It’s been two weeks without an edition of the Within WordPress newsletter. It has also been one week since I gave my talk at PressConf in Tempe, Arizona. And yes, these two facts are related 😅. I had planned to do at least one, but things just went differently.
I’ve given the most raw and personal talk of my life, and the feedback has been incredibly humbling. As in, I’m still processing.
I’ll do a full recap on PressConf later, but to say it was an impactful event would be a gigantic understatement. Huge shout-out and congrats to Raquel for pulling this off.
Hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- WordPress 6.8 has been with us a few weeks now. In fact, we’re already at 6.8.1. It has brought a whole bunch of improvements, but I particularly want to focus on
the performance improvements . Because there are a lot just besides the inclusion of Speculative Loading. More on that down below!
Also check out Birgit‘s most excellent
- Ever added WordPress hooks inside a class constructor? It might work, but it can also lead to tight coupling, brittle code, and testing nightmares. In this insightful article, Gary Jones breaks down why this common pattern is problematic and offers better alternatives for structuring your plugin or theme code. If you’re building with OOP in WordPress,
this is a must-read .
- WordPress without servers? Yup. Simply Static Studio + Wasmer uses WebAssembly to
run WordPress as a static , sandboxed app, secure, fast, and edge-ready. Really like this integration!
- Ever wondered how your WordPress contributions stack up over time? Peter Wilson built a tool to chart your commit history across releases—perfect for
reflecting on your impact (or spotting when life got in the way).
- Love seeing how Calvin Alkan is expanding CommandUI by integrating with 3rd party plugins. Smart move. You should check out how
CommandUI can help you boost and vastly improve your usage of WordPress’ dashboard.
- WordPress in the enterprise? It’s not just viable, it’s composable. This piece from Crowd Favorite lays out how WordPress fits into a modern, API-first architecture, playing nice with microservices, headless frontends, and enterprise workflows.
Discover how WordPress goes composable →
If you’ve never heard of composable in this context before, let me try and explain it with Lego. Composable architecture is like building with LEGO, each tool is a modular block you can snap together to create exactly what you need. Instead of relying on a single, all-in-one system, you might use WordPress for content, BigCommerce for ecommerce, Algolia for search, and a modern frontend like Next.js. WordPress becomes one focused, flexible part of a bigger system, making it easier to scale, swap parts, and tailor your stack without starting from scratch.
- I found myself working on a site where I explicitly didn’t need all the available Block Editor blocks. Kinsta came to the rescue with this great article on how to disable the ones you’ll never use—cleaner editor, less bloat, tighter control.
Exactly what the client needed .
- Speculative Loading is here for WordPress 6.8, and it will make your site be experienced a lot faster. But, you may want to have more control over it, and you can:
Perfmatters 2.4.3 now allows you to fine tune this .
- Kyle Van Deusen published the results of the WordPress Professionals survey he ran recently. It’s good to note that when he’s speaking of agencies, on average, we’re talking about 3 people. So, those are relatively small agencies. That said,
still hella interesting data !
- From the 12th through the 16th of this month, my friend Nathan Wrigley will host the
Page Builder Summit again. It’s an online conference, free, and full of gold. Highly recommend you sign up.
- Joost de Valk published his take on why WordPress needs an AI-ready infrastructure. And I agree. In
this blog post , he gives a shout-out to Felix Arntz‘ AI Services plugin (which I covered in the newsletter a couple of times), which to me is the thing we need inside of WordPress. But Joost covers a lot more. Go check it out .
- Kaspars Dambis created a nifty optimizing plugin called
Lazy Load Blocks for WordPress . It does exactly what it says on the tin. Configurable per block, even.
- WooCommerce wants your input: they’re researching what’s holding developers and merchants back from adopting the Checkout block. If you’ve run into friction, technical, UX, or otherwise,
now’s your chance to influence its future .
- Matt, of the Medeiros kind in this case, has been vibe coding. And normally, I would tell you to stay away from it, but this is actually a cool tool. It’s called
WP API Explorer . It allows you to discover and test WordPress REST API endpoints.
- From Anchor Hosting, Austin Ginder demonstrates how to
render HTML output using WP-CLI . It’s perfect for generating static content, debugging templates, or scripting complex workflows. A handy trick for devs who live in the terminal.
🚀 Performance & Security
- My friend Jonny Harris published a wonderful article on how to enhance
WP_Query Performance in WordPress , because WP_Query just got a speed boost. Thanks to smarter SQL and fewer JOINs, WordPress can query posts faster, especially on big sites.
- Jeff Starr shares a clever technique to
block darknet market spam using .htaccessrules. It’s a simple, low-overhead way to cut off shady referral traffic and keep your server clean, no plugins required.
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
My good friend, Brad Williams, shared a new plugin called: ThemeSwitcher Pro. It lets you run multiple WordPress themes on a single site. It’s perfect for A/B testing, redesigns, or client previews without touching your live theme or spinning up a staging site. It works seamlessly with the block editor, keeps things fast by only loading what’s needed, and avoids the security risks of syncing environments.
And I love this solution! So many options with this!
💡 Interesting Finds
- In 2001, a researcher tested the real-world efficiency of email by sending a message 500 miles—but instead of over the internet, he walked a CD with the email on it to the recipient. The result? It was faster than sending the email over the network. A cheeky but powerful reminder that bandwidth ≠ speed, and that physical transfer can still beat the internet under certain conditions.
Read the full 500-Mile Email experiment here . - Pascal Birchler’s new
CSS-only Carousel block shows how far native WordPress Blocks can go without JavaScript. Lightweight, accessible, and built entirely with core tools—this is block development done right.
🔎 Scanfully Updates
Did you know Scanfully has a full WordPress Activity log built in? Easily find what happened on your WordPress site without bulking up that database unnecessary and slowing your site down.
🎁 Bonus
No bonus for today, but I’ve got a whole bunch of podcasts lined up. The first one will be released next week. But while I have your attention, is there anyone you’d like to see featured on the podcast, my friend?
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
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