Savvy Musings Digital Digest, August 27th, 2022

What I Bookmarked This Week

Gimme a five, buddy

H/T @pubity

When the scratches hit so good

In WordPress…

WordPress if effin’ hard, yo!

I’ve been beating this drum for a while now, and I’m far from the only one to do so.

WordPress ain’t easy. It’s not even easy if all you do is blog. Once you start stacking functionality and plugins, it’s a lot more difficult; it’s a beast.

Fun fact: The more code you add to any platform, the more brittle it becomes aka prone to breaking!

I rarely recommend WordPress to people who are starting up their businesses. While WP is a wonderful tool, it’s not feasible for the average user, and the learning curve is steep 📈 or 🏒 if you catch my drift. Lesley of Newsletter Glue discusses this in this fabulous thread.

In WordPress Acquisition News…

DigitalOcean is purchasing Cloudways; a managed WordPress hosting provider. Cloudways leverages DigitalOcean in its managed, semi-dedicated hosting offerings. According to the article that, configuration accounts for roughly 50% of their customers.

I’ve used CloudWays in the past, and it’s a good service but not my preference. I think WP Engine and Pantheon do the whole managed WP hosting product quite well, in my opinion. But also, DigitalOcean’s platform is great, and when paired with something like Laravel Forge or SpinupWP, it’s hard to beat.

Wikimedia Enterprise Site Gets a Block-Based WP Makeover

Wikimedia, the organization Wikipedia and behind teachers’ and professors’ worst nightmares while grading research papers, recently received a nice WordPress-y upgrade. The new site is gorgeous and does its job well, leveraging blocks and WordPress’s Full Site Editing functionality. The site was built by @jeremyscott. While the website is snazzy, snappy, and works well I’m curious what technical hurdles occurred during the development phase. 🤔

Check it out here.

Actionables

Common Reasons for Client Project Delays

This one goes out to my service-provider professionals! Trailing only slightly behind the Winnebago Man for the honor of being my Patronus, Peter Kang of Barrel shares his thoughts on what commonly trips up client projects.

Competitive Research

Here’s a snazzy quick tip from LearnDash founder Justin Ferriman (a very smart eggz).

As someone who is a big believer in positioning statements, I believe this is a wonderful method for figuring out how you’re better than the competition and how you can use that to differentiate yourself.

SEO Tactics That Will Make Your Friends Proud

Possibly but not really. Your friends think you’re okay and the good news is I think you’re okay, too!

This Twitter thread has a couple of good nuggets of info to improve SEO for your websites

Admittedly, this is a very specific tactic, and you may find it’s not easy to implement.

In short, if you’re trying to promote ranking for a brand new website and have access to a high authority website, produce your content for the new website but publish it on the old, high authority website. Wait for your content to begin to rise up in rankings on the old site. Once you’ve achieved higher rankings, copy that content over to your new website and create redirects to the content on the new website from the old website (and update canonical links to the new site). Yes, it’s weird, but I can see this working. For how long, though?

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