WP Weekly 189 - $5K Sites - SMTP Plugins, Prefetched Loading, Does WP Scale

The WordPress Professional Survey 2024 found that “72% of people charge less than $5,000 for a website”. This issue also includes new SMTP plugins, collaborative table editing, and Automattic’s acquisition of a second messaging app.

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• Identify WP People on GitHub… while working within GitHub, checking whether a specific person has a WordPress profile or not, can be time consuming routine. Pascal Birchler has created a browser extension that displays a WordPress logo next to a GitHub username if the person has a username on the WP Org website.
  
  
• New SMTP Plugin… the team at Gravity Forms has launched their own SMTP plugin called Gravity SMTP that allows you to connect forms to secure and reliable SMTP providers of your choice. It is only available to Elite License users, which is priced at $259 per year.
  
  
• Speculative Loading… the WordPress Performance Team has released Speculative Loading plugin which allows defining rules by which certain URLs are dynamically prefetched or prerendered based on user interaction like hover on a link.
  
  

New Features: Woo Emails, Multicollab, SMTP

Woo Disable Emails… Ahmed Nagdy has released a new free Disable Emails Per Product for WooCommerce plugin to disable emails for products and orders along with global view to see which emails are disabled.

Multicollab… the 4.4 version update comes with collaborative table editing that allows users to delete rows and columns easily. It has also added support for the users of WPForms and MemberPress.

SMTP & MainWP… Post SMTP has released MainWP Post SMTP Extension making it easy to configure and manage Post SMTP settings for all child sites within your MainWP dashboard.

1. Woo to WooCommerce… back in October 2023, WooCommerce .com migrated to Woo .com domain. Due to plunging Google traffic, they are reversing changes and reverting Woo .com back to WooCommerce .com domain. Product sellers in the Woo / WooCommerce niche need to update accordingly.
   
   
2. No support for PHP… 7.0 and 7.1 in the upcoming WordPress 6.6, which is scheduled for release in July 2024. The new minimum supported version of PHP will be 7.2.24, while PHP 7.4 or greater is the recommended version. Looking ahead, PHP 8.0 and 8.1 is supported by WordPress core (with exceptions), and PHP 8.2 and 8.3 is considered beta since WordPress 6.4.
   
   
3. WP Contributor Mentorship… Hari Shanker shared about the conclusion of Second Cohort (2024 Q1) of the WordPress Contributor Mentorship Program. With the support of 28 mentors, 44 mentees enhanced their WordPress contribution knowledge and made an impactful contribution to the WordPress project.
   
   
4. WP Milestones… Crocoblock has crossed 30K subscribers on their Crocoblock’s Youtube channel. Adam Preiser shared (Links X) about Spectra now powering 700k websites, it went from 500k to 600k in 201 Days and then 600k to 700k in 154 Days.
   
   
5. Does WordPress Scale… well, it does! Matt Mullenweg shared an interesting fact (Links X) with Automattic handling more than 1 billion requests with the large majority of those served in under 400ms for the NASA website in a 4.5 hour span during eclipse event.

Quick Bits

• New Email Reports plugin for SureCart users by Nelson Miller.
• Kadence with Taylor Swift’s site inspired Willow Starter Template.
• OpenLiteSpeed Servers are now available on the xCloud Hosting.
• Inspiration: 30+ examples of coming soon page for your website.
• James shared (Links X) Woo will have Coming Soon & Live modes.
• WordPress 6.5.2 maintenance and security release is available.
• Browse the official photos from the WordCamp Asia 2024 event.

Takeaways from WP Professional Survey 2024

Kyle Van Deusen shared results of the 2024 WordPress Professional Survey with participation from 1,144 freelancers and agency owners (members of The Admin Bar group). It concluded with findings like: 72% of people charge less than $5,000 for websites, and only 32% income comes from recurring revenue sources.

With regard to the website building tools, Bricks builder climbed usage charts rather quickly this year. Among the Block Editor users, Generate Blocks and Kadence Blocks were the most popular block addons.

Automattic acquires another messaging app

Acquisitions Train… Automattic has acquired Beeper, a universal chat app with over 115,000 users, which allows you to send and receive messages on 14 different chat networks. Previously, Automattic acquired a similar app called Texts.

Matt Mullenweg explained – they aim to combine the best technology from Beeper and Texts, and use Beeper as the main brand – moving forward. More such coverage in the Business of WordPress database.

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Upcoming Events 💬

June 15, 2024: WordCamp Europe 2024 in Torino, Italy.
September 23, 2024: Digital Asset Congress 2024 in Iceland.

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By
Davinder Singh Kainth
A creative who Loves to Create Online Spaces powered by WordPress.

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