for a simple native JavaScript application in a React application, or vice-versa.

In this session we will learn how the different features that Web Components encompass work. We will also dive into how they can be used by example, taking a look under the hood of the AMP framework which relies on them and diving into their usage within Gutenberg.

Websites and WordPress stopped being standalone business systems a long time ago – now integration is standard and understanding the role that CMS plays in business systems is key to our success.

So, what are some common content monetisation strategies? How are they being successfully used by brands like the FT, Forbes and Guardian? From paywalls to tokenized micropayments, there are a variety of different ways you can leverage WordPress to support those strategies, but how do you know which way is right for you?

In this talk, David will answer all of these questions and will discuss the successful content monetisation that Pragmatic built for PEI. David will conclude his talk on why you should be using WordPress to create seamless customer journeys.

Gender Gap in IT and the WordPress Community

In 2012, Matt Mullenweg stated his concern about how we get more women involved here in the WordPress Community. And during the last six years, attempts have been made to balance the number of men and women working on WordPress, but the reality is far from this ideal.

We know that this is not a unique problem in the context of WordPress but of the tech world in general. Therefore, in this talk, I will summarize what I’ve found in research articles on the numbers of women involved in technology. I will also summarize the evidence shown in a large-scale study of gender bias, comparing the acceptance rates of men’s and women’s contributions in an open source software community. Finally, I will also provide similar figures in the context of the WordPress Community.

This issue is too complex to provide easy solutions. So this talk is only meant to give a vision that can serve as a starting point for us to feel more comfortable discussing and working on finding solutions to something that interests us all.

Speaker: Ruth Raventós

A Greener Web is Good for Everyone

The internet has huge potential to move us towards a sustainable future through dematerialising products and streamlining industries. Despite its many benefits though, it is not perfect. The storage, processing and transmission of data consumes electricity and that has an impact on the environment.

The good news is that there are simple things that we can do about it, and contrary to what some may think, a green website can actually be a better website for everyone. Approaching web projects through the lens of sustainability can have benefits not just for the environment, but also in terms of improved SEO, accessibility, user experience and even cost savings.

We will look at some practical steps to green the web and the benefits that they bring.

Speaker: Tom Greenwood

The Business Case for Web Accessibility

Making websites more accessible for persons with disabilities creates good karma, but often gets dropped from projects because it has a perceived negligible impact on the bottom line. Accessible websites however, have good ROI (return on investment) for both developers and the businesses who make their sites accessible.

This talk will not deal with technical aspects of making sites accessible, but will focus on why building in accessibility is good for business. Anyone who builds sites for businesses (and nonprofits!) and business site owners will find this talk helpful.

Speaker: Bet Hannon

In this session, I will introduce using WordPress as a backend application through a combination of using the WP REST API and a shared database with a Laravel application as a use case. I will explain how developers can harness the advantages of using a modern PHP framework based on MVC principles, coupled with the ‘wp-admin’ interface and database structure of the WordPress CMS for a more rapid and satisfying development experience.

With use cases from a real example of a recent project to illustrate the focus of my talk, I will explain these concepts which settled a debate in my development team between using a CMS or framework for a specific project by combining the best of both worlds in a way that worked best for the project and the development team’s methodology. I will show through my real-world example, how the WP REST API was so important to the evolution of WordPress into more than just a CMS and how it makes the use of WordPress as a headless CMS so advantageous.

WordPress is a rapidly evolving CMS to the point where it is no longer simply a CMS but has serious potential uses as an application framework, data source and/or headless CMS for a PHP or JavaScript framework for increased performance and yet unrealised potential uses. Laravel is just one framework that PHP can be used with and in this talk I will give a brief introduction to the concepts of Laravel being used with WordPress in building complex web applications to show that there is no need to firmly choose between the two and that the strong advantages of both options can be fully realised in our development projects no matter the purpose.

WordPress is planning to raise its minimum PHP version requirement and if all goes according to plan, we will have a required minimum of PHP 7+ for December 2019.

Few plugin developers currently know how to make the best use of the language features that PHP 7.2+ provides. That’s why I worked on a new plugin boilerplate that provides you with a robust, strictly typed OOP framework and incorporates a lot of applied best practices.

In this session I will introduce this new boilerplate and go into the details of how this will improve your plugin code and reduce its maintenance cost in the long run.

Experiment: A month before WordCamp London I will publish two articles on a generic subject… The first one, is what I see most clients do, a-199-word, two paragraph blog or news item with minimal SEO. Usually, that is it for the next six months for most SMEs…

The second article will be original and content heavy, following all the rules to maximise exposure. With comprehensive SEO and promoting it through other channels like social media and GMB. My website will be a standard company test case where today’s stats are around 20 users per day… will it be a success or a complete flop?

There are lots of lessons to be learned along the way with things that worked well and things that didn’t… How far should we go with promoting new content? What would work best for SME? Should ‘we’ actually maintain a news or blog section? I would expect some audience participation that will give feedback both positive and constructive. It will put some of my theories to the test that I tell my clients to do.

Inside A Product Manager’s Toolbox

More and more people in the WordPress community and the greater tech industry are building products: SaaS, applications, interfaces, for profit or as side projects. And in fact, once people take that step, whether they realise it or not, they become product managers.

In this talk I will illustrate who a product manager is, what a product manager does, and what a product manager uses, in terms of tools and resources, to do what they need to do.

This talk is for product managers, but also for founders at very early stage startups, solopreneurs, freelancers, plugin / theme shop owners, and generally speaking people who are in the business of building and selling digital goods.

Rocking Remote Work: Living Your Best Life & Maintaining Your Sanity

Remote work is all the rage these days as more and more companies have started to go remote or offer remote friendly positions, but not everyone knows how to navigate this new reality.

I will talk about the fabulous benefits of remote work, the potential pitfalls and how to mitigate them, how to hold on to your sanity, not need to shrink the kids (if you have them), and have a grand old time doing it all.

How To Sell 5 Figure Marketing Funnels With WordPress

WordPress businesses that are confident they can sell 5 figure projects, are more likely to grow and less likely to take risks. In this talk I want to show the audience, how even with a “lack of experience” or having never sold a project for 5 figures, they can comfortably attract and close 5 figure projects.

WordPress businesses are uniquely positioned to offer their customers amazing results through marketing automation, simple funnels and email and copywriting. By the end of the talk, I will have demonstrated how the audience will be able to confidently attract and close 5 figure deals for their WordPress business.

When we think about UX, we’re often too focused on fonts, colors, and flow to think about microcopy – those small bits of text that guide users through almost every part of a web interface. These words may be tiny, but they can make a significant difference in the usability of your design and even affect your site’s conversion rates.

Key takeaways. In this talk, I will share copywriting and communication tips that will immediately improve your user interface microcopy, such as error messages and interface instructions, so your users experience less frustration and more delight.

Talk attendees will get a quick introduction to branding and communication principles, basic UX principles, and how to evaluate effective copy in website flows. They will also see real examples of before and after situations where simple changes made a big difference and how and where to apply the same changes to their own sites.

Why make your site load fast when you can pre-load everything in advance? Take advantage of those SSL certificates to speed everything up, prefetch resources, preload pages, and push assets to the browser directly before the HTML arrives

Every organisation can gain a lot from strategic partnerships. However, many small companies do not feel confident approaching potential partners. If most of your pitches aren’t getting a reply, it might be time to review your approach. It is not about your company size, it is about your company ideas and how you present them.

In this talk, I will share my strategy as a Key Partnerships Manager at SiteGround for approaching potential partners and developing winning proposals that will get you noticed. I will share practical tips and guidelines to help companies of any size articulate the benefits of a partnership for both sides and increase the chances for success of the future collaboration.

Key Takeaways:

• learn how to create a structured approach for outreach to partners
• understand the main pitfalls and what not to do
• get tips for successful tactics and mindsets that will help your efforts be fruitful and increase your chances of successful partnerships.

WP-CLI is the official command-line interface for WordPress. It allows you to update plugins, configure your site, build new plugins, and much more – all without using a web browser.

This talk serves as an introduction to the powerful capabilities WP-CLI provides, from very simple commands to powerful combinations to make your life as a WordPress developer or user much easier.

Developing and deploying are two activities that can and should easily embrace innovation. This is where the Presslabs Stack comes in—it’s the first open-source serverless hosting platform that bridges two major technologies, WordPress and Kubernetes, and ultimately our contribution to advancing the WordPress infrastructure and operations.

Calin will first make a hands-on tour of the Stack and introduce the productivity benefits it brings: developer-focused, best practices bundle, scaling, security. He will also address the importance of ensuring a consistent behavior both locally and in production environments by using Kubernetes as a common denominator between the two.

Then he will walk the participants through the process of installing the Stack locally and pushing the changes to a Production Stack. Calin will present healthy development practices that are baked in the Stack and can be successfully adopted in the WordPress ecosystem. These practices include source code versioning, using a dependency manager like Composer or having a clear deployment pipeline.

Years ago, when you started a business, the first thing you took care of was making business cards. Today your first thought goes to a website. Often freelancers create their websites without a clear plan. It’s true that WordPress makes it easy to build a website on your own, but it’s a good practice to start such a project by asking yourself some questions. Do all freelancers need a website? If you decided to build one, what pages should definitely be there? What information is useful to your readers? What is worthless? And by the way, who are your readers? What and how do you write for them? We will explore common questions together and see examples of best practices.

If you are a site owner, blogger, content manager, editor or writer you want to reach as many people as possible. Is your content accessible? How to do test this and what guidelines to follow?

In this workshop Rian will give you an overview of best practices and useful hands-on test tools.

Together with Rian, you will be able to discuss how to integrate accessibility testing into your workflow.

Bring your laptop and join in!

As a WordPress freelancer or an agency owner, you are primarily focused on delivering a great plugin, theme or website for your clients. What do you do though when your client needs to outgrow your existing developer capacity? You need to hire people.

Hiring full-time employees are both time-consuming and inflexible. Hiring contractors comes with challenges of reliability and quality of work. In this talk, I will share some tips on where and how to find quality developers, so that you get great value for your business, hire talent just when you need it and not worry about the quality of work or time-consuming hiring processes.

Key takeaway. Despite some of the challenges of hiring remote developers, if done right, it can save you time, make you more money and help your business grow.

Have you ever been confused about why the code you wrote doesn’t do what you expect? Are you learning to code and don’t want to get caught out? Many people learn to code by example without understanding why the code works – or doesn’t! I hope to inspire and equip you to learn more about what your code is doing.

I will use interactive examples and plain language to explain how learning coding principles can help debugging, help you understand documentation, and make you a better developer. And we’ll learn some basic but invaluable principles that will help de-mystify your code and solve problems faster.

With legal cases like the recent one involving Dominos Pizza in the US, focus is sharpening now around ensuring that your own website, or your clients’ websites have a good level of accessibility.

But if you’re building a site using WordPress for yourself – or someone else – how do you go about ensuring its accessibility? Is just following the WordPress accessibility themes guidelines enough? When is the right stage to think about accessibility?

In this presentation, I will be pulling together all the different threads that make up accessible WordPress sites, and compiling them into a useful accessibility checklist that can be used on any project.

The term JAMstack was coined by Mathias Biilman, the co-founder of Netlify, to contrast more ‘modern’ approaches to web development with the LAMP stack we all know very well. JAMstack refers to the serverless, database-less stack comprised of Javascript, APIs and Markup.

Interest in the JAMstack is growing, and many feel that the JAMstack approach to web development, which in many ways is faster, more secure, and offers greater stability than the traditional stack, is the future of the web. But it also has many drawbacks and issues.

In this talk we will examine the JAMstack to understand what it is and what it offers, and look at the progression of approaches to web development, the pros and cons of the various methodologies, and where WordPress fits in with it all.

Maintainable CSS Architecture In The Gutenberg Era

Writing maintainable and scalable CSS is one of the biggest aspects of the front-end work. In this talk, we will go through how CSS methodologies like ITCSS, BEM, and utility classes can help to achieve that.

In the same time we will get maximum WYSIWYG experience in the Gutenberg editor without re-writing the front-end CSS that much.

A Master Class In Collaboration With Education

We all benefit from today’s students making up the next generation of the WordPress community, so creating and maintaining strong links with education should be important to all of us. This talk will show that the support we offer students can result in major wins for business too.

Partnerships between industry and education can supercharge business activities, provide opportunities for joint research, and provide valuable industry exposure for students. During this talk, Tom will use stories and examples to introduce the many ways the WordPress community (individuals, businesses and agencies) can engage with educational institutes to grow their business and find new opportunities. Case studies will cover: providing training and mentoring, formal knowledge exchanges, funding opportunities, graduate recruitment, supporting students, business growth and collaborating on innovation.

Key takeaways. There are many opportunities for businesses to support their growth and innovation by partnering with educational institutions. In doing so, business can provide students with valuable skills, experience, and opportunities.

If You Haven’t Added Structured Data, Your Site Isn’t Finished

I am a theme developer. My themes look lovely, the pages load fast, the UX flowed but am I missing something?

In a word. Yes!

Structured data is foundation for the search engine machines to understand your content. It allows them to understand the context of page. It allows them to convert information into knowledge (Skynet anyone?)

As a developer working with a client to launch a site – we must consider the ‘bots as well as the humans that will see our page. Failure to do that is not an option anymore!

I will quickly run through structured data types currently recognized by google. I will explain how these tie into Rich results (with live case studies on improved SERPs for clients). I will finish up the talk with examples of how developers can add JSON-LD code to page head (dynamically for custom posts where possible)