hello everyone marco montemagno here der
tak alchemist and here with me today
Jason Cohen co-founder and CEO of WP
engine hi Jess on how you going hey
thanks for having me alright Jason so
the reason why I wanted you in my show
is that first I’m a customer WP engine
customer and this is you know it’s
always embarrassing on one side but very
good because you took exactly of
something that you try and test every
day so and the topic generally is a very
interesting topic of tons of people
asking for tips and advices about
WordPress and we’re toast WordPress
security and all the problems around and
in my experience who better than you
could help us understand more could you
imagine if I was that totally unhappy
customer and this was you know a trop to
talk bad about dolly future would be
genius i mean you know it would be
amazing but no i think the main problem
here for me i mean i’m running digital
stuff for 15 years and for the last 10
years doing stuff on wordpress but the
the big pain that that I think WP engine
came to to solve or WP engine alike
companies i mean is to give a managed
hosting where I don’t have to be to
think about right upgrade security and
all this kind of stuff and so I think
this is a good asset but can you first
explain in your Wars what WP engine does
and why are you different from any other
hosting companies sure well we host
WordPress which means if you have a
wordpress blog of course if a browser
goes to your site it has to go somewhere
and so we run the servers that that
browser it is in fact connecting to it
makes us different is number one we’re
more expensive than things like
dreamhost in bluehost so it does cost
more yeah and then
so what do you get for that so first of
all the blogs go a lot faster on average
our customers see of four times speed
improvement second it scales under
traffic so if you get some nice press
your blog won’t go down number three we
handle security and in fact if you’re if
you are ever hacked we’ll fix it for
free as part of our normal tech support
and the fourth and probably most
interesting one is that we have more
tech support members who know wordpress
on staff than anyone else per thousand
customers which means we actually have
the time and human beings to help you
with wordpress specific questions even
down to things like which plugin should
i use for this and that sort of thing so
our service by investing in human beings
for service our service indeed can be
both really responsive but also also
deep we have the time to get on the
phone with you if you want her and that
sort of thing so you get your money’s
worth automatic the found the company
founding wordpress did they invest also
in WP engine or i’m wrong they did an
hour last year when we raise some money
automatic yeah was an investor in that
round which you know you have to be
careful automatic works with lots of
hosting companies and you know you
shouldn’t read into that that we’re
favored or that or read anything into
any other hosting company as a result
that that would be not true but
certainly it’s a vote of confidence in
what we’re doing how we’re doing it
whether it’s something that they approve
of or like or think that it’s you know
sort of correct for wordpress i mean
obviously it is an odd for that the the
speed prom is that WP engine was doing I
was very fascinating about and also run
checking around I saw your fabulous
t-shirt that was you got written my blog
is 4x faster than your blog so i thought
this guy or is very arrogant who he
knows his stuff you know so let’s try to
test and the first question that I have
for you is how about speed I mean how
can you promise and deliver because then
you do it to make a wordpress website
faster because you know people and
business is norm
we are used with don’ts of cash plugins
or cloudflare or this kind of services
cash CDN and this kind of stuff so how
can you can you handle this part of the
hosting sure well there’s there’s many
aspects to making a site fast or
scalable or secure in the same way that
if you ask like how do you make a car
fast you would not mean the engines
important but obviously it’s not the
only thing and spark plugs can be
important and the size of the engine is
important and the gas that you put in is
important and the oxygen mixture the
carburetors and is important and so
forth right if you put a supercharger
that’s important so like that it’s not
one thing so is everything from having
superior hardware having resources detik
those hardware resources dedicated to
your site and not shared with say a
thousand other blogs and then having um
systems around your blog to cache pages
and so on so he’s mentioned CloudFlare
CloudFlare for example caches static
content meaning things like your images
and CSS but it does not cashier pages
like your homepage or a particular other
page or a post and those are the things
that are actually typically the slow
thing and the thing that doesn’t scale
the other stuff is usually not the
problem so though it does make it
incrementally faster for that other
stuff it doesn’t address the hard part
which is dynamic stuff there’s also the
database I mean so just in the same way
there are many many pieces that go
together sometimes it’s just in plugins
that we say you should not use because
we know those plugins slow your site
down and we have alternatives for those
so there’s many there’s many ways but
what’s interesting because again I hate
for this to turn to just an ad for WP
engine so maybe a story about about
speed that’s maybe not as obvious which
is kind of fun we hit a customer move to
us and instantly got a twenty percent
increase in revenue because you got a
twenty percent increase in page views
and you got that because people stop
bouncing off the site as much or by
twenty percent bouncing meaning the
browser came to the site and then left
but here’s the interesting part those
statistics were not in Google Analytics
and this is why and this is the neat
part this is true of any website
anywhere so it’s kind of fun you know
when you click a link in google search
results and there’s a white page and
it’s spinning and then you get tired of
waiting and hit back right obviously you
just bounce off the page obviously that
was a potential page view that did not
happen right but here’s what’s
interesting because the page didn’t load
google analytics didn’t load either
which means google analytics or any you
know any tool that you might use won’t
know that that happened that is a bounce
rate that’s invisible to tools sort of
by its nature when your page goes faster
you get those kinds of bounces less
because the page does of here so you do
get it and even if they do run oh right
away at least you know it right it’s in
a bounce rate you can see in your in
your tools and of course in general and
this is this is sort of now i think
common knowledge with all the studies
that are out but in general people tend
not to bounce off side as much when
they’re fast but what’s interesting is
you can’t measure how many people are
doing that sort of by its nature you can
all you can do is make the site a lot
faster and see and so that’s what that’s
what it happened exactly to this
customer i’m referring to and so it’s
interesting effect that not that
sometimes these things are hard to
quantify so this thing’s people know
like faster sites get higher search rank
position or that in general people will
stick around sites that are more
responsive sort of stands to reason as
well i mean besides the fact that there
are studies but there’s even like little
holes like that which I think are also
very interesting and you know you ask
how can we guarantee what will happen
but we don’t know is there’s some effect
and it is what it is and will depend on
the site and lots of things and we don’t
we just we just do many many things to
make the site fast and those other
things more things then you’re going to
do by yourself just because who is the
time and even if your technical it’s
interesting but who has the time what’s
the best tea that you can give to a
business owner that okay as to take a
decision and maybe it’s not hosting on
WP engine or regular web services was
the most important thing just going on
this kind of plug-in with
cash CDN on and so on or any team that
you could give specifically sure um make
sure you have a caching plug-in like w3
total cache or WP super cache something
like that because it’ll stick Asha
dynamic content and that’s the slowest
part number one number two they’re very
inexpensive CDNs like Mac CDN or
CloudFlare which is free I highly
recommend that you go use CloudFlare it
will cash a whole lot of stuff for you
and there’s a lot of other controls and
their basic version is free that also
affords you some security which is also
very good so no reason not to get
CloudFlare number three you can use
something from yahoo called yahoo smush
it and it’s a free tool that will make
your image is smaller without making the
quality less I’m going to why if you
want to but that’s what it does and it
gives it back to you in a format that’s
very easy to them upload again to your
website so that that’s permanent and you
like to do that once every time you
change your theme so no reason not to do
that again it’s free another thing you
should do that’s free is use a tool
either like w3 total cache or a plug-in
like WP minify and these are plugins
which take all of your style sheets and
JavaScript so that means the stuff
ending in dot CSS and stuff ending in
j/s and they combine them into one so
one style sheet instead of 10 1
javascript file instead of four and also
makes them smaller and both of those
actions and I could go into detail if
you want but both of those things make
your site download much faster and that
plugin again and w3 total cache plug and
do that and again it’s free and so again
no reason not to do it so those are all
free things you can do on any hosting
provider that will make wordpress faster
and the final thing I’ll say about that
is there’s a tool online tool called web
page test org also free where you can
put in your blog URL or really any page
and get a very detailed analysis on
what’s fast or slow if you do that first
and then do some of the things I just
said you’ll literally see the difference
and also that too will help but it can
help point out other things that you may
be able to do to increase speed right um
few years ago I’ve been launched
a weblog network in Italy and the
finally did died in a three million and
half unique visitors a month and the
funny thing is that one of the biggest
biggest problem it was before the cloud
so one of the biggest problem was going
down so every time that the there was a
peak of traffic everyone happy on one
side on the other side everyone very sad
because you know you have to pay for
additional servers and so on so now with
cloud is different but still a website
going down is something often happening
by the way I think also the right moment
when I me gray my wet my website not
with the agenda website went down and I
say gosh you know I just changed
provider buddy first you know just 10
minutes something like that so what can
you suggest on this topic because I mean
is it do you think it is related with
caching if you cash good then if the
site goes down you still have the cash
in place or is something else that you
have to do um uptime and data centers is
rough there’s literally no hosting
provider that I know of and no WordPress
provider i know that has a hundred
percent of time in the last 12 months
not one it’s hard and then you know when
amazon has their big data center failure
in virginia’s they’ve had a couple of
times in the last couple years all kinds
of services that you use has go down
right and you say wait a minute I
thought it was cloud I thought it was
high availability I thought they had
backups I thought they were redundant in
various ways whatever and and yet all of
these big players that invest countless
dollars in infrastructure on things like
Amazon and cloud and all that sort of
stuff um fail anyway that’s unfortunate
that’s very unfortunately life in
hosting is that it’s not perfect and so
now that doesn’t mean you throw your
hands up and say there’s nothing we can
do about anything not true of course
there’s many things but one thing it
does point out that’s interesting is
it’s very very expensive to get very
high uptime you can’t even multiple
servers isn’t enough because if they’re
all in one data center the data center
can have problems like for example oh I
don’t know hurricane hitting the west
coast and taking out your data center
that’s on the west coast which happened
to a couple of data centers right like
this is this happens um so you have to
have multiple data centers and that’s
tricky because keeping your data
synchronized between them is a project
it’s hard enough that again a lot of
those very tech savvy companies that
have one you know application they have
to keep running are unable to do it or
there’s trouble and when you are able to
do it it’s very very expensive its I
mean because you need multiple servers
in one data center to survive single
server issues they need mobile data
center so you need servers everywhere
all dedicated for you you have to test
that stuff it’s very complicated and so
honestly for almost anyone it’s not
worth it and it’s it’s a horrible thing
to say because you hate to say like a
you know too tough but the truth is that
you pay for what’s necessary to get that
is not the right cost benefit trade-off
for most people and so services like us
or indeed our competitors any of us we
have a lot of measures in place for high
availability there are still going to be
some events I fortunately we did not go
down with that storm even though we do
have hundreds of servers in Newark but
we do have some high availability stuff
and so we did survive that but there are
other things that we especially in our
past when we were less sophisticated you
know a couple years ago where a
datacenter failure did take us down for
a little while um now we’re more
sophisticated but even so uh you know I
can still divides us a plausible
scenario where we’re going to go down
right where there’s or there’s lots of
service providers the other day Go
Daddy’s DNS went down sort of famously
and a ton of sites were down our phones
rang off the hook how come my site is
down of course we weren’t down but their
dns provider godaddy was down and so so
their site was down so there’s a chain
of service providers actually that all
have to be working for your site to go
down so failures anywhere in there will
take your site down and it happens and
so again very expensive in fact too
expensive for almost anyone to try to
get it really tried designed for a
hundred percent of time and Jason do you
think this scenario will will
change sooner or later with the
technology progresses around them in
because as you say I totally agree there
are so many players in the chain that
you can be great but then the DNS go
down or DNS can be okay and the
hurricane is coming so is so difficult
to get everything up but do you think it
will improve the situational will stay
like this for forever and ever oh it
definitely improves it’s already
improved so cloud does improve things
because you can have a failure in a
single piece of hardware and not go down
because your your thing it can float
over to another piece of hardware and
you could have built that ten years ago
and it would have been much much more
expensive now it still costs money but
it’s much cheaper and so more accessible
and in the same way all this stuff will
become easier more accessible and less
expensive at the end of the day high
availability means redundancy it means
there’s multiple things that know how to
do this or are doing this at all times
that’s what it means so there’s always
some expense with having resources
allocated for you in multiple places
like that’s always going to be more
expensive than not having those
resources but I think that the the extra
cost will come down the difficulty of
setting it up will come down so I do
believe it’ll be it’ll be less expensive
over time do that in fact there’s even
an offering that we’re working on right
now that would provide something like
that very thing but in a way that’s more
affordable and and so we’re going to try
to do that but even so like in 10 years
it’ll be a whole different story just
like like cloud is but cloud doesn’t
automatically mean you don’t go down
that’s certainly not true as you can see
by things going down jizzle security
this is another top hot topic you know
because on one side you worried about
yes the website goes up it goes down on
the other side you worried about being
attacked somehow and the to fear are
okay what can I do with my security I
don’t know my
password long past or this kind of stuff
and what does my provider do with
security could you elaborate on that
because I think there is a lot of
confusion you know when we talk about
security and WordPress there is a lot of
confusion with security in WordPress um
I think it’s accurate to say that almost
none of the security vulnerabilities
that people have almost none of the
hacks that happen are due to WordPress
itself or the hosting provider and I
include all of my competitors in that in
other words I will you know it’s very
very rare for one of my competitors for
a security vulnerability on their side
to be the cause of the attacker
succeeding and the same thing is true of
WordPress itself that is if you look at
you know there are of course third-party
organizations whose job it is to track
security problems and fixes and if you
look at WordPress and tracking that you
can see there’s almost none that is
almost never the problem in fact up even
the very very few things that they find
are usually things where an attacker
actually wasn’t successful in doing it
they found it themselves and patch it
before even anyone even found it in
short WordPress is about as iron clad as
you can have for any web application and
in general the service providers in
general it don’t have problems and again
you can always pull out well one time
this happened with this one yes yes one
time but people get hacked constantly
all day long so if there was one problem
one time somewhere like that’s obviously
not really the main brain problem
problem is the user in the end well well
at some times its user but remember
WordPress you can install anything and
any plugin well that means you can run
any code well all kinds of problems
happen as soon as you say i can run
anything well okay guess what like that
then they’re all potential security
vulnerabilities and as you say of course
things like passwords and I mean there’s
a meet just like speed there’s a myriad
of things about passwords that happen
here’s I think the biggest mistake that
people have about security they say and
I we hear this every day they say I
won’t get hacked because
I just run a little site where I sell
lawn gnomes and nobody wants to hack a
site that sells lawn gnomes because who
cares and they’re absolutely wrong those
are exactly the sides to get hacked but
not because they care about lawn gnomes
it’s that the hackers want to do
something else like send spam email or
bounce it use your server to then do
something else to yet another machine
but mask their identity because it comes
from your machine in other words the
hackers have some other aim because
you’re right they don’t care about your
site they have some other aim and
they’re going to use they want to hack
your site in order to do that other
thing that they really want to do and so
they don’t care who you are they just
want to hack you so that they can use
you to do stuff like a puppet um and so
everyone’s vulnerable and people get
scanned constantly for these things
because hackers will literally write
code that runs around the internet
looking for sites where they can do this
too and they they don’t know either who
you are they don’t care so damage isn’t
that to give a practical tip I mean I’m
thinking about the most common way of
hacking maybe okay get good passwords
changing passwords limit login attempts
there is a plug-in by the way I think
now WP engine has got it by default so
that when someone tried to look in your
WP admin dashboard after tree log you
know or whatever they that IP is blocked
anything else that that someone can do
by itself yeah so the biggest well
there’s a few things the the again i
would use cloudflare they do have a
layer of security we have customers with
cloud for that get hacked but security
is something where every little bit that
you do does help if you use cloudflare
some you know number of attacks will be
blocked not one hundred percent but
whatever they are it’s a number who
cares it’s free do it you know right
number to use the fewest number of
plugins possible and use themes and
plugins which generally are well warm
just because they’re used a lot doesn’t
necessarily mean they’re safe there’s
been some famous examples of plugins
like admin ER and the tool called Tim
thumb which were vulnerable however the
ones that are often used when they’re
vulnerable it’s big news and is often to
patch out quickly in other words you’ll
find out and you’ll be able to fix it
and ones that are not used if they’re
vulnerable you’ll never know all right
and so using well-worn code and as
little of it as possible and same thing
goes with themes themes that are used by
a lot of people same thing that that is
maybe the number one thing you can do to
be safe I would suggest what you’re
talking about it’s something called log
in lockdown that’s a plug-in it’s free
and if it sees someone attempting to log
in a number of times unsuccessfully it
locks them out for a little while that
prevents people who are trying to gasps
your username or password so that’s nice
again like that’s just one little thing
that one little piece of your armor
right but every bit counts I would say
finally on passwords changing the
password is probably not that important
because that assumes someone’s getting
your password and knowing it and again
they’re not targeting you that
specifically right there trolling around
so just having a really good password
like one that’s long and has some
punctuation and stuff in it that’s
that’s better if you’re really paranoid
use two-factor authentication so in
other words so for example there’s a
free plugin from google we’re in order
to log into your WordPress blog you type
in a password but then Google sends a
number to your cell phone like it texts
you and then you type it in that’s
something that of course a hacker well
good it would have to be pretty amazing
to it to get um and so that’s in that
kind of thing you can use one more
little thing that’s important when you
log into WordPress it’s insecure that is
when you go to your login page it’s HTTP
colon slash slash not HTTP s with a
little key like you get when you go to
your bank and so on it’s not secure and
so that means when you type your name
and password when you’re in the coffee
shop everyone in the coffee shop who
wants to just got your name and password
now again that that’s a hacker who who’s
sort of snow
hang around a little bit more than what
I was describing earlier but that
absolutely happens and so number one
two-factor authentication fixes that
number to use a hosting provider in
which that is secure like wordpress com
we have that option a couple of our
competitors do too though that’s not
completely unique but that’s you are in
you know you are sending your password
over completely unencrypted unless
that’s not the case super interesting by
the way I’m a big fan of double LP teen
authentication Google authentication
I’ve been using for for a while I’m
super happy with that I didn’t know that
there was a plugin for wordpress so i
will install it when we finish I will
just install it right Mary and how about
ftp hacking for security is something to
be worried about or not again has in a
strong passwords can you imagine that
when I i launched my web locks network i
I’ve been choosing movable type because
the commute the WordPress community was
not there yet and I thought right well
it’s not so much you know if I think now
wow there’s so many things so how about
themes and design because with such a
large choice a lot of time people you
know start to change design and theme
and then use a framework and then use
another thing so it’s a very Celtic
situation do you have any guidelines for
themes and designed to do a good job I
not really in that there are a lot of
really good players with quality themes
that have support behind it as you say
you know frameworks with child themes I
would say if you’re if you’re developing
a single blog you can you know there you
have a large range of choices for what
to pick and so you should pick the thing
where you know other people who have
experienced there so you have people to
ask questions of is probably the best
thing because there’s lots of good
choices if you’re a designer and you’re
making lots of WordPress blogs and this
is your career then you could learn a
lot of different themes but that’s
that’s maybe not a best use of your time
is as the designer of the blog you get
to pick more or less what the theme
framework is and so it’s it’s probably
best that you specialize in a couple or
even one theme framework and go super
deep in that framework so you become
really competent in in in delivering
sites quickly especially for the easy
for the more simple or common stuff and
also a facility for yourself of more
complicated features and so you know
some of these frameworks like like whew
with canvas or genesis and thesis and
all these things they are a whole thing
unto themselves you could almost think
of them as applications or products in
themselves they have tons of hooks right
they have their own way of doing things
you make child themes and there are
plugins that work with them i mean it’s
it’s a whole ecosystem within itself
right each one of them is a little one
and so i think it makes sense to
specialize in one or two of those and
say each you know a couple of these have
very large followings with lots of
design and stuff behind them and that
learning that probably allows you to
generate web sites faster and and deeper
um and so rather than just pulling
random themes off the shelf and sort of
having to get inside that theme authors
head every time it’s it’s probably best
specialized if that’s your career i’ll
be using genesis and thisis anima i’m a
big fan of framework because i think
there’s yeah as you say more stability
more support support and so on what wiII
happen in the next in the next year for
WordPress have been recently watched the
mat talking the founder WordPress
talking about how amazing WordPress is
going to be more and more what are you
expecting I mean what wiII happen from a
technical point of view in one year big
changing more or less will be the same
as any particular thing that you think
will will be a game changer for
well I think you’d have to ask the
people at automatic who are literally
making those decisions some trends that
we’re seeing is number one word press is
getting some sort of you could say
software process maturity that is there
are things like unit tests and and
documentation and you know things like
that which you would you know in the in
the regular software development world
you know but back into Java and.net and
stuff are part of a what you might call
a software maturity process and that
sort of being backfilled into wordpress
now which i think is very good I think
you’ll see that being pushed into a
plugins and theme developers to
participate in that that will help with
things like WordPress upgrades and stuff
where you know currently that can break
up lots of things or vice versa and
that’s that’s a whole thing and with
with more process around that especially
with automated testing and continuous
integration and stuff like that I’m
hopefully you’ll see improvements there
there’s this goal of having WordPress
automatically upgrade continuously like
Chrome I feel like that’s a very very
good thing to do upgrades on the one
hand we want upgrades on the other hand
they are events every time for everyone
and again as part of the type process
means you can start doing that as well
and I think that’s a that’s a terrific
goal that will help WordPress grow in
whatever way it wants to grow more
easily because it can be more continuous
development and deployment and so in
that sense that’s that that will enable
WordPress itself to to proceed in
whichever direction it wishes I think
you’ll see more applications built on
wordpress so in the old days WordPress
was quote-unquote blogging software now
WordPress is websites or CMS right it’s
just anything and that we see the same
thing I would say I would actually say
the minority of our customers I would
say is just their blog it’s the website
whatever that means you know the company
website or the marketing site so on um
so that will I think that will know not
only continue but I think move into the
application realm where it’s also a
shopping cart it’s also
that you know more dynamic functionality
it’s you know and and applications which
are currently built on things like Ruby
on Rails you know more and more might be
built in type of WordPress because after
all it’s got that CMS stuff built in and
so theming it is so much easier and
having non-technical people be able to
edit text and behavior is so much easier
and so it’s kind of a logical place for
it at certain types of applications to
go to I think you’ll you’ll see it
moving into application another trend I
think you’ll see is more enterprise
level features some of which means
things like performance and scale on
certain internal stuff which would
matter if you have a hundred thousand
posts or if you have a hundred thousand
users and and wouldn’t matter if you
were smaller than that so some of that’s
internal and I think you’ll you might
see some external features as well but
you know most of all the stuff that I’m
saying is speculation because of course
um automatic and the foundation sort of
together are the ones that in fact drive
that stuff and so I’m going kind of off
of what we’re seeing kind of awful if
they’ve said kind of off of what Matt
said in the last state of the word is
what his goals were so I think that
they’re more or less in line with what
you know publicly is being stated as the
direction of WordPress and we’ll see
Celinda jezel thank you so much chasm
Cohen WP engine co-founder and CEO jasm
good luck for everything and keep in touch thanks for having me
tak alchemist and here with me today
Jason Cohen co-founder and CEO of WP
engine hi Jess on how you going hey
thanks for having me alright Jason so
the reason why I wanted you in my show
is that first I’m a customer WP engine
customer and this is you know it’s
always embarrassing on one side but very
good because you took exactly of
something that you try and test every
day so and the topic generally is a very
interesting topic of tons of people
asking for tips and advices about
WordPress and we’re toast WordPress
security and all the problems around and
in my experience who better than you
could help us understand more could you
imagine if I was that totally unhappy
customer and this was you know a trop to
talk bad about dolly future would be
genius i mean you know it would be
amazing but no i think the main problem
here for me i mean i’m running digital
stuff for 15 years and for the last 10
years doing stuff on wordpress but the
the big pain that that I think WP engine
came to to solve or WP engine alike
companies i mean is to give a managed
hosting where I don’t have to be to
think about right upgrade security and
all this kind of stuff and so I think
this is a good asset but can you first
explain in your Wars what WP engine does
and why are you different from any other
hosting companies sure well we host
WordPress which means if you have a
wordpress blog of course if a browser
goes to your site it has to go somewhere
and so we run the servers that that
browser it is in fact connecting to it
makes us different is number one we’re
more expensive than things like
dreamhost in bluehost so it does cost
more yeah and then
so what do you get for that so first of
all the blogs go a lot faster on average
our customers see of four times speed
improvement second it scales under
traffic so if you get some nice press
your blog won’t go down number three we
handle security and in fact if you’re if
you are ever hacked we’ll fix it for
free as part of our normal tech support
and the fourth and probably most
interesting one is that we have more
tech support members who know wordpress
on staff than anyone else per thousand
customers which means we actually have
the time and human beings to help you
with wordpress specific questions even
down to things like which plugin should
i use for this and that sort of thing so
our service by investing in human beings
for service our service indeed can be
both really responsive but also also
deep we have the time to get on the
phone with you if you want her and that
sort of thing so you get your money’s
worth automatic the found the company
founding wordpress did they invest also
in WP engine or i’m wrong they did an
hour last year when we raise some money
automatic yeah was an investor in that
round which you know you have to be
careful automatic works with lots of
hosting companies and you know you
shouldn’t read into that that we’re
favored or that or read anything into
any other hosting company as a result
that that would be not true but
certainly it’s a vote of confidence in
what we’re doing how we’re doing it
whether it’s something that they approve
of or like or think that it’s you know
sort of correct for wordpress i mean
obviously it is an odd for that the the
speed prom is that WP engine was doing I
was very fascinating about and also run
checking around I saw your fabulous
t-shirt that was you got written my blog
is 4x faster than your blog so i thought
this guy or is very arrogant who he
knows his stuff you know so let’s try to
test and the first question that I have
for you is how about speed I mean how
can you promise and deliver because then
you do it to make a wordpress website
faster because you know people and
business is norm
we are used with don’ts of cash plugins
or cloudflare or this kind of services
cash CDN and this kind of stuff so how
can you can you handle this part of the
hosting sure well there’s there’s many
aspects to making a site fast or
scalable or secure in the same way that
if you ask like how do you make a car
fast you would not mean the engines
important but obviously it’s not the
only thing and spark plugs can be
important and the size of the engine is
important and the gas that you put in is
important and the oxygen mixture the
carburetors and is important and so
forth right if you put a supercharger
that’s important so like that it’s not
one thing so is everything from having
superior hardware having resources detik
those hardware resources dedicated to
your site and not shared with say a
thousand other blogs and then having um
systems around your blog to cache pages
and so on so he’s mentioned CloudFlare
CloudFlare for example caches static
content meaning things like your images
and CSS but it does not cashier pages
like your homepage or a particular other
page or a post and those are the things
that are actually typically the slow
thing and the thing that doesn’t scale
the other stuff is usually not the
problem so though it does make it
incrementally faster for that other
stuff it doesn’t address the hard part
which is dynamic stuff there’s also the
database I mean so just in the same way
there are many many pieces that go
together sometimes it’s just in plugins
that we say you should not use because
we know those plugins slow your site
down and we have alternatives for those
so there’s many there’s many ways but
what’s interesting because again I hate
for this to turn to just an ad for WP
engine so maybe a story about about
speed that’s maybe not as obvious which
is kind of fun we hit a customer move to
us and instantly got a twenty percent
increase in revenue because you got a
twenty percent increase in page views
and you got that because people stop
bouncing off the site as much or by
twenty percent bouncing meaning the
browser came to the site and then left
but here’s the interesting part those
statistics were not in Google Analytics
and this is why and this is the neat
part this is true of any website
anywhere so it’s kind of fun you know
when you click a link in google search
results and there’s a white page and
it’s spinning and then you get tired of
waiting and hit back right obviously you
just bounce off the page obviously that
was a potential page view that did not
happen right but here’s what’s
interesting because the page didn’t load
google analytics didn’t load either
which means google analytics or any you
know any tool that you might use won’t
know that that happened that is a bounce
rate that’s invisible to tools sort of
by its nature when your page goes faster
you get those kinds of bounces less
because the page does of here so you do
get it and even if they do run oh right
away at least you know it right it’s in
a bounce rate you can see in your in
your tools and of course in general and
this is this is sort of now i think
common knowledge with all the studies
that are out but in general people tend
not to bounce off side as much when
they’re fast but what’s interesting is
you can’t measure how many people are
doing that sort of by its nature you can
all you can do is make the site a lot
faster and see and so that’s what that’s
what it happened exactly to this
customer i’m referring to and so it’s
interesting effect that not that
sometimes these things are hard to
quantify so this thing’s people know
like faster sites get higher search rank
position or that in general people will
stick around sites that are more
responsive sort of stands to reason as
well i mean besides the fact that there
are studies but there’s even like little
holes like that which I think are also
very interesting and you know you ask
how can we guarantee what will happen
but we don’t know is there’s some effect
and it is what it is and will depend on
the site and lots of things and we don’t
we just we just do many many things to
make the site fast and those other
things more things then you’re going to
do by yourself just because who is the
time and even if your technical it’s
interesting but who has the time what’s
the best tea that you can give to a
business owner that okay as to take a
decision and maybe it’s not hosting on
WP engine or regular web services was
the most important thing just going on
this kind of plug-in with
cash CDN on and so on or any team that
you could give specifically sure um make
sure you have a caching plug-in like w3
total cache or WP super cache something
like that because it’ll stick Asha
dynamic content and that’s the slowest
part number one number two they’re very
inexpensive CDNs like Mac CDN or
CloudFlare which is free I highly
recommend that you go use CloudFlare it
will cash a whole lot of stuff for you
and there’s a lot of other controls and
their basic version is free that also
affords you some security which is also
very good so no reason not to get
CloudFlare number three you can use
something from yahoo called yahoo smush
it and it’s a free tool that will make
your image is smaller without making the
quality less I’m going to why if you
want to but that’s what it does and it
gives it back to you in a format that’s
very easy to them upload again to your
website so that that’s permanent and you
like to do that once every time you
change your theme so no reason not to do
that again it’s free another thing you
should do that’s free is use a tool
either like w3 total cache or a plug-in
like WP minify and these are plugins
which take all of your style sheets and
JavaScript so that means the stuff
ending in dot CSS and stuff ending in
j/s and they combine them into one so
one style sheet instead of 10 1
javascript file instead of four and also
makes them smaller and both of those
actions and I could go into detail if
you want but both of those things make
your site download much faster and that
plugin again and w3 total cache plug and
do that and again it’s free and so again
no reason not to do it so those are all
free things you can do on any hosting
provider that will make wordpress faster
and the final thing I’ll say about that
is there’s a tool online tool called web
page test org also free where you can
put in your blog URL or really any page
and get a very detailed analysis on
what’s fast or slow if you do that first
and then do some of the things I just
said you’ll literally see the difference
and also that too will help but it can
help point out other things that you may
be able to do to increase speed right um
few years ago I’ve been launched
a weblog network in Italy and the
finally did died in a three million and
half unique visitors a month and the
funny thing is that one of the biggest
biggest problem it was before the cloud
so one of the biggest problem was going
down so every time that the there was a
peak of traffic everyone happy on one
side on the other side everyone very sad
because you know you have to pay for
additional servers and so on so now with
cloud is different but still a website
going down is something often happening
by the way I think also the right moment
when I me gray my wet my website not
with the agenda website went down and I
say gosh you know I just changed
provider buddy first you know just 10
minutes something like that so what can
you suggest on this topic because I mean
is it do you think it is related with
caching if you cash good then if the
site goes down you still have the cash
in place or is something else that you
have to do um uptime and data centers is
rough there’s literally no hosting
provider that I know of and no WordPress
provider i know that has a hundred
percent of time in the last 12 months
not one it’s hard and then you know when
amazon has their big data center failure
in virginia’s they’ve had a couple of
times in the last couple years all kinds
of services that you use has go down
right and you say wait a minute I
thought it was cloud I thought it was
high availability I thought they had
backups I thought they were redundant in
various ways whatever and and yet all of
these big players that invest countless
dollars in infrastructure on things like
Amazon and cloud and all that sort of
stuff um fail anyway that’s unfortunate
that’s very unfortunately life in
hosting is that it’s not perfect and so
now that doesn’t mean you throw your
hands up and say there’s nothing we can
do about anything not true of course
there’s many things but one thing it
does point out that’s interesting is
it’s very very expensive to get very
high uptime you can’t even multiple
servers isn’t enough because if they’re
all in one data center the data center
can have problems like for example oh I
don’t know hurricane hitting the west
coast and taking out your data center
that’s on the west coast which happened
to a couple of data centers right like
this is this happens um so you have to
have multiple data centers and that’s
tricky because keeping your data
synchronized between them is a project
it’s hard enough that again a lot of
those very tech savvy companies that
have one you know application they have
to keep running are unable to do it or
there’s trouble and when you are able to
do it it’s very very expensive its I
mean because you need multiple servers
in one data center to survive single
server issues they need mobile data
center so you need servers everywhere
all dedicated for you you have to test
that stuff it’s very complicated and so
honestly for almost anyone it’s not
worth it and it’s it’s a horrible thing
to say because you hate to say like a
you know too tough but the truth is that
you pay for what’s necessary to get that
is not the right cost benefit trade-off
for most people and so services like us
or indeed our competitors any of us we
have a lot of measures in place for high
availability there are still going to be
some events I fortunately we did not go
down with that storm even though we do
have hundreds of servers in Newark but
we do have some high availability stuff
and so we did survive that but there are
other things that we especially in our
past when we were less sophisticated you
know a couple years ago where a
datacenter failure did take us down for
a little while um now we’re more
sophisticated but even so uh you know I
can still divides us a plausible
scenario where we’re going to go down
right where there’s or there’s lots of
service providers the other day Go
Daddy’s DNS went down sort of famously
and a ton of sites were down our phones
rang off the hook how come my site is
down of course we weren’t down but their
dns provider godaddy was down and so so
their site was down so there’s a chain
of service providers actually that all
have to be working for your site to go
down so failures anywhere in there will
take your site down and it happens and
so again very expensive in fact too
expensive for almost anyone to try to
get it really tried designed for a
hundred percent of time and Jason do you
think this scenario will will
change sooner or later with the
technology progresses around them in
because as you say I totally agree there
are so many players in the chain that
you can be great but then the DNS go
down or DNS can be okay and the
hurricane is coming so is so difficult
to get everything up but do you think it
will improve the situational will stay
like this for forever and ever oh it
definitely improves it’s already
improved so cloud does improve things
because you can have a failure in a
single piece of hardware and not go down
because your your thing it can float
over to another piece of hardware and
you could have built that ten years ago
and it would have been much much more
expensive now it still costs money but
it’s much cheaper and so more accessible
and in the same way all this stuff will
become easier more accessible and less
expensive at the end of the day high
availability means redundancy it means
there’s multiple things that know how to
do this or are doing this at all times
that’s what it means so there’s always
some expense with having resources
allocated for you in multiple places
like that’s always going to be more
expensive than not having those
resources but I think that the the extra
cost will come down the difficulty of
setting it up will come down so I do
believe it’ll be it’ll be less expensive
over time do that in fact there’s even
an offering that we’re working on right
now that would provide something like
that very thing but in a way that’s more
affordable and and so we’re going to try
to do that but even so like in 10 years
it’ll be a whole different story just
like like cloud is but cloud doesn’t
automatically mean you don’t go down
that’s certainly not true as you can see
by things going down jizzle security
this is another top hot topic you know
because on one side you worried about
yes the website goes up it goes down on
the other side you worried about being
attacked somehow and the to fear are
okay what can I do with my security I
don’t know my
password long past or this kind of stuff
and what does my provider do with
security could you elaborate on that
because I think there is a lot of
confusion you know when we talk about
security and WordPress there is a lot of
confusion with security in WordPress um
I think it’s accurate to say that almost
none of the security vulnerabilities
that people have almost none of the
hacks that happen are due to WordPress
itself or the hosting provider and I
include all of my competitors in that in
other words I will you know it’s very
very rare for one of my competitors for
a security vulnerability on their side
to be the cause of the attacker
succeeding and the same thing is true of
WordPress itself that is if you look at
you know there are of course third-party
organizations whose job it is to track
security problems and fixes and if you
look at WordPress and tracking that you
can see there’s almost none that is
almost never the problem in fact up even
the very very few things that they find
are usually things where an attacker
actually wasn’t successful in doing it
they found it themselves and patch it
before even anyone even found it in
short WordPress is about as iron clad as
you can have for any web application and
in general the service providers in
general it don’t have problems and again
you can always pull out well one time
this happened with this one yes yes one
time but people get hacked constantly
all day long so if there was one problem
one time somewhere like that’s obviously
not really the main brain problem
problem is the user in the end well well
at some times its user but remember
WordPress you can install anything and
any plugin well that means you can run
any code well all kinds of problems
happen as soon as you say i can run
anything well okay guess what like that
then they’re all potential security
vulnerabilities and as you say of course
things like passwords and I mean there’s
a meet just like speed there’s a myriad
of things about passwords that happen
here’s I think the biggest mistake that
people have about security they say and
I we hear this every day they say I
won’t get hacked because
I just run a little site where I sell
lawn gnomes and nobody wants to hack a
site that sells lawn gnomes because who
cares and they’re absolutely wrong those
are exactly the sides to get hacked but
not because they care about lawn gnomes
it’s that the hackers want to do
something else like send spam email or
bounce it use your server to then do
something else to yet another machine
but mask their identity because it comes
from your machine in other words the
hackers have some other aim because
you’re right they don’t care about your
site they have some other aim and
they’re going to use they want to hack
your site in order to do that other
thing that they really want to do and so
they don’t care who you are they just
want to hack you so that they can use
you to do stuff like a puppet um and so
everyone’s vulnerable and people get
scanned constantly for these things
because hackers will literally write
code that runs around the internet
looking for sites where they can do this
too and they they don’t know either who
you are they don’t care so damage isn’t
that to give a practical tip I mean I’m
thinking about the most common way of
hacking maybe okay get good passwords
changing passwords limit login attempts
there is a plug-in by the way I think
now WP engine has got it by default so
that when someone tried to look in your
WP admin dashboard after tree log you
know or whatever they that IP is blocked
anything else that that someone can do
by itself yeah so the biggest well
there’s a few things the the again i
would use cloudflare they do have a
layer of security we have customers with
cloud for that get hacked but security
is something where every little bit that
you do does help if you use cloudflare
some you know number of attacks will be
blocked not one hundred percent but
whatever they are it’s a number who
cares it’s free do it you know right
number to use the fewest number of
plugins possible and use themes and
plugins which generally are well warm
just because they’re used a lot doesn’t
necessarily mean they’re safe there’s
been some famous examples of plugins
like admin ER and the tool called Tim
thumb which were vulnerable however the
ones that are often used when they’re
vulnerable it’s big news and is often to
patch out quickly in other words you’ll
find out and you’ll be able to fix it
and ones that are not used if they’re
vulnerable you’ll never know all right
and so using well-worn code and as
little of it as possible and same thing
goes with themes themes that are used by
a lot of people same thing that that is
maybe the number one thing you can do to
be safe I would suggest what you’re
talking about it’s something called log
in lockdown that’s a plug-in it’s free
and if it sees someone attempting to log
in a number of times unsuccessfully it
locks them out for a little while that
prevents people who are trying to gasps
your username or password so that’s nice
again like that’s just one little thing
that one little piece of your armor
right but every bit counts I would say
finally on passwords changing the
password is probably not that important
because that assumes someone’s getting
your password and knowing it and again
they’re not targeting you that
specifically right there trolling around
so just having a really good password
like one that’s long and has some
punctuation and stuff in it that’s
that’s better if you’re really paranoid
use two-factor authentication so in
other words so for example there’s a
free plugin from google we’re in order
to log into your WordPress blog you type
in a password but then Google sends a
number to your cell phone like it texts
you and then you type it in that’s
something that of course a hacker well
good it would have to be pretty amazing
to it to get um and so that’s in that
kind of thing you can use one more
little thing that’s important when you
log into WordPress it’s insecure that is
when you go to your login page it’s HTTP
colon slash slash not HTTP s with a
little key like you get when you go to
your bank and so on it’s not secure and
so that means when you type your name
and password when you’re in the coffee
shop everyone in the coffee shop who
wants to just got your name and password
now again that that’s a hacker who who’s
sort of snow
hang around a little bit more than what
I was describing earlier but that
absolutely happens and so number one
two-factor authentication fixes that
number to use a hosting provider in
which that is secure like wordpress com
we have that option a couple of our
competitors do too though that’s not
completely unique but that’s you are in
you know you are sending your password
over completely unencrypted unless
that’s not the case super interesting by
the way I’m a big fan of double LP teen
authentication Google authentication
I’ve been using for for a while I’m
super happy with that I didn’t know that
there was a plugin for wordpress so i
will install it when we finish I will
just install it right Mary and how about
ftp hacking for security is something to
be worried about or not again has in a
strong passwords can you imagine that
when I i launched my web locks network i
I’ve been choosing movable type because
the commute the WordPress community was
not there yet and I thought right well
it’s not so much you know if I think now
wow there’s so many things so how about
themes and design because with such a
large choice a lot of time people you
know start to change design and theme
and then use a framework and then use
another thing so it’s a very Celtic
situation do you have any guidelines for
themes and designed to do a good job I
not really in that there are a lot of
really good players with quality themes
that have support behind it as you say
you know frameworks with child themes I
would say if you’re if you’re developing
a single blog you can you know there you
have a large range of choices for what
to pick and so you should pick the thing
where you know other people who have
experienced there so you have people to
ask questions of is probably the best
thing because there’s lots of good
choices if you’re a designer and you’re
making lots of WordPress blogs and this
is your career then you could learn a
lot of different themes but that’s
that’s maybe not a best use of your time
is as the designer of the blog you get
to pick more or less what the theme
framework is and so it’s it’s probably
best that you specialize in a couple or
even one theme framework and go super
deep in that framework so you become
really competent in in in delivering
sites quickly especially for the easy
for the more simple or common stuff and
also a facility for yourself of more
complicated features and so you know
some of these frameworks like like whew
with canvas or genesis and thesis and
all these things they are a whole thing
unto themselves you could almost think
of them as applications or products in
themselves they have tons of hooks right
they have their own way of doing things
you make child themes and there are
plugins that work with them i mean it’s
it’s a whole ecosystem within itself
right each one of them is a little one
and so i think it makes sense to
specialize in one or two of those and
say each you know a couple of these have
very large followings with lots of
design and stuff behind them and that
learning that probably allows you to
generate web sites faster and and deeper
um and so rather than just pulling
random themes off the shelf and sort of
having to get inside that theme authors
head every time it’s it’s probably best
specialized if that’s your career i’ll
be using genesis and thisis anima i’m a
big fan of framework because i think
there’s yeah as you say more stability
more support support and so on what wiII
happen in the next in the next year for
WordPress have been recently watched the
mat talking the founder WordPress
talking about how amazing WordPress is
going to be more and more what are you
expecting I mean what wiII happen from a
technical point of view in one year big
changing more or less will be the same
as any particular thing that you think
will will be a game changer for
well I think you’d have to ask the
people at automatic who are literally
making those decisions some trends that
we’re seeing is number one word press is
getting some sort of you could say
software process maturity that is there
are things like unit tests and and
documentation and you know things like
that which you would you know in the in
the regular software development world
you know but back into Java and.net and
stuff are part of a what you might call
a software maturity process and that
sort of being backfilled into wordpress
now which i think is very good I think
you’ll see that being pushed into a
plugins and theme developers to
participate in that that will help with
things like WordPress upgrades and stuff
where you know currently that can break
up lots of things or vice versa and
that’s that’s a whole thing and with
with more process around that especially
with automated testing and continuous
integration and stuff like that I’m
hopefully you’ll see improvements there
there’s this goal of having WordPress
automatically upgrade continuously like
Chrome I feel like that’s a very very
good thing to do upgrades on the one
hand we want upgrades on the other hand
they are events every time for everyone
and again as part of the type process
means you can start doing that as well
and I think that’s a that’s a terrific
goal that will help WordPress grow in
whatever way it wants to grow more
easily because it can be more continuous
development and deployment and so in
that sense that’s that that will enable
WordPress itself to to proceed in
whichever direction it wishes I think
you’ll see more applications built on
wordpress so in the old days WordPress
was quote-unquote blogging software now
WordPress is websites or CMS right it’s
just anything and that we see the same
thing I would say I would actually say
the minority of our customers I would
say is just their blog it’s the website
whatever that means you know the company
website or the marketing site so on um
so that will I think that will know not
only continue but I think move into the
application realm where it’s also a
shopping cart it’s also
that you know more dynamic functionality
it’s you know and and applications which
are currently built on things like Ruby
on Rails you know more and more might be
built in type of WordPress because after
all it’s got that CMS stuff built in and
so theming it is so much easier and
having non-technical people be able to
edit text and behavior is so much easier
and so it’s kind of a logical place for
it at certain types of applications to
go to I think you’ll you’ll see it
moving into application another trend I
think you’ll see is more enterprise
level features some of which means
things like performance and scale on
certain internal stuff which would
matter if you have a hundred thousand
posts or if you have a hundred thousand
users and and wouldn’t matter if you
were smaller than that so some of that’s
internal and I think you’ll you might
see some external features as well but
you know most of all the stuff that I’m
saying is speculation because of course
um automatic and the foundation sort of
together are the ones that in fact drive
that stuff and so I’m going kind of off
of what we’re seeing kind of awful if
they’ve said kind of off of what Matt
said in the last state of the word is
what his goals were so I think that
they’re more or less in line with what
you know publicly is being stated as the
direction of WordPress and we’ll see
Celinda jezel thank you so much chasm
Cohen WP engine co-founder and CEO jasm
good luck for everything and keep in touch thanks for having me
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