A Better Understanding of WordPress, Themes, and Plugins

Season #8 February 10, 2024

0:00 - Introduction: Introduction to the episode's focus on WordPress, including themes, plugins, and how they interact with WordPress core.

1:00 - Understanding WordPress as a CMS: Explanation of WordPress as a content management system and its basic functionalities.

3:00 - WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com: Discussing the differences between WordPress.org and WordPress.com, including their uses and limitations.

5:00 - Themes in WordPress: Deep dive into WordPress themes, including selecting the right theme, the importance of regular updates, and free vs. paid themes.

10:00 - Customizing WordPress Themes: The concept of building custom themes and the implications for website maintenance and updates.

14:00 - Plugins for Extending WordPress Functionality: Introduction to plugins, their role in adding functionalities to WordPress sites, and how to choose the right plugins.

18:00 - Security and Maintenance of WordPress Sites: Discussing the security aspects of WordPress, the importance of keeping themes and plugins updated, and maintenance tips.

22:00 - Performance and Optimization: Tips on ensuring your WordPress site remains fast and efficient, including minimizing the number of plugins.

25:00 - Choosing and Managing Plugins Wisely: Further advice on selecting plugins for functionality without compromising site performance.

28:00 - Conclusion and Next Episode Preview: Wrapping up the discussion on WordPress and teasing the next episode's focus on SEO and YouTube optimization.

[00:00:00] Hello there it is that time of the month once again, or the time of the week once again where we get on and talk about GeekSpeak. And today we are talking about under getting a deeper understanding of WordPress. That's how themes and plugins they all interact, how they interact with the core, what's the distinction between them and how to pick the right one for the right situation.Hey, Phelan, did you already introduce yourself and no, I hadn't. My

[00:00:30] yeah go for it. Go for it. Yeah. My name is Phelan. I work at Seymour Digital Media, where we do search engine marketing. And I'm Greg McKinnon with OriginalSeventyTwoCreative, and we're a full-service website, graphic design and digital marketing firm in Vancouver. Yeah, I as everybody knows, I've changed my year for GeekSpeak. I'm only on once a month. The wrap-up as well on the third month. And each, each second week I'm releasing a blog and doing the

[00:01:00] topic. So today's topic was giving a better understanding of WordPress themes and plugins and what each of them do and how each of them work together.Like what are the differences of each, and just a more broad overall understanding of using WordPress and. Customizing and how everything works together. So basically, the first thing I wanted to go about

[00:01:30] was that WordPress is a content management system. It will allow you to, um, build your site.On top of, so that it gives you the functionality of maintaining your content, images, a blog and any features related to being able to put in that content, put in the images, build out the pages um, and things like that. So people don't I don't know if people think of

[00:02:00] WordPress as more than that.Or if they just think, if they think of WordPress as everything. But in a nutshell, that's all WordPress is. It's a content management system that allows you to maintain your pages, add your content, add your images, and have an interface to go in and create all of that stuff, or maintain all of that stuff within your work, your website.I think the dogs agree. Yeah. They're very

00:02:30] upset with your description. Yeah. They're like, you're completely wrong. They're like, what about WooCommerce? Yeah. There's e-commerce functionality. They're um, and so they're yeah. I think that yeah, it's a, ultimately it's a CMS where basically it has a backend that.It is graphically represented. And so with that, it means that someone doesn't have to write like raw code to put out a blog post. Yeah. They can have some sort of interface. And then that's the core functionality of

[00:03:00] WordPress. The smart part about WordPress is that it was during the aughts and the open source wars of the lamp stacks, which is like the PHP based backends, your Drupal's, your Juma's. There's a fourth one that I'm forgetting, but like with Yanto Magento magenta kicking around too. It's. Yeah. Magento's still around? Yep. I think they're all still around. Drupal and Joomla have been deprecated.

[00:03:30] Oh, have they? Yeah. Yeah. 'cause I did work on a a Drupal website. No. A Joomla website and boy, howdy.Has it not been updated since twenty-ten? Oh boy. It was limited features of Galore. And yeah but it comes outta that world where everyone was doing open source every, and because of that, it meant that also it meant that people could build off of WordPress and add some additional functionality or even different.Ways of having the website looks like your

[00:04:00] themes and your plugins. So it opened up and built a community, which the added benefit of having open source as well is that you have, you're not just whatever the team is that say you work at Apple and you're fixing an Apple product, it's all the people on the internet who are adding to the.Code base and finding fixes and finding errors. So it meant that you're not limited to the people in a specific company. You have all the power of people on the internet who want to contribute to it. So it it improves the overall product because you have so many new minds

[00:04:30] working on it, looking at it in different ways, adding new features that you wouldn't even have thought of necessarily.And so that's the big power behind WordPress. Yeah. The, a little backstory of WordPress it was basically a blogging platform that matt Mullenweg picked up and forked and. Created it started working on what he was calling WordPress. But it was an original blogging platform that he he picked up

[00:05:00] and forked off of. Do you remember, I'm trying to think of what the original blogging platform might have been called. Do you recall, should look that? Yeah, I know, like I think it. I can't even remember the name of it. And I know some pretty esoteric names of the original companies, but that's one I don't even know. And actually WordPress just recently within the last year turned 20, like it was, it's been around for 20. 20 plus years

[00:05:30] now, but it was, there was a milestone twenty-year thing I remember just not far back. So it's been around a long time. But essentially, WordPress itself does that basic stuff for you. It allows you to create pages in an interface without having to know HTML or CSS and stuff like that. And within WordPress you get. The themes and plugins that you can select. So WordPress on its own is a CMS. Within WordPress.

[00:06:00] Then you have obviously the themes where you would there's a default theme and there's been a default, a new default theme with WordPress every year.Going back from its beginning. They're typically always called whatever the year is. So like the 2024 theme. The 2023 theme not very exciting. That's what you get when you get web developers naming things is that they're like gonna, uh, they're gonna name it, but boy, how do you say, not gonna be creative, which is why there's 20 million SEO or real

[00:06:30] function apps that are all like redirect.But every release of Wordpress is named after a jazz something jazz related. If it's a Ja, I don't remember if it's specifically jazz singers or just jazz, something Jazz. In general, they could always. This? Yeah, with whichever, jazz related theme this release is they might be able to do something like that, but they do multiple releases.

[00:07:00]Per year. So that might not exactly work, but they could be more creative. Yes. I mean that, that's basically like every product manager at any software company is guys, you could have been a bit more creative in your naming here would've been a big thing that they circle of yeah, but they're famously like coders like.

Get a really creative streak on one specific thing, and then don't think to apply to anything else in their main conventions. Very common you'll find that across the board. It's funnier

[00:07:30] when they actually do get like a proper theme like a. Not to go on a tangent, but like Homebrew, it's like a terminal system for Mac and everything is like related to brewing. So you get a cask or a keg and that's like a module that you install and like actually kept like a proper theme and naming conventions based around like brewing. So it's fun when they actually do get that. But yeah. Anyway yes, WordPress is I think also one of the other parts that's interesting about WordPress is because it's from like basically the.

[00:08:00] The earliest period of the internet where like mass internet culture came from. It also has some inherent issues that just can't get resolved out of just the way it's situated and it's one of those ones where they could fix it, but basically by, if they make a mistake, they could break a third of the internet.And so they have to very cautiously move with it and find new ways to adapt with a system that isn't really built for. A lot of big changes because there's so many people use it that you can

[00:08:30] make one too many changes and break everything. Yeah. Yeah, the o The other thing before moving on more with themes and eventually plugins with WordPress I'd wanted to reiterate that there is WordPress.org and there's WordPress.com.The WordPress.org is the free open source version of WordPress that anybody can download. It's free, you can install it on most any

[00:09:00] hosting provider. And everything's completely free. The default theme is in there for you as well. Which, so you could build a completely free website with just getting hosting and a domain name With WordPress, the free theme and any free plugins versus WordPress.com is a subscription service where there's a little bit more handholding and support.With WordPress.

[00:09:30] So you can sign up for WordPress.com account and then do the exact same thing you can with the .org. But they do have that support. So you have, they, you can chat with someone or you can call 'em and ask questions, but it's also completely do-it-yourself if you want to do it. But you do have that behind you because the free version, you're on your own, right?Like you can take it, you can do whatever you want. For free, but if you need help, you're either going

[00:10:00] to a free WordPress community on Facebook or something like that to try to get information on something that might've gone wrong. Or have a guy like you yourselves, or myself who know WordPress people can come to a web developer and be like, oh, I have this site.I need help. Sure, no problem. And do it that way, or the WordPress.com is a paid service. You pay, you get your hosting, you can build your site, and

[00:10:30] they also have support to give you a hand with whatever it is that you might need. And they have tiered levels. Obviously. If you want a basic blogging site, it's.robably pretty cheap. And then if you want to do like e-commerce or more advanced business sites they have levels that you could go up to, which give you. A little bit more functionality, features and functionality. So I wanted to make sure people knew that distinction between WordPress.org and

[00:11:00] WordPress.com Yeah and I'm just gonna say for the record, avoid WordPress.com like the plague. Yes. I agree. Just like I, it is torture. It is because you cannot access all the plugins that are on WordPress.org. On WordPress.com. That's right. It's a more strict thing. Yeah. Which, looking at it could be good because as I'll mention later on when we get to plugins, there are.Plugins that are really bad, so yeah. Oh, a hundred percent. They give you

[00:11:30] access in there to limited number of plugins that they've deemed to be, reputable and good and serve, very specific functionality and stuff like that. But it's not the type of thing where you have your own ho your self-hosted WordPress, and you can just install whatever you feel like.Yeah. No. I'm just saying for the record, just to let people know, like the, my, I'm not speaking for you, Greg. I'm just speaking for myself. My official stamp is Void. WordPress.com because you will pull your hair out at

[00:12:00] one point you will get to something and go, what do you mean I can't do that thing?And it's just gonna be a weird, arbitrary part where they're just like, no, actually we decided that you can't do that. I completely agree. I think it's a better obviously, this would be a plug for, coming up. Have me help you with your site, but I would definitely recommend having a go-to guy who you can trust and knows.WordPress that if you have an issue, you have them to fall back and say, oh, hey Greg, can you

[00:12:30] I'm having trouble with this, or this is wrong with my site. Just knowing, having someone in the community or having a developer who's been doing it for a long time, behind you to give you a hand when you're trying to do it yourself, but then get stuck is really good.And there's tons of WordPress people out there yeah. It's, it is not hard to find a person who knows WordPress. Yeah. Yeah, and that's another thing I'd also say is just like a quick vote of building off of that before we jump in of like I talked about it earlier,

[00:13:00] having a system that's popular is a good thing because it means that if you have to fire your guy or something happens to them and they disappear off the face of their, you can get a new person in and they will ostensibly have some way of not only fixing it, but being able to reach out to more people.So it's actually having a community that. A large community of using a specific piece of software is good for hiring people is good for knowing how to search for problems. Like it just makes your life easier the

[00:13:30] more popular Yeah, system is. Okay, so a little more on themes then. We touched on the free in default theme that is always available in WordPress, which you can use.

[00:14:00] at most up to date. Yeah, because themes are built like a theme that was built even two or three years ago.Might not have some of the things that are, designed and built more in the last year. So my suggestion for people when looking for themes is try to find themes that are being updated regularly. For one. And have a lot of downloads, just like

[00:14:30] WordPress. If a theme is widely, the more widely used it is, the more.Easily, you might be able to find someone who knows the specific intricacies of that theme if you needed help. So there's the free theme auction or as well, there's paid themes, paid pro themes from a lot of developers where you can find 'em on places like ThemeForest or other theme shops. But again, when

[00:15:00] you're looking through those, check when they were made.Check how often they're updated to make sure you're choosing a theme that works for you and will work for you in the future. And then in the repository there's also what I refer to as highly customizable framework themes. Which again, they're free, but they might have a paid tier to them for a pro version of it. But they have they typically have a free version with a lot

[00:15:30] of the basic stuff that you would need, and they're very customizable. Again, I can't reiterate enough, always check how often they're updated that they're being maintained actively and that they have a pretty good, download volume to indicate how well or how popular the theme might be.Above all of that, you can just customize and build your own theme from scratch,

[00:16:00] and that typically would be done if you went to a company or a person like myself, and you really wanted a theme that was custom built. To the exact thing that you need for your business. But for that scenario, you're really talking about a much larger budget of three to five or more thousand dollars initially to get something designed and built out for that.And it's becoming more and more, I

[00:16:30] feel something that. Massive businesses are doing because of the popularity of these free theme frameworks and how customizable they are, people can really go in and make pretty amazing sites for a much better value than doing something for for custom. Not to mention the fact that a custom site, once it's done Me too.

[00:17:00] And it doesn't change if something needs to be upgraded, you have to go back to the developer, have them, fix the theme or do whatever you want. Build something back into that theme that that wasn't there last year. That is a new thing in WordPress, for instance. Whereas these highly customizable three theme frameworks. They're actively being updated by the developers. So when you get those updates to that theme, you're getting the new things that are available within

[00:17:30] WordPress or the new trends in design or web design or things like that. Yeah. As well as another one I'd like to touch on why it's important to make sure it's up-to-date is security. PHP is notoriously one of the most insecure coding languages. Like it. You ask it anything, it'll try to give you a sequel injection and tell everyone the database of passwords. Like it will It just so keep that in mind as well. Anytime you do any customizations that are like

[00:18:00] specialty we're dealing with this right now with another. One website that they had it customized and it's just been a pain to get it to talk to plugins, which I know we're gonna touch on because the interactions now are like customized. And so the plugin got updated, but that update meant that how it responded didn't work with the customization, so then they had to go back. And maintenance is definitely gonna be a difficult one. So keep, bear that in mind that you will, you have, how maintainable is it in the long term? I always

[00:18:30] recommend for just kind of future proofing, leave as few customizations as you need because the more that you use within what they gave you with a theme or a plugin, the easier it's gonna be in the future because someone else is hopefully maintaining those two things and keeping it up to date with the core.And so it's just gonna be, you can flow along with what's already existing within it. Rather than try to build something specialty and then it just over time, it'll just be this weird little sore in your website of having to maintain it and keeping

[00:19:00] it working regularly. Yeah, definitely.And the, that gets tricky sometimes when people have themes and they start customizing them a little bit too much, and then the theme has an update and you do the update. If you didn't do those customizations in a certain way, when you update that theme, it's possible you can lose the customizations that you did.Again, depending on how you made those customizations. I'll touch on that maybe a little bit when we talk about plugins, but essentially the theme,

[00:19:30] think of it only as what styles your site, how you set up your navigation, the look of where your logo is, your colors, your fonts. Your overall layout, your footer, that kind of a thing is really what you're achieving with your with your theme.The theme itself does have certain functionality related to styling and and design. But don't think of the theme as something you need

[00:20:00] to add functionality. Oh, I wanna add, a way for my customers to be able to do this. Don't build functionalities of whatever feature you think you need into the theme.And let's move into plugins. And the reason why plugins are there is exactly for what I was just describing. Was to add the functionality and features that you might be missing from what you get in WordPress core functionality,

[00:20:30] like being able to send through contact forms being able to uh, perform SEO on your pages.Being able to add e-commerce to your website to sell product. These are all accomplished through plugins and there's a massive, just like there's a big repository for themes, there's an even bigger repository for full of plugins that are all features that you can [00:21:00] add to your site should you have that need to add. Some type of functionality that you've defined. Yeah it goes back to that open sourceness where someone in the audience finds like, Hey, there's one that I use all the time. Contact form seven while that's being built, other people built connectors for the contact form seven. So it's oh, I want it to reach out to the Google Sheets and I want it to store, when someone fills up my form, it goes there as well. So it's like

[00:21:30] people building off of even what other people are thinking. And so it adds a lot and it's usually, yeah, like you said, it's more functionality, right? It's a lot more, the PHP coding of a specific thing is gonna happen and then it does some logical programming where it like does, say a person comes to a website and then five seconds later I wanna pop up to show up and it's gonna say X, Y, and Z. If they fill it out, sends it to my email marketing platform.Like that kind of stuff where it's not core of the styling, like

[00:22:00] you said, or the layout. It's more just I need my website to do an extra thing. And and again you also wanna make sure, same as the themes as well, make sure it's popular. They have now a compatibility feature as well, which is nice that isn't compatible with my version of WordPress, which is, it's a nice thing to, a little touch for security because I think a lot of us have been seeing that we've had a lot of day one issues, or they call 'em day one bugs. So it's something that they didn't even know was necessarily a security issue

[00:22:30] and they've there's been a couple of those. And so that definitely, you wanna make sure it's maintained and up to date and works with your website because I Even more so than a theme. Anything that's involving the PHP is more directly than like style, which is more like CSS and HTML, which does like layout and styling. That makes it more dangerous basically for the, your security of your website. Yeah. So now that we know a little bit more about what.

[00:23:00] You do with your theme and what you would do to by adding plugins to extend functionality. One of the things I wanted to get across to people is the reason why you wanna make these, keep these distinctions to keeping your theme as. What it looks like only without functionality being added to the site and why plugins are important to add that functionality versus actually building it into the theme is for the upgrade path

[00:23:30] Like we already touched on earlier, I. If you have a theme and it gets updated and you've built things into the theme, then you might lose those customizations, whether it's visual or feature related. So keeping the features within plugins only gives you an easier upgrade to when you, a couple years down the road, you're like, I don't really the look at my site anymore. I'm gonna switch themes. Switching themes now becomes much

[00:24:00] easier because when you choose a new theme, you just have to deal with the new styling and set it up. You're not gonna lose any functionality of your site because all of that is driven from the plugins that you've chosen. And I've seen many times people build certain things into their theme.

[00:24:30] so now you lost that on your site. So that's the important reason why you wanna know the distinctions between each and make sure that you use each for what its core purpose is so that you don't possibly run into that type of a situation in the future.Yeah, definitely. I know that like I've run into it many times where I had to tell someone, did we need to code this? Is there another way we could have done this with the tools that have already been built? Because

[00:25:00] A, like you said, it's easier migrating, it's also like easier if someone needs to change it, and if you wrote it all in code and then someone who doesn't know code has to come along and change it like all of a sudden.It just opens up so many new avenues for things to go wrong for people. That is just not, it's just not beneficial long term for this for anyone who's maintaining the website. There's also, like whoever wrote the code may have wrote like a little snippet in there and you don't understand why they picked those things.

[00:25:30] So then new web developer comes along and has to figure out like. That's a weird way they did that. And they may have chosen a reason, but they left no notation. Like no way to identify it. And so it's gonna be one where you're gonna run into those issues. One other thing I wanted to say as well, don't I know, Greg, you're big on this one as well, for performance of your WordPress website.

Don't just add plugins 'cause they look nice. Keep keep the number of plugins you have at exactly the amount you need. Don't have duplicates. And the,

[00:26:00] this one WordPress website that I'm dealing with is has this issue where there's 30 or 40 plugins and a bunch of 'em are doing the same thing and they're migrating to a new WordPress website.

But it's just the performance is, it's. Being very negatively impacted because it has so many things that it's doing duplicates of and it's just a nightmare. And there are ways, yeah, the more plugins you have, the more resources that your site might be loading, if it's got CSS or JavaScript or whatever it

[00:26:30] is that plug-in needs to function.All of those things need to be Additionally loaded. So it weighs down your page load speed. As far as, performance, though you theoretically could have a lot of plugins with a site that runs just as fast as one with, one or two. It's really more based on how well the plugin has been coded

[00:27:00] Because that's really what that's really what weighs it down. The additional resources do play a little bit of a role, but if there's a call to the database or something's not programmed right, if it's just like a weighted down plugin that would be what would more substantially.

Cause your site to become slow. So for that reason, you always want to make sure that you're looking for plugins again, that have a lot of downloads that have,

[00:27:30] that are being actively updated. And that have a really good star rating. And you should be pretty good to go. Again, like you say, the more you install, the more possibility that there is of, you having that issue.

So try not to install things for a little, the smallest of functionalities when there's probably other solutions of being able to to get that in the site.

[00:28:00] Exactly. And so with that, I think we are gonna have to call it there today. I think we've learned a bit more about how all the WordPress works together and of course we know what next week is gonna be.

Is Rena back with us next week? Yes. I believe that she is. And so I think we are doing. Quickly looks over at Banner. Oh, it's SEO and YouTube

[00:28:30] optimization with Pip and I. Yeah. And yeah, so that should be that should be a lot of fun and I'll see it next week with that. And I think we mentioned it over the weekend, but we are also doing a live teaching on our Knowhow Marketing Lab YouTube channel.

About Google Business profile. Pip's gonna teach you all the ins and outs of that Fun. Yeah. Yeah. So it should be good. I have to go to make sure that we are ready for that though. All. Bye. Oh, is that happening like now?

[00:29:00] Next in an hour or so? I need to make sure everything works. I might have to try to tune in a little bit for that.

Yeah, for sure. And we'll post a link to that as well when we go live. All right. Bye. Alright, thanks Phelan Thanks everybody for watching.

Episode Transcript

Geekspeak Feb 8 2024 - Wordpress
===

Hey, Phelan, did you already introduce yourself and no, I hadn't. My, yeah go for it. Go for it. Yeah. My name is Phelan. I work at Seymour Digital Media, where we do search engine marketing. And I'm Greg McKinnon with OriginalSeventyTwoCreative, and we're a full-service website, graphic design and digital marketing firm in Vancouver. Yeah, I as everybody knows, I've changed my year for GeekSpeak. I'm only on once a month. The wrap-up as well on the third month. And each, each second week I'm releasing a blog and doing the [00:01:00] topic. So today's topic was giving a better understanding of WordPress themes and plugins and what each of them do and how each of them work together.

Like what are the differences of each, and just a more broad overall understanding of using WordPress and. Customizing and how everything works together. So basically, the first thing I wanted to go about was that WordPress is a content management system. It will allow you to, um, build your site.

On top of, so that it gives you the functionality of maintaining your content, images, a blog and any features related to being able to put in that content, put in the images, build out the pages um, and things like that. So people don't I don't know if people think of [00:02:00] WordPress as more than that.

Or if they just think, if they think of WordPress as everything. But in a nutshell, that's all WordPress is. It's a content management system that allows you to maintain your pages, add your content, add your images, and have an interface to go in and create all of that stuff, or maintain all of that stuff within your work, your website.

I think the dogs agree. Yeah. They're very upset with your description. Yeah. They're like, you're completely wrong. They're like, what about WooCommerce? Yeah. There's e-commerce functionality. They're um, and so they're yeah. I think that yeah, it's a, ultimately it's a CMS where basically it has a backend that.

It is graphically represented. And so with that, it means that someone doesn't have to write like raw code to put out a blog post. Yeah. They can have some sort of interface. And then that's the core functionality of [00:03:00] WordPress. The smart part about WordPress is that it was during the aughts and the open source wars of the lamp stacks, which is like the PHP based backends, your Drupal's, your Juma's.

There's a fourth one that I'm forgetting, but like with Yanto Magento magenta kicking around too. It's. Yeah. Magento's still around? Yep. I think they're all still around. Drupal and Joomla have been deprecated. Oh, have they? Yeah. Yeah. 'cause I did work on a a Drupal website. No. A Joomla website and boy, howdy.

Has it not been updated since twenty-ten? Oh boy. It was limited features of Galore. And yeah but it comes outta that world where everyone was doing open source every, and because of that, it meant that also it meant that people could build off of WordPress and add some additional functionality or even different.

Ways of having the website looks like your [00:04:00] themes and your plugins. So it opened up and built a community, which the added benefit of having open source as well is that you have, you're not just whatever the team is that say you work at Apple and you're fixing an Apple product, it's all the people on the internet who are adding to the.

Code base and finding fixes and finding errors. So it meant that you're not limited to the people in a specific company. You have all the power of people on the internet who want to contribute to it. So it it improves the overall product because you have so many new minds working on it, looking at it in different ways, adding new features that you wouldn't even have thought of necessarily.

And so that's the big power behind WordPress. Yeah. The, a little backstory of WordPress it was basically a blogging platform that matt Mullenweg picked up and forked and. Created it started working on what he was calling WordPress. But it was an original blogging platform that he he picked up [00:05:00] and forked off of.

Do you remember, I'm trying to think of what the original blogging platform might have been called. Do you recall, should look that? Yeah, I know, like I think it. I can't even remember the name of it. And I know some pretty esoteric names of the original companies, but that's one I don't even know.

And actually WordPress just recently within the last year turned 20, like it was, it's been around for 20. 20 plus years now, but it was, there was a milestone twenty-year thing I remember just not far back. So it's been around a long time. But essentially, WordPress itself does that basic stuff for you.

It allows you to create pages in an interface without having to know HTML or CSS and stuff like that. And within WordPress you get. The themes and plugins that you can select. So WordPress on its own is a CMS. Within WordPress. [00:06:00] Then you have obviously the themes where you would there's a default theme and there's been a default, a new default theme with WordPress every year.

Going back from its beginning. They're typically always called whatever the year is. So like the 2024 theme. The 2023 theme not very exciting. That's what you get when you get web developers naming things is that they're like gonna, uh, they're gonna name it, but boy, how do you say, not gonna be creative, which is why there's 20 million SEO or real function apps that are all like redirect.

But every release of Wordpress is named after a jazz something jazz related. If it's a Ja, I don't remember if it's specifically jazz singers or just jazz, something Jazz. In general, they could always. This? Yeah, with whichever, jazz related theme this release is they might be able to do something like that, but they do multiple releases.[00:07:00]

Per year. So that might not exactly work, but they could be more creative. Yes. I mean that, that's basically like every product manager at any software company is guys, you could have been a bit more creative in your naming here would've been a big thing that they circle of yeah, but they're famously like coders like.

Get a really creative streak on one specific thing, and then don't think to apply to anything else in their main conventions. Very common you'll find that across the board. It's funnier when they actually do get like a proper theme like a. Not to go on a tangent, but like Homebrew, it's like a terminal system for Mac and everything is like related to brewing. So you get a cask or a keg and that's like a module that you install and like actually kept like a proper theme and naming conventions based around like brewing. So it's fun when they actually do get that. But yeah. Anyway yes, WordPress is I think also one of the other parts that's interesting about WordPress is because it's from like basically the.[00:08:00]

The earliest period of the internet where like mass internet culture came from. It also has some inherent issues that just can't get resolved out of just the way it's situated and it's one of those ones where they could fix it, but basically by, if they make a mistake, they could break a third of the internet.

And so they have to very cautiously move with it and find new ways to adapt with a system that isn't really built for. A lot of big changes because there's so many people use it that you can make one too many changes and break everything. Yeah. Yeah, the o The other thing before moving on more with themes and eventually plugins with WordPress I'd wanted to reiterate that there is WordPress.org and there's WordPress.com.

The WordPress.org is the free open source version of WordPress that anybody can download. It's free, you can install it on most any [00:09:00] hosting provider. And everything's completely free. The default theme is in there for you as well. Which, so you could build a completely free website with just getting hosting and a domain name With WordPress, the free theme and any free plugins versus WordPress.com is a subscription service where there's a little bit more handholding and support.

With WordPress. So you can sign up for WordPress.com account and then do the exact same thing you can with the .org. But they do have that support. So you have, they, you can chat with someone or you can call 'em and ask questions, but it's also completely do-it-yourself if you want to do it. But you do have that behind you because the free version, you're on your own, right?

Like you can take it, you can do whatever you want. For free, but if you need help, you're either going [00:10:00] to a free WordPress community on Facebook or something like that to try to get information on something that might've gone wrong. Or have a guy like you yourselves, or myself who know WordPress people can come to a web developer and be like, oh, I have this site.

I need help. Sure, no problem. And do it that way, or the WordPress.com is a paid service. You pay, you get your hosting, you can build your site, and they also have support to give you a hand with whatever it is that you might need. And they have tiered levels. Obviously. If you want a basic blogging site, it's.

Probably pretty cheap. And then if you want to do like e-commerce or more advanced business sites they have levels that you could go up to, which give you. A little bit more functionality, features and functionality. So I wanted to make sure people knew that distinction between WordPress.org and [00:11:00] WordPress.com.

Yeah and I'm just gonna say for the record, avoid WordPress.com like the plague. Yes. I agree. Just like I, it is torture. It is because you cannot access all the plugins that are on WordPress.org. On WordPress.com. That's right. It's a more strict thing. Yeah. Which, looking at it could be good because as I'll mention later on when we get to plugins, there are.

Plugins that are really bad, so yeah. Oh, a hundred percent. They give you access in there to limited number of plugins that they've deemed to be, reputable and good and serve, very specific functionality and stuff like that. But it's not the type of thing where you have your own ho your self-hosted WordPress, and you can just install whatever you feel like.

Yeah. No. I'm just saying for the record, just to let people know, like the, my, I'm not speaking for you, Greg. I'm just speaking for myself. My official stamp is Void. WordPress.com because you will pull your hair out at [00:12:00] one point you will get to something and go, what do you mean I can't do that thing?

And it's just gonna be a weird, arbitrary part where they're just like, no, actually we decided that you can't do that. I completely agree. I think it's a better obviously, this would be a plug for, coming up. Have me help you with your site, but I would definitely recommend having a go-to guy who you can trust and knows.

WordPress that if you have an issue, you have them to fall back and say, oh, hey Greg, can you I'm having trouble with this, or this is wrong with my site. Just knowing, having someone in the community or having a developer who's been doing it for a long time, behind you to give you a hand when you're trying to do it yourself, but then get stuck is really good.

And there's tons of WordPress people out there yeah. It's, it is not hard to find a person who knows WordPress. Yeah. Yeah, and that's another thing I'd also say is just like a quick vote of building off of that before we jump in of like I talked about it earlier, [00:13:00] having a system that's popular is a good thing because it means that if you have to fire your guy or something happens to them and they disappear off the face of their, you can get a new person in and they will ostensibly have some way of not only fixing it, but being able to reach out to more people.

So it's actually having a community that. A large community of using a specific piece of software is good for hiring people is good for knowing how to search for problems. Like it just makes your life easier the more popular Yeah, system is. Okay, so a little more on themes then. We touched on the free in default theme that is always available in WordPress, which you can use.

It's a block-based theme now because they're moving towards the block-based builders. But there's a really big repository of. Free themes that are in there to choose from. It's about choosing the right one choosing the one that, uh, is [00:14:00] at most up to date. Yeah, because themes are built like a theme that was built even two or three years ago.

Might not have some of the things that are, designed and built more in the last year. So my suggestion for people when looking for themes is try to find themes that are being updated regularly. For one. And have a lot of downloads, just like WordPress. If a theme is widely, the more widely used it is, the more.

Easily, you might be able to find someone who knows the specific intricacies of that theme if you needed help. So there's the free theme auction or as well, there's paid themes, paid pro themes from a lot of developers where you can find 'em on places like ThemeForest or other theme shops. But again, when [00:15:00] you're looking through those, check when they were made.

Check how often they're updated to make sure you're choosing a theme that works for you and will work for you in the future. And then in the repository there's also what I refer to as highly customizable framework themes. Which again, they're free, but they might have a paid tier to them for a pro version of it.

But they have they typically have a free version with a lot of the basic stuff that you would need, and they're very customizable. Again, I can't reiterate enough, always check how often they're updated that they're being maintained actively and that they have a pretty good, download volume to indicate how well or how popular the theme might be.

Above all of that, you can just customize and build your own theme from scratch, [00:16:00] and that typically would be done if you went to a company or a person like myself, and you really wanted a theme that was custom built. To the exact thing that you need for your business. But for that scenario, you're really talking about a much larger budget of three to five or more thousand dollars initially to get something designed and built built out for that.

And it's becoming more and more, I feel something that. Massive businesses are doing because of the popularity of these free theme frameworks and how customizable they are, people can really go in and make pretty amazing sites for a much better value than doing something for for custom.

Not to mention the fact that a custom site, once it's done Me too. [00:17:00] And it doesn't change if something needs to be upgraded, you have to go back to the developer, have them, fix the theme or do whatever you want. Build something back into that theme that that wasn't there last year.

That is a new thing in WordPress, for instance. Whereas these highly customizable three theme frameworks. They're actively being updated by the developers. So when you get those updates to that theme, you're getting the new things that are available within WordPress or the new trends in design or web design or things like that.

Yeah. As well as another one I'd like to touch on why it's important to make sure it's up-to-date is security. PHP is notoriously one of the most insecure coding languages. Like it. You ask it anything, it'll try to give you a sequel injection and tell everyone the database of passwords. Like it will.

It just so keep that in mind as well. Anytime you do any customizations that are like [00:18:00] specialty we're dealing with this right now with another. One website that they had it customized and it's just been a pain to get it to talk to plugins, which I know we're gonna touch on because the interactions now are like customized.

And so the plugin got updated, but that update meant that how it responded didn't work with the customization, so then they had to go back. And maintenance is definitely gonna be a difficult one. So keep, bear that in mind that you will, you have, how maintainable is it in the long term? I always recommend for just kind of future proofing, leave as few customizations as you need because the more that you use within what they gave you with a theme or a plugin, the easier it's gonna be in the future because someone else is hopefully maintaining those two things and keeping it up to date with the core.

And so it's just gonna be, you can flow along with what's already existing within it. Rather than try to build something specialty and then it just over time, it'll just be this weird little sore in your website of having to maintain it and keeping [00:19:00] it working regularly. Yeah, definitely.

And the, that gets tricky sometimes when people have themes and they start customizing them a little bit too much, and then the theme has an update and you do the update. If you didn't do those customizations in a certain way, when you update that theme, it's possible you can lose the customizations that you did.

Again, depending on how you made those customizations. I'll touch on that maybe a little bit when we talk about plugins, but essentially the theme, think of it only as what styles your site, how you set up your navigation, the look of where your logo is, your colors, your fonts. Your overall layout, your footer, that kind of a thing is really what you're achieving with your with your theme.

The theme itself does have certain functionality related to styling and and design. But don't think of the theme as something you need [00:20:00] to add functionality. Oh, I wanna add, a way for my customers to be able to do this. Don't build functionalities of whatever feature you think you need into the theme.

And let's move into plugins. And the reason why plugins are there is exactly for what I was just describing. Was to add the functionality and features that you might be missing from what you get in WordPress core functionality, like being able to send through contact forms being able to uh, perform SEO on your pages.

Being able to add e-commerce to your website to sell product. These are all accomplished through plugins and there's a massive, just like there's a big repository for themes, there's an even bigger repository for full of plugins that are all features that you can [00:21:00] add to your site should you have that need to add.

Some type of functionality that you've defined. Yeah it goes back to that open sourceness where someone in the audience finds like, Hey, there's one that I use all the time. Contact form seven while that's being built, other people built connectors for the contact form seven.

So it's oh, I want it to reach out to the Google Sheets and I want it to store, when someone fills up my form, it goes there as well. So it's like people building off of even what other people are thinking. And so it adds a lot and it's usually, yeah, like you said, it's more functionality, right?

It's a lot more, the PHP coding of a specific thing is gonna happen and then it does some logical programming where it like does, say a person comes to a website and then five seconds later I wanna pop up to show up and it's gonna say X, Y, and Z. If they fill it out, sends it to my email marketing platform.

Like that kind of stuff where it's not core of the styling, like [00:22:00] you said, or the layout. It's more just I need my website to do an extra thing. And and again you also wanna make sure, same as the themes as well, make sure it's popular. They have now a compatibility feature as well, which is nice that isn't compatible with my version of WordPress, which is, it's a nice thing to, a little touch for security because I.

I think a lot of us have been seeing that we've had a lot of day one issues, or they call 'em day one bugs. So it's something that they didn't even know was necessarily a security issue and they've there's been a couple of those. And so that definitely, you wanna make sure it's maintained and up to date and works with your website because I.

Even more so than a theme. Anything that's involving the PHP is more directly than like style, which is more like CSS and HTML, which does like layout and styling. That makes it more dangerous basically for the, your security of your website. Yeah. So now that we know a little bit more about what.

Like we already touched on earlier, I. If you have a theme and it gets updated and you've built things into the theme, then you might lose those customizations, whether it's visual or feature related. So keeping the features within plugins only gives you an easier upgrade to when you, a couple years down the road, you're like, I don't really the look at my site anymore.

I'm gonna switch themes. Switching themes now becomes much [00:24:00] easier because when you choose a new theme, you just have to deal with the new styling and set it up. You're not gonna lose any functionality of your site because all of that is driven from the plugins that you've chosen. And I've seen many times people build certain things into their theme.

And then when that theme gets switched out for something, they're like, oh, I don't have the ability to do this anymore. It's yeah, because it was built into the theme and you've changed it for something else, so now you lost that on your site. So that's the important reason why you wanna know the distinctions between each and make sure that you use each for what its core purpose is so that you don't possibly run into that type of a situation in the future.

Yeah, definitely. I know that like I've run into it many times where I had to tell someone, did we need to code this? Is there another way we could have done this with the tools that have already been built? Because [00:25:00] A, like you said, it's easier migrating, it's also like easier if someone needs to change it, and if you wrote it all in code and then someone who doesn't know code has to come along and change it like all of a sudden.

It just opens up so many new avenues for things to go wrong for people. That is just not, it's just not beneficial long term for this for anyone who's maintaining the website. There's also, like whoever wrote the code may have wrote like a little snippet in there and you don't understand why they picked those things.

So then new web developer comes along and has to figure out like. That's a weird way they did that. And they may have chosen a reason, but they left no notation. Like no way to identify it. And so it's gonna be one where you're gonna run into those issues. One other thing I wanted to say as well, don't I know, Greg, you're big on this one as well, for performance of your WordPress website.

Don't just add plugins 'cause they look nice. Keep keep the number of plugins you have at exactly the amount you need. Don't have duplicates. And the, [00:26:00] this one WordPress website that I'm dealing with is has this issue where there's 30 or 40 plugins and a bunch of 'em are doing the same thing and they're migrating to a new WordPress website.

All of those things need to be Additionally loaded. So it weighs down your page load speed. As far as, performance, though you theoretically could have a lot of plugins with a site that runs just as fast as one with, one or two. It's really more based on how well the plugin has been coded.[00:27:00]

Because that's really what that's really what weighs it down. The additional resources do play a little bit of a role, but if there's a call to the database or something's not programmed right, if it's just like a weighted down plugin that would be what would more substantially.

Cause your site to become slow. So for that reason, you always want to make sure that you're looking for plugins again, that have a lot of downloads that have, that are being actively updated. And that have a really good star rating. And you should be pretty good to go. Again, like you say, the more you install, the more possibility that there is of, you having that issue.

So try not to install things for a little, the smallest of functionalities when there's probably other solutions of being able to to get that in the site. [00:28:00] Exactly. And so with that, I think we are gonna have to call it there today. I think we've learned a bit more about how all the WordPress works together and of course we know what next week is gonna be.

Is Rena back with us next week? Yes. I believe that she is. And so I think we are doing. Quickly looks over at Banner. Oh, it's SEO and YouTube optimization with Pip and I. Yeah. And yeah, so that should be that should be a lot of fun and I'll see it next week with that. And I think we mentioned it over the weekend, but we are also doing a live teaching on our Knowhow Marketing Lab YouTube channel.

About Google Business profile. Pip's gonna teach you all the ins and outs of that Fun. Yeah. Yeah. So it should be good. I have to go to make sure that we are ready for that though. All. Bye. Oh, is that happening like now? [00:29:00] Next in an hour or so? I need to make sure everything's works. I might have to try to tune in a little bit for that.

Yeah, for sure. And we'll post a link to that as well when we go live. All right. Bye. Alright, thanks Willem. Thanks everybody for watching.

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