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How the Holidays Are Shaping Web Traffic Trends (and Why You Should Care)

Happy almost-2025, everyone! While you’re finishing up your year-end to-do’s (or wishing you had started them earlier), I’ve been diving into some fresh data published by Cloudflare. This time, they’ve looked at how people around the globe have been spending their time online during the holiday season – between Christmas and the New Year. As it turns out, when the feasting starts, the web often takes a back seat.

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I Tried OpenAI’s Sora Video Generator…It’s Mostly Unusable

If you haven’t tried Sora yet (or are in a region where it’s not currently available) and you’re curious about it, then keep reading. I will begin with an overview of Sora’s usage limits, its UI / UX, and the different ways you can make a video with it. Then I’ll share samples of the videos I made – both good and bad – and I’ll review some of Sora’s additional features that you can use to edit your videos.

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I Read Through Cloudflare’s “2024 Year in Review.” Here’s What You Should Know

Cloudflare just released their “2024 Year in Review” report – a detailed document that dives into the key trends and patterns shaping the web over the past year. I’ll be honest with you, it’s my first time paying attention to this report, but I’m really fascinated by the insights that they’ve been able to deliver. It’s an opportunity for all of us (website owners) to explore the forces behind the internet as we use it every day, and perhaps walk into 2025 a little more prepared.

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WP Engine Gets Its Preliminary Injunction Against Automattic/Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg’s crusade against WP Engine seems to have hit a roadblock as the case moved from the court of public opinion to the court of…well, the actual court. On Tuesday December 10, WP Engine won a preliminary injunction against Mullenweg and Automattic that seems to be aimed at preserving the status quo from before Mullenweg’s alleged attack, thus giving the case time to work through the court system while limiting the damage to WP Engine.

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The Dark Side of Reddit’s Search Dominance: Inside the Parasite SEO Game

Have you noticed in the past few months that Reddit seems to pop up in almost every single one of your Google search results? Whether you’re looking for product reviews, travel tips, or life advice, those distinctive Reddit threads are almost always there on either page one or two – though it’s usually the former. This isn’t just Google’s algorithm being extra friendly to Reddit – there’s actually a story behind it.

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WordPress 6.7 “Rollins” Released, Including a New Default Theme

On November 12, WordPress 6.7 was released for WordPress users everywhere to enjoy. Keeping with the jazz theme, WordPress 6.7 goes by the name “Rollins,” named after Sonny Rollins. In total, 750 different contributors worked on WordPress 6.7. In this post, I want to take you through some of the highlights of the release, including features that regular users will care about and features that developers might care about.

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How to Add a Background Image Cover in WordPress – in 1 Minute

While overall opinions on the Gutenberg editor vary, even the naysayers can’t deny that there are so many elements you can add now with just the core WordPress blocks that you couldn’t before. One of those elements is a background cover image. Not only is there a dedicated “cover block” solely made for this purpose, but it only takes a minute to add it to your posts. In this guide I’ll show you how to do it and also how to customize it.

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How to Find and Remove Large Files on cPanel Hosting

One of the most popular control panels that many hosting companies rely on is cPanel. If you have cPanel hosting and you’re starting to hit your storage limits then you need to learn how to remove large files from your database. This quick 3-minute guide will explain it to you.

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Add HTML to WordPress With the Custom HTML Block (and Claude?)

The Gutenberg block editor has close to 100 default blocks available for use. However, there are still situations where you might want to add a feature to your post that’s simply not available via the default blocks. That’s where custom HTML comes to the rescue! In this quick guide, I’m going to show you how you can use the HTML block along with Claude (a freemium AI tool) to customize your own posts.

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Mullenweg and Co. Take Over the Advanced Custom Fields Plugin

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about the new and growing fight between Automattic/Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine. Back then, the two were mainly trading words, and dueling cease and desist letters. However, the scope seems to be continuing to expand, including WP Engine filing an actual lawsuit against Matt Mullenweg and Automattic.

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WordPress Profile Picture Without Gravatar (And How to Add It to Posts)

As much as I love using WordPress, there are certain quirks about it that annoy me. One of those in particular is that the only default way to change your user profile photo is by linking it to a Gravatar profile. It’s not only annoying because it forces you to create an account with a service that you probably wouldn’t use otherwise, but then it also populates that same photo on any WordPress site you log into (if you use the same email address).

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How Does WordPress Sound to You? Join Our Survey About WordPress Brand Tone and Voice

Over the past few years, we have seen increased efforts to better position and market the WordPress brand. Along with these efforts, we now have a Brand Writing Style Guide that defines how the WordPress voice should sound and what tone it should convey. The brand book was first created in August 2018 and has undergone several updates since then. It serves as a manual for all marketing messages, campaigns, and communication from WordPress.

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I Spent 20 Hours Testing 60+ Niche WordPress Themes, and There Are Some Elephants in the Repo

Recently, I was working on a rewrite of one of our theme list posts and in the process I tested over 30 themes. By the end, I came to the unfortunate conclusion that the majority were junk. My gut feeling was that the “shiny cover, empty box” syndrome I encountered was more widespread than only the niche I worked on. So I decided to fire up a test instance of WordPress and went through 31 additional themes in a separate niche. These are the results of my research.

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12 Best WordPress Hosting Providers of 2024 Compared and Tested

Ever since we started this site, we’ve been deeply involved in the topic of hosting a WordPress website. Personally, it wasn’t something I deliberately set out to learn that much about; rather, the topic found me. If you’re using WordPress, hosting is just essential, and there’s no way to ignore it. You just can’t run a site without it. So naturally, you’d want the best hosting available and steer clear of the sub-par options.

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Automattic Wants to Migrate 500+ Million Tumblr Blogs to WordPress

If you like ambitious projects, I think this news tidbit will be right up your alley. In late August, Matt Mullenweg and Automattic announced plans to migrate all of the existing Tumblr websites to WordPress. Given that Tumblr hosts more than half a billion blogs (yes – that’s a “B”), I think this might just be one of the largest migration projects ever undertaken.

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8 Mistakes I Made When Building My First WordPress Plugin Using AI (With No Prior Development Experience)

As the title of this article says, I have no formal development experience. Prior to taking this plunge into building my first plugin, the most coding I was capable of, was fumbling my way through some HTML and CSS. But! I was damn enthusiastic about building a WordPress plugin, so I decided to see if all the fear mongering about AI replacing junior developers had any merit.