WCEU 2020 – our main takeaways

Here is a snippet of our main  takeaways from WCEU 2020. What a fantastic event! The WordPress community truly confirmed its place as a world leader in remote working.

05.06.20 13:15 UTC – Track 2

Very insightful talk from a real industry expert in Miriam Schwab, CEO of Strattic.

Main Takeaway: headless/static #WordPress performs better and is more secure. This technology is the future of #WordPress – it will keep developers interested and designers (content managers) engaged because of the significant increase in content delivery performance. Also a mention here of the WP REST API #WCEU #wceu2020

05.06.20 14:00 UTC – Track 2

Miriam Schwab’s colleague Zeev Suraski took over on track 2 to give us the history and evolution of PHP.

Main Takeaway: Upgrade to PHP7+! If you’re on PHP5 or lower, you shouldn’t be – security risks & performance. Watch out for further improvement with PHP8 release this year which has enhanced preloading #WCEU #wceu202

05.06.20 16:15 UTC – Track 2

Chris Teitzel took to the track 2 stage with an excellent session on site security. Main Takeaway: To protect your site, you need to think like a hacker.

• Get a quality managed hosting service
• Sanitize everything – in & out
• Trust nothing inputted (user and/or admin).
• Priority attacks to defend against – Cross Site Scripting (XSS), DDOS attacks

06.06.20 14:00 UTC Track 2

Amit Kvint brought us through the do’s and don’ts of translating a WP website. Really insightful session! Main Takeaway: Very important to consider cultural differences e.g. nuances of language makes it difficult for translation tools (Google Translate).

Site per location:

• Hosting
• Language
• Currency

06.06.20 14:55 UTC Track 2

Lightning Talk – still trying to figure how Doug Cone packed so many ‘speed up your site’ tips into 10 minutes. Great work!

Main Takeaway:

• Consider less resource heavy tools than Hotjar, GA etc.
• WebPack for compression
• Test and test again (New Relic), Lighthouse (Chrome)
• Use Edge CDN

06.06.20 17:45 UTC Track 1

Fantastic insight from Luis Herranz on the current state of Headless/Static #WordPress.

Main Takeaway: Following on from Miriam Schwab session on Friday, this is the future of #WordPress! Combining #WordPress + React rather than promoting one over the other.

Excellent overview explaining how it works and how its evolving. It opens #WordPress to a more secure and better performing platform while availing of the huge array of NPM packages:

• Vercel
• Frontity
• Gatsby JS