500 Million New WordPress Sites + Can Anyone WordPress?

If you’re serious about building better WordPress sites, this is the newsletter for you.

Today officially marks the end of the summer, doesn’t it? Time to get ready for the last third (ish) of 2024! There’s a lot happening in the world of WordPress as well as with Within WordPress in the upcoming months. More on that very soon, but if you see me at WordCamp US in two weeks, feel free to ask me about it 😁.

Anyway, I’ve got some really nice WordPress and related new for you in the 130th edition, so I hope you enjoy it!

🗞️ Within WordPress News

Here’s what I saw happening this past week:

I mean, Mike McAlister level of excitement should prompt you to check out the links above right this instance:

Literally the greatest news I’ve heard in years (and I had a baby last year).


  • This Plugin Template Registration API together with the up and coming Data Views feature is what I’m super excited about for the next version of WordPress. Have you studied the Data Views feature yet? It powers the Site Editor screen already, for instance.

  • We’re about to have 500 MILLION more WordPress sites. Well, “about to” still means that the people who are going to build this still need to be hired (some of them), but the fact that Automattic is converting Tumblr to WordPress is a huge push for WordPress. Do apply if this is your cuppa!

  • It should be obvious now that WordPress has entered its maturing phase. I mean, it is of legal drinking age, isn’t it? 🤪. But I love seeing hosting companies like Kinsta matching that and matching their offering accordingly with ISO certification.

I’m curious to learn if this is something you need in your WordPress projects, so please reply and let me know, {{ subscriber.first_name | strip | default: “my friend” }}!



  • As mentioned, I’m in the middle of rebuilding my personal site. One of the things I need to solve better is my email marketing for those who are interested to learn about when I launch my courses. I’ve started using Omnisend for that and will report on that more later in process of rebuilding. For those of you new to Omnisend, it’s a super complete All-in-one ecommerce marketing platform.

  • InstaWP launched a super cool hackathon project that allows anyone to win prizes building cool things with WordPress. The project is called Anyone can WordPress and the first-place winner receives $3,000, the second-place winner gets $1,000, and the third-place winner earns $500. Quite significant, I’d say.

Learn all about the rules for this awesome event that starts mid October!

🚀 Performance & Security

  • Chrome Dev Tools added console error insights 😍
  • Harry Roberts from CSS Wizardry shares a very cool deep dive into how he debugged and fixed an issue that was slowing down pages for no obvious reason. Vague, I know, but you’re just going to have to click this link.
  • Speaking of fixing slow pages, over on the Web.dev blog they shared common misconceptions about how to optimize LCP. One of the Core Web Vitals the solution in the box below fix, btw.

🔆 Within WordPress Highlight

Listen to Rich Tabor explain why WordPress’ development should be design led and how that doesn’t mean a few designers make all the decisions.

I am very much in agreement with Rich on this one. Very much.


💡 Interesting Finds

  • DNS can be used as a filesystem. Yes, you heard that right. DNSFS is a project to store files in other peoples DNS resolver caches.
  • AI is everywhere now, but did you that we now have a code editor with AI fully natively integrated that is has a LOT of folks raving? It’s called Cursor.

🔎 Scanfully Updates

We’ve added a big feature to Scanfully to help your site stay healthy and secure. We’ve introduced Certificate Monitoring and it includes notifications so you’ll always be in the know when there’s something up with your SSL certificates.


That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!

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