Here at Kinsta, we try to give back to the community as much as we can. This year alone we’ve sponsored 28 WordCamps all around the globe: Helsinki, Bordeaux, Torino, Rotterdam, Paris, Bari, Managua, Asheville, Berlin (WCEU), Ottawa, Montréal, Singapore, San José, Zurich, Nijmegen, Pontevedra, Hong Kong, Panamá, Dallas, Tokyo, St. Louis (WCUS), Stuttgart, Sydney, Milano, Udaipur, Marseille, Osaka, and Ahmedabad.
But sometimes we give back to the non-WordPress community as well. Especially around the holidays, there are many that need additional help. Even if it’s just something small.
This year we decided to help the homeless in the Dallas, Texas area by donating food and supplies to The Samaritan Inn. They have active programs to try and get people back on their feet.
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The Samaritan Inn
The reason we chose this program is that we love their mission and the work they are doing for the community. As they state on their website:
The Samaritan Inn is more than just a place to spend the night. It is a comprehensive program that teaches self-sufficiency and life skills to meet the needs of individuals and families experiencing homelessness. We help willing people gain dignity and independence. On a given night, approximately 160 people sleep at the Inn, of which 1 out of 3 are children.
We actually have a few Kinsta team members in Texas, so this isn’t just an organization we selected at random. Last weekend our Chief Customer Office, Tom Sepper, headed to Costco.
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Costco
Tom filled up a grocery cart with the following:
204 oz coffee
20 dozen eggs
8 gallons of milk
40 lbs flour
40 lbs sugar
320 styrofoam cups
180 fl oz dishwashing liquid
520 cough drops
20 fl oz cough medicine
1,060 antacid tablets
Costco cart
Want to do something similar? Here are a few tips:
Take a look at the needs list at the shelter or give them a call to find out what they need. We did, and it worked out great.
If anyone on your team has a Costco or Sam’s card, it will allow you to get far more food than a typical grocery for whatever your budget is (we spent several hundred).
Be sure to check expiration dates if you are doing the purchase in advance to make sure the food will last at least a couple of days beyond Thanksgiving.
You will most likely want to focus on items that don’t require refrigeration unless they specifically list such items. Things like Turkeys are typically delivered the day of by large providers that specialize in that. Many shelters lack extra refrigeration space.
Are you or your company giving back during the holidays? We’d love to hear about it!
If you want to learn more about what The Samaritan Inn is doing, make sure to check out their website at saminn.org.
The post Kinsta Gives Back to the Homeless for Thanksgiving appeared first on Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting.
Review Signal has released its annual 2019 WordPress hosting performance benchmarks, and we’re ecstatic that five years in a row, Kinsta has been one of only two companies that earned Top Tier status on every plan, from Starter all the way up to Enterprise.
Year after year we’ve proven that our hosting platform (built from the ground up on top of Google Cloud Platform) is consistent, reliable, and one of the fastest in the industry. 🚀
When it comes to managed WordPress hosting, one of our goals has always been to build an all-in-one solution for our clients which can help make site management easier. Things like 24/7 customer support, reliability, and uptime are also very much a part of that.
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But one of the most important factors to us is performance and ensuring that when you get that surge of traffic that your site stays online. If a host can’t scale, this can present all sorts of growing pains for your business. Many of our clients, unfortunately, have what we call “host hopped” for many years before finally arriving at Kinsta. Better late than never right?
I’ve been building websites for close to 20 years now. I’ve used my fair share of hosts (~60+). Kinsta is, without a doubt, the best host I have used.
Jason Dittberner, Website Engineer Trustpilot review
TL;DR
For those of you short on time, here’s a quick summary:
Kinsta is one of the fastest and most reliable WordPress hosts on the market! We’ve proven this five years in a row and will continue to do so. We are a bootstrapped company and don’t answer to VCs. Our entire platform is built on customer feedback.
You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars. Kinsta is affordable for all kinds of businesses and cheaper than its competitors. We give you the best value, price, and performance. Read the truth about the real cost of cheap web hosting.
We have all the features you and your developers need. Did you know that Kinsta checks each of your WordPress sites 720 times per day for uptime? If something goes wrong, our team knows about it.
Having trouble tracking down a slow query or trying to pinpoint a slow plugin? Our team can temporarily enable New Relic monitoring for you. If you have your own New Relic key you can even add this in our MyKinsta dashboard.
Google reveals the top three SEO ranking factors, and guess what? Performance is one of them. Having a slow site in 2019 is going to seriously impact your bottom line.
Review Signal
For those of you who may not be familiar with Review Signal, it’s an independent web hosting review site run by Kevin Ohashi. Thanks to Kevin’s attention to detail and in-depth analysis, Review Signal has become one of the leading authorities when it comes to benchmarking WordPress hosting providers. In fact, this is their 5th consecutive year publishing these in-depth performance benchmarks.
We had the pleasure of doing an interview with Kevin Ohashi back in 2015, in which one of the questions we asked was, “Is there anything you find surprising about the hosting industry?”
How generally terrible it is. I started my business because, after a decade in the web hosting industry, there still wasn’t an honest web hosting review site that I would be comfortable recommending to people. And after operating my site for 4 years now, it’s very easy to understand why.
I get web hosting companies emailing me regularly trying to bribe their way into being rated the best. The worst part is, most of them aren’t even hiding it. This behavior is business as usual to them. So the most surprising thing to me is how regularly I am disgusted by the behavior of a lot of the companies in the space. That isn’t to say there aren’t some awesome companies out there, but it seems like they are the minority. The worst part about that is that these scammy/disgusting tactics are seemingly very effective and the real good guys are fighting an even worse uphill battle because of it.
Kevin Ohashi
Founder, Review Signal
Benchmark Setup and Tests
Over the past five years, we’ve seen new names entering the market, as well as old familiar faces. Some popular hosting providers also weren’t tested this year, and this is most likely due to the fact that they didn’t want to be.
Kevin tests two distinct performance attributes: peak performance and consistency over the course of two months using the following six tools:
LoadStorm: Used to help simulate real user load.
LoadImpact: Used to test the static caching of the homepage with users. (Blitz, now discontinued, was used in tests 2016 and prior)
Uptime +StatusCake: Two uptime monitoring services were used to measure consistency.
WebPageTest.org: Used to test overall speed from different locations (first view only).
WPPerformanceTester: Used to benchmark CPU, MySQL, and WP database performance.
Qualysis SSL Report Grade: Checks your SSL server rating. See their SSL check tool. This test was added in 2019 benchmarks.
The tests were run on an identical WordPress dummy site with the exact same plugins, unless one was needed for that particular provider’s caching mechanisms, etc. The benchmark reports were split up into six different tiers based on price range and plans from different hosting providers:
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<25/month tier (Kinsta doesn’t have a plan in this tier)
$25-50/month tier (Kinsta introduced hosting plans under $100 in 2017)
$51-100/month tier
$101-200/month tier
$201-500/month tier
$500+/month (enterprise) tier
Below we’ll include a summary of how Kinsta performed each year (2019, 2018, 2016, 2015, 2014) and a few places we shined. If you want to dive into all the nitty-gritty details, we’ll include a link to each benchmark test.
WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks 2019 🏆
In 2019, 27 different hosting companies were tested, this is the most of any year to date. Kinsta earned top tier status across the board. We were one of only two companies that have earned Top Tier status on every plan, every year for the past 5 years.
What does top tier mean? Kevin awards this title to hosting companies who maintain 99.9% uptime throughout the entire testing period and show little to no performance degradation during load testing, primarily focused on errors.
2019 Review Signal hosting performance benchmarks
How Kinsta Performed
$25-50/month tier: Handled Load Storm and Load Impact tests without any issues with 100% uptime.
$51-100/month tier: Handled Load Storm and Load Impact tests without any issues with 100% uptime.
$101-200/month tier: Flawless Load Storm and Load Impact tests and 100% uptime.
$201-500/month tier: Handled Load Storm and Load Impact tests without any issues with 100% uptime.
$500+/month (enterprise) tier: Flawless Load Storm and Load Impact tests and 100% uptime.
Check out all the tests in Review Signal’s 2019 benchmarks.
WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks 2018 🏆
In 2018, 26 different hosting companies were tested. These benchmarks were supposed to be in 2017, but were delayed until early 2018.
It’s not a surprise that most large shared hosts have problems with traffic waves – after all, that’s why WordPress specialized hosting companies were born in the first place – but in the 2018 tests you can clearly see that many premium hosts had troubles too. Hosts such as Pantheon, Cloudways, and Dreamhost all struggled on certain tests.
2018 Review Signal hosting performance benchmarks
How Kinsta Performed
$51-100/month tier: Handled Load Storm and Load Impact tests without any issues with 100% uptime.
$101-200/month tier: Flawless Load Storm and Load Impact tests and 100% uptime.
$201-500/month tier: Handled Load Storm and Load Impact tests without any issues with 100% uptime.
$500+/month (enterprise) tier: Flawless Load Storm and Load Impact tests and 100% uptime.
Check out all the tests in Review Signal’s 2018 benchmarks.
Kinsta had a perfect run at the Enterprise tier. This is why people shell out top dollar for Enterprise level hosting. Kinsta had a perfect 100% uptime on both monitors. They also had 0 errors on both load tests and the lowest peak response time on the Load Storm test. A Top Tier Performance was rightly earned.
Kevin Ohashi
Founder, Review Signal
WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks 2016 🏆
In 2016, 26 different hosting companies were tested. Kinsta introduced hosting plans under $100/month in 2017, so for these tests, we were only included in four tiers.
2016 Review Signal hosting performance benchmarks
How Kinsta Performed
$51-100/month tier: Handled Load Storm and Blitz tests without any issues with 99% uptime.
$101-200/month tier: Handled Load Storm and Blitz tests without any issues with 99.98% uptime.
$201-500/month tier: Handled Load Storm and Blitz tests without any issues with 99.98% uptime.
$500+/month (enterprise) tier: Handled Load Storm and Blitz tests without any issues with 99.98% uptime.
Check out all the tests in Review Signal’s 2016 benchmarks.
Kinsta had essentially perfect LoadStorm and Blitz tests. They also had no flaws in any other tests. I’m at a loss for words to praise their performance.
Kevin Ohashi
Founder, Review Signal
WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks 2015 🏆
In 2015, 19 different hosting companies were tested. These were not split up into different tiers. Tests were simply run against the servers the hosting providers made available to Review Signal for testing. Note: Kinsta wasn’t running on Google Cloud Platform in 2015.
Struggling with downtime and WordPress problems? Kinsta is the hosting solution designed to save you time! Check out our features
2015 Review Signal hosting performance benchmarks
How Kinsta Performed
Handled Load Storm and Blitz tests with minimal issues.
Had 100% uptime throughout all tests.
Check out all the tests in Review Signal’s 2015 benchmarks.
Kinsta had another top tier performance. There was a slight decline in performance but that could be explained by the fact we tested different products. Kinsta’s test last year was a Shared plan they no longer offer. This year it was a 2GB VPS that we tested. Dedicated resources are great but sometimes shared gives you a little bit extra with good neighbors which could explain the difference. Either way, Kinsta handled all of the tests exceptionally well and earned itself top tier status.
Kevin Ohashi
Founder, Review Signal
WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks 2014 🏆
In 2014, 19 different hosting companies were tested. These were not split up into different tiers. Tests were simply run against the servers the hosting providers made available to Review Signal for testing. Note: Kinsta wasn’t running on Google Cloud Platform in 2014.
2014 Review Signal hosting performance benchmarks
How Kinsta Performed
Had flawless Load Storm tests.
Performed near perfect on Blitz tests.
Had 100% uptime throughout all tests
Check out all the tests in Review Signal’s 2014 benchmarks.
A new-comer that jumped straight to the top of the performance tiers. Kinsta’s performance was amazing in the Load Storm 2000 logged in user test. They had the lowest peak response time and zero errors over a 30-minute test. They didn’t struggle with any tests whatsoever and showed zero downtime. Kinsta’s performance was top tier.
Kevin Ohashi
Founder, Review Signal
Summary
Kinsta is proud that year after year, we’ve been able to show that our hosting platform isconsistent, reliable, and fast!
We’re confident in the decisions we’ve made regarding our infrastructure over the past couple of years and are excited to see the results pay off. We were the first managed WordPress host to exclusively use Google Cloud Platform and we feel that our tests reveal just how important that decision was.
In 2019, some of our competitors have followed suit. But you can be confident that our team knows Google Cloud Platform better than anyone in the industry. We’re committed to providing you with the best possible environment to grow your business and stay ahead of your competition. Check out our Why Us page to see exactly how we’re different from other hosts.
If you have any questions regarding our service or platform, contact our technical sales team which would be more than happy to assist you. Or if you’re ready to dive right in and let us show you the Kinsta difference, migrate your site today. All of our plans include one or more free migrations. We even have a deal running right now that depending on who you’re migrating from, we’ll include an unlimited number of free migrations.
The post 2019 Performance Benchmarks – Kinsta is Top Tier, 5 Years in a Row appeared first on Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting.
Kinsta is thrilled to welcome Matteo Duò to the Marketing team as our very first Editor in Chief.
Over the years, Kinsta has become one of the most popular sources of WordPress tutorials and guides on the web. Hundreds of thousands of users read our blog and knowledge base every month. Besides providing world-class managed hosting, our mission has and always will be to help educate WordPress users on how they can succeed with their websites and businesses.
Matteo will help us achieve this by pushing our content production even further. This also includes acquiring new leads and customers, streamlining our workflows, providing editorial feedback to all in-house and third-party contributors, and improving our overall growth strategies.
About Matteo
Prior to Kinsta, Matteo worked for 4+ years as Content Marketing Strategist at Codeable — one of our trusted and loved partners — where he was “the Content guy”: traffic growth, blog, newsletter, lead generation and nurturing, SEO, ebooks, etc. are just some of the activities he’s experienced in.
Before that, Matteo grew his passion and expertise as a freelance journalist, Project Manager, and tech blogger. His articles have been featured on WooCommerce, Freemius, The Next Web, Jeffbullas.com, and several other well-known publications and sites.
Matteo’s experience with WordPress goes beyond editorial activities and spans out over marketing WordPress plugins and WordPress-based products. In fact, he also works with WordPress plugin developers and helps them generate more leads, new paying users, improve their funnels as a Marketing consultant.
Matteo is an active member of the WordPress community by participating, sometimes even volunteering, in almost all WordCamp Europe events, but also because he’s the founder and co-organizer of the Lugano WordPress Meetup in Switzerland. Funny anecdote: Matteo met with Tom, Mark, and Anita — three of Kinsta’s co-founders — at WordCamp Europe 2014 in Sofia while Kinsta was still in its infancy and he was working with another WordPress company, wpXtreme, which is unfortunately no longer in business. It’s a small world, isn’t it?!
Matteo has an MA in Philosophy of Language from Alma Mater Studiorum University in Bologna, Italy. He loves traveling and getting to know new cultures. When he needs to take a break, you can find him in Lugano, Switzerland.
Traveling, reading, going to art exhibitions, playing tennis and squash — not all the same time — are his preferred ways to experience his “offline” time. When you’ll meet him, there’s a 50% chance you’ll learn more about our blog and content. But there’s another 50% chance where you’ll have a philosophical dissertation on whether the Hawaiian pizza should be even considered a pizza in the first place.
Summary
We are excited to have Matteo join the Marketing team. As Kinsta continues to grow, he will play a pivotal role in ensuring we keep bringing you high-quality and applicable content.
You can follow Matteo on Twitter: @matteoduo or drop him a welcome below in the comments.
The post Kinsta Welcomes Matteo Duò as Editor in Chief appeared first on Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting.
On May 19, Marcel Bootsman will begin his long 465 mi. (748 km) trek on foot from his hometown of Berkel en Rodenrijs to WordCamp Europe in Berlin. That’s right, he’s walking across Germany. And better yet, he’s donating all the proceeds to DonateWC.
We love it when people think, or should we say step , outside the box. Being a bootstrap company ourselves, innovation and creativity aren’t just nice to have, they’re a necessity. When we see others in the space coming up with ingenious ways like this to contribute to the WordPress community, we have to be part of it.
Check out how you can help and follow along with Marcel on what’s going to be the most epic WordCamp adventure ever documented! Migrate today for free
Who is Marcel Bootsman?
Marcel Bootsman left the corporate world behind in 2009 and founded his own company, Nostromo. Marcel does everything from WordPress development and maintenance (theme, plugins), to building responsive ecommerce sites (WooCommerce), and even consulting for marketing agencies. He lives with his wife Beatrijs, son Noam, daughter Mila and dog Grover, in Berkel en Rodenrijs, a village near Rotterdam.
I no longer wanted to use my creativity and knowledge in my spare time alone, I wanted to help clients solve their challenges and problems.
Marcel Bootsman
Founder, Nostromo
Not only does Marcel use WordPress to make a living, but he also very active in the WordPress community, specifically Nederlands / Dutch. He’s a moderator on the WordPress NL forum, a translation editor for NL, and has organized various WordCamps and Meetups through the years.
In fact, Marcel was the organizer for WordCamp Rotterdam 2019 where the Kinsta team actually had the pleasure of meeting Marcel in person.
The Kinsta team is enjoying WordCamp Rotterdam today!
If you're attending, make sure to stop by our booth, say hi, and pick up a free copy of our "Speed up WordPress" book. #WCRTM @WCRotterdam pic.twitter.com/yt6WV3J4zP
— Kinsta (@kinsta) April 12, 2019
Walk to WordCamp Europe
Starting May 19, 2019, Marcel Bootsman will begin his 465 mi. (748 km) journey walking to Berlin from his hometown of Berkel en Rodenrijs. The trek will entail of 32 days of travel with 6 days of rest, ending on June 19, 2019.
Walk to WordCamp Europe route (Image source: Google Maps)
First off, why walk to WordCamp Europe? Marcel has three reasons:
To raise funds for DonateWC and help support the community. We encourage you to chip in and help donate!
To step, literally, out of his comfort zone and try something new. Everyone drives/flies to WordCamps, but who actually walks to one?
To have fun and meet friends along the way. Many awesome people and members of the WordPress community have helped by providing places for Marcel to stay along the way.
If you aren’t familiar it, WordCamp Europe is the largest WordPress conference in the world. It’s an annual event that welcomes everyone and aims to form and strengthen connections between European WordPress communities and beyond, it includes two conference days and a separate Contributor Day, when people gather to give back to the WordPress Open Source Project.
WordCamp Europe, or WCEU, is hosted in a different European city each year and organized by a team of volunteers selected from the WordPress community. In 2019 it will take place in Berlin, Germany on 20-22 June at the Estrel Hotel and Congress Center.
Kinsta is proud to be a Gold sponsor for Walk to WordCamp Europe! It’s all for a good cause and we wanted to help. You’ll see him sporting some Kinsta swag along the way.
Thanks @kinsta for the sponsor-wear for #WalkToWCEU.
So, now you all know what baseballcap I'll be wearing during the route.
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pic.twitter.com/cLbDIVevEz
— Marcel Bootsman (@mbootsman) April 24, 2019
Donate and Proceeds Go to DonateWC
You can help Marcel! Donate and proceeds raised from Walk to WordCamp Europe go to DonateWC. DonateWC is an initiative founded by Ines van Essen, and aims to provide people with lesser financial means with funds to get to a (big) WordCamp.
Helping people with financial challenges to attend a WordCamp is something that strengthens the community and brings people together. By raising funds for DonateWC, I’m helping these people, and supporting the WordPress community (which I have been doing for a while in other areas the last years).
Marcel Bootsman
Founder, Nostromo
From donations collected, they provide deserving community members with the following:
A WordCamp ticket
Door to door transportation
Accommodation
Food and drink money
Internet access
A once-in-a-lifetime experience
Follow Along on Marcel’s Adventure
We’ll be following Marcel along on his adventure and sharing updates as he makes the long trek to Berlin. The Kinsta team will also be at WordCamp Europe and we hope to see you all there! Make sure to stop by and say hello if you’re attending.
If you can, we encourage you to donate (https://walktowc.eu/donate/) and help make the dreams of attending a WordCamp possible for individuals who might not be able to attend otherwise. Marcel is trying to raise $6,700 (€6000). With that amount, three people can go to a WordCamp (based on average costs).
Marcel will be tweeting and posting vlogs along the way, make sure to follow him:
Follow Marcel on Twitter: @mbootsman
Follow Marcel on YouTube
View his schedule
Are you ready to walk to the next WordCamp?
The post Follow Marcel on His Epic 465 mi. Trek on Foot to WordCamp Europe appeared first on Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting.
WordPress 5.2 “Jaco” was officially released on May 7, 2019, and is available for download.
This version comes packed with a lot of exciting changes, the biggest one being the new Site Health check tool which will help both educate users and give developers the essential information they need. Other improvements include PHP error protection (fewer white screens of death), block editor improvements, new dashicons and emojis, and various developer and accessibility updates.
Update: What’s New in WordPress 5.3
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As the WordPress team describes it:
WordPress 5.2 gives you even more robust tools for identifying and fixing configuration issues and fatal errors. Whether you are a developer helping clients or you manage your site solo, these tools can help get you the right information when you need it.
This is the second major release since the launch of the WordPress block editor (AKA Gutenberg) in WordPress 5.0. Below we’ll dive into all the new improvements and the most important changes you will find with this latest WordPress release. PHP version compatibility checks for plugins and themes. In WordPress 5.2, they’ve added a completely new tool which comes with two new pages to help debug common issues due to server and software configurations, PHP versions, etc.
Site Health Status
Under “Tools” → “Site Health” there is a new page called “Status.” The site health check shows critical information about your WordPress configuration and items that require your attention.
WordPress Site Health
One thing you’ll probably notice right away is that they’ve added a percentage score grade at the top of the page based on how many tests your site passes. Some aren’t happy about this and there is a discussion among developers (Ticket #47046) of whether or not a grading system should exist. The main reason is that scores sometimes create additional problems as users are obsessed with scoring 100%.
However, we are glad to see this, as it will help raise awareness among users. For example, a check for inactive plugins and themes is important. Why?
Many don’t realize that simply because something isn’t active on your WordPress site doesn’t mean someone can’t execute the code if they browse directly to it. Therefore, in order to keep your WordPress site secure, it’s recommended to completely remove inactive themes and plugins if they aren’t being used.
The tests in the new Site Health tool includes checks for the following performance and security-related items:
Performance Checks 🚀
Latest WordPress version
Up to date version of PHP
Up to date SQL server
Required and recommended PHP modules are installed
UTF8MB4 is supported
Scheduled events
Working HTTP requests
REST API available
Can perform loopback requests
Security Checks 🔒
Only running active themes
Up to date plugins
HTTPs connection
Secure communication
Debug mode off
Can communicate with WordPress.org
Background updates are working
If you’re a Kinsta client, it’s easy to score 100% as everything on our platform is always kept up to date. 😉
Site Health tool in WordPress – 100% score
The tests are also filterable via site_status_tests, meaning plugin or theme developers can add their own tests, or remove existing ones. See more info.
Site Health Info
Under “Tools” → “Site Health” there is another new page called “Info.” This is a place to find helpful debugging information about your WordPress site’s configuration which you can share with developers, hosting providers, etc. There is a handy “Copy site info to clipboard” button which allows you to easily grab the information and paste it into a text file to share with a third-party.
WordPress Site Health Info
The Site Health Info page contains hundreds of different data points about your WordPress site. Without a doubt, this new page will help developers get the information they need from users faster.
Here’s just a small snapshot of some of the awesome and very helpful details you can quickly see.
WordPress: WordPress version, site language, user language, Home URL and Site URL, permalink structure, multisite check, number of users.
Directories and Sizes: WordPress directory location, size, upload location and size, theme location and size, plugin location and size, database size, total installation size.
Active Theme: Name of theme, version, author, author website, parent theme, theme features, theme directory location.
Must Use Plugins: Details of any must use plugins currently running, version numbers, and author names.
Active Plugins: Active plugins running, version numbers, and author names.
Media Handling: Active editor, ImageMagick version number, string, resource limits, GD version, Ghostscript version.
Server: Server architecture (such as Linux, Windows, etc.), Web server (such as Nginx or Apache), PHP version, PHP SAPI, PHP max input variables, time limit, memory limit, max input time, upload max filesize, post max size, cURL version, SUHOSIN status, Imagick library status, .htaccess rules.
Filesystem Permissions: Check against the following directories to see if they are writable. Main WordPress directory, wp-content directory, uploads directory, plugins directory, themes directory, must use plugins directory.
PHP Error Protection
WordPress 5.1 was originally scheduled to introduce a new feature called “fatal error protection” which would protect from the WordPress white screen of death while updating PHP. However, due to several critical flaws, this feature was delayed. It has now been included in WordPress 5.2.
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With this protection, WordPress will recognize when a fatal error occurs and pause the offending theme or plugin in the WordPress admin dashboard so that you’ll still be able to log into the backend of your site and (hopefully) fix the problem. For less tech-savvy users, this is a great new feature. All we can say is, we wish this feature had been added years ago!
However, we always still recommend using a staging environment when testing out a new version of PHP.
If your site experiences issues while upgrading PHP versions, it will look like the image below on the front-end, but you will still be able to log into the backend to fix the problem.
Fatal error protection in WordPress 5.2
On the backend, you will see a message letting you know that your WordPress site is currently in recovery mode and that there may be an error with a theme or plugin.
Admin backend while in recovery mode (Image source: WordPress.org)
Miscellaneous Developer Updates
WordPress 5.2 also comes with improvements for developers; everything from improvements to the block editor and privacy policy pages, a new WordPress hook, updates to the coding standard, and more.
Block Editor Improvements
There were dozens of improvements made to the block editor (Gutenberg) that is shipping with WordPress 5.2. A few that caught our eye:
In 5.0, WP_Screen::is_block_editor() was introduced to allow developers to conditionally execute code depending on whether the block editor is being loaded. However, there were some issues with this that have now been fixed in WordPress 5.2. See #46195.
Media and text blocks got enhanced.
Image and block resizers are much better than before.
There were performance improvements made in terms of loading time.
Block editor performance in WordPress 5.2 (Image source: WordPress.org)
PHP Coding Standard Updates
WordPress now officially recommends running PHP 5.6 or higher with your hosting provider. If you’re curious, Kinsta supports up to PHP 7.3!
With WordPress 5.2, this means developers can take advantage of new coding standards such as namespaces, anonymous functions, short array syntax, short ternary syntax, and assignments with conditionals. If you’re a developer and have already been running on PHP 7 or higher for a while now, this might not impact you, but it’s good to see WordPress making updates.
Read more about updates to the coding standards.
Privacy Updates
WordPress 5.2 brings several improvements for developers working with Privacy Policy pages and data exports.
The first is four new helpers which will make customizing the privacy policy page easier:
New function: is_privacy_policy()
A new theme template file: privacy-policy.php
New body class: .privacy-policy
New menu item class: .menu-item-privacy-policy
The second change is in regards to data exports:
User Data exports no longer use a hardcoded list, but now use the default list of allowed tags in wp_kses(). New filtering is now available as well.
Read more about the privacy updates in WordPress 5.2.
Improvements for Writing JavaScript
With the addition of webpack and Babel configurations in the @wordpress/scripts package, developers won’t have to worry about setting up complex build tools to write modern JavaScript. Read more about JavaScript improvements.
New Body Tag Hook
WordPress 5.2 adds a new wp_body_open() hook, which lets themes support injecting code right at the beginning of the <body> element. The WordPress team encourages theme developers to start using this. Read more about some of the other miscellaneous developer updates.
New Emojis and Dashicons
In terms of visual updates, WordPress 5.2 has new emojis and dashicons.
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Twemoji Updated
In WordPress 5.2 the latest version of Twemoji, 12.0.1, was added. Version 12 includes 230 new emojis, including accessibility emojis and our personal favorite, the Sloth. See #46805.
Twemoji 12.0
New Dashicons
Dashicons are used to prettify your WordPress admin dashboard. It was definitely time for an update as they haven’t changed since WordPress 4.5. WordPress 5.2 has 13 new icons, including Instagram, a suite of icons for BuddyPress, and rotated Earth icons for global inclusion. WOFF 2.0 font file format has also been added.
Along with WordPress 5.2 comes a number of changes working together to improve contextual awareness and keyboard navigation flow for those using screen readers and other assistive technologies.
Post formats are now in list tables.
New link markup on the WordPress admin bar submenu.
The currently viewed archive in the archive dropdown widget is now pre-selected.
A new media view was added to the media library.
Headings were added to the data tables on the Export Personal Data and Erase Personal Data pages.
The alt text field is now the first field displayed in the media modal.
Security Enhancements
Ticket #39309 was opened in 2017 describing a security issue with the WordPress infrastructure. Basically, if someone was able to compromise api.wordpress.org, they could issue fake updates and take control of user’s WordPress sites.
Therefore, as of WordPress 5.2, it now checks for the existence of a x-content-signature header. If one isn’t found, it falls back to a signature file. Regardless of the method, the update packages are now digitally signed using Ed25519 and are base64-encoded.
How to Update to WordPress 5.2
Since every customer’s site is different we always recommend utilizing the one-click staging environment. You can clone your live site in a matter of seconds and then test WordPress 5.2 with your existing theme and plugins to check for compatibility. You can of course also take a manual backup before updating your live site, just to be safe.
To update WordPress to 5.2 simply click on the updates icon in your WordPress admin dashboard. And click on the “Update Now” button. While your site is being updated, it will be in maintenance mode. As soon as your updates are complete, your site will return to normal.
Update to WordPress 5.2 in dashboard
As long as everything goes well with the update you should then see the “Welcome to WordPress 5.2” screen. And that’s it! Quick and easy.
WordPress 5.2 welcome screen
After clicking around in the dashboard you will also receive a message to update your database to the newest version. Simply click on the “Update WordPress Database” button and you’re good to go.
Database update required
Troubleshoot Issues with WordPress Update
Whenever people update a major version of WordPress, there are always some that experience issues, and that is due to the thousands of different plugins and themes currently co-existing in the market. Here are a few ways to troubleshoot common issues.
Getting the white screen of death? This is commonly resolved by simply restarting PHP and deleting the full page cache on your WordPress site.
Try deactivating all your plugins to see if that fixes your issue. Then reactivate them one by one until you find which plugin might need an update from the developer.
Try switching over to a default WordPress theme, such as Twenty Twenty. If this fixes your problem, you might want to reach out to your theme developer.
Troubleshoot and diagnose JavaScript issues in your browser.
Summary
There are a lot of exciting things packed into WordPress 5.2! The new Site Health Status information will help educate users on the best security and performance practices. It will be interesting to see how the new percentage score comes into play here, but regardless, it will raise more awareness regarding things such as running the latest version of PHP, deleting inactive themes and plugins, etc.
The new Site Health Info information should dramatically help developers get the info they need right away when working with users. This means fewer tickets for plugin and theme developers, as well as hosting providers. In fact, you’ll probably see many developers update their documentation to require that you include an export of the info screen data before you can even submit a ticket.
The PHP error protection provides a way for users upgrading to newer versions of PHP to be able to still login in case something has gone wrong. Fewer white screens of death is always a good thing!
What do you think of WordPress 5.2? We’d love to hear your thoughts regarding the new Site Health tool.
The post What’s New in WordPress 5.2 (Site Health and PHP Error Protection) appeared first on Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting.
WordPress 5.1 “Betty” was officially released on February 21, 2019, and is available for download.
WordPress 5.1 is the first major release since the launch of the WordPress block editor (AKA Gutenberg) in WordPress 5.0. And while it does bring some tweaks and improvements for the block editor, the biggest new features in this release involve the WordPress Site Health project and notices for PHP versions.
In this post, we’ll take a look at all of the new features that might affect how you use WordPress:
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New dashboard notice for PHP version
PHP version compatibility checks for plugins and themes
White screen of death protection
Improved block editor performance
Changes for developers
latest versions of PHP for improved performance and security.
From our benchmarks, PHP 7.3 is on average 9% faster than PHP 7.2. And If you compare PHP 7.3 to PHP 5.6, it can handle almost 3x as many requests (transactions) per second! You should always test your plugins and themes first on a staging site for compatibility. If all is good, make sure to take advantage of this free performance boost.
WordPress is now finally getting on board with pushing the latest versions of PHP with some new tools and notices to promote PHP versions and compatibility.
First up, if you’re running an outdated version of PHP on your server with WordPress 5.1, you’ll see a new dashboard widget prompting you to upgrade your PHP version.
WordPress 5.1 PHP version dashboard prompt
If you host at Kinsta, there’s zero chance you will see this message because the minimum PHP version that we allow is PHP 5.6. Right now, the warning will only trigger for PHP versions under that.
We wish the WordPress team had gone with a higher version, but this is a step in the right direction. Also, if you click on the button to “Learn more about updating PHP” in the notice, the official WordPress docs do recommend PHP 7.3.
minimum PHP version required as a comment in the plugin header. However, up until now, this hasn’t done anything but show what minimum PHP version the developer is willing to support.
In WordPress 5.1, if you try to install a new plugin or theme from WordPress.org where the developer has set a minimum PHP version higher than the version on your server, you’ll see a message telling you that “This plugin doesn’t work with your version of PHP. Learn more about updating PHP.”
Additionally, you will be prevented from installing the plugin. At this time, you can get around this by manually downloading the ZIP file from the repository and installing a plugin that way. But really – just update your PHP version!
The PHP compatibility check for plugins
WordPress white screen of death while updating PHP.
Unfortunately, this feature was been pulled from the WordPress 5.1 release at the last minute. However, it’s for good reason.
The fatal error protection mechanism explained here has been pulled out of the 5.1 release as it had several flaws critical enough to postpone the feature. A new path to address the issues is underway via #46130 and is intended to be released as part of WordPress 5.2.
Felix Arntz, WordPress Core Team
make.wordpress.org
With this protection, WordPress will recognize when a fatal error occurs and pause the offending theme or plugin in the WordPress admin dashboard so that you’ll still be able to log into the backend of your site and (hopefully) fix the problem. For less tech-savvy users, this will be a great new feature once they iron out all the problems.
If your site experiences issues while upgrading PHP versions, it will look like below on the front-end, but you should still be able to log into the backend to fix the problem.
Fatal error protection in WordPress 5.1
Gutenberg block editor in WordPress 5.0, the Gutenberg team has been hard at work improving the block editor. If you remember from our annual PHP benchmarks, we found that WordPress 5.0 and 5.02 were actually slower than WordPress 4.9.8. That’s not good! Best rest assured, the WordPress core team is working on this.
There was a bit of confusion as the Gutenberg team released Gutenberg 5.1 at the same time as the core team released WordPress 5.1.
Despite the identical version numbers, WordPress 5.1 does not include Gutenberg 5.1. Instead, WordPress 5.1 includes Gutenberg 4.8.
As such, the biggest changes to the block editor in WordPress 5.1 deal with performance. Compared to WordPress 5.0, you should see faster load times in the editor and a shorter KeyPress event time.
There’s more good news, too. The block editor performance will get even better once the most recent versions of Gutenberg are merged into the core – you can see a performance comparison of different Gutenberg versions below (remember – WordPress 5.1 includes Gutenberg 4.8 – so that’s where we’re at right now).
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Gutenberg performance benchmarks for different versions
Learn more.
Cron API
The Cron API now has new functions to help with returning data. You’ll also get new filters to modify cron storage. Learn more.
New JavaScript Build Processes
WordPress 5.1 offers a new JavaScript build option. You can learn more about the specific tweaks here.
How to Update to WordPress 5.1
Since every customer’s site is different we always recommend utilizing the one-click staging environment. You can clone your live site in a matter of seconds and then test WordPress 5.1 with your existing theme and plugins to check for compatibility. You can of course also take a manual backup before updating your live site, just to be safe.
To update WordPress to 5.1 simply click on the updates icon in your WordPress admin dashboard. And click on the “Update Now” button. While your site is being updated, it will be in maintenance mode. As soon as your updates are complete, your site will return to normal.
How to update to WordPress 5.1
As long as everything goes well with the update you should then see the “What’s New” screen. And that’s it! Quick and easy.
The WordPress 5.1 welcome screen
Troubleshoot Issues with WordPress Update
Whenever people update a major version of WordPress, there are always some that experience issues, and that is due to the thousands of different plugins and themes currently co-existing in the market. Here are a few ways to troubleshoot common issues.
Getting the white screen of death? This is commonly resolved by simply restarting PHP and deleting the full page cache on your WordPress site.
Try deactivating all your plugins to see if that fixes your issue. Then reactivate them one by one until you find which plugin might need an update from the developer.
Try switching over to a default WordPress theme, such as Twenty Nineteen. If this fixes your problem, you might want to reach out to your theme developer.
Troubleshoot and diagnose JavaScript issues in your browser.
Summary
While there aren’t any big front-facing features in this release, WordPress 5.1 adds some great features to push for healthier WordPress sites.
The focus on PHP versions will hopefully push the large percentage of WordPress users running out-of-date PHP versions to update to more recent versions, and the block editor performance improvements are much welcomed.
What do you think of WordPress 5.1? Does anything catch your eye? Anything you wish they would’ve included?
The post What’s New in WordPress 5.1 (Moving PHP Forward) appeared first on Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting.
Clear your schedules and mark your calendars for March 7-8, 2019. The first ever WordCamp Nordic is taking place in Helsinki, Finland, and we are beyond excited! This is one WordPress event you don’t want to miss. Eleven team members from Kinsta will be attending, and we would love to meet and chat with all of you.
Whether you’re a Kinsta client or not, we’d love for you to stop by and say hello. There’s nothing we enjoy more than striking up a conversation about WordPress and how we might be able to help your business.
What is a WordCamp?
WordCamps are just one of the many things that set the amazing open source WordPress community apart from others. For those who have never attended one, a WordCamp is a conference (usually organized by local leaders), where people can come together to learn and enjoy sessions about how to better use WordPress.
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They provide great opportunities for meeting and sharing with all types of users, from web developers and agencies to enthusiasts without any technical knowledge. It’s a time when competitors lay down the sword to make connections with users and collaborate on ways to take WordPress to the next level or discuss how the CMS is changing the industry as we know it.
The first WordCamp was organized in San Francisco by Matt Mullenweg in 2006, and since then local communities around the world have organized hundreds of others. As of writing this post, there have been 948 WordCamps, across 71 cities, in 65 countries, on 6 continents! Make sure to check out the WordCamp schedule to see if there is one happening in your local area.
WordCamps
Why WordCamp Nordic is Important
There are a couple of reasons why you don’t want to miss WordCamp Nordic on March 7-8, in Helsinki, Finland.
First off, this will be the first one ever held. It’s always fun bringing together a new group of people for the first time. Over 600 attendees are already expected! Eleven of which will be from our own Kinsta team.
Second, it’s the only WordCamp in the world that represents Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden! Other WordCamps in Finland have been popular and successful, so the sky is pretty much the limit.
Given the importance of this unique opportunity and our passion to share, we are proud that Kinsta is a Gold Sponsor for WordCamp Nordic 2019.
Thank you @kinsta for being a #WCNordic Gold sponsor! https://t.co/YoZr6yxgz8 #WordPress
— WordCamp Nordic (@WordCampNordic) January 31, 2019
Contributor Day (March 7, 2019)
The event will take place over two days, the first is the contributor day on March 7. This is basically an entire day dedicated to sharing and you can have some fun visiting all the booths! Some common topics you might see come up in discussions include:
Hosting
Gutenberg
Accessibility
Community
WordPress Core
Design
Marketing
Polyglots and translating WordPress into multiple languages
Themes and Plugins
Conference Day (March 8, 2019)
The second day is the conference itself (March 8), in which there will be 24 talks about all sorts of riveting topics, all related to the awesome world of WordPress. Here is the speaker and session lineup:
Allan Halme: Integrating Multi-Lingual Products from a PIM to WooCommerce
Andrey Savchenko: Lessons from WordPress Core on How to (Not) Write Code
Antonio Villegas: Gutenberg Best Practices for WordPress Developers That Had No Time to Learn Javascript Deeply
Bjørn Johansen: Continuous Integration and Deployment with WordPress
Christian Nikkanen: Revamping a Local Media Giant’s Web Service with a React Single Page App
Dominik Schilling: State of WordPress Internationalization in 2019
Elisa Heikura: The Next Most Important Skill to Learn
Felix Arntz: Web Policies and Reporting – Defining Contracts Between Your Site and the Browser
Francesca Marano: Standalone Contributor Days: Help Make WordPress with Your Community
Jaakko Alajoki: Environmentally Friendly WordPress Development
Jenny Wong: Getting Ready for PHP7.2
Jonathan Sulo: The WordPress Plugins That Your Hosting Provider Fears
Julius Haukkasalo: 5 Big Mistakes I’ve Made as an Entrepreneur That You Can Avoid
Kristoffe Biglete: How We Grew Our Blog Mobile Traffic by 800%
Laura Hinkkanen: Content <3 Design (And Vice Versa)
Magne Ilsaas: WordPress at Scale Within the Norwegian Government
Marco Fernandes: Gutenberg Cloud: Your Blocks in the Cloud (For Every CMS)
Monica Solheim Slind: WordPress at Scale Within the Norwegian Government
Otto Kekäläinen: How to Investigate and Recover from a Security Breach – Real-Life Experiences with WordPress
Piccia Neri: UX for Everyone
Rian Rietveld: Who’s Afraid of ARIA?
Sarah Semark: Why I’m Building a Robot to Steal My Job
Taeke Reijenga: The Accessibility Business Case
Thomas Audunhus: Cache Is Keeping You from Reaching Your Full Potential as a Developer
Thomas Hurd: How Do You Create the (Almost) Perfect Multilingual Website?
Thor Andre Gretland: Gutenberg Cloud: Your blocks in the cloud (for every CMS)
Get our Free Fully Illustrated Speed up WordPress Guide
Kinsta will be present at WordCamp Nordic and has prepared a special surprise for any of you wanting to improve your WordPress site’s performance. If you haven’t yet seen our speed up WordPress guide, we share over 15 years worth of experience and hard lessons we’ve learned. And now you can grab yourself a free fully illustrated printed copy.
Speed up WordPress guide
Visit our Kinsta booth during the event and grab yourself a free copy. We promise it will beat out any other swag!
We will also have a few other surprises at our booth which you don’t want to miss. Hint: It might involve some free hosting and cookies.
Who Is Kinsta?
For some of you, this might be the first time you’ve seen us. Therefore, here’s a little information on what we do at Kinsta and exactly how we can help your business.
Kinsta provides premium managed hosting optimized for WordPress. About seven years ago we realized that it was not easy to find WordPress hosting providers that would guarantee an adequate level of security, speed, and stability. We thought that a higher level of service was needed in the hosting market and we decided to change things. Therefore, a new business that leaves nothing to chance was born.
Kinsta has put together the fastest platform in the world (built on top of Google Cloud), a fantastic design team, and a group of experienced WordPress developers.
Speed is our obsession, security is our main concern, and scalability is one of our unique features. We’ve combined lightning fast PHP 7, MariaDB, latest LXD container technology and developer tools like SSH and WP-CLI. We believe we have created the best managed WordPress hosting solution available today.
In addition to speed, we are more than proud to have the most knowledgeable and professional support team that you’ll find in the industry.
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Our entire support team is made up of WordPress developers and Linux hosting engineers many of whom have managed their own servers, created themes and plugins, and contributed back to core. This ensures you’ll receive expert advice from someone who actively uses and develops with WordPress. We ditched the outdated support tier model. Every Kinsta client gets to chat with the same team members that support our large enterprise and Fortune 500 companies.
We also invest a lot of time and resources in sharing what we’ve learned, offering contributions to the community, and creating in-depth guides and tutorials! Knowledge is power, and everyone deserves to have access to this.
You’ll Love Our MyKinsta Dashboard
What distinguishes Kinsta’s hosting service is not limited to just speed and support. We weren’t satisfied with any of the existing control panel solutions on the market, so we built our own from the ground up specifically for WordPress site management. Our MyKinsta dashboard is one of a kind because of its complete suite of features and ease of use.
MyKinsta dashboard
Earn Recurring Lifetime Commissions with Our Affiliate Program
Motivating partners is important to us, and we fully understand that your success is our success. That is why we decided not to rely on clunky third-party affiliate tools or services and again created our own from the ground up. Check out our in-depth post on how we went from MVP to the final product.
With the Kinsta affiliate program, you can earn up to $500 for every referral + 10% monthly recurring lifetime commissions. This is the best deal you’ll find in the industry! Our affiliate dashboard mimics the look and feel of our MyKinsta dashboard so you’ll feel right at home. You don’t even need to be a Kinsta client to join. Sign up today and start building your passive income.
Kinsta affiliate dashboard
Internationalization and Localization of Kinsta
The success we have achieved internationally has pushed us to localize our services to be even better for our clients. In addition to the English version, our website is also available in 11 languages:
Italian
French
Spanish
German
Portuguese
Japanese
Dutch
Norwegian
Swedish
Danish
Finnish
The sites in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Finnish have been live for a few months and the corresponding blogs are growing fast. Moreover, we are producing new content for the English blog at a rapid pace. For this reason, we advise you to keep an eye on all of these blogs, so you won’t lose any news, guides or tutorials that our authors are constantly publishing:
Kinsta English Blog
Kinsta Norwegian Blog
Kinsta Swedish Blog
Kinsta Danish Blog
Kinsta Finnish Blog
In addition to the site and blog, we are working hard on localizing both the MyKinsta and affiliate dashboards. We expect to have this completed within the next few months.
With regard to our support, we currently provide 24/7/365 support in English. Support is also available in German (9:00-17:00 CET), French (7:00-15:00 UTC) and Dutch (8:00-16:00 CET).
In regards to billing, we only accept USD for right now. However, we will be supporting payments in EUR, NOK, SEK and DKK (as well as in various other currencies) in the near future.
Mark Your Calendars!
Events like WordCamp are fantastic opportunities for anyone using WordPress, whether professionally or as a hobby, to meet and bounce ideas off each other. For this reason alone, we are excited to be participating in WordCamp Nordic 2019.
We hope to see you there! Make sure to stop by our booth and say hello.
The post Join the Kinsta Team at the First Ever WordCamp Nordic appeared first on Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting.
Wow, 2018 has been an incredible year for the team at Kinsta. We are growing faster than we ever thought possible and have been pushing out new feature updates at an astounding rate. Like you might have guessed, we have many new faces that have joined the team, from developers to support engineers. Together we are on a mission to continue building the best managed WordPress hosting platform in the industry.
We want to first thank all of you for supporting us thus far and trusting us with hosting your businesses, blogs, and ecommerce sites. We wouldn’t be here without you, and your feedback and suggestions have been invaluable to our team. One thing that never changes at Kinsta is we’ll never stop innovating.
Some of the changes and new features we’re especially proud of this year include:
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Releasing dozens of improvements to our MyKinsta dashboard. We still call this a dashboard, but in reality, it has evolved into so much more than that. It truly is an all-in-one solutionfor managing all of your WordPress sites.
Adding five new data centers, allowing you to choose from 18 different data centers to host your sites.
Listening to your feedback and adding more disk space, migrations, and installs on our hosting plans.
Being one of the first hosts to release PHP 7.3. Performance has and always will be a top priority for us. That’s why we publish our annual PHP performance benchmarks.
Helping developer teams of all sizes do more. SSH is now available on all plans. This allows those even on our starter plans to utilize Git, WP-CLI, and popular tools like Bedrock and Trellis.
Releasing multi-user access permissions so agencies and developers can work together.
Check out more below of what we accomplished in 2018 and some amazing features we have planned for this upcoming year.
Customer and Revenue Growth Rate
For those of you who don’t know, Kinsta is a100% bootstrapped company and we’re really proud of this! If you haven’t read it yet, make sure to check our CFO’s post on 16 lessons we learned bootstrapping Kinsta from $0 to 7-figures in revenue.
While almost all of our competitors have gone down the VC funding route, we’ve chosen to build the company we want to build, without investors making decisions behind the scenes. This allows us to focus on things such as performance, customer’s feedback, and providing the best support in the industry. For example, our support team isn’t tiered into different levels. We think that model is broken when it comes to hosting. Our entire team is made up of only the best Linux Engineers and WordPress developers.
Some of these strategies don’t always make us the most money upfront but it helps to improve our platform as a whole moving forward. Being bootstrapped, we have the advantage of being able to do this. And we are happy to see it pay off in the results!
Kinsta has yet again seen continuous customer and revenue growth throughout 2018. We try to stay as open and transparent as possible, so here is our annual run rate graph below, pulled directly from Baremetrics. Over the past 12 months, we’ve seen a 124% increase in revenue. We are now generating over 11x what we did in 2015.
Annual run rate from Baremetrics
And over the past 12 months, our client base has grown by over 262%! (previous growth in 2017 was 157.7%). October was by far our busiest month ever.
Active subscriptions from Baremetrics (client growth rate)
We always find it fascinating how diverse our client base is. Over the past year, we’ve had the pleasure of working with everyone from small bloggers, to WordPress agencies, and some of biggest names in the industry, such as MariaDB, Freshbooks, and Tripadvisor.
Our amazing affiliates have also contributed a big part to our growth. This year the number of Kinsta affiliates skyrocketed and we now work with thousands of bloggers and affiliate marketers around the globe.
Who doesn’t like a little passive income? Our low churn rate, currently sitting at under 5%, makes this a little easier! We are proud that Kinsta affiliates can refer customers knowing that they’ll be taken care of, not just because we are trying to make a quick buck.
Here are a few additional fun facts on the massive amount of data that we deliver every month:
Clients average a little over 7.5 billion HTTP requests through Kinsta’s servers.
236+ terabytes egress data transfer travels through Kinsta’s servers.
2.05 billion HTTP requests are served through the Kinsta CDN.
92+ terabytes data transfer travels through the Kinsta CDN.
According to our data from Intercom, we again managed to decrease our median support ticket response time, down to 1 minute and 35 seconds (previously 2 minutes in 2017, and 7 minutes in 2016). The median time to solve and close your issue has also improved. Right now it’s at 48 minutes, down from 55 minutes in 2017.
Median support time (From Intercom)
As we grow we continue to add new highly-skilled support engineers so that we always maintain the same level and quality of service. And so far so good. 97% of all live chats/tickets are closed with the client happy and satisfied. A big shout out to our amazing support team for accomplishing this! They work 24×7 365 days a year to ensure all Kinsta clients get the best support possible.
Support conversation ratings (From Intercom)
This year we are also excited to offer support in additional languages. That’s right, many of our support engineers are bilingual as well. We are working on getting native language support to 24×7 across the board, but for right now the schedule is as follows:
Spanish support is available weekdays between 10:00 and 01:00 CET.
German support is available weekdays between 9:00 and 17:00 CET.
French support is available weekdays between 8:00 and 16:00 CET.
Dutch support is available weekdays between 8:00 and 16:00 CET.
Team Expansion
The team has again more than doubled in 2018. We’ve hired more support engineers, developers, sysadmins, as well as team members to help in marketing and sales. In fact, there isn’t a time when we aren’t hiring, so make sure to check out our career page if you want to explore opportunities to work at Kinsta.
With so many of our competitors providing subpar service, Kinsta has had to add a dedicated migration team which now helps with all of our white-glove migrations. You can rest easy knowing your data will be safe when migrating over.
On the management front, we’re excited that Tom Sepper is our new Director of Support. Tom has over 16 years of experience working in the web hosting and IT industry, much of which was spent in a managerial type role working alongside remote teams. You could also consider him a “jack of all trades,” as he’s done a little bit of everything, including operations, customer service, project management, marketing, and HR.
Tom hails from the great state of Texas (Dallas/Fort Worth area). He’s a family man, die-hard Cubs fan, and is a Texas Hold’em aficionado. Learn more about Tom.
On the marketing side, we are happy to welcome Simon Illes, as our Affiliate Marketing Manager. If you have a question about the affiliate program, need help with content for your blog, you can contact him directly by emailing affiliates@kinsta.com.
On the sales side, we have Jennie Lawton, as our Sales Manager. Got a question about which hosting plan to choose or if Kinsta can help you on your next project? Or maybe you need a custom plan, yes Kinsta does offer custom dedicated solutions if you need them. Send us a message, and most likely you’ll chat with Jennie throughout some point in the process.
Restructuring
Whenever a company grows as fast as we have, there is always some restructuring that goes on. You want to put team members in positions where they will succeed the most, as well as doing something they enjoy. Over this past year, we’ve made a few changes to our management team:
Jon Penland has been moved from Head of Sales & Support over to Chief Operating Officer.
Anita Dunai has been moved from Chief Operating Officer to Head of Local Operations.
Brian Jackson has been moved from Director of Inbound Marketing to Chief Marketing Officer.
Feature Updates and Changes
Now for the fun part! All the feature updates and changes we were able to push out over this past year. We can’t possibly go into detail on all of the changes, so we’ll just cover the major ones.
Huge Changes to Our Hosting Plans Based on Client Feedback
Kinsta takes all feedback and suggestions very seriously. When we message or tweet you back saying that we’ll pass this along to our development or client care team, we mean it. Throughout 2018 we heard from a lot of you that some of our plans weren’t satisfactory, and therefore we made some changes!
Previously our Business 1 plan had three installs. A lot of you manage multiple websites or work with clients, and this simply wasn’t enough. Therefore, we’ve added two more, bringing it to five WordPress installs on our Business 1 plan.
We also heard from a lot of developers with smaller sites, that the lack of SSH on our lower-tier plans was a big let down. This has slowed down your workflows and prevented great tools like Bedrock and Trellis from being used.
Therefore, SSH access is now available on plans, from Starter plans through Enterprise. Previously this was only available on our Business 1 and higher plans. This also means that Git and WP-CLI are also now accessible across the board. We hope as developers, this will help make your lives a little easier!
SSH
One of the biggest criticisms we heard is that we didn’t provide enough disk space (SSD storage) on our lower-tier plans. And while we have found that many users severely overestimate the disk space they actually need, we still agreed. Especially for those of you with bigger files and media. Therefore, we added more disk space on our Starter, Pro, and Business 1 plans.
Here is a summary of the changes:
Starter plans now have 5 GB (previously 3 GB)
Pro plans now have 10 GB (previously 6 GB)
Business 1 plans now have 15 GB (previously 10 GB)
SSH, disk space, and free migrations
We know for some of you, migrating a WordPress site is a pretty big deal and it can be overwhelming. Previously, only our Pro and higher plans included a certain number of free migrations. However, we’ve found that those on Starter plans are typically the ones who require the most help with migrations. Therefore, all Starter annual plans now include a free migration.
This includes those paying annually by credit card and wire transfers. Those eligible for our non-profit and open source project discounts can also take advantage of the free migration.
We definitely don’t want to hinder anyone’s ability to give Kinsta a try, so let our expert team handle your website’s migration. We hope this makes your transition to Kinsta a little smoother!
Infrastructure Additions: Five New Data Centers
Adding new data centers is always a big priority to us, not only because of performance but also for data privacy laws. Because Kinsta is built on Google Cloud Platform, our team has the ability to roll out new locations almost immediately after they become available. Which means as Google grows, so does Kinsta! This allowed us to add five more data center locations this past year, bringing us to a total of 18.
Google Cloud data center locations
This infrastructure change allows you to even more strategically position your WordPress sites closer to your visitors and customers. This helps to decrease network latency, TTFB, and ensure faster page load times. Below is a list of old locations and the new ones added in 2018:
Hong Kong (new)
Los Angeles, California, USA (new)
Hamina, Finland (new)
Montreal, Canada (new)
Eemshaven, Netherlands (new)
Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA
St. Ghislain, Belgium
Changhua County, Taiwan
Sydney, Australia
The Dalles, Oregon, USA
Ashburn, Virginia, USA
Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA
London, UK
Frankfurt, Germany
Jurong West, Singapore
Tokyo, Japan
São Paulo, Brazil
Mumbai, India
It’s important to remember as well, that all of Kinsta’s hosting plans are on Google Cloud Platform’s premium tier network. While some of our competitors are utilizing the standard tier, we never settle for second best.
For data traveling across continents, Google Cloud’s premium tier network is about 41% faster, on average, than the standard tier network. For data traveling to a nearby region (same continent), the premium tier is about 8% faster. While networking only makes up a fraction of your total page load times, every millisecond adds up!
If you want to read more about why Kinsta chose Google Cloud Platform as a provider, check out our case study with Google.
Improvements to MyKinsta Dashboard
Our development team has been literally working around the clock this past year to make our MyKinsta dashboard, not only a dashboard, but an all-in-one solution for managing your hosted WordPress sites. If you’re not a Kinsta client and are used to cPanel, you’ll be blown away by this! Below are a few of the many improvements that were made over this past year.
Force HTTPS Tool
In the past, Kinsta clients had to reach out to our support team or use a plugin to redirect all of their HTTP traffic to HTTPS. No more! We now have a Force HTTPS tool. This allows you to redirect the traffic with a few simple clicks from the MyKinsta dashboard.
Force HTTPS in MyKinsta
CDN Usage in MyKinsta Analytics
Being data junkies ourselves, we want you to have access to as much data as possible. This makes it easier for you to troubleshoot performance and billing issues on your WordPress sites, without ever having to reach out to our support team. Therefore, we added the ability to see your CDN usage in MyKinsta Analytics.
You can see an overview of usage across all of your sites, or filter it down individually. Data is available from the past 24 hours, 7 days, and 30 days. The top section shows you bandwidth used by the Kinsta CDN. Below it, you can see the top files by requests and the top files by bytes. If a certain media file from your site is hogging all of your CDN bandwidth, you’ll be able to easily spot it within a few seconds.
CDN usage in analytics
You can also see the top file extensions by bytes. This makes it easy to see what type of media on your site is responsible for the majority of your bandwidth usage. We also give you a response code breakdown.
CDN top file extensions and response codes
Multi-User Access and Permissions
Multi-user access and permissions was also one of the most highly requested features in 2018. We were excited to finally get this in our MyKinsta dashboard. Whether you’re an agency working with hundreds of clients, or simply needed to give a developer restricted access, this can now all be done with a few simple clicks.
There are six roles that you can now apply to users to further grant or restrict access:
Company Administrator: Complete control of all company and site data.
Company Developer: Manage all sites and manage users on or below their level. No access to billing details or company settings.
Company Billing: Only sees billing details and company settings such as invoices, company address, etc.
Site Administrator: Complete access to a site and have full control of all environments attached to that site. Cannot remove a site from a company.
Site Developer: Access to the staging environment for a single site. Can perform any actions on it, apart from removing the staging environment.
Company Owner: Only one allowed and is automatically a company administrator. Can request account closure or transfer ownership to another company administrator.
Working in a constantly changing team? No problem. Another new feature we added is the ability to transfer company ownership. This allows for easy restructuring of permissions at the top-level of your company.
Downloadable Backups
Paranoid much? Even though Kinsta offers automatic backups, you can never be too safe. Therefore, this past year we added downloadable backups. You can now with a single click create a downloadable archive file (.zip) containing your entire WordPress site. The archive file contains your website’s files as well as the SQL file containing the contents of your database.
Downloadable WordPress backup
You Can Add Your SSH Keys in MyKinsta
Being WordPress developers ourselves, we are always trying to figure out ways to speed up development workflows. Many of you utilize SSH here at Kinsta on a daily basis. Whether it is to perform common sysadmin tasks or run tools such as Composer, WP-CLI, etc.
Therefore we added the ability to add your SSH keys in the MyKinsta dashboard. SSH keys provide a more secure way of logging into a server and eliminate the need for a password. Although you can further protect your login by adding a passphrase.
Add SSH keys
Hourly Backups Add-on
While Kinsta already offers automatic backups every 24 hours, this simply wasn’t enough for some clients.
Many run WordPress sites that are frequently changing. Whether it’s a high-traffic blog that gets a lot of comments or more data-intensive sites such as e-commerce, membership, and communities. Losing data is something you can’t afford. If a problem occurs, having to roll back a site 24 hours is just not a feasible solution and can be a nightmare when it comes to merging back in transactional data.
Therefore we added a new hourly backup add-on which allows you to choose from increments of every hour or every 6 hours.
WordPress hourly backups
IP Deny Tool
While we already have some security precautions in place at Kinsta, certain sites will simply get hit harder than others, whether it’s from bots, spammer or hackers. Therefore, to help combat this we added an IP Deny tool. This allows you to stop them dead in their tracks.
IP Deny tool
One-Click Database Password Changes
Previously you had to reach out to the Kinsta support team to change your database password. No more! We’ve added a simple button in the MyKinsta dashboard which you can use to easily generate a new database password.
Change database password
Rebuilt Our Affiliate Dashboard
We launched the Kinsta affiliate program back in 2017, however, this year our developers rebuilt the entire affiliate dashboard from the ground up. When we finished we were left with a vastly superior system which required a lot less management, had a lot more features, automated common affiliate admin tasks, and shared the same technology stack as our main product, MyKinsta.
Struggling with downtime and WordPress problems? Kinsta is the hosting solution designed to save you time! Check out our features
The affiliate dashboard is also now available in Spanish, Italian, French, and German. More languages are coming in 2019.
Kinsta affiliate dashboard
Read more about what went into rebuilding our affiliate system.
Launch an Affiliate Facebook Group and Blog
If you’re an affiliate marketer, figuring out additional ways to make money or increase your earnings is something that’s probably always on your mind. The frustrating part is many new strategies and approaches take time to test, and time is something a lot of you don’t have.
Therefore, we decided to launch the Make Money with WordPress Facebook group focused entirely on how to increase your income with the best CMS on the planet! Learn affiliate marketing techniques and chat with others who have seen success and get applicable shortcuts to higher earnings. We’ve already got 650+ members! Head on over and join in on the conversation.
Make money with WordPress Facebook group
Want more affiliate content? We also launched the affiliate academy section on our blog. This is still fairly new but we already have some interviews with some big name affiliate marketers which will be published soon. It always helps to get insider tips from those in the trenches on a daily basis.
PHP 7.3 Is Here and It’s Fast!
We aren’t ashamed to admit it, being obsessed with performance, one of the most exciting feature updates for us this year was the official release of PHP 7.3! Who doesn’t like a free speed boost?
Curious how it performs? We tested PHP 7.3 with WordPress 4.9.8, WordPress 5.0, WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads. PHP 7.3 was a clear winner in every single one of our benchmarks.
From our findings, PHP 7.3 is on average 9% faster than PHP 7.2.
If you compare PHP 7.3 to PHP 5.6, it can handle almost 3x as many requests (transactions) per second!
To see the performance of all platforms and more detailed test results, make sure to check out our annual PHP benchmarks report.
Remember, you can change your PHP version with a few simple clicks in the MyKinsta dashboard.
Change to PHP 7.3
Additional Updates
Besides all of the major features updates and changes mentioned above, here’s a quick rundown on a few additional ones.
November 02, 2018: WP-CLI v2 Is Now the Default on All Kinsta Servers
September 21, 2018: Improvements to MyKinsta Navigation, User Profiles, and Billing
September 17, 2018: Stay in the Loop with Our New Status Page
May 01, 2018: Export Redirects to CSV, New Backup UI, and Quick Navigation
Our CDN partner, KeyCDN added nine additional POPs in 2018, bringing the total locations to 35. They also added IPv6 support.
Connecting with the WordPress, Blogging, and Marketing Community
Looking back at this same time last year, WordPress powered 29% of the web, and today it now powers over 32%. Because of this we always try and connect with the growing community as much as possible. We were happy to sponsor various WordCamps and Meetups this year:
WordCamp Verona
WordCamp Asheville
WordCamp Toronto
WordCamp Udaipur
WordCamp Atlanta
WordCamp Porto
WordCamp São Paulo
WordCamp Gran Canaria
WordCamp Guadalajara
WordCamp Puebla
WordCamp Montevideo
WordPress Meetup Tuluá (Col)
WordPress Meetup Caracas (Ven)
WordPress Meetup Bogotá (Col)
WordPress Meetup León (Nic)
WordPress Meetup Monterrey (Mx)
WordPress Meetup Pubela (Mx)
It’s always nice to see a few pictures. So here’s Daniel Harfouch, our Head of Global Expansion, hanging out with the YITH team.
Kinsta with YITH (on the left)
And Rafael Benard, a support engineer at Kinsta, who got a snapshot with Matt Mullenweg while attending WordCamp US.
Rafael Benard (Kinsta) with Matt Mullenweg
The Kinsta team will also be attending WordCamp Nordic and WordCamp Europe in 2019 (and there are some more already in our schedule). If you’re going, make sure to stop by and say hi! We would love to meet you.
Throughout 2018 we had the pleasure of interviewing nine of the top minds throughout the community; from developers to bloggers, and even WordCamp organizers. Below are just a few, you can check out all of them here.
Interview with Raelene Morey of Words By Birds
Interview with Jonathan Denwood of WP-Tonic
Interview with David Vongries of MapSteps
Interview with James Laws of Ninja Forms
Interview with Kevin Muldoon of kevinmuldoon.com
Interview with Daman Jeet of XLPlugins
Interview with Basilis Kanonidis of NinjaOutreach
Interview with Jean Galea & Mark Zahra of WP Mayor
Interview with Laura Sacco of Yoast
Providing High-Quality Content
As you might have guessed, we love content marketing here at Kinsta! We literally spent thousands of hours in 2018 writing and updating content to help make your lives a little easier. Here’s a list of our 10 most popular blog posts and tutorials:
What’s New in WordPress 5.0 (Hello Gutenberg)
Is PHP Dead? No! At Least Not According to PHP Usage Statistics
The Do’s and Don’ts for Hosting WordPress Membership Sites
Pingdom Speed Test Tool: Ultimate Guide for 2019
Ultimate WordPress Multilingual Guide – How We Launched 12 Languages
Why You Should Stop Using Nulled WordPress Plugins and Themes
Affiliate Systems Suck, So We Rolled Our Own
What’s New in PHP 7.3
Is WordPress Secure? Here’s What the Data Says
Website Downtime: Applicable Tips on How to Prevent It
Another piece of content we are especially proud of this year is our Speed up WordPress guide. If you haven’t seen it yet, make sure to go check it out! We share over 15 years worth of experience and hard lessons learned, all in one massive guide. It’s 25,000+ words of applicable tips and advanced strategies on WordPress performance.
And of course, we can’t forget our annual PHP benchmarks report. We tested the performance of 18 platforms/configurations (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!) on five versions of PHP (5.6, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3)! From the results, you can clearly see that PHP 7.3 is dominating. Also check out which version of WordPress is faster, 4.9.8 or 5.0.
We have a lot of great content coming down the pipe in 2019, so make sure to subscribe to our newsletter.
Going Multilingual
In 2017 we launched our Spanish site. But this year we took it a step further and launched our website in 10 more languages! We don’t use auto-translation tools either. Our team works with professional native language speakers to ensure the highest-quality translations. When our team does something, we go all the way.
Our content is now available in the following 12 languages:
English
Italian
Portuguese
French
German
Japanese
Dutch
Spanish
Swedish
Finnish
Norwegian
Danish
Language switcher
How We Stack Up
Curious how Kinsta stacks up? Based on independent tests from Review Signal, Kinsta was among the highest-performing WordPress hosts for the fourth year in a row in 2018, earning the Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance award. We also have built some pages to help you see how we differ from other providers on the market:
Kinsta vs. WP Engine
Kinsta vs. SiteGround
Kinsta vs. Flywheel
New 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
We stand behind our service and that’s why we decided to now offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, along with no long-term contracts. This means you can try out Kinsta risk-free for 30 days! We have no doubt that once you try our platform that you’ll see what you’ve been missing and why Kinsta is different.
What to Expect in 2019
In 2019 we’ll be focusing heavily on overhauling our support systems. The goal is to provide a better support experience for our customers and for our support engineers. On the MyKinsta side, we’ll be focusing on the user experience. We’re going through our UI elements and making sure they’re the absolute best fit for each task. The goal is not to only to give you the best tools on the market but to make sure you spend as little time as possible in MyKinsta so you can focus on growing your business.
You will see a bunch of upgrades to the Analytics section (with more metrics than ever), easier migrations, better notifications (both in-app and email) and bunch of optimization to make sure MyKinsta runs smoothly. We’ll be continuing our global expansion on multiple fronts. We’ve launched in 12 languages with business-hour support being added gradually. We’re getting ready to introduce multiple currencies to make sure as many of our customers can pay in their selected currency.
A couple other specific things we’ll be improving/adding include:
Switching from a development domain to a live domain will be easier than ever.
Improvements to our DNS Editor UI.
WebP support is coming.
MyKinsta dashboard will be available in all of our new languages.
Tighter integration between MyKinsta and our support systems: MyKinsta tools will be easier than ever to find and our support team will reach new heights of effectiveness as our support systems intelligently and proactively feed our Engineers critical time-saving information.
The affiliate dashboard will be getting a lot of new features to provide more data, such as seeing which sites are converting, which pages and posts, etc. We’ll also be adding the ability to easily share Kinsta’s content on social media with your affiliate link.
Affiliate dashboard and banners will be available in all of our new languages.
Translating our website into more languages is a strong possibility.
New hires for our global expansion project.
Always feel free to let us know if you need something and we appreciate your continued support. From all of us at Kinsta, we wish you a Happy Holidays. Here’s to a successful 2019!
The post Looking Back at an Incredible 2018 – Kinsta Year in Review appeared first on Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting.
As of December 06, 2018, WordPress 5.0 “Bebo” is here! If you ignored all the other updates this year, now’s the time to buckle down and take notice as this is the biggest update for 2018. WordPress is completely revamping how users and developers use the CMS with their new Gutenberg editor. It’s now all about blocks. We also have a fresh Twenty Nineteen theme which is the default on new installations.
As with any new version of WordPress, we always recommend testing. This might sound like a broken record, but because this release impacts everything from the editor, to third-party plugins, and even your theme, testing is not optional! If you don’t test, things could easily break. This is one release where you don’t want to just click that update button.
That being said, let’s dive into everything that’s new with WordPress 5.0 release.
WordPress 5.0 Changes Everything (What’s New)
What the Community Thinks of Gutenberg
Official WordPress 5.0 Release Date
How to Get Ready and Update to WordPress 5.0
WordPress 5.0 Changes Everything (What’s New)
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With WordPress 4.8 (Evans) we got a multitude of new widgets and improvements, along with a handy improvement to how links work in the visual editor.
With WordPress 4.9 (Tipton) we saw a significant step toward a more user-centric way to customize and manage websites, with great improvements to the Customizer, new exciting functionalities to widgets, a powerful text editor for editing code.
Most of the past updates have been relatively minor and for a lot of us, didn’t impact us that much. WordPress 5.0 is different. Rather than adding minor improvements here and there, this release is entirely focused on the following two things:
The new Gutenberg WordPress Editor
Twenty Nineteen WordPress theme
Other than that, minor changes and bug fixes are only being looked at on a case-by-case basis. In reality, it’s all about Gutenberg.
While at first, this might sound like there isn’t that much changing, but that couldn’t be further from the truth! Gutenberg is an attempt to push WordPress as a CMS forward in website building space. In fact, the WordPress team is planning on moving away from the old release cycle where we only get small updates to one where we’ll see bigger changes happening at once. However, they have also said the plan is to have a minor WordPress release twice a month now that WordPress 5.0 is released. You can check out what they have planned for Gutenberg Phase 2.
So what exactly is Gutenberg? The Gutenberg handbook does a great job at summarizing it:
Gutenberg began as a transformation of the WordPress editor — a new interface for adding, editing, and manipulating content. It seeks to make it easy for anyone to create rich, flexible content layouts with a block-based UI. All types of page components are represented as modular blocks, which means they can be accessed from a unified block menu, dropped anywhere on a page, and directly edited to create the custom presentation the user wants.
It is a fundamental modernization and transformation of how the WordPress experience works, creating new opportunities for both users and developers. Gutenberg introduces new frameworks, interaction patterns, functionality, and user experiences for WordPress…
In other words, in WordPress 5.0, you will no longer have the same classic WordPress editor or text editor that you’ve been used to using over the past decade. It’s now going to look like this:
Gutenberg Editor
In fact, you might have already seen a callout about it in your WordPress dashboard. This was added in the WordPress 4.9.8 minor release as a way to give users a heads up that this is really happening.
WordPress 5.0 Gutenberg callout
Gutenberg is the default and only editor on fresh WordPress 5.0 installations. Don’t worry, you can install the Classic Editor plugin if you want. This will allow you to continue using it alongside the new Gutenberg editor.
However, fair warning, the WordPress team has said that the Classic Editor plugin will only be officially supported until December 31, 2021. So we highly recommend diving into Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0 sooner than later.
Why is this happening? There are a couple of reasons.
1. WordPress Has to Compete
The first is that even though the self-hosted version of WordPress is open source, Automattic, the team behind WordPress.com is still a business. It needs to compete with all of these other website building solutions such as Wix and Squarespace. If you take a look at the WordPress market share, from 2017 to 2018, year-on-year growth is at around 17.3%. While that seems great, take a look at some of the competitors. Squarespace grew by 180% and Wix grew by 233%.
And while the open source project and the business are technically separate, they go hand in hand with each other. In other words, WordPress needs to catch up! Why do you think all the fancy page builder plugins are growing at an unbelievable rate? It’s because people need easier ways to build their websites and write content. Even other publishing platforms such as Medium and Ghost frankly have a much better writing experience if you’re just wanting to blog.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, competition is what drives the product and community forward faster.
2. Needed a Rewrite
Second, Gutenberg is now built on React, a very popular JavaScript framework used and maintained by companies like Facebook and Instagram. Our developers at Kinsta love React, and in fact, we used it when we decided to roll our own affiliate system. Besides that Gutenberg takes advantage of a lot of other modern technologies such as the REST API, ESnext + JSX, WebPack, etc. Riad Benguella has a great post on how Gutenberg is changing WordPress development.
Because of how it is structured, it opens up a whole new world for developers in terms of “block development.” Remember, everything in Gutenberg is about blocks. So you’ll probably be hearing that term a lot.
But it can also complicate things as typically developers would need to learn new languages. However, thankfully, the WordPress community has come to rescue and there are great open source projects such as create-guten-block. Essentially this is a zero-configuration dev-toolkit (#0CJS) to develop WordPress Gutenberg blocks in a matter of minutes without configuring React, webpack, ES6/7/8/Next, ESLint, Babel, etc.
You’ll probably also want to check out the following:
Atomic Blocks
Stackable
Kadence Blocks
Atomic Blocks
You would think that with all of this, the aim would be to improve performance? While we hope this is the case, a lot of reports so far are indicating slower performance.
Slow perceived performance compared to Classic Editor
Benchmarking Gutenberg
Note: Some of these should be taken with a grain of salt as the Gutenberg team has been pushing out a lot of updates. And now that WordPress 5.0 is officially here, you can expect a lot more to come.
The other downside to this is that most (not all) WordPress theme and plugins have to be rewritten to work with Gutenberg. Mainly those that interact with the WordPress editor. Yoast SEO is a great example of a WordPress plugin developer that jumped on board really quick! They pushed out their first Gutenberg update back in July 2017, and have been releasing new ones ever since. Even though they were first worried about accessibility. The WordPress team has now issued a statement regarding accessibility in Gutenberg.
If you want to dive into all of the features of Gutenberg and really see how it works, check out our deep dive into the Gutenberg WordPress editor.
If you’re not ready yet you can delay this change by disabling the Gutenberg WordPress editor.
Twenty Nineteen Theme
WordPress 5.0 also includes the new minimal Twenty Nineteen theme. It is shipping with full Gutenberg support, both on the front and back-end. We’ll be covering this theme more in-depth in an upcoming post.
Twenty Nineteen WordPress theme
What the Community Thinks of Gutenberg
With WordPress powering over 32% of all websites on the internet, any major change like this is bound to cause some controversy. After all, let’s be honest, the WordPress editor really hasn’t changed much at all in the past decade.
If you take a look at the Gutenberg WordPress plugin, with over 700,000 active installations, it has a rating of 2.3 out of 5-stars. With a whopping 900+ 1 -star ratings. While this doesn’t look good, it’s important to realize that people have been rating Gutenberg ever since it was in beta. Also, with such a huge change, there are bound to be some reviews from users who are simply resistant to change.
Gutenberg WordPress ratings
We took a poll on Twitter to see what users think of Gutenberg right now. With over 450 votes, 42% say they haven’t used it much and therefore don’t really have an opinion either way. With WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg quickly approaching this is kind of scary in itself. Another 28% say they hate it, 19% say they love it, and 11% say it’s growing on them.
We want to know, what do you think about the new #Gutenberg WordPress editor? Read more: https://t.co/bkJvrMmfNE
— Kinsta (@kinsta) October 23, 2018
Ian from Declious Brains also has a very good post where he shares a lot of valid concerns for Gutenberg. No matter how you look it, due to the fact that WordPress is pushing all of these new languages and technologies, sites, when upgraded to WordPress 5.0, are simply going to break. There is no preventing it. Unless every single plugin and theme you’re using has been fully updated, which in most cases it hasn’t, you might be in for a world of hurt when it comes to troubleshooting.
And who does this impact the most? Agencies, freelancers, and developers. Which is why this big of an update might have you concerned.
If all that isn’t enough, ClassicPress has emerged. This is a hard fork of WordPress (without Gutenberg) that serves the CMS-based business website market. The concern here is are we going to start to fragment? Even their team doesn’t know yet how they will handle plugin and theme compatibility yet. Either way, this is definitely an interesting project to keep an eye on.
ClassicPress
Official WordPress 5.0 Release Date
So now the question you probably all have, when is WordPress 5.0 coming out? The WordPress core team originally set a target release date of November 19, 2018. However, this was a tentative date.
As of December 6th, 2018, WordPress 5.0 is now officially here!
If you’re working with clients running on WordPress this is something to keep in mind. You can, of course, install the Classic Editor or simply put off updating until later.
Either way, you should have a game plan for the holidays. The last thing you want is your client calling you up complaining about their site being broken after they upgrade to WordPress 5.0.
How to Get Ready and Update to WordPress 5.0
We can’t stress enough how important testing WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg is. You really need to make sure all of your plugins and theme are going to work properly. If you have a custom built solution, make sure to start reaching out to a WordPress developer to get it updated. This is not something your WordPress host will be able to fix for you.
Struggling with downtime and WordPress problems? Kinsta is the hosting solution designed to save you time! Check out our features
It’s important to note, that unless you have specifically configured WordPress to auto-update major releases, you will have to manually update to WordPress 5.0. By default, WordPress only auto-dates minor releases in its own branch, like 4.9.7 to 4.9.8, not major releases like 4.9.8 to 5.0.
Kinsta also doesn’t force major updates.
WordPress 5.0 and WooCommerce
WooCommerce has released an official statement regarding the release of WordPress 5.0. If you’re running WooCommerce, make sure to update to WooCommerce 3.5.1+ before updating to WordPress 5.0 to avoid breaking changes.
WordPress 5.0 and Plugins
The team over at Yoast is consistently pushing out new features, bug fixes, and improvements for Yoast SEO and Gutenberg compatibility. We highly recommend updating to the latest version (version 9.2.0 was released on November 20th) before updating to WordPress 5.0.
1. Create a Staging Environment
We highly recommend installing WordPress 5.0 on a test site or utilize your host’s staging environment. This way you won’t affect your live site. If you’re a Kinsta client you can easily copy your live site to staging with a few simple clicks.
WordPress staging environment
2. Take a Backup of Your WordPress site
If you aren’t testing on a development or staging site (which you should be) make sure to take a complete backup of your WordPress site. There are a lot of great WordPress backup plugins you can utilize. If you’re a Kinsta client you have access to a staging site as well as four different types of backups, including automatic backups which are stored for 14 days.
However, due to the fact that WordPress 5.0 is such a huge change, we also recommend taking a downloadable backup of your entire site. This includes all of your files and your MySQL database. You never know, you might miss something after those 14 days have passed. It’s always handy to be able to launch a backup if needed. Kinsta clients can download a full backup with a simple click anytime in the MyKinsta dashboard.
Download full WordPress backup
3. How to Update to WordPress 5.0 (Staging or Production)
Depending on your hosting provider, your website might automatically update to WordPress 5.0 after it’s released. WordPress core doesn’t do this by default. And at Kinsta, we will not upgrade your site to WordPress 5.0 automatically unless you’ve set WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE to true in your site’s wp-config.php file. This is intentional, as you should always test first.
WordPress 5.0 is available in your admin dashboard. Simply click on the updates icon in the toolbar. Then click on the “Update Now” button. While your site is being updated, it will be in maintenance mode. As soon as your updates are complete, your site will return to normal.
Update to WordPress 5.0
You will then get a prompt to update your WordPress database.
WordPress 5.0 database update required
As long as everything goes well with the update you should then see the “What’s New” screen. And that’s it! Quick and easy.
Troubleshoot Issues with WordPress Update
As with every new release of WordPress, there are always some that experience issues, and that is due to the thousands of different plugins and themes currently co-existing in the market. Here are a few ways to troubleshoot common issues.
Getting the white screen of death? This is commonly resolved by simply restarting PHP and deleting the full page cache on your WordPress site.
Seeing a “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute” screen that won’t go away? Your site might be stuck in maintenance mode.
Try deactivating all your plugins to see if that fixes your issue. Then reactivate them one by one until you find which plugin might need an update from the developer.
Try switching over to a default WordPress theme, such as Twenty Nineteen (once it’s available). If this fixes your problem, you might want to reach out to your theme developer.
Troubleshoot and diagnose JavaScript issues in your browser. This can be especially helpful if a crucial component like the Visual Editor (TinyMCE) breaks.
4. Check Plugins and Themes (They Might Be Impacted by Gutenberg)
With WordPress 5.0 comes the new Gutenberg Editor. You can disable this and restore the classic editor if you want. Or perhaps you find a bug that breaks something.
As part of your testing with Gutenberg, you’ll want to make sure that all of your third-party plugins and theme work with Gutenberg. Anything that interacts with the WordPress editor will most likely be affected. Yoast SEO is a good example as it has custom meta boxes. Advance Custom Fields would be another one.
Check with the developers of your plugins and theme. Many have started announcing Gutenberg support or when they will have it. Many theme developers are also releasing their own Gutenberg blocks.
After installing WordPress 5.0, the “Edit” option under your pages and posts will automatically open in the new Gutenberg editor. If you have the classic editor plugin installed, you’ll also see an option for that as well.
Gutenberg edit
What Happens to Current Content?
What happens to the content you created in the classic editor when opened in the new Gutenberg editor? Basically, the entire post will show up as one big TinyMCE editor box. They did this to preserve the content format of all of your posts and pages. To take advantage of the Gutenberg editor, you can select the option to “Convert to Blocks.”
Gutenberg convert to blocks
Everything will then be automatically converted into the new Gutenberg blocks.
Converted Gutenberg blocks
What Happens to Shortcodes?
The same goes for shortcodes. In this example, we had a NinjaForm contact form contact form already on our development site. It was placed in the classic editor using a shortcode. So in the Gutenberg editor, we again select the “Convert to Blocks.”
Gutenberg shortcode
The shortcode is then turned into a Gutenberg shortcode block. The contact form still renders fine on the front-end.
Converted Gutenberg shortcode block
Summary
WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg is the biggest update to WordPress that we’ve had in a long time. It affects everyone, from how users interact with the editor and write content, to how developers code plugins and themes. Only time will tell how successful the Gutenberg project is. But no matter what, we encourage everyone to test WordPress 5.0 on a staging environment before upgrading.
Have any thoughts regarding WordPress 5.0 or Gutenberg? We’d love to hear what you think about it.
The post What’s New in WordPress 5.0 (Hello Gutenberg) appeared first on Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting.
We couldn’t be more excited to welcome Tom Sepper, a hosting industry veteran, as Kinsta’s new Director of Support. He will be handling the daily operations of our support department to ensure as Kinsta continues to grow, that every client still receives the attention they deserve. Nothing is more important to us than the quality of our support and it’s what has set us apart from the competition.
Meet Tom
Tom has over 16 years of experience working in the web hosting and IT industry, much of which was spent in a managerial type role working alongside remote teams. You could also consider him a “jack of all trades,” as he’s done a little bit of everything, including operations, customer service, project management, marketing, and HR.
Tom comes to us with a wealth of senior-level industry experience. Among the companies he’s worked for:
Chief Operating Officer at Site5.com, a web hosting provider in operation since 1998.
Chief of Staff at Pressed, a white label managed WordPress hosting platform, acquired by Envato in 2017.
Chief Operating Officer at HostPapa, a Canada-based hosting provider.
Community & Documentation Manager at PowWeb, a web hosting provider in operation since 1999.
Tom hails from the great state of Texas (Dallas/Fort Worth area). He graduated from Texas Tech University with a Bachelor of Business Administration in management. He’s a family man, die-hard Cubs fan, and is a Texas Hold’em aficionado.
Customer experience has always been a passion of mine, and as I was discussing the opportunity with Kinsta executives, it became quite clear that our ideals around the customer experience and culture were in complete alignment. I am excited to bring my experience and ideas to the Kinsta team to help build on the amazing foundation already in place! – Tom
No matter what problem you might have, you can pretty much bet that Tom has encountered it before. We are excited about the breadth of expertise and experience he is adding to our team.
Want to say hi? You can connect with Tom on LinkedIn or Twitter. Or feel free to leave him a welcome below.
The post Welcome Tom Sepper as Kinsta’s New Director of Support appeared first on Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting.
, outside the box. Being a bootstrap company ourselves, innovation and creativity aren’t just nice to have, they’re a necessity. When we see others in the space coming up with ingenious ways like this to contribute to the WordPress community, we have to be part of it.
#WCRTM @WCRotterdam pic.twitter.com/yt6WV3J4zP
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Fully managed 
Secure like Fort Knox
Free migrations
Ultimate speed
Daily backups
Google Cloud Platform
There’s nothing we enjoy more than striking up a conversation about WordPress and how we might be able to help your business.
Other WordCamps in Finland have been popular and successful, so the sky is pretty much the limit.
One thing that never changes at Kinsta is we’ll never stop innovating. 
Our low churn rate, currently sitting at under 5%, makes this a little easier! We are proud that Kinsta affiliates can refer customers knowing that they’ll be taken care of, not just because we are trying to make a quick buck.
The frustrating part is many new strategies and approaches take time to test, and time is something a lot of you don’t have.
We would love to meet you.
Here’s to a successful 2019!
It’s now going to look like this:
