WordPress 4.8

The latest version of WordPress was recently released and has been applied to all member sites without issue. This appears to have been a bit more polished than 4.7 which had a few minor upgrade issues. Theme and plugin developers were also more prepared and we experienced no problems with our member sites. More details on what’s new in 4.8 can be found here.

Updated Barrel Roll Reports

We’ve been working on providing more polished reporting for a while now and we’ve settled on a new template that’s both more visually appealing and provides more useful data. All members have received the new version of the Monthly Maintenance Report and, as always, we can provide additional reporting upon request.

WP Rocket Updates

Many of our members use the excellent performance optimization plugin WP Rocket. Recent updates have made it even better, including tweaks to increase testing scores and reduce load times. Let us know if you’d like development hours used to apply and test some of these improvements.

Cloudflare’s Argo 

If you’re using Cloudflare to distribute your site globally, you may be interested in their new Argo Smart Routing feature. Cloudflare describes Argo thusly:

Argo analyzes and optimizes routing decisions across the global Internet in real-time. Think Waze, the automobile route optimization app, but for Internet traffic.

Their average beta customers saw a 35% decrease in latency, a 27% decrease in connection errors, and a 60% decrease in cache misses. Those numbers are impressive, especially considering the minimal setup requirements and cost. Most sites would spend less than $20 per month. We’re looking forward to testing it for ourselves in the near future. More on Argo here.

Woocommerce 3.0 & 3.1

Skipping 2.7, 2.8, and 2.9, the Woocommerce team made the jump straight to 3.0 in April and have been releasing minor updates frequently ever since. 3.0 was a major update, including updated templates, so we took our time testing and implementing it for members. Everyone is up and running on the latest version and so far it seems to be very stable. More about Woocommerce 3.0 here.

Woocommerce 3.1 is in the works and should be released soon. It adds a product import/export feature (finally), and a number of other features. Also, more template changes. Ugh. Still no word on order or customer import/export, which seems like a no-brainer.

 

Yoast SEO Updates 

Yoast’s SEO plugin continues to evolve with the recent addition of more cornerstone content functionality. You can mark your most important articles as “cornerstone content” and Yoast will scrutinize them more thoroughly and with a different set of rules. The idea is that your most important content gets cornerstone status and you more efficiently link other internal content to it, thereby sending signals to search engines that you think the cornerstone content is the most important. Makes sense!