Last week, I finally opened up the prelaunch of my Make WordPress Fast course. The support from friends in helping share that message as well as the support from people buying in early has been humbling. Thank you all in any way you’ve contributed and helped. It truly means the world to me.
If you haven’t checked it out yet, now’s a great time to do so. It’s the most complete course on how to make WordPress fast(er) out there. Promise.
I have more courses in the pipeline, btw. I haven’t really decided on which one to release next. Scroll down and let me know in the poll if you have a favorite.
Next week I’ll be at WordCamp Gdynia and WordCamp Lithuania. I was going to go to LoopConf as well, but unfortunately, I can no longer make that.
Anyway, lots of WordPress news to share as well, so let’s jump into it. Hope you enjoy it!
Get in front of 2000++ dedicated WordPress friends and check out my sponsoring options and reach out to me if you think we can be a good fit!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- What’s new for developers, September 2025 edition, is now up on the WordPress Developer Blog. Featuring too many things to list here, but you know the drill, if you’re building with WordPress, you’ll want to read through the whole thing.
- Fully integrate Really Simple Licensing (RSL) is a new standard from the creators of RSS. And it’s now compatible with your WordPress site. Establish clear, machine-readable licensing agreements for your materials, allowing AI businesses, bots, and other automated entities to correctly secure licenses for your online creations.
- Justin Sainton is no stranger to WordPress veterans. He’s been building cool stuff for decades now, and his latest project is no exception. It’s called Simpul, and it aims to solve a problem for the premium WordPress plugin ecosystem.
- Troy Chaplin shared a resource on the WordPress Developer Blog in the shape of a foundation for refactoring a Multi Block Plugin. His foundation allows you to build Smarter, register Cleaner, and scale easier.
- Adding more core Blocks to WordPress will inherently introduce a larger maintenance burden, but Justin Tadlock explains really well why we should still want that.
- Stumbled upon a really neat plugin that acts like an advanced autocomplete CSS Class Manager for your blocks. Honestly, this belongs in Core.
- My friends at Human Made released v3.5 of Accelerate. It seamlessly integrates and extends the Block Editor to give you unparalleled access to the next generation of marketing technologies.
Sounds like marketing speak, I know, but just click the link. It’s a super neat tool for personalization, A/B testing, block level analytics, etc.
- Ever seen 45MB images uploaded by your client? Sure you have. There’s plenty of solution out there that can help you with this, but did you know this can be done in the browser while uploading? Yeah, I didn’t know that was a thing either. Benjamin Intal released a WordPress plugin that does exactly that. It’s called Cimo.
If this doesn’t become one of your default plugins to use on all your client sites, I don’t know what would.
- While we’re on the topic of useful solutions, did you know WordPress 6.9 will finally make it more visible if you’ve got “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” activated? No more accidentals!
- Here’s another great thing to be added to WordPress 6.9: Adding wp_posts index: type_status_author to the database. This is especially wonderful for sites with a huge amount of posts.
This should’ve probably been added to the performance section below, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- GenerateBlocks Pro followed Mike McAlister’s suit and now also supports Mega Menus in the Site Editor with version 2.3. That, and Overlay Panels and Conditions. I love seeing these additions raise the bar with what we can do with Blocks. Love it.
🤖 WordPress & AI
- In Matt’s Keynote at WCUS, he shared a chatbot demo, and you can now check out how that works based on the PHP AI Client SDK. There’s even a screencast to follow along as well.
- ICYMI, Agents.md is a new and simple, open format for guiding coding agents. It’s already used by over 20k open-source projects. Finally, projects can now provide LLM instructions without favoring a specific provider or tool, and without including duplicate instructions files.
- The Abilities API is advancing swiftly. We’ll soon have client-side capabilities covering all WP interfaces, simplifying programmatic interactions with our CMS for AI and systems alike.
🚀 Performance & Security
- The base understanding of doing anything in the performance optimization side of things is understanding how the WordPress Sequence Loading works. I’ve published the most complete version of that now, including FSE themes.
- I mentioned Weston Ruter twice in the previous newsletter, but that’s not stopping me from sharing his content again. The talk he did a really good talk at WordCamp US, and that’s been published now. And it’s one you should really check out. It’s called The Site Speed Frontier with Performance Lab and Beyond.
- Do you truly truly understand caching? Chances are, you have a few holes in your complete understanding. Which is why Jono Alderson wrote an explainer on HTTP caching.
💡 Interesting Finds
- Do you find network debugging in DevTools a mystery? Well, the AI assistance panel in Chrome DevTools analyzes them now for you. Get instant insights, spot bottlenecks, & more. Pretty neat from what I’ve seen so far!
- Here’s a super complete and curated list of developer tools that make life easier, from debugging & testing to security, CI/CD, and productivity.
- Here are the findings from this year’s CSS-flavored survey, highlighting the fundamental shift this language has taken beyond just styling.
- A tool that calculates the Code Quality score of your CSS based on a range of different quality guards.
🛒 WooCommerce News
- If you’ve ever had to connect WooCommerce to a POS, you know those things are a PITA. So, I was really pleased to see the launch of WooCommerce POS as a native solution.
- WooCommerce’s features can make caching tricky, especially since cart sessions and logged-in users don’t lend themselves to edge caching due to their dynamic nature. WooCommerce is keen to solve Edge Caching better, and you get help them out by letting them know your experience!
- Your WooCommerce clients will love Omnisend. Omnisend is trusted by 125,000+ brands who love using it for email & SMS marketing. Sign up now.
- You can now order tickets for the Checkout Summit in Palermo (Sicily), Italy, in April of 2026. I got my tickets already! It’s the first independent IRL conference for WooCommerce Makers.
🎁 Bonus
🎙️ A while back, I talked to famous YouTube WordPresser Imran Siddiq about whether we have Echo Chambers in WordPress, or not. I wrote a response on my blog about it, but I also invited Imran on my podcast.
This is the recording of that conversation. We also touch on quite a few other topics.
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