The web is full of big beautiful images these days. They look great but they can come at a HUGE cost for performance. If your images aren’t optimised properly your websites speed will suffer, and that means higher bounce rates, lower conversion rates, poor engagement, and worse.

In this talk, we’ll explore all of the techniques at our disposal for optimising images to make your site way faster. We'll cover image formats and sizes, optimization tools, responsive images, and exciting new opportunities.

Gatsby is all the rage now - it is a blazing-fast React-based static site generator which has won the hearts of many. And for good reason!

After Gatsby introduced themes, I began converting WordPress themes to Gatsby themes and experimenting with WPGraphQL for providing content. Now I want to help you take advantage of using WordPress as a headless CMS with Gatsby.

Let's talk about the important pre-requisites you need in order to convert your entire production site to Gatsby.js.

There are a lot of things WordPress provides for free. In this talk we'll look at how to add sitemaps, embed videos, include RSS feeds, and more.

Over the last 3 years the team at Castos took an already popular free WordPress plugin, Seriously Simple Podcasting, and built a successful SaaS app around it using Laravel. This workshop will dive into some of the reasons why SaaS is a great option for earning income in the WordPress space, and dig into the technical aspects building your first SaaS for a WordPress product.

During this workshop we will build a simple SaaS app for an existing WordPress plugin. We’ll start by building the Laravel app from scratch, including a simple API for third party access. We will then move onto using the WordPress HTTP API to connect our plugin to our Laravel app, in order to provide the premium service for plugin users. By the end of the workshop you should have a basic understanding of building a Laravel SaaS app and connecting your WordPress plugin or theme to it.

GitHub Actions are the newest solution for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). They offer a streamlined path to trigger automations with each alteration to a GitHub repo.

This talk will introduce and walkthrough a few of the available features in order to demonstrate how to automatically deploy a plugin to WordPress.org every time a new version is tagged.

Despite the constant stream of “Is blogging dead?” articles, having a blog is a great way to showcase your knowledge and expertise in a given field and serves as a solid base to build your reputation through content strategy.

There are indeed more blogs competing for people’s attention today than there were ten years ago, which means it’s even more important to write quality content to differentiate yourself from competition and rank on search engines.

In this talk, I will go over why you should start a blog in 2019 if you haven’t already. You will learn about the power of blogging, the shelf-life of a good blog post, and what you should blog about depending on the goal you set for yourself.

There are a lot of people throwing around a lot of marketing words about "digital experience platforms" (DXP). What's the bottom line? What does all the marketing fluff have to do with WordPress and how we think about building and delivering WordPress services and products?

Today, SMB Clients are not asking for DXPs, yet increasing numbers want to integrate their online marketing tools. How does the Enterprise trend of moving away form Content Management, and towards Digital Experience, help you with SMB clients today? Let's get together and walk through it.

On 28 April 2012 my life changed forever. I lost my companion, was forced to turn my 14 year old daughter over to a children's home, and lost my job. I spent 16 weeks in rehab in a trauma clinic where doctors told me that I am mentally ill (depression, borderline PTSD, etc.) and disabled for work.

This talk is about the lessons I have learnt to change my way from “I am mentally ill, cannot work any more, and have no options” to “I am mentally ill; despite this I shape my life and run a business.”