Fit For the Future
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This document discusses how WP Engine is preparing for the future needs of websites and digital experiences. It highlights that WP Engine is the 7th largest website platform and introduces several of its products that allow for faster, more scalable websites including Atlas, a headless WordPress platform, and Atlas Content Engine, which can handle 10 times the requests per second of traditional WordPress. The document also discusses trends around front-end frameworks and how WP Engine is adapting to allow customers to choose technologies like Next.js and build headless WordPress sites.
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Fit For the Future
- 2. Fit For The Future Jason Cohen CTO & Founder, WP ENGINE
- 3. WP Engine is the 7th Largest Website Platform SOURCE: W3 Techs 5.8% 5.0% 4.6% 3.6% 3.0% 3.0% 2.1% 2.0% 2.0% 1.9% Amazon Newfold Digital GoDaddy Group Shopify OVH Hetzner WP Engine Group Google SiteGround DigitalOcean 2.1% Amazon Newfold Digital GoDaddy Group Shopify OVH Hetzner WP Engine Group Google SiteGround DigitalOcean
- 10. ”How Worried Should I Be About The Core Web Vitals?”
- 12. AVIF File Format
- 13. Backlinko was concerned about Core Web Vitals CASE STUDY The new website loads three times faster Next.js & WordPress WordPress He switched to Next.js and WordPress
- 15. Most Developers Prefer JavaScript & TypeScript Over PHP LOVED STACKOVERFLOW 2020 65,000 DEVELOPERS HATED SOURCE: StackOverflow 2020 survey 62.2% 62.3% 62.9% 66.7% 67.1% 86.1% Julia Go Kotlin Python TypeScript Rust 80.4% 76.6% 71.4% 70.6% 66.9% 62.7% VBA Objective-C Perl Assembly C PHP
- 16. The Complete Headless Stack ATLAS Atlas CMS Engine Atlas Node Engine Global Edge Network
- 17. Android Authority Is Now Faster On Desktop + Mobile Than Competitors CASE STUDY 6x increase in performance! BRAND BREAKOUT: Why Android Authority is Betting on Headless to Captivate Audiences on a Global Scale @2:55pm CT
- 19. Introducing Content Engine ATLAS Atlas CMS Engine Atlas Node Engine Global Edge Network Atlas Content Engine 10x req/sec vs traditional WordPress
- 21. Thank You Jason Cohen CTO AND FOUNDER, WP ENGINE
Editor's Notes
- Hi, I’m Jason Cohen, founder and CTO of WP Engine. I started WP Engine eleven years ago, with a mission to make WordPress websites fast, scalable, and secure, while providing the best customer service in the industry. Eleven years later, we power millions of websites for nearly 200,000 customers. We succeeded well beyond even my expectations, and a lot of you listening to this are a part of that journey. So on behalf of the global team of 1000 people here at WP Engine, we thank you. Truly. Together we've succeeded more than you might think.
- We’re now the 7th largest public website platform in the world. Of the top 10 million websites, we host more than Digital Ocean or Wix or Squarespace. And our direct competitors -- the other managed WordPress platforms -- they don't even crack the top 20. The way we earned this leadership position, is by making good on those promises of incredible customer service, and through relentless product innovation. We have become excellent at predicting the needs of our customers and then building products that everyone loves, whether you are a developer, a designer, or a marketer. Now, with this leadership position in websites generally and WordPress websites specifically, of course people look to us to find out “what’s next.”
- You can imagine I get asked all the time: What is the future of the web? What new things are just fads? What’s going to stick? What do I need to learn? What new technology should I be adopting? And behind those questions are more fundamental questions, and perhaps even more scary questions: Is my team ready for these changes? Is my brand ready? Is my agency ready? As we would say, are we “fit for the future”? So in the next twenty minutes, I'm going to show you how the latest product innovations from WP Engine help you answer those questions, and make YOU, "fit for the future."
- The big thing to understand about being fit for the future, is that you can’t rely on just one silver bullet. Like, the answer isn't going to be just one piece of technology. You can’t think about just the web developer or just the content marketer or just the web designer. Everyone on the team needs to be empowered. The reality is the web is multifaceted. There are many challenges and opportunities for marketers and developers, and furthermore these evolve over time. You know that as an agency. Each of your clients is different. One client is dead-set on WordPress, the next wants a Headless solution, and the next wants you to tell them what to do. The same can be said of twenty different technology choices.
- Even zooming into a single brand alone, your needs are multifaceted too. Take this example: First, your brand starts out needing a corporate site to talk about the product. OK, that’s standard. But later, as you grow, you decide to launch a conference of your own. Kind of like the Summit conference we have here. So now you need a standalone microsite. Then - uh oh! - 2020 comes around, and a pandemic hits. You've been selling your products in stores, so your business model is disrupted. So now, you have transform your business, and sell products directly to your customers online. So you build an online store. Now, over the past eleven years, WP Engine has made our customers "fit for the future," through product innovation for just these sorts of things.
- So, take the corporate website. A corporate website needs to be beautiful and on-brand. It needs optimal SEO, and it needs to run A/B tests. The content team needs the ability to rapidly publish all kinds of content, like home page text or pricing updates or breaking news or social media pieces. [NEXT] WP Engine’s Genesis suite of themes and blocks is the perfect solution. Beautiful themes to get started quickly, and a hundred different layouts to support all the usual things you need to do on a corporate website. That’s why more than a million people have built their websites with Genesis. Not only that, Genesis has always been in lock-step with WordPress Core and the evolution towards Gutenberg and full-site-editing. So Genesis customers have always been compatible with all changes to Core, long before those changes are adopted by the general public. That is what "fit for the future" looks like.
- Now in the second example, your brand became so successful that it launched its own conference. The corporate site wasn’t designed to also be a conference site of course. So, now you need a microsite on a short timeline. And THAT requires developers, designers, and marketers, all working closely together. [NEXT] WP Engine’s Local product is perfect for this. With Local the developer can work rapidly on their own computer to bring a site to life. Local websites run many times faster than docker-based solutions, so that’s a godsend for developers. And Local has awesome features. Like: “live links”. With live links you can send a URL to collaborators and they get direct, private access to the project running on the local computer. You don’t have to deploy it somewhere first! They can just see it instantly. So Local isn’t just the fastest way to develop, it’s the fastest way to collaborate. With speed plus features, this is why 100,000 developers rely on Local, more than any other WordPress development tool. So your brand can launch that conference microsite quickly, and the entire team is happy.
- Now remember this part? COVID hits and your brand needs to build an online store. The team can use Genesis and Local to build and launch the site. Plus of course they can get the fast, scalable, and secure hosting platform that WP Engine is known for. But there’s more! [NEXT] With WP Engine they get instant store search for WooCommerce. This gives their shoppers an incredibly fast product search experience, including auto-suggest as you type. Now get this: Stores that enable WP Engine’s instant search see an 18% lift in conversion rates. In this case WP Engine’s innovation isn’t just fit for the future, it’s directly making you more money. So for everything this brand did, WP Engine had the best tools for what they needed, including even making them more money. This is what it means, to be fit for the future. Often when you hear "change" you think "scary" and "disruptive" and "now we have to do work just to get back to where we already were." But with the relentless product innovation from WP Engine, your company can embrace the complexity of change and use it to grow and thrive!
- Speaking of change - have you heard about Core Web Vitals? If you haven’t, here’s what it is: Core Web Vitals is a new standard, created by Google, for measuring the user experience on web pages. It measures things like how fast your page loads, and how annoying it is for the user, like if the page jumps around while it’s loading, or if clicking a button takes a long time to respond. Earlier this year, Google announced that search rankings will now factor in Core Web Vitals. So, all things being equal, a faster site with a pleasing page experience will rank higher than other sites. Because Core Web Vitals affects search rankings, this is a serious business issue for anyone who relies on organic web traffic... which is pretty much everybody. Marketing professionals are worried about the impact of this change on their business. And they’re right to be worried. They’re wondering if their website is fit for Core Web Vitals? Is it fit for THIS future?
- Now here’s the good news. Google and other major internet companies are making free tools to help your site become faster. So, they're not just rewarding sites that have better performance, they’re creating tools to help improve performance. Here’s an example. It’s called “predictive prefetching”. This is a new technology that guesses which link the user will click next. The guess comes from Google Analytics data and machine learning. Then, having guessed which link is likely to be clicked, the browser pre-loads that page in the background. So then, when the user does click that link - boom - the next page appears instantly. This creates an incredibly fast browsing experience. It also means higher search rankings and more conversions. There’s an assortment of tech that makes this possible. And it’s all open source and free. WP Engine wants to make this experience available to our customers, but predictive prefetching has not been implemented in WordPress. Rather, it’s been implemented for the tech you see there on the end. That’s Nextjs and Gatsby. THEY are two examples of JavaScript frameworks that developers use to build websites apart from WordPress. So we have a situation where new technology is available to make websites fast, but it’s flowing to these JavaScript frameworks before WordPress. And this isn’t the only example of this new pattern.
- Here’s another example. Netflix created a new image file format called AVIF. AVIF is the same quality as a JPEG, but just half the size. This means your media-rich webpages load twice as fast, if you use AVIF. Again, you can take advantage of new technology and free tools. Thank you, open source! Thank you big internet companies, for once. WP Engine wants to make these capabilities available to our customers. But WordPress does not yet support the AVIF file format. It’s possible to hack it in, but it’s hard. As you can see, once again these new innovations are flowing to Javascript frameworks first. So what are marketers and developers doing about all this? They need strong Core Web Vitals. They need high search rankings and high conversion rates, so maybe they need this JavaScript stuff. But marketers love WordPress. Marketers know how to use WordPress. Maybe WordPress been customized for them. So what do you do?
- Well, here’s what Brian Dean did. Brian is the author of Backlinko -- one of the most respected SEO thought leaders. Now, he's a famous SEO experience, so his site HAS to rank high for SEO keywords, right? His site needs to be an example of what the very best looks like. So, Brian was concerned about Core Web Vitals, just like everybody else. So Brian adopted one of those new Javascript frameworks and PAIRED IT with his WordPress site. So you see - Brian still uses WordPress to write and manage his content. But he doesn’t give WordPress the responsibility of creating web pages and serving those to visitors. Instead he uses different Javascript infrastructure and a Javascript framework called Nextjs. So now, in addition to having strong Core Web Vitals, his site can now use things like predictive prefetching and AVIF images.
- So this technique has a name. When you use WordPress for content editing, and use a JavaScript system to create the webpages, this is called “headless WordPress”. Backlinko is using headless WordPress to be fit for the future. Now, this Headless WordPress thing is becoming very popular, and you can see why. Marketers love the high performance. But developers love it too.
- Developers love headless because they can create websites using Javascript or Typescript instead of PHP. And developers as a whole dramatically prefer Javascript to PHP. At WP Engine we’ve anticipated these trends. We see that many Marketers are shifting to headless, and developers are also pulling their marketing departments and pulling their agencies into the headless world. So, anticipating this trend, and keeping you fit for the future, earlier this year WP Engine launched the first complete Headless WordPress solution.
- It’s called Atlas. Atlas innovates in the space of Headless WordPress in several ways: First Atlas makes WordPress ready for headless. What does that mean? Well, WordPress is 18 years old, which is part of why it has so many great features, but it also means it was not originally designed to work in a headless environment. So, there are some things that need to be tweaked. Hyperlinks and media URLs have to be changed, settings need to be changed or even hidden, things like that. The most difficult part is, the draft preview button needs to be completely rewired. So Atlas does all this for you. The next piece is Node Engine. Atlas builds and deploys your Javascript code to our own auto-scaling, auto-healing system. With other Headless WordPress architectures, developers have to use one vendor for WordPress, a different Vendor for Node, and sometimes even more vendors for a CDN or a build server, but with Atlas you get all of that in one place. So you don’t have to waste time choosing different vendors, and then integrating different vendors, and then paying for different vendors, and also troubleshooting problems that span different vendors. So, the question is: This all sounds good, but does it work? Do our customers get all these advantages of performance and scale and Core Web Vitals?
- Of course, you knew I was going to say Yes! Case in point is Android Authority. They get thirty million monthly visitors. It's a hugely popular media site dedicated to news and reviews about mobile devices and the mobile space in general. They have 60,000 posts and they receive hundreds of hits per second. And, they switched from standard WordPress to headless WordPress running on Atlas. So what happened with their Core Web Vitals? Once they launched on Atlas all of their Core Web Vitals scores increased. Their performance score in particular, jumped 6x. And you can see this for yourself -- go to their website it's android authority dot com -- you’ll see their pages load instantly. It’s so fast, you really don’t even need analytics tools to tell you that it’s incredibly fast. Best yet, Android Authority’s site performance now leapfrog’s their direct competition. Imagine what that does to their search rankings when their optimized site goes head-to-head with a site with the same breaking news. So this is what it looks like to be fit for the future. If all this is interesting to you, come to the breakout session later today where AA will talk in detail about their headless journey. OK, that’s what launched with Atlas earlier this year. But now I’m proud to announce the launch of something new.
- It's a new product, called Atlas Content Modeler. In our work with customers who are building headless websites, we found that developers needed a modern, flexible way to build something that we call “content models.” What is a content model? OK, a website might have an object called an “event.” Events have a title, they happen at a time and location, they have an icon, and so on. The marketer needs to be able to manage these -- creating, editing, deleting, and so forth. The developer needs to be able to access these via API, for example maybe on the home page there’s a list “the next three events.” And maybe there's a whole “events page" that lists all the events, maybe even in a calendar format. Together, developers and marketers need to agree on the “model,” meaning all of these fields that go into an "Event." This entire process is what we mean by “content modelling” -- creating and managing the models, and creating and managing the content, which are the instances of those models. In WordPress, this has traditionally been done with an amalgamation of things like “custom post types” and “custom fields,” with multiple plugins, with extra work to make things work with the API, or be able set the order of these items, and other basic features. Even so, it’s this confusing user interface where everything still looks and acts like a “post” rather than like whatever it’s supposed to be, even down to strange things like requiring a “title” field and sorting by “creation date” instead of by however the user actually wants them ordered. These Content Models have never been a first-class citizen in WordPress. With Atlas Content Modeler, we’ve changed all that. Content Modeler is a simplified, headless-first, beautifully-designed approach to data modeling inside WordPress. It’s lightning fast, and it’s even fully accessible, and usable by mouse or keyboard. Under the hood, it's completely compatible with how WordPress normally handles this, which means it's compatible with other plugins or your own custom code. If this sounds interesting to you, come to our workshop later at the conference, where we’ll do a full demo, and you can try it for yourself. But wait, as if that’s not enough, there’s even more! I’m also proud to announce another new product that is now in alpha.
- It’s called “Content Engine.” Content Engine dramatically accelerates the speed and scalability of the APIs that pull content from WordPress. When I say “dramatically accelerates content,” it’s actually head-spinning how much faster it is. We currently process ten TIMES more requests per second than a beefy WordPress server, and this is still in alpha! It will be even faster over time. So, obviously this makes website faster, and that's already enough reason to care about it, but it goes further than that. Because, when APIs answer in a matter of milliseconds, even under high scale, it means you can build completely different kinds of sites. For example, today developers spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about caching. Caching database queries, caching API requests, caching React properties, caching entire pages. And they HAVE to do all that, to make the site is fast and scalable. But, Content Engine is so fast, you can just throw a lot of that into the trash. You don’t need to cache APIs when they only take milliseconds. You don’t need to cache WordPress database queries if your headless site isn’t even talking to WordPress! You can have a dynamic site like Android Authority with zillions of URLs and you don’t have to pre-render everything like you do with Gatsby, because it’s so fast and scalable to generate pages in real-time when they’re requested. And it opens the door to things like personalization, analytics, integrating all sorts of third-party tools, because your site is dynamic now, not some statically-generated brochure like the sites we used to make in the 1990s. Content Engine changes the game for headless websites, by drastically accelerating the Content API layer. If you want to see Content Engine in action, we have a demo of this later in the conference, so join us there!
- So! This is how WP Engine has been helping our customers be fit for the future for the past eleven years. And, as you can see, our pace of innovation is accelerating as our company continues to grow and lead in global websites. What’s next? The future will continue be multifaceted. For example, right now maybe your only concern about mobile devices is that your site loads fast, even on poor Internet connections, and that your content looks good on a small screen. But the capabilities of Android devices are diverging from iOS devices. And Chrome and Edge browsers are charting a separate path than Safari and Firefox. And new customer expectations are emerging, like the expectation of a "dark mode" theme. Your site will need to adapt to the preferences and capabilities of the specific user on their specific device, in a specific region of the world and their local laws. Managing all those dimensions by hand, and adding A/B testing into the mix, might be impossible to build by hand, so we might need something like machine learning to predict the best experience for each user, and a high-performance platform deliver that experience quickly. You can imagine Google personalizing search results according to more and more dimensions as well. The possibilities and challenges are endless. But don't worry. WP Engine has seen this story before. Whatever you need today, and whatever you grow into in the future, WP Engine will ensure you are ahead of the curve. WP Engine will ensure that YOU are fit for the future! Thank you.