Matt Mullenweg State of the Word, 2016

Matt Mullenweg just completed the 2016 State of the Word, which highlights the accomplishments of the past year, and sets the direction for the year ahead for WordPress. Matt Mullenweg just completed the 2016 State of the Word presentation at WordCamp US 2016.
This year, Matt focused on a variety of important topics, including the state of user experience in WordPress today, goals for future interface improvements, a WordPress growth council, internationalization gains, the further proliferation of secure websites, and important changes to the WordPress development process.
WordCamp US in Philadelphia
Matt began his talk by thanking the city of Philadelphia for being a great host of the first two WordCamp US events, as well as the sponsors, organizers, and volunteers that helped make WordCamp US one of the most successful and smoothest run WordCamps ever.
He also said the per person cost for WordCamp US is over $500 per person, and that only the sponsors make that happen. And next year, WordCamp US is making its way to Nashville.
WordCamps and meetups in 2016
There were 116 WordCamps in 2016, and over 36,000 attendees, 2,056 speakers, 1,036 sponsors, and 750 organizers.
There were 3,193
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/13948/matt-mullenweg-state-of-the-word-2016

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2016/12/03/matt-mullenweg-state-of-the-word-2016/

Liquid Web Hires WordPress Authority Chris Lema to Head Up Product and Innovation

LANSING, Mich., Dec. 1, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — Liquid Web, LLC (www.liquidweb.com), a $100 million managed hosting provider focused on web-dependent professionals, announced today the hiring of Chris Lema as VP of products and innovations. Lema brings more than 20 years of software development and product development experience to Liquid Web. Most recently, Lema served as an independent industry consultant focused on the WordPress community, sharing his insights via a daily blog, ebooks, public speaking and product strategy. Lema will develop innovative products to complement Liquid Web’s traditional managed hosting suite of product offerings as well as integration with its recent Cloud Sites purchase from Rackspace. His addition demonstrates the company’s commitment to its growing WordPress community, which currently supports more than 250,000 mission critical WordPress sites, and onboards, on average, one site every hour of every day.
"We are very excited about Chris joining the team. His experience working with our target customers, web-dependent SMBs and the creators who serve them, will accelerate our quest to build more innovative products for this underserved community,"
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/13946/liquid-web-hires-wordpress-authority-chris-lema-to-head-up-product-and-innovation

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2016/12/03/liquid-web-hires-wordpress-authority-chris-lema-to-head-up-product-and-innovation/

WordPress Editor Survey

Source: https://managewp.org/articles/13947/wordpress-editor-survey

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2016/12/03/wordpress-editor-survey/

Matt Mullenweg: WP Growth Council

In the WordPress world, when we look back an 2016 I think we’ll remember it as the year that we awoke to the importance of marketing. WordPress has always grown organically through word of mouth and its passionate community, but the hundreds of millions being spent advertising against WP has started to have an impact, especially for folks only lightly familiar with us. I’ve started to hear about a number of folks across many WordPress companies and industries working on this from different angles, some approaching it from an enterprise point of view and some from a consumer point of view. There’s an opportunity for learning from each other, almost like a mastermind group. As the survey says:
Never have there been more threats to the open web and WordPress. Over three hundred million dollars has been spent in 2016 advertising proprietary systems, and even more is happening in investment. No one company in the WP world is large enough to fight this, nor should anyone need to do it on their own. We’d like to bring together organizations that would like to contribute to growing WordPress. It will be a small group, and if you or your organization are interested in
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/13945/matt-mullenweg-wp-growth-council

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2016/12/02/matt-mullenweg-wp-growth-council/

Why Serious eCommerce Brands Prefer WooCommerce Over Shopify

Coke vs. Pepsi. Tom vs. Jerry.
WooCommerce vs. Shopify.
This last rivalry between eCommerce platforms may not be as well-known, but it’s no less fierce a competition.
But, from our point of view, the winner is clearly WooCommerce. At least for serious eCommerce brands.
That’s not to say Shopify is a bad product. It’s actually quite good. Shopify is price-efficient, easy to use, and saves time. It takes a lot of the conventional hassles out of building an online store so you can go from nothing to something overnight.
What we’re saying is that WooCommerce is better suited for bigger and more ambitious eCommcerce brands. Shopify can only get you so far, but WooCommerce is a platform that you can ride all the way to the top. Shopify is great if you want to operate an online store in your spare time, but if you have big dreams in eCommerce, WooCommerce is the way to go.
Here’s why…
1. Complete Ownership
With Shopify, you don’t own your site. You get your own URL, and you’re spared the fee of hosting, but you’re restricted only to what Shopify allows you to do. This straightforward approach works well for eCommerce beginners (and lazy
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/13943/why-serious-ecommerce-brands-prefer-woocommerce-over-shopify

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2016/12/02/why-serious-ecommerce-brands-prefer-woocommerce-over-shopify/

Optimal Settings For Yoast – Website Maintenance Tip

Onsite SEO is the key and foundation to online success. It doesn’t matter how many quality inbound links you have if your website isn’t correctly structured and optimised for your targeted keywords then all your offsite efforts will be wasted. A great tool we use is the Yoast SEO Plugin. Its not just about having the ‘green lights’ pop up on every web page (to be honest, this bit is irrelevant to me), its all the additional functionality that comes with Yoast that many people are unaware of or not utilising correctly. WordPress websites kick out a lot of unwanted data and pages that you do not want Google indexing as this will lead to index bloat and other ranking issues. Yoast helps with this.
Below you will find the optimal SEO settings achieved with Yoast to give your search engine rankings a quick boost.
Can I Do This Myself?
Importance: 96%
Difficulty: 31%
Time Required: 38%
What Does Yoast SEO Offer?
Yoast and onsite SEO isn’t about getting those green lights to display. In my opinion, they are only very, very rough guides. All these lights tell you is if your targeted keyword is repeated in the right places multiple times, but when you come to optimise
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/13942/optimal-settings-for-yoast-website-maintenance-tip

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2016/12/02/optimal-settings-for-yoast-website-maintenance-tip/

How to Properly Setup Google AMP on Your WordPress Site

Do you want to setup Google AMP on your WordPress site? Accelerated mobile pages or AMP is a way to make your website load faster on mobile devices. Fast loading websites offer better user experience and can improve your traffic. In this article, we will show you how to set up Google AMP in WordPress.

What is Google AMP?

Google AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It is an open source initiative supported by technology companies like Google and Twitter. The goal of the project is to make web content load faster for mobile users.

For many mobile users, reading on the web is often slow. Most content rich pages take several seconds to load despite all efforts taken by site owners to speed up their website.

Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP uses bare minimal HTML and limited Javascript. This allows the content to be hosted on Google AMP Cache. Google can then serve this cached version to users instantly when they click on your link in the search results.

It is very similar to Facebook Instant Articles. However, Instant Articles are limited only to Facebook’s platform, more specifically to their mobile app.

Accelerated Mobile Pages are platform-agnostic and can be used by any app, browser, or web viewer. Currently it is used by Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and others.

Pros and Cons of Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

SEO experts claim that Accelerated Mobile Pages will help you rank higher in Google, and it improves the user experience for mobile users on slow internet connections. However, they are several challenges for website owners, bloggers, and marketers.

AMP uses limited set of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. This means you cannot add certain widgets and features to your mobile AMP website. This limits your ability to add smart email optin forms, facebook like boxes, and other dynamic scripts.

While Google AMP supports Google Analytics, it does not support many other analytics platforms. Same goes for advertising options which are limited to select few advertising platforms.

Despite its limitations, Google is pushing AMP pages by giving them a boost in mobile search.

If significant chunk of your traffic comes from mobile searches, then you may benefit from adding AMP support to improve and maintain your SEO.

Note: There have been a few complaints about Google AMP by bloggers.

First is by Alex Kras who claim that you can potentially lose mobile traffic if you enable Google AMP. Read the article thoroughly because that’s a huge problem, and despite what the Google Tech Lead for AMP project has said, there aren’t any good solutions that address the issue in our opinion.

Second is by Terrence Eden which highlights the difficulties of switching back from Google AMP should you change your mind in the future. We don’t believe this is a major issue because you can do a 301 redirect which several have pointed out in the comment section of his blog posts, but nonetheless it is something you need to think about.

For the reasons above, we are not switching WPBeginner to Google AMP just yet.

However since several of our readers asked about how to setup Google AMP in WordPress, we have created a step by step process on how to setup Accelerated Mobile Pages in WordPress.

Setting up Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP in WordPress

First thing you need to do is install and activate the AMP plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you can head over to Appearance » AMP page to see how your site looks on mobile devices using AMP.

You can change the header background and text color on this page. The header background color you choose will also be used for links.

The plugin will also use your site’s icon or logo if your theme supports it. See our guide on how to add a favicon or site icon in WordPress for detailed instructions.

Don’t forget to click on the save button to store your changes.

You can now visit any single post on your website and add /amp/ at the end of the URL. Like this:

http://example.com/2016/10/my-blog-post/amp/

This will show you a stripped down AMP version of the same post.

If you view the source code of the original post, you will find this line in the HTML:

<link rel="amphtml" href="http://example.com/2016/10/my-blog-post/amp/" />

This line tells search engines and other AMP consuming apps/services where to look for the AMP version of the page.

Troubleshooting:

If you see a 404 error when trying to view the amp version, then here is what you need to do.

Visit Settings » Permalinks page in your WordPress admin and click on the ‘Save Changes’ button. Remember, don’t change anything here, just press the save button. This will refresh your website’s permalink structure.

View Accelerated Mobile Pages in Google Search Console

Want to know how your Accelerated Mobile Pages are doing in Google Search? You can easily check this using the Google Search Console.

Log in to your Google Search Console dashboard and then click on Search Appearance » Accelerated Mobile Pages.

Don’t worry if you don’t see your AMP results right away. It may take a while for Google to index your Accelerated Mobile Pages and then show data in Search Console.

Extending and Customizing Your Accelerated Mobile Pages

The AMP plugin for WordPress comes with very limited customization options. However you can use some other WordPress plugins to add few more customizations.

If you are already using Yoast SEO, then you need to install and activate the Glue for Yoast SEO & AMP.

It is an add-on plugin for Yoast SEO and AMP plugins. Upon activation, you need to visit SEO » AMP page to configure plugin settings.

The plugin allows you to enable AMP support for other post types.

On the design tab, you can choose colors and design options. You can also upload a logo and a default header image which will be used when a post does not have its own featured image.

You can switch to the Analytics tab to add your Google Analytics ID.

Don’t forget to click on the save settings button to store your changes.

There are many more plugins which will allow you to add related posts, footer widgets, and even social media icons to your AMP pages.

However, you need to make sure to validate your AMP pages after you install any addon plugins.

We hope this article, helped you learn how to set up Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) on WordPress. You may also want to see our list of 19 actionable tips to drive traffic to your WordPress site.

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The post How to Properly Setup Google AMP on Your WordPress Site appeared first on WPBeginner.

source http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-properly-setup-google-amp-on-your-wordpress-site/