Today’s roundup highlights some useful WordPress plugins. They’re either new, or have recently been updated with interesting features. From A/B testing to profiling and more… And of course, I have some bonus links for you as well!
A/B testing made easy
Testing between two versions, to see which one works best, is called A/B testing. You can A/B test many things, like your newsletter or your website. There are plenty of ways to do A/B tests on your website, but here, I’d like to highlight a new one. Gaya Kessler developed a sweet little WordPress plugin called A/B Testing for WordPress. This plugin allows you to create two variants right inside Gutenberg.
The plugin works while keeping SEO in mind, which means it doesn’t do anything that affects your SEO. It simply works like most A/B testing tools out there, but directly from your own WordPress site. Without the use of third-party services. You can find it here on WordPress.org.
WordPress profiling plugin
Andrey Savchenko published an update to his WordPress profiling plugin, releasing version 3.3:
Laps is a plugin that shows performance information about WordPress page load. It provides a visual summary in a toolbar that is quick and easy to inspect. Laps and John Blackbourn’s Query Monitor have always been my two favorite plugins in my quest to make WordPress sites performant and faster. Check out Andrey’s plugin over at Github.
WordPress Emails
Query Monitor isn’t the only useful resource John Blackbourn has shared with us, by the way. This is an older resource, but if you haven’t heard of it before: you’ll love it. John has listed every single type of email WordPress sends out and how to filter them.
Bonus links
- Jonathan Wold shares an interesting view on where the next opportunities lie in the WordPress ecosphere. He calls it ‘ecosystem plugins’. So, if you’re looking to build something with our favorite CMS tool, check out his post!
- Our friends at Google (hello Felix!) released a plugin for WordPress last week. It’s called Reporting API and it provides a storage mechanism and endpoint for browser reports according to the Reporting API spec in WordPress. Additionally, it provides an admin interface for browsing these reports. Lastly, it also provides an API for sending the Report-To response headers. You can learn more about it here.
- Have you tested WordPress 5.2 Beta 1 yet?
- WordPress updating its minimum PHP version to 5.6 is beginning to make waves. You can now create themes for the WordPress theme repository with PHP 5.6 as a minimum. Exciting times!