Introduction Recent observations have highlighted a significant surge in new plugin submissions to the WordPress repository, as noted in this post. We also know that Automattic recently “unpaused” their contributions, leading to some pretty critical articles like this one from Roger Montti. The increase in plugin submissions got Marieke and me wondering about the relationship ... Read more| joost.blog
Back in December, I wrote about the state of leadership in the WordPress ecosystem. I shared how too much power rests with one person, and how the lack of clear governance puts contributors and businesses alike in difficult positions. That post ended with a call: we need to lead. That wasn’t rhetorical. It was a ... Read more| joost.blog
At Yoast, we had one mission: make SEO easier. For a long time, SEO for everyone was Yoast’s tagline, and we meant it. We helped millions of people optimize their content. We made technical SEO more accessible. We gave small businesses, bloggers, and creators a real chance to be found online. And we were successful. ... Read more| joost.blog
Last week was a whirlwind, first diving deep into AI and WordPress while working with the WP CLI as MCP host team at Cloudfest, then heading off to SMX Munich for non-stop conversations about SEO, AI, and the future of search. Two very different settings, one clear takeaway: The web has come full circle. Despite ... Read more| joost.blog
Exploring the world of WordPress comment cookies and caching. Discover the challenges and solutions to comment cookies and caching.| joost.blog
A vision for a new WordPress era WordPress is at a crossroads, now even more clearly then when I wrote my previous post on WordPress’s roadmap. I had very much intended to leave this topic alone for a bit until after the holiday break, until, last night, Matt imposed a holiday break on us all. ... Read more| joost.blog
I was reading Hendrik Luehrsen’s excellent post “WordPress isn’t WordPress anymore“, and I decided I had to write more about this. I recently spoke at WordCamp NL about “The missing features of WordPress”, and these two things “touch”, in an important way. I love WordPress. I love WordPress plugins. I don’t love some of the ... Read more| joost.blog
By Marieke van de Rakt and Joost de Valk WordPress marketing is a collaborative effort. WPBeginner, Yoast, BobWP, Siteground, Post Status, and the Repository are just a few of the many, many brands and individuals advocating for WordPress. We’re incredibly proud of the WordPress community. Amid the recent drama, we feel the community’s role and ... Read more| joost.blog
When we sold Yoast to Newfold in 2021, I quickly learned we had been incredibly naive. While at Yoast, I hadn’t realized how many deals were made between big companies to promote their products. This was my first realization that not all companies thought and worked like we had been doing. I did learn a ... Read more| joost.blog
AVIF and WebP are efficient image storage formats. They are smaller than their predecessors, PNG, JPG, and GIF. This leads to smaller images, which means faster page loads, which is what we all want. Ideally, we’d also be able to use these image formats for our OpenGraph image tags (og:image). In fact, some platforms, like ... Read more| joost.blog
This commentary focuses on the data found in my monthly CMS market share report, which is generated automatically every month. This is the first time I’m writing the commentary separately from the data, so I’m still figuring things out, but as I was building this, I had so many interesting tidbits that I wanted to ... Read more| joost.blog
Check out which CMSs are doing well, and which ones are declining. Also tracks other key WordPress related technologies like page builders and SEO plugins.| joost.blog
The WordPress’ admin UI needs to be drastically improved. It should be improved not just for WordPress core itself, but it should implement a simple and clearly defined open design system, so that plugins and themes can use it to build their own interfaces. Now that Yoast’s new Settings UI is out in the open ... Read more| joost.blog
Search engines rely on spiders / bots to crawl the web and find (new) content. Every time they find a URL, they crawl it and if it’s interesting to them, they’ll keep crawling it basically forever. The bigger your site, the more URLs you have, the more likely every individual URL is to be hit ... Read more| joost.blog
For the first time in a very long time, WordPress' market share is shrinking. This post explores the numbers, and why that is happening.| joost.blog
Is Elementor the secret behind WordPress' growth? Could it be that a lot of WordPress' growth is actually caused by Elementor's popularity?| joost.blog
Today we announced that Yoast will join Newfold Digital. Marieke and myself, as well as Omar, Chaya and Thijs have sold our shares. We will, however, all remain in our current roles, as will all of team Yoast. Why this step? Well, honestly, this was a combination of a couple of things. First of all, ... Read more| joost.blog
