The Jetpack team has been quietly testing a new plugin called Jetpack Boost, which addresses website owners’ performance and SEO concerns. Version 1.0 was released today, one month after the final pre-release came out in March.

Boost is a separate plugin under the Jetpack brand and it does not require Jetpack core to work. The first iteration bundles three performance modules:

1. Local Critical CSS generates optimized styles for the homepage, posts, and pages to display content faster, especially for visitors on mobile devices.
2. Defer Non-Essential Javascript moves some tasks to…

Having a place to call home online is pretty nice. Whether you want to run a personal blog that updates friends and family on what you’ve been up to, or you’re eager to advertise your business across the world or showcase your creative talents, a website is a great way to do all this. In the past, you’d need to know a little about website design and coding, but nowadays, solutions like Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress mean that you can enjoy design flexibility without necessarily knowing more than what looks good. Thanks to the growth in  drag and drop website builders, it makes it easy…

Facebook has introduced two new data portability types that will help users directly transfer their posts and notes to Google Docs, Blogger and WordPress. The social network last year enabled people to transfer their photos and videos to Backblaze, Dropbox, Google…

The backlash against Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) has continued, with a proposal raised in WordPress Core to block the controversial alternative identifier to third-party cookies by default.

The WordPress proposal would see the blogging system use its weight to thwart FLoC.

“WordPress powers approximately 41% of the web — and this community can help combat racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, and discrimination against those with mental illness with four lines of code,” it states.

For users that want to enable FLoC,…

WordPress announced today that they plan on treating Google’s new FLoC tracking technology as a security concern and plans to block it by default on WordPress sites.

For some time, browsers have begun to increasingly block third-party browser cookies [1, 2, 3] used by advertisers for interest-based advertising.

In response, Google introduced a new ad tracking technology called Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC, that uses a web browser to anonymously place users into interest or behavioral buckets based on how they browse the web.

After Google began testing FLoC this month in…

Sometimes a theme’s description is so moving that one must install, activate, and test the project. I often rail against the obviously keyword-stuffed text in the free WordPress theme directory. But, I am pleasantly surprised from time to time.

Enō is an elegant, modern and functional WordPress theme. Probably this is the best blogging theme ever. Just see the demo at…It supports Gutenberg block editor and has a lot of Customizer options…

Thus began my journey into Enō, an upcoming theme by Ivan Fonin. I could have been partially a language-barrier thing. Or, the…

Zerodium, one of the most well-known security vulnerability brokers, announced that it is tripling payouts for remote code execution exploits on default WordPress installations. Payouts are typically $100K but have been temporarily increased to $300K.

The company focuses on acquiring original and previously unreported zero-day research. It pays researchers for high-risk vulnerabilities and fully functional exploits, with the highest rewards at $2.5M for ‘full chain, zero-click, with persistence’ Android exploits. This price tag was increased from $200K in September 2019,…

Recently, I realized my professional site hadn’t been using SSL for some time. This was an oversight on my part—one that I had to rectify. After all, people could purchase items from the site, and without SSL, those purchases couldn’t exactly…