This Saturday, my wife and I celebrated our first year wedding anniversary. Incredible that it has been one year since we got married and had our honeymoon trip to Cape Town. If you ever get the chance to see Cape Town, go for it. I promise, it’s worth it.

But back to business 🙂

For this week, I’ve got one of my new articles on Liquid Web for you, as well as news on the new WP 5.2.3, adding additional income streams to your business and a Lego Star Wars orchestra.

Enjoy!

Business & Growth

WooCommerce Reporting: 3 Tips to Increase Profitability | Liquid Web — www.liquidweb.com
Are you building WooCommerce shops for clients? If so, they’ll need a strong reporting to make business decisions. I wrote this article, breaking down 3 ways to get the most out of Woo reporting.

3 Tips for Running Facebook Ads for Clients – Andrea Vahl
You’re a rockstar WP developer but want an additional income stream that works in a more residual way?

Andrea Vahl wrote a great piece on how to run FB ads for your clients. That’s a nice upsell opportunity!

Social Media Attribution: How to Get Started With Measuring
When signing a new client or selling your course, do you always know where the sale came from?

Here’s how you can fix social media attribution on your site and for your clients. Side-note: there are three different attribution methods you need to choose from.

WordPress News & Tools

News – WordPress 5.2.3 Security and Maintenance Release – WordPress.org
If you haven’t already, please install the update to WP version 5.2.3. It fixes security issues in post previews, comments, media uploads, shortcode previews, in the dashboard and also includes enhancements.

WooCommerce Speed Optimization: 7 Key Areas For Improving The Speed Of Your Store
Making Woo load fast can be a pain in the a**. Especially with all sorts of extensions installed, Woo sites can behave like behemoths. Matteo did a great job of identifying 7 key areas that you need to optimize when building a WooCommerce site.

Google Releases Native Lazyload Plugin for WordPress – WordPress Tavern — wptavern.com
As I said in previous newsletters, Google Chrome 76 added flags for native lazy loading. However, the implementation of this feature in WP Core is still being discussed – so Chrome 76 will not lazy-load your images by itself.

Google released a WP plugin to fix this matter and to also provide fallbacks for other browsers. This article explains why this plugin could be better for site performance than JS-based lazy loading as implemented by other plugins.

How-To’s & Dev

getbowtied/Hook-Me-Up: Easy Hooks for WooCommerce — github.com
Nice little plugin that lets you customize WooCommerce pages via the WP Customizer. Especially helpful if you are building Woo sites for your customers and want to give them more flexibility.

Headless WordPress: Why Gatsby Should Be Next on Your List of Things to Learn — deliciousbrains.com
Headless CMS is everywhere! If I weren’t so caught up with work, I’d check out building a headless WP with Gatsby for sure. This article makes the start super easy.

My favorite CSS hack – DEV Community ?‍??‍? — dev.to
Neat little CSS hack that helps visualize the page structure you are currently building.

It’s a simple copy/paste snippet you can add to any project you’re working on.

Random Articles

Watch this awesome droid orchestra! – LEGO Star Wars™ BOOST Droid Commander – YouTube — www.youtube.com
A 95-piece Lego Star Wars orchestra. What more do I need to say?!

Build Virtual Assistant with Python | Automate Tasks – DEV Community ?‍??‍? — dev.to
I loved the Interstellar movie. Having my own TARS sounds exciting, but unfortunately I don’t have the time to implement this tutorial 🙁

That’s it for this week! I hope you enjoy this handpicked list of articles! If you think that I’m missing certain topics or blogs, don’t hesitate to reach out and let me know!

Best,

Jan

https://wpmastery.xyz

P.S. Here are some tools I use daily, maybe they’ll benefit your business too.

Cloudways (hosting). I host all my own and our client sites with them. We have 7 servers and roughly 50 sites on Cloudways and are in love with them since 2014. Their servers make our sites blazingly fast, they give us plenty of flexibility for development workflows (e.g. Github auto-deploy embedded), and the servers run stable. What more could you ask for?

Elementor (page builder). We use the Elementor page builder plugin when building new sites or adding landing pages to existing client websites. It’s super easy to use and gives plenty of flexibility. And the predesigned layouts are a great starting point if you’re not a designer.

Ora.pm (project management tool). When collaborating with a team, you need a strong PM tool. Ora serves this need for us with its combination of Kanban and List views. You can even embed single projects on websites, e.g. to automatically keep your client updated on progress!

Page Builder Cloud. Looking to transfer your Elementor layouts from the staging site to the live website easily? Page Builder Cloud is my tool of choice. It works with Elementor, BB, Divi, Fusion Builder, Oxygen and so many more. And it’s just $99/year. Even if it saves you just 1h, it pays for itself.

WP Buffs Maintenance Partnership. Want to sell WP maintenance plans but don’t have a team to handle the actual work? The WP Buffs offer white-label maintenance plans at exceptional quality. Schedule a free call with them now to get to know them and to partner up. I keep referring my friends to them.