Modern Monolithic: Modern Approaches to Content Management with a Monolithic CMS

Miriam Schwab 0:13
Thanks for having me. And thanks for that really nice introduction. Okay, so I’m going to be talking about modern monolithic, which is something that a lot of you might be like, Wait, those two words don’t go together, right? Because if it’s monolithic, kind of old school, except for that’s not necessarily the case, and I’m going to explain why. So we’re gonna talk about modern approaches to content management with monolithic CMS. So I’m just gonna go through this quickly because Brian Tracy, me. So I’m Miriam. I’ve been in the WordPress industry for over 15 years, I organized five word camps, which is the main WordPress events in our industry, I founded a WordPress development agency. Through my experience there, I came up with a concept for Stradic. Stradic is a different way of hosting and deploying WordPress sites as fully static replicas of the WordPress site. And I was the CEO, we were acquired by Elementor a bit over a year ago. Elementor is probably the most widely used page builder in the WordPress ecosystem. Elementor has over 14 million active installs and just crossed the 9% of the internet line. So 9% of websites are powered by Elementor at this point, and now I’m head of WordPress relations, as Brian mentioned. So let’s talk about WordPress, which is the ultimate or the most well known monolithic CMS out there. So I’m not sure if you know, but WordPress, just celebrated 20 years, since it was founded and forked by Matt Mullenweg, and Mike Liddell in 2003. And that’s a very significant milestone, a lot of products in general, don’t make it to the 20 year mark, let alone open source projects that can kind of be wild and messy. But here we are, 20 years later, and going strong. So Wow. But also, if, if it’s 20 years old, and it’s running a 20 year old code base, you can also say that it’s probably kind of legacy. But regardless, WordPress has reached over 43% of the web, you can see that the growth has kind of stagnated. But it does continue to grow. And basically, there’s no other CMS out there that comes even close, the next largest ones are around the two or 3% mark. So what is the secret to WordPress to success. So there are a few things that were involved from the beginning that I think contributed to WordPress success. One is the, you know, extensibility in the plugin and theme ecosystem around it. And of course, the robust community pretty early on, Matt started organizing WordCamps. And it’s the content management aspect of it really played a big role. So it was easy to get started.

Miriam Schwab 2:54
And especially 20 years ago, the user experience was, by far, way better than anything else out there. And of course, the open source aspect to it, which in the end played a big role in its its growth. In the beginning, people were questioning whether WordPress can be a serious CMS, but today, it’s powering some of the biggest sites out there. So think that’s past. So who is WordPress serving? And this is the crazy thing about WordPress, unlike a lot of other systems, it’s serving everyone, like the like, you name it, they can be using WordPress and probably are, especially if you’re at the 43%. Mark. So you’re talking about people who barely understand, you know, how, like what a website is, and that a domain name is something else, you know, those kinds of people, and they just want to get their contents up there up to very sophisticated developers, who are also using WordPress and anything in between and for, like, endless purposes and goals. So on the one hand, that’s also, I would say, contributing to WordPress as growth. But on the other hand, that also is, it’s a really hard sell, meaning the messaging around WordPress, it’s hard, it’s hard for people to understand is this the tool for me, because let’s say you’re an enterprise company, you know, the messaging around WordPress is not targeting you. So, but nevertheless, it keeps growing. And it’s being used by all sorts of users, including enterprise. So who is everyone? Let’s look at what means to be managing modern content successfully today. When you’re, in the end, in my opinion, a website or web presence is all about the content on it. So everything else around it, including the developers is about supporting that. So in many ways, the rock stars are actually the content creators and marketers who are using it to to further their goals and reach their goals and achieve, you know, achieve what they’re aiming for. So let’s just but but having said that, also, all the stakeholders in the website are very important and you want to make sure that everyone is having a good experience. So let’s just look at this. Okay, so we have the developers who are always involved are mostly volved in a website, including WordPress websites, particularly if it’s a larger scale website and being used for, you know, a more sophisticated or business oriented organization, developed developers play a key role in building, customizing, maintaining, etc. And then, of course, like I mentioned, the marketers, everything is there to make sure that they can do their job that they can move fast, and create content on the fly as needed, landing pages, etc, integrate marketing tooling. So those are the two main audiences. And then underlying their usage are two important components, security, and performance. And I think this is those two aspects are why there’s a lot of ongoing discussion about what’s the right CMS to use, how do we you know, and then, of course, the push towards headless static, all the kind of more modern trends around web development, it’s to meet these goals, because if your site’s not secure, it’s not performing and it’s not scaling, then your marketers can’t do your job. And developers are frustrated.

Miriam Schwab 6:06
So. So let’s take a look at these four aspects of the website with regards to WordPress. So first of all, security requests has a bad rap when it comes to security, unfortunately, and it’s based on things that have happened along the way, and 20 years of being used, plus the fact that it’s 43% of the web, it’s going to be heavily targeted by hackers. If you’re a hacker, and you’re looking to reach a site, WordPress will give you a good ROI on that you just keep pinging sites until a lot of them are going to be WordPress. And because it’s open source, you’re gonna know what the vulnerability vulnerabilities are, and you’re going to probably find something that you can breach. So, overall, that has impacted WordPress is reputation from security perspective. In general, the vast majority of vulnerabilities are related to plugins. So plugins are, are at the same time, both one of the major strengths of the WordPress ecosystem of giving people tooling at a click, and not needing to code and develop custom functionality. On the other hand, you’re like installing other people’s software all the time on your site, and if it’s not well maintained, or if it has issues that those issues apply to can infect your site, and who knows how many other sites. So let’s just look at security. So first of all, just I’m not sure how well known this is, but WordPress Core is generally secure. So that that you can kind of like rest assured about, it’s important to keep plugins updated. So if you’re, if you have a WordPress site you need to be responsible about it, can’t just leave it out there and forget about it. And that’s one of the challenges around WordPress, but generally keep your plugins update as much as possible hosts with a good hosting provider that will also provide another security layer like a higher quality provider. This is something that is generally worth investing in firewalls, which often hosting providers will will give you in addition to the general service. And then there’s a number of WordPress solutions, which we’re just going to look at quickly that can add another layer of security. So there’s patch stack, which is relatively new. And they have an interesting approach to security, you can check out their site wordfence is well known, they’ve been around for a while. They’re the they’re a plugin, which has its pros and cons.

Miriam Schwab 8:17
But the irony around security plugins, sometimes that they themselves have security issues, not wordfence at the moment, but you know, not a fan of necessarily that approach. But they are very effective, very professional and been doing a lot for the WordPress ecosystem over the years and security, which was acquired by GoDaddy years back, also a good solution. So there’s more. So it’s, you know, good to know about these if you want to take security to the next level. I’m also going to talk about just quickly this other approach to security, which is pushing your site to the edge and not running WordPress in its standard kind of traditional format. The way I see what running WordPress in its traditional format, it’s kind of like it’s a sitting duck, because it’s really hard to stay on top of it all the time. And if there’s even one vulnerability at a certain point, and you like, there’s like a window where you don’t update. That’s a window of opportunity for hacker. So maybe we want to kind of like remove WordPress from the picture. So there’s an interesting tool that’s developed by an active WordPress community member named Carl Xander. It’s called one year or Eimear, I think as I pronounce it, and it’s basically running WordPress since a serverless. At the edge, it’s still WordPress. But one can argue that running it in that format does give it a certain additional level of security, potentially, of course, is CloudFlare, which is easy to put on top of your WordPress site. And it has, you know, its own firewalls and security functionality built in and works well with WordPress. So that, you know, gives people a lot of reasons to sleep at night. And then, you know, of course I’m biased but Stradic so Stradic and there are other approaches to this type of deployment of WordPress with Stradic. You deploy the site as a fully static version, which is served up through CDN so it’s vailable around the world applications and the WordPress site is when it’s spun up, it’s behind off. And when it’s spun down, it’s just not there. So, you know, if you want to look at more sophisticated or I don’t know, modern approaches to running WordPress, looking at this type of format can also meet your needs. While you’re still working with WordPress as a monolithic CMS, in its traditional form, just it’s somewhere else. So this is what it looks like when you’re running it in that way. So you have a traditional WordPress, and everyone can access all of it right, you’ve got the database in everything, the servers and the plugins, and it’s all just there under the surface. And you can protect it to a certain extent, but it’s just it’s still there. So visitors are visiting a site that’s basically always accessing that. And the same with hackers. Whereas if you decouple it in this way, you get to still maintain the functionality of WordPress, which is a strength in terms of, you know, being able to use plugins and the editor and things like that, while making sure that WordPress itself is not accessible.

Miriam Schwab 11:09
So the next aspect is performance. WordPress also has a bad rap when it comes to performance. And this is something that’s been known and discussed a lot in the WordPress community over the years. And it didn’t become a focus until a few years back until the WordPress performance team was formed. driven a lot by Google, I think, and no one has ever said this to me outright. But Google’s perspective is if WordPress powers 43% of the web, then a good way to make 43% of the web faster, which is what Google wants is to try to improve WordPress. So there’s a very effective performance team now that’s working on kind of hammering away at old issues related to performance and you know, implementing new approaches to optimizing WordPress in general. And it’s showing results. So Search Engine Journal, just compared a bunch of CMS is and show that we’re presses core vitals have improved at over 7% Since January 2022, which is impressive. And this performance team themselves just published the report, they analyzed hundreds of 1000s of like live WordPress sites and the most recent version of WordPress that was released to 6.3 and the LCP increased by almost 6% at scale, and for some sites, even by more than 20%. So overall, the core software of WordPress is improving, which means that even if a site is being loaded down by who knows what bad code ped plugins and themes, everyone’s going to see an uptick in performance. And you can see that here in this correlate vitals report. So you can see that WordPress, like, got worse. And then over time, it’s getting better. And hopefully, with the next, the last release, and the last improvements, we’re going to see even more improvements around that. In addition to WordPress itself, working on improving performance, a lot of tools and plugins are also making efforts to improve their performance in the end is better for everyone. It’s in everyone’s interest, and nobody wants to be known as the slow plugin. So that includes obviously Elementor. So in Elementor, is last hosting release, working actually, with Google, the hosting load time was improved by something like 190%, which is impressive, and then back to the edge for performance. These types of approaches also can help you improve performance. So my perspective is people should be able to certain extent to run their websites as they want. And not everyone’s going to be an expert on performance and things like that. So how can we kind of add a layer or give them an approach that fixes that for them, so they can just do their thing. So again, and also static, so by running a fully static site, then there’s no underlying server and processing and things like that the page is just served up instantly, and serves up, you know, hundreds of Edge locations around the world. So you don’t even if the original WordPress site is just like bogged down by stuff, then that doesn’t matter. Because that’s not what people are accessing or visiting. So even if there’s increased traffic, that has no impact, because it’s fully static.

Miriam Schwab 14:18
So and again, there’s different ways to to take on this type of approach. But by doing this, you’re removing the whole performance factor altogether. And and you just get fast and performance sites. So the edge so these are just some examples of like a modern approach to developing and deploying WordPress sites that that help with performance and you know, there’s more innovation being worked on all the time. Even in the world of WordPress, which is kind of legacy. Now we get to who I call the rock stars of the of the scene, which is the marketers and they want to work in no code as they should be able to write coding is not their, their expertise, their epic area of expertise is making sure that a site is performing well for the business generating leads, etc, or whatever the goals are of the organization. And they should just be able to do that without friction. So, and this aligns with WordPress vision, which is democratization of publishing. If you’re familiar with WordPress, his vision and mission, you know, there’s a number of principles. But the one that’s quoted, I would say the most and that we all know the best is democratization of publishing, which is that anyone should be able to publish to the web easily, regardless of who they are. That’s an important principle. And when running complicated CMS is that add layers of friction or increased demand for developers that’s being removed from you know, from people’s reach. And particularly when it comes to content creators, they need to be able to do that. And what I’ve seen over the years is that what happens is developers want to be developing in a way that’s like, enjoyable for them, and even fun for them. And in a way that they can be proud of, and all that’s legitimate. But sometimes the decisions on which CMS or which approach is being used, doesn’t take into consideration the end user, which is the marketers on their team. And in my opinion, that’s problematic. And often you can see that companies will do this kind of cycle. And I just saw one on Twitter that it’s a SaaS company, they had built their site and React js. And you know, because their engineers, the founders, and their marketing team just couldn’t do their job properly, or well. So they actually refactor the whole thing and WordPress, and now they say their marketing teams like hundreds of times faster.

Miriam Schwab 16:48
So it’s an important thing, particularly this, this is the reason I’m emphasizing this. It’s also the topic of this of this conference, which is content management. And I’m really appreciate that this is the topic because often in the world of developers, it’s ignored. But in the end, they are the ones that are being served and need to be able to do their job. So so how does WordPress support them? Well, first of all, WordPress is a world of one click goodness, in many ways, from the beginning, it was, you know, something that you could just Well, there was the Famous Five Step install, which became one click install and hosting companies. And then once that’s done, you can just install plugins and themes at a click, I remember when I first started working with WordPress, I thought that was the most amazing thing. Instead of having to develop stuff, I would just like search for something. And there was often a solution there. And so for marketers, especially that can be super useful. And of course, as time goes on, and marketers come up with their favorite kind of stack of plugins that help them do their job. And they can all be installed in one click. And the pricing is generally either free or really reasonable. So what are the features that WordPress has, I think this is funny to have the slide. But I’ve realized with time, especially with the

Miriam Schwab 18:00
push towards headless CMS is that these features, which we all took for granted, are actually really great. Because often in the world of decoupled and headless, they have to be recreated, and on an ongoing basis. So I’m just going to list them. But these are things you get out of the box with WordPress and can be challenging in other approaches. So permanent control, you can you know, they can easily change the URLs of theirs of their pages, like marketers, users, and permissions. It’s all there and easily extended. You can preview your pages before publishing. You can manage your media, like images and videos, etc. taxonomies are built in custom post types cetera. And there’s a ton of tooling and integrations which are easy to do to implement, and page builders. So when WordPress started out, it was just the plain old editor. And it was amazing at the time, and then page, like the attempt to have page builders started becoming part of it. In the beginning that was super clunky, like just filling your page with sort codes. And it was kind of a mess, and not pretty at all. And heavy. But slowly but surely this approach of page builders came on the scene to give, again, the no code people the ability not just to, let’s say write a blog post or edit some content, but to actually lay out their pages in easy fashion. So I think the first one was probably I think, well okay, there was the WP bakery, and then Beaver Builder, and Divi and Elementor, of course, came in there at some point. Elementor is seven years old now. So I’m not sure how to fit it in the chronology. But let’s just take a look at that. And this is an amazing thing for people to be able to do without having to depend on some kind of developer workflow to get these types of pages up and running. So first of all, of course, there’s Gutenberg, which is, well, Matt’s pet project for WordPress, which is a block editor, adopting the block approach to content management. It’s it really Think gives a lot of power to people in terms of laying out their pages managing content. There’s a ton of API’s around it. And there’s a big developer push around it.

Miriam Schwab 20:09
So there’s Gutenberg, which by the way, is also being used outside of WordPress, it’s being used in Drupal, there’s a Gutenberg integration, and Tumblr, which WordPress acquired about a year or two ago. So it’s also very portable, it can be used anywhere. So it’s kind of cool. And then here’s just like a look at Elementor. So with Elementor, you can just drag and drop tons of widgets, elements, very precise page layout, giving a lot of power to users. And some people find this approach, you know, frustrating in different ways, or they prefer kind of like the cleaner, more code oriented approach to WordPress, but you don’t have to use PHP to use Elementor, which can be a benefit to a lot of people. And it’s just it’s really flexible. So. So there’s that. What’s interesting is that this is not like WordPress has been, let’s say, improving in incremental ways. And big ways. Gutenberg is big. But there’s a really interesting plan for what’s known as phase three of WordPress, which is real time collaboration, which is very sophisticated. So this is just a very kind of rough demo of what’s coming. But this is what is being worked on in the WordPress Core project next, where more than one person work on content at the same time, so so you can see the two, the purple guy, and then the green guy. That’s basically to indicate this kind of new, upcoming approach, which for larger teams is huge. And it’s going to evolve a lot and other things around it, like version, management and things like that on content. But that’s an amazing thing related to content management, and gives a lot of power to users. This is just another like workflow that is available in Strattic, which is so Strattic, you have your WordPress site, which is not accessible. And then you have a live static site. And you also have a previous static site. It’s like a staging site. And you can choose which level of users can publish to which version of the site. So you can, let’s say, say authors can only publish to the staging static, but then in order to publish it to production, you need a higher level of permission. And also for larger teams, that type of control can be really valuable. We’ve heard that from a lot of our customers. So you know, there’s different creative ways of managing your workflow, even with let’s say, staging sites, and things like that. And now developers, so developers are very important in WordPress, and in general, and often are the decision makers about which platform is going to be used. And if developers don’t like WordPress is not being selected. In many cases, unless the marketing team push, push as hard. So we know developers don’t like WordPress, there’s in this 2020 developer survey from Stack Overflow. By they, you know, what’s your most dreaded anything and WordPress was the most dreaded, that’s not a good sign. By the way, since then, WordPress hasn’t even appeared in their survey. So it just dropped off is something that like anyone even wants to talk about, I guess, for some reason, I’m just gonna quote this guy, Chris Cordero. Some of you might know how he’s speaking later. He, he wrote at one point that he thinks WordPress needs to spend a year working on developer experience.

Miriam Schwab 23:27
So the developer experience in WordPress has not been the best. But things are changing. And there is innovation around it. And there is a push to create a better developer experience. So I’m just going to share some of the projects that are, you know, out there and being worked on. Okay, so first of all, there’s the REST API, which is great. And it’s good, it’s there. But that is generally used for headless and decoupled architectures, which is not what we’re talking about, right? We’re talking about monolithic WordPress. The REST API allows people to use WordPress with a more modern front end, not PHP based, which makes a lot of developers happy. But then what it’s basically doing is stripping WordPress down to its basics and just becomes like, a bunch of fields more or less. And then why, what’s the benefit there? I don’t fully get it. Although someone explained to me that it’s still better than the other headless CMS is out there, which are like, apparently really bad. Not like, like the big enterprise ones. They can offer offer a pretty poor experience for enterprise companies. So when they see WordPress, even if they’re just stripped down to mostly fields, there’s still happy with that. So I don’t know. But the you know, the, the big benefits of WordPress around the content management and all the how feature rich it is. So I’m just mentioning it because it’s there. And it can be used, let’s say if you want to also push the content from the site to different platforms, like a mobile app or something. So you’ve got the API, and that can be helpful. Wordpress in general has API’s galore, particularly around the block editor. We even now have an HTML API, which was released in the last version. So you know, you can check those out. And that can kind of help improve your experience around WordPress, potentially. In version five of WordPress, which was a few years back, the WordPress admin was being refactored to be react. So actually, the WordPress admin is basically, a React app doesn’t necessarily help with the front end. But it’s just something to know. And a lot of plugins, for example, build their settings, pages and react and things like that. So. So that was that changed, which is pretty significant. WordPress does have a developer site with resources for developers. So you know, we can always check that out. It’s interesting to see, you know, the resources that are there to try also to improve the developer experience. Let’s just talk about developer developer workflows around WordPress for a minute. So this is a really cool project, which I love. It’s called the WordPress playground. And I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but basically, you just open, I think it’s playground@wordpress.net in the browser, and then you just get a full blown WordPress installation that you can play with and work with. So I’m going to show you what it’s like, this is all my browser, I didn’t install anything. So it’s WordPress, I can go into my dashboard. I can write a post and publish it.

Miriam Schwab 26:48
And then it appears on the front end of this browser based WordPress, you can install plugins and themes, you have to upload the zip file, but it is possible. And if you look in the top right corner, you’ll see up and down arrows. Once you’ve worked on it, you can actually export it or import it as a file. And you can also choose with this is also really cool, which PHP version for testing, which can be really useful and which Wordpress version. So if you have conflicts or whatever, you could just easily test that here. So this is an amazing project, in my opinion, for easy testing, you know, and sharing of installations or whatever, like anything, even tutorials with users, you can just quickly do it here. So that’s, that’s that. A little bit about it. It works in no JS and mobile apps. It runs as a web assembly binary, it’s using SQL Lite, which is also another project, which is cool. The web server is implemented in JavaScript, and you can integrate it in any app or anything with an iframe, like old school way, but it works. And it exposes there’s a bunch of API’s you can use with it that are really cool. Like you can spin it up and already, like tell it to install theme or run WordPress 6.3 and PHP 7.2 or something like that. There’s a Docker tool. So you can easily run WordPress Dockerized environment. There’s WordPress local, which was created by flywheel which was acquired by WP Engine. So there it’s loved tool by developers for local development. The WP CLI project is really good and well maintained. And as a lot of built in prompts, and things like that. And then of course, other tools like Elementor integrate with that and have their own CLI. So there’s lots of CLI is for other tooling. And that can also help with workflows. If you’re interested, we wrote a white paper, it’s 20 pages, if you feel like reading it, and ideal WordPress development and deployment workflow. It’s useful. And if you want it, I’m happy to send it to you, you can email me miriam@elementor.com Because find it on our site under white papers. But it’s just also goes into more modern workflow. Version Control gets cetera around managing WordPress sites. So WordPress is 20 years old. So it’s old, but also in many ways with the experience behind the community. And with millions of users giving feedback. It’s one of the best content management experiences out there. You can disagree with me, but that’s how I see it. It still is and with interesting and aggressive and ambitious plans for the future like the real time collaboration, improving Gutenberg further etc. And working on performance and just chopping down the time further and further low time. It seems to have a promising future and it is continuing to grow. So yeah, it’s monolithic, which is old school. Yeah, its legacy but it gives concentrators what they need. easy integration with SEO plugins, easy integration with marketing tools, forms, etc. You know, it’s just, it does the job and does it pretty well. So I I would recommend that if you’re a developer who’s like Boo, Wordpress, maybe take another look. Maybe also listen to the marketers on your team and hear what they have to say or not. But I just wanted to give you another perspective on content management in a monolithic environment, which is looking to the future, and improving from developer experience perspective, and generally as a platform. So that’s it. Thank you.

Brian Rinaldi 30:30
Thank you so much, Miriam. That was That was great. You know, I, I agree with you, I think there was a period maybe that coincided with that dip in performance that we saw on that chart there where developers are like, you know, I’m fed up, you know, I can’t I can’t deal with this anymore. And then, but, but it never, it never ceased, that the marketers were always like, Oh, this, but this is what I need. I need my tool. Yeah. And every other tools seem to be like, Oh, hey, you know, we’re going to try and recreate that editing experience that you got used to in WordPress. And and it’s kind of set the bar for that that experience. And so that collaboration stuff you showed, I think, even starts to raise that bar a little bit. So I, we did have one audience question. But I want to remind folks, we have we have a few minutes here to ask questions of Miriam live. So if you have additional questions, please go ahead and post them in the chat. So the first the I’ll get to the audience question first. And then I had some questions myself. So this was from, I think, is Chow to I’m sorry, if I’m mispronouncing your name. So he says it’s hard, like he wants to create, they want to create semantic HTML. And it’s hard to create that code, they find that the output is successively filled with divs, I guess there’s an element or user as well, is there a way to tackle that issue?

Miriam Schwab 32:02
That’s really good feedback. And Ciao, that’s your name, please, if you don’t mind, reaching out to me and sharing your experience, because I like to share it internally with our team. Elements are, it’s a, it’s a, because in order to achieve what it does, which is it allows people to just basically drag and drop stuff. So in the end, it does, it historically did create a lot of extra code, that wasn’t great. But the team has been working very hard on cleaning that up and making it better. And that includes actually accessibility improvements. In our last release, there was some significant accessibility improvements in terms of using the editor, the Elementor editor, so I recommend keeping an eye on that. But also, we definitely want to hear that type of feedback. Because the idea is to always improve, like WordPress is always improving in terms of performance and optimization, and things like that. And so a mentor has, also is aiming to do that, particularly 14 million active installs, it’s important that we do that. So So yeah, we want to prove that. And maybe, also, if you reach out to me, I may be able to get you an answer on how to fix that situation. I don’t know off the top of my head, but I’d love to help you with that.

Brian Rinaldi 33:18
Okay, very cool. So, okay, I mispronounce the name, it’s actually pronounced kayo. So reach out to Miriam. So, you know, that’s what I get for trying to pronounce names live here. So okay, I’ve got some more questions here. Let’s see that. I guess it’s the only question. It’s so two questions. So me that there was two questions. So I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t have to ask you. So I was curious about the edge stuff. Because I, you know, I do a lot of stuff related to the edge myself, and in how, so? How do those work? Do they? Do they just cash things at the edge? Or is it I know, Stradic does like static edge. But the other tools? Are they just doing some kind of heavy caching at the edge? Or how are they how are they actually improving performance by using the edge?

Miriam Schwab 34:16
So Eimear it’s running WordPress is serverless. And it scales well, horizontally. It’s probably combination of cash, but also just the general infrastructure that can scale. So that’s their approach from a from a performance perspective. Cloudflare. Just, it’s crazy tool. And I mean that in a good way. It does heavy caching, and in a smart way, and then pushes it to the edge. It’s not like a the ultimate cache like strategy is so you’re still pinging the server, which can have its own issues. And I’m sure you’ve all encountered a situation where you try to access the site with Cloud flare. And then it says, Well, you know, the original the Site Origin is down, right? Because you still can still have that kind of issue. And it’s still very dependent on it. Unlike Stradic, where it’s not, it’s, you know, it’s fully going to work whether the site is up or down. So, but overall Cloudflare is just really easy like to implement and then it does do significant caching. And it does work well with WordPress overall, at I have seen some reports of it’s slowing down WordPress sites, which is weird. So it’s important to pay attention to that, like, if you’re going to try to use it, I think we’re good is for scaling, let’s say there’s an increased demand of traffic or something like that. But maybe on a day to day basis, it might slow down the site. So and also there’s, there’s like the one click installation within his left tweaking you can do so. In some cases, one click does a good job. Sometimes it needs more work, but it can definitely help with with sites in terms of performance and scaling.

Brian Rinaldi 36:02
Okay, very cool. Um, I have not tried that on class. I didn’t even know they offered that. So that’s, that’s really, that’s really

Miriam Schwab 36:09
yeah, they offer like everything. By the way, yeah. So but by the way, on Elementor hosting the users all get the kind of paid version of Cloudflare. I can’t remember what it’s called. But that’s included. So that.

Brian Rinaldi 36:28
Yeah, and I’m, I’m actually curious, because I never really thought like, in theory, you could be there’s all these MySQL at the edge kind of solutions where it pushes reads out to the edge. Have you heard of anybody trying to use like, an Edge database as a back end for WordPress? Or is that not something yet?

Miriam Schwab 36:48
So I don’t know if it’s exactly considered edge, but it is serverless. So there’s AWS, Aurora. It hasn’t there haven’t been good reports about using it. It’s supposed to help with scaling and things like that. But there’s some issues around it. So other than that, I haven’t heard of anything. There’s this SQL lite project in the WordPress community, and that’s being used in playground. I wonder if in some way that can scale better. But no, I haven’t really heard of anything.

Brian Rinaldi 37:20
Okay. I was just, you know, it’s been a while, honestly, since I did WordPress development, and it was always, that was the one error I kept hitting was like, it would just be like a database connection error. And I

Miriam Schwab 37:34
was like, Oh, my gosh, I know, it’s so we’ve all been there. We’ve all seen it. And it’s just so frustrating. And the challenge is, well, probably, well, with a lot of infrastructures, but particularly monolithic is that you want to make sure there’s enough resources in case you need them. But then on the other hand, if you keep running too many resources, it’s too expensive. It’s just a waste. So you want to be able to be more elastic, or whatever, and scale is needed. And it’s hard to get that type of infrastructure up and running in a good way. So that’s so some of these tools are, you know, are there to, to work around that or try to improve the situation.

Brian Rinaldi 38:17
Yeah, I mean, I’ll admit this was a while ago, but I also think, like, back then, one of the things I remember thinking, if you wanted to really have like a, if you had a WordPress site that was large and heavily traffic, like you really had to use one of the existing tools trying to set that up myself was, I think, part of the process. I did not have enough expertise in any of it in in particularly in setting up the caching because I people who were experiencing, it would always tell me like, oh, yeah, you just have to set up this and that and all this caching for outside of my expertise, never

Miriam Schwab 38:53
just the just the adjuster never just one of the reasons I’m sure that this I just remember this. This like one scenario we had in my agency, and I’m sure it was one of the things that pushed me towards creating Stradic we had this one customer that had a pretty heavy big site, and also like ridiculous amounts of traffic. And then they ran a campaign and we knew they were going to run a campaign. And we set up their servers, Stripe infrastructures, they had two database servers. And then I think we went to three to try to scale it. And it still wasn’t scaling. And I was like, This is the worst. Like, the worst. No matter what we’re doing, we’re throwing more resources at it’s just not scaling. And I was like, that doesn’t make sense. And then, you know, in the good old days when he ran static sites that like they were bad in different ways, but they weren’t crashing because of traffic. So yeah, that’s a challenge. Yeah.