Monthly Roundup – March 2021

Hello!

We turned 12 years young on March 12. We all hopped on a zoom call and reminisced about our journey so far – “a dozen years full of ups and downs, great camaraderie, and a group of good people with decades of combined experience” – sipping drinks and sharing anecdotes.

Insights

Google will begin using Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor starting May 2021. Core Web Vitals, including the old Search signals will be part of the new page experience signals. Refer to this FAQ page for more info and here’s the original announcement post.

Optimizing your website’s speed is going to become more important than ever. AMP can help achieve this in a resource-efficient way.

News from Around the Web

Automattic recently released Newspack Newsletters to the WordPress plugin directory. The plugin (part of the Newspack platform from WP.com and Google) lets editors design, write, and send newsletters right from the WordPress admin.

(Psst psst. We built a similar functionality for one of our clients a while ago, which was featured in the annual State of the Word by Matt Mullenweg.)

WordPress 5.7 “Esperanza” was released. Notable features include: drag and drop for blocks and block patterns, one-click HTTP to HTTPS switching, and admins can now manually send password reset emails to users. Check out the release post and here’s the field guide for a more exhaustive list of what’s new.

Two new Gutenberg versions are out, and it’s gotten even faster. Each block now has its own CSS stylesheet and styles are loaded only for the blocks used. Furthermore, small styles are inlined to reduce browser requests. This is a dramatic improvement in performance. Changelogs here for 10.1 and 10.2. “With the changes coming to Google Search, performance improvements have never been more timely.”

Clearlake Capital Group, L.P. acquired Endurance International Group (EIG), the parent organization of brands Bluehost, HostGator and more. Following the acquisition, EIG was delisted from NASDAQ and multiple EIG subsidiaries including Bluehost were merged with Web.com Group to form a new company called Newfold Digital.

Water Cooler

Popular on our #watercooler Slack channel.

• content-visibility: the new CSS property that boosts your rendering performance
• Why some of us don’t have one true calling
• Ramen Profitable
• Cloudflare Pages open beta

Events

React JS Case Study Festival will happen online on April 27 and 28. Developers from companies across the globe will be sharing their experiences working on bleeding-edge stuff. rtCamper Imran will talk about how we built OpenWeb with decoupled WordPress and Gatsby. Tickets are $99 for the Pro Track.

WordPress VIP and Parse.ly are hosting a webinar on April 7. Join WPVIP CEO Nick Gernert, Parse.ly head Sachin Kamdar, and Microsoft Sr. Communications Manager Will Tuttle to know how Microsoft uses content analytics to improve their content marketing and how you can too.

That is all for March, see you next month!

Links: rtCamp Turns 12