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David Vogelpohl: Hello everyone and welcome to Press This, the WordPress community podcast on WMR. This is your host, David Vogelpohl. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and I love to bring the best of the community to you here every week on Press This. As a reminder, you can follow me on Twitter @wpdavidv, and you can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, or download the latest episodes at wmr.fm. But for today what we’re going to talk about is product lead content strategies for WordPress product companies. And joining us for that conversation as someone who knows a little bit about that like to welcome to press this. Alex had nice scale Matt. Alex, welcome to Press This.

Alex Panagis: Hey David. Great to be here.

DV: Excellent. Really excited to have you here. I know I didn’t really tell you this kind of coming into the episode may have surprised you at that point. But product led content strategies is a hot topic for WP Engine these days. And I think a lot of other kind of WordPress product companies but for those listening, what Alex is going to talk about are his thoughts around how product teams not only shouldn’t be involved in content strategy, but should really pay and play a big part in leading it. Alex is going to talk about how most product works Product Marketing words, approach content creation, why product teams should really be playing a leadership role and ways product can lead content initiatives without bending their roadmap. Now lots of trick Alex, I’m really curious about your tips on that one. But we’ll kick it off with the first question I asked every guest. Alex, could you briefly tell me your WordPress origin story? When was the first time you used WordPress?

AP: My journey with WordPress started back in 2011. So quite a while ago, but not not as long ago as for most people. For me, it was when I launched my first website, which was all about photography, videography and technology, which at the time was sort of my thing, my hobby and what I was really passionate about. And within a relatively short period of time I grew that informational content site and I had the opportunity to work with some amazing companies like Think Tank photo, which are renowned for their high quality camera backs. And then from there, I guess you could say the rest is history. I went from figuring out how to build or more so at the time throwing together my first site with some help to watching WordPress grow to being the leading CMS in the world, but also both in my view, as well as by statistic.

DV: That’s really interesting. So you started your WordPress journey, kind of building the site around your interest at the time photography and videography. Did you know that Matt Mullenweg was photo Matt, did you know about his photography, persona, I guess or side?

AP: I’m disappointed to say that I actually didn’t. And it wasn’t until a few years or maybe a year after I had built that site that I got more involved in the WordPress community which, as many will agree is one of the one of if not probably the best part of the WordPress industry is the community behind it. I did the first year or so that I used it I moreso just saw it as this brilliant piece of software that allowed me to do something that I couldn’t before with previous solutions. And then as I got involved in it, I was like oh, there’s this you know, obviously then it came into my knowledge who Matt was and oh, he’s also behind automatic and all these other companies.

DV: Interesting. Interesting. Well, 2011 of course was an exciting year to join just like basically around a year after custom post types and meta fields were added. It’s like kind of in my view the start of WordPress. As a true seeing this. But it was I’m sure there was a real exciting time to start getting involved and to see it grow over time. Now, I was wondering if we could shift gears a little bit. Can you tell me a little bit about what scale math is and we all do?

AP: Yeah, so from first using WordPress in 2011 around five years ago, I first started working in the industry with our first company that we had partnered with, which is still what we do to this day, but at that time, it happened to be a company in the WordPress space. And now although a lot of our work isn’t necessarily just in the WordPress space anymore, we continue to work with a number of WordPress businesses on growth. So, of course we continue to use and love it as a solution for our own sites. And again, as I mentioned earlier, I have a soft spot for the community alone. And as we said before we hit record I attended or had the pleasure to attend WordCamp Europe as well. So yeah, I’m actively still trying to be involved in the WordPress space as a community but also moreso still work with companies, whether they’re not directly in the space that obviously in some ways, because it occupies such a large part of you know, the online industry, they still touch the WordPress community in some way.

DV: Okay, and you’re this is a consulting service for product based businesses are helping you understand like the core mission of scale, man.

AP: Yeah, so the short is we partner with industry leading companies to help them grow. That’s the sort of, you know, one word or one sentence answer but then beyond that, we go a bit further as well. So it’s not just on growth, although that’s really what kind of hooks people in it’s also then you know, what goes on beyond that. So the operations of doing that. So largely like how to get product teams to work with content teams, for example, is one of the things and then also of course, customer experience, onboarding, all these types of things. Because in our mind, they ultimately fall into the category of growth or work that goes towards growth and most categorize it as that. But really, it’s so much more because without the rest, ultimately, it’s very difficult to do wholeheartedly drive growth for a product or service company for that matter if you’re not also doing the rest really well.

DV: So that makes sense. I’m on your website. Now I can see some of your customers or people you’ve had on the show like Vito for Mandarin and Vova from Freemius. I’m wondering if you accept customers though from principles that first names don’t start with the that maybe will ask you that question. Interview yeah, those are some awesome new customers that you have there. That’s great to see. So now kind of on the topic, you know, that we wanted to focus on here today. I’m just curious, like, in your view, how do you think most orgs approach product content and what are maybe with some of the challenges with a common approaches to creating content around products?

AP: Yeah, I’d actually lean towards saying that most organizations, at least that we see don’t actually approach content with the view that it should be led by product. Even at larger companies. It tends to be the case that as you grow, the more disconnected you become with the overall approach and the link between product and growth strategy or the people that are involved in actually executing that strategy. And something that in our view ultimately shouldn’t be the case because when growth both near term and long term aren’t aligned with where a product is headed. You often see companies waste a lot of resources. Focusing on things that have little impact on the business. But it takes way too long for that feedback loop to close and for people to realize that that’s the case. And then once it does, it’s always about finding who the person is to blame instead of realizing that it’s not one person to blame. It’s the fact that the people in the organization weren’t working together. So simple examples of this range from the most basic form of it is really just writing content about topics that aren’t even remotely related to the product you’re building or not understanding what the important part of the product is. So let’s say at WP engine, a perfect example right now is you’re you’re doing a push on headless WordPress. So ultimately, that’s something that the marketing team, I assume is aware of based on the recent acquisitions that you’ve made and everything. But if they aren’t, then it’s something that they should be so that they can also focus their efforts on driving growth organically on that side. And then it also ranges from things like not even aligning on the products business model. So let’s say you have a b2b business model, but also a b2c model for a product. If you don’t actually align with you know, if it’s in the case where we’re working directly with the founder, or if it’s, you know, in house people that are working with a CMO, for example, it’s not aligning on what the core goal is because even if you have two business models, depending on the resources you have allocated, you really can only focus on doing one at a time and then doing it in cycles is normally how we’d approach it because otherwise, you don’t know whether the efforts that you’re investing are supposed to drive impact on the b2c model. side of the business or on the b2b model side of the business which ultimately becomes a whole different argument which is again, more so on the product side to decide which is what shouldn’t be leading what should be the priority, which is where the where the whole confusion stems from. So I feel like the product teams which don’t have it all figured out, often tried to, you know, blame or not blame but more so just rely on marketing and say, Oh, that that’s something that they should have been focusing on, even when they at the time, didn’t know that it’s something that they were focusing on. So those are kind of some some of the more common examples.

DV: So it sounds like just summarize that the most or approach content creation through the winds or the leadership of the content team, which are fundamentally disconnected from what is being built, why it’s being built. And maybe even a guessing certainly kind of growing personal experience the use cases of people that are then going to go use it. And so it seems like what you’re kind of proposing here is that if those involved in the building and solving for the puzzles or jobs to be done if you will, for the products are involved more intimately than the content ultimately produced is better. And so I kind of want to dive into some of the whys behind that, and even your thoughts on how to approach it, but we’re gonna take our first break and we’ll be right back. Time to plug into a commercial break. Stay tuned. For more pressing this in just a moment. Everyone welcome back to press this WordPress community podcast on W EMR. We’re in the middle of our interview around product lead content strategies with Alex tinnitus. Alex right before the break you were talking a little bit about the kind of common approach Mr. X take around kind of the content team weighting, of course with the content strategy. But when it came to products, you felt that the product team really should be more leadership focused there. Now, you said something early on where you’re like even big companies approach it that way. Like my instinct would say big companies would be more likely to approach it that way, because they have more resources and people did. Did you mean to sound surprised when you made that reference? Or was I reading too much into it? Or do you think that smaller companies somehow are less inclined to leverage their engineers and product people to participate in content?

AP: Well, yeah, no, definitely. So I mean, my surprise is more so from the expectation that, like companies that are bigger have been going for longer and should have figured it out by that point. But yeah, you’re definitely right. The inclination is, it actually tends to be more so the case the bigger you get, because the more disconnected people are and the less people are working one on one, which ultimately is probably where the problem stems for for most organizations. So yeah, the surprise there is, yeah.

DV: Yeah, that’s a it’s a good point. It’s certainly as people specialize and things like content creation, you start to see this division of labor. But you also see the division of, you know, being close to the use case, being close to the customer being close to the product. And you start to create these, you know, additional distance between those two. So if the common way that people kind of fall into is it’s a content team driven approach, and I can obviously see a lot of key benefits in that too. But why do you think product orgs in particular, should have a Senate Senator seat in terms of the content strategy, like what is that benefit in doing that? You kind of touched on it earlier, but I’m just curious in particular with product doors what is the value see there?

AP: Definitely. So I mean, we generally see a tight association between how closely product and marketing work hand in hand and the ROI driven from money invested in general in growth. And we won’t get into tracking and attribution for content or for marketing in general, because that’s a whole other course or maybe even PhD realistically, because it’s not as straightforward but it’s realistically centered around the idea that when you have marketing teams, be it content, social, you know, everything in between paid as well, speaking the same language as customers that are leaving product feedback that makes its way to product managers, and aligning on the way that you talk about how those customers are solving problems using the solutions that you’ve built. The more aligned you are ultimately with the people that you’re aiming to target with the work that you’re doing. So you have a person in mind with with everything that you’re doing, and you know what the objective is of, let’s say if it’s a blog post of that blog post if it’s a resource and have that resource, so it just aligns with the end goal.

DV: So when you say product lead really it sounds like what you’re describing is like setting the tone, setting the language identifying the problems identifying describing how to the problems are solved with the product, but it didn’t sound like what you were saying was like the product leader is going to sit down with the content roadmap every week and help to use what’s in there. Feels like maybe when you say lead, it’s maybe more trail braking than like bringing along the I don’t know the caravan and making sure the caravan gets a twist ago. It’s more like defining the path. Is that a fair assessment and how you’re describing it?

AP: Yeah, I think there’s there’s an extent to which it doesn’t work because it also depends on the company and the product itself, but having everybody on the marketing team follow the roadmap, conversations and meetings every week or every day they stand up. That would be a nightmare. I think that for us. That’s not something that we’d encourage organizations to because it becomes more complicated and you have information overload. And then you have people thinking that oh, I heard you mentioned this. On the last meeting. I felt that’s what we were talking about. And then then that leads to confusion. So it’s not so much throwing everybody in into the deep end in terms of getting them all the information that the product team is working with. But there just has to be a people willing to work together. So without collaboration it realistically. The one thing you guarantee is that it’s going to be an uphill battle. So the worst of the worst we’ve seen is company Slack channels, isolating team members entirely so they have no contact with each other at all, so that everybody on marketing teams wasn’t even able to realistically reach out to a person who built a feature to ask a question about it. For example, if they had they were working on a piece of content about how that works. And then you know, for example, right before a feature launch or anything coming up. There’s just a small note posted to the people who are responsible for the people on the growth team that are ultimately responsible for making sure it lands the right way. And that usually happened on the day or just the day before and in those cases. So that of course that is ultimately a recipe, I would say for disaster because it’s never going to work nearly as well. And it’s not going to be a great experience for the people working on the teams nor motivating as when you get a team that is working closely with each other and aligned and working towards the same mission.

DV: Yeah, I can think of various initiatives and products and content strategies. We have a WP Engine and those close knit groups are definitely the best performing and so that definitely hits home to me. I’m just curious if you’ve run across this and if you’re unfamiliar, feel free to add it say so that you feel like writing and participating in content from like the product or even the engineers working on stuff you find that helps them make better products and maybe make better features like just having to explain it somehow translate into better products.

AP: Yeah, so we try to encourage all the companies we work with to have a very much a written work culture. So as opposed to having meetings, you know, throughout the day to encourage them to write because in general, that makes everything much more thoughtful. So when you have people in a meeting, you normally have somebody explaining something in five minutes, or in 10 minutes and then you have everybody you know 10 People in the meeting saying like oh, yeah, that’s great. Makes a lot of sense in my head. And that’s because they’re led to and they’re motivated by the fact that they’re on a call. But ultimately, when if they were reading a written explanation with screenshots of how something could or currently does work, then they’d have more time to think and sit back about whether that actually makes sense. So I think it helps people form better opinions. So I think writing whether it’s internally or or also publicly, I think having people that are on the product side also spend their time do public facing actual growth work tends to take away from the work they do on the product side, but internally I definitely think that there should be a lot more emphasis in general across the board on writing, as opposed to having things in meeting because in meetings because when you do that, yes, I think people think what they’re saying through a lot more and everything tends to be more thoughtful.

DV: Yeah, that bright idea doesn’t always seem as bright when you write it out and into fish. It’s, it’s a really interesting and salient point. Okay, so with product, lead or release, I guess, trail broken content strategies. When, like one of the benefits I can imagine, of course is having you know, better content about the products and more accurately describes them. I can see that translating into people getting more excited about the products and potentially buying the products more often or using them more often. What are the like is that the totality of the growth opportunities and product versus content strategies? Like how do you think about like, why would this help an organization grow?

AP: Yeah, I think beyond just that, beyond it, you know, coming across better to customers in individual pieces of content or individual work that’s done. It also makes the company and I say this as a user, but also it’s from what we’ve heard from users that the companies that we’ve worked with, is that it makes the company look more put together in the simplest way. Because when you don’t have that you have the feeling that content and all the work that certain teams are doing is just not aligned with what features the product is pushing. So then that just leads to confusion that customer side if you have for example, on the content side, people writing one thing about okay, I mean, this is, let’s say not not the best example, but it comes to mind given the context of the conversation with WP Engine, which is let’s say WP Engine is doing something on the product side with regards to performance. Let’s say you then don’t align with the content team. And they write something that in some ways actually contradicts what the product is doing in terms of performance. So you’re having support teams, advise people and you’re having the product, encourage people nudge them towards optimizing for performance in a specific way. I want to think of a specific example. But then in a piece of content, you’re actually having the content team, which is working so isolated from the support and the product teams, that you actually don’t even have them aware of that, that they’re they’re contradicting what’s written there. So that just leads to a lack of cohesion, I think for customers, because then what’s what happens then if a customer comes across you through that piece of work, and then they get into the product and they come across it and they think Oh, I thought I was explained differently when I was originally signing up. Or when I originally read about WP Engine. I didn’t know that this was how it’s going to be for example.

DV: So you have this notion of like expectation settings which if you get it wrong because of bad experience caused cancellations, of course, cancel prevention is growth of course, particularly with recurring revenue products. And so it’s it’s not just convincing people to buy it for the first time but it’s also playing this role in enablement, and getting started and continuing to find success. And so by having a strong kind of inaccurate product representation in that content, you can drive value beyond just converting on our website, and that makes total sense and I’m thinking of a project right now. That like would fit rare very well and the conversation you’re just kind of fun suffocating we would have. So now I want to kind of dive into a little bit around how we do all this without, you know, ripping up our roadmap. But we’re gonna take our last break. We’ll be right back.

DV: Everyone welcome back to press this WordPress community podcast and WMR. This is your host, David Vogelpohl. I’m interviewing Alex Panagis about product lead content about product lead content strategies for WordPress product companies. Alex right before the break you were talking about you know the different growth opportunities and having a product lead content strategy, you know, kind of played a little bit on my my suggestion that it’s good for maybe converting new customers but then you pointed out, it’s really helpful for things like setting the proper expectations and enablement, which can have additional growth benefits, which I thought was a really great way to look at it. But of course, every time you talk to a product person or an engineer about participating in content, the question inevitably comes up, like what about the roadmap is actually talking about this tension of the value of product and engineering like content and, and the pressure on the roadmap with Ian Paulsen of delicious braids. He recently joined WP engine because of the acquisition. I was actually doing that this morning, Alex so I was like, Oh, but I get some tips and this interview with Alex that you’re bringing back to you. But like what are your thoughts like how can product works, manage content and workstreams without you know, torching big chunks of the roadmap?

AP: I think, I think when done when executed, right. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. If not, it can be the opposite. So one example and correct me if I’m wrong, if I’m not answering this the way you initially had it in mind in terms of torching chunks of the roadmap. But the other way we’ve seen like one example is actually gauging the potential for a certain feature with content. So let’s say you run a very active Facebook community surrounding a product. But you can let the informational content let’s bring it back to an example. So let’s say informational content about how to achieve x doesn’t necessarily have to feature the solution, but can still have a place on on a company site. So in that case, if you have an active community to push this to, it can be very interesting to actually put together this informational piece that as of present doesn’t feature your product as the solution because it doesn’t have that feature. Push it to the community see what the response is. And then you generally know if you get 1020 comments saying, Oh, this is really great. I appreciate you putting together this guide, in theory would be great if your product could automate this or you know, do this out of the box, because it seems like that should be doable. And then you know, you can feed that back to the product team and say, Look, they’re actually very interested in being able to do this with our product. Is this something that we can build? Because it looks like we validated the demand for it. So that I think is how I would have it feed back into the roadmap. And I will try to keep with regards to torching big chunks of the roadmap. I would say that the content team shouldn’t be that involved in informing the roadmap. They should generally work with a handful of people on a bigger organization only. So it doesn’t come to the point where they’re even giving instructions to specific people about specific features because otherwise it does create more mess than then it actually improves the overall work.

DV: In terms of like the product engineering teams right now like the interference of working on content I first off I love the idea of doing like a how to guide that if your product did it with saw that that’s very clever. Is it that when you’re having new features available, or do you can use cases you’re solving for like the product and maybe the engineers would kind of work on the story behind that and then like pass it off. Is that a way to to kind of reduce the impact to the engineering roadmap is to your point like Don’t be involved with every lick of content, but really kind of be directional?

AP: Yeah, definitely. So I mean, ultimately you want the service becomes more difficult as products become more technical. So with WP Engine, there’s a range because of the ICP you target the ideal customer profile that you’re ultimately targeting. It differs but with more technical products. If you only have a technical audience, you do want the people on the content team are on the growth team in general to be able to speak with experience and expertise on the vertical that your product operating. So if you need them to lean on somebody on the product side for everything from an explanation of how a feature works. In general that tends to be bad because it means that they don’t they ultimately don’t have the understanding of their product and without the true understanding of the product. It’s very difficult to do growth work because then it tends to interfere with the product people and then being able to focus on what is their actual full time job is of course they also have a whole other set of responsibilities to fulfill. So I think that comes down to that comes down to the people you have on your team being a really good fit for the product as well. Which is difficult to vet for. But if specifically within the WordPress space, it’s about hiring people that have used the product so if you’re if you’re a relatively small product company, and you’re hiring, we met with a couple of people at WordCamp Europe that actually said they hired a significant number of people from their customer base, as opposed to going out and looking for recruiters that hire people that have used their product, know how it works inside out. And that significantly cut down the time of onboarding them because it wasn’t about, okay, you have a general understanding of you know, you have a technical background, but you’ve never heard of our product or understand how it works. They have had actually used it because they were previously customers.

DV: Yeah, that’s really interesting because in WordPress in particular is an opportunity because it’s such a dominant CMS that it’s so easy to find people with a background. My last two senior manager hires actually were customers of WP Engine. So I modified my team is the growth team Alex it you know that that that a built that that history and having you know what I would the way I put it is have you built WordPress sites for money, you know that that’s experience that is difficult to replicate through learning and to your point, particularly on smaller orders that might not have extensive pmk support. It’s it’s often critical for this content creators to have that domain directly domain experience. And I definitely could see that being a big pillar of what you focus on. Well, this was incredible. Alex, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your thoughts here.

AP: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

DV: Fantastic if you’d like to learn more about what Alex is up to please visit scalemath.com. Thanks everyone for listening to Press This, the WordPress community podcast on WMR. Again, this has been your host David Vogelpohl. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine. And I love to bring the best of the community to you here every week on Press This.

The post Press This: Product Led Content Strategies for WordPress Product Companies With Alex Panagis appeared first on Torque.

Free options like Local offer useful resources that can enable you to troubleshoot your WordPress website. It gives you access to tools for testing outbound email functionality, live reloading, and even a link checker.

In this article, we’ll explain why you may want to use a local environment when debugging your WordPress website. Then, we’ll show you how to complete three basic WordPress debugging tasks using Local. Let’s get to it!

Why You May Want to Use a Local Environment for WordPress Debugging

If you manage a WordPress website, you’ll likely run into errors sooner or later. That’s not because WordPress is a poorly-coded piece of software, but because it’s a complex one. Add heavy traffic; multiple plugins and themes; custom code; complex server configuration, and issues are bound to pop up from time to time.

Therefore, debugging your website is crucial if you want to make sure it remains running smoothly. However, WordPress troubleshooting on a live website can be tricky. In many cases, you may need to temporarily disable features or tweak parts of your site that will impact the user experience. Instead of doing that in a live environment, a local setup offers a safer alternative.

Local WordPress development environments are a great solution when it comes to troubleshooting. In a local environment, it doesn’t matter if you break parts of your site while trying to fix it. Plus, a local environment will likely load much faster than a staging site. You can even set up multiple copies of the same site for testing.

There are many types of local WordPress development environments to choose from. However, Local has the advantage of being free, and it includes several built-in tools for debugging. You don’t need to be a WP Engine or Flywheel user to take advantage of Local.

3 Ways to Debug Your WordPress Website With Local

Now that you know a bit more about the advantages of debugging with a local WordPress environment, you’d probably like to know how to do it. The first thing you’ll need to do is set up your Local environment. Now, let’s cover three ways you can debug WordPress using Local!

1. Analyze Local Error Logs

Local automatically sets up error logs for PHP, your local server software (either NGINX or Apache), and your MySQL databases. Those logs are available on a site-by-site basis and you can access them manually at any time.

To access your web server and PHP error logs, simply select a website and click on the Go to site folder option at the top of the screen in Local:

This will open the directory that contains your test website’s root folder. To access this folder, you can go into app/public_html. However, if you want to access your site’s PHP and server logs, you’ll need to open the logs folder instead:

Inside the logs directory, you’ll find one folder for your web server and another for the PHP installation. The web server folder will either be called nginx or apache depending on the configuration you chose when setting up your local website.

Accessing either folder will lead you to different error.log text files. Open the files using your local text editor and you’ll see a comprehensive overview of all the errors Local has recorded since you set up the website:

With so much data, analyzing error logs isn’t always straightforward. Therefore, we recommend focusing on entries around the time when errors started occurring on your website.

You’ll want to read both the server and PHP error logs and see what files they point towards around those dates and times. Once you have identified errors that are causing disruptions in your site’s functionality, you’ll be able to more easily resolve them.

2. Use MailHog to Troubleshoot WordPress Email Issues

By default, WordPress uses PHP to send emails. However, PHP is not an optimal method for sending transactional emails such as registration confirmation or lost password retrieval messages. Ideally, you’ll want to use Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) services to manage those types of important emails.

In fact, some web hosts won’t even enable you to send emails using PHP. If you run into a situation where WordPress emails aren’t arriving, you can use MailHog to find out if they’re sending correctly.

MailHog is a Local tool that ‘captures’ all outgoing emails from your website. The tool then enables you to access those emails from the Local dashboard:

To access MailHog, select a Local website and go to its Tools tab. Then, click on Open MailHog and the tool should open in your browser. From here, you can navigate and explore the MailHog inbox just as you would with any other email:

If your outgoing emails appear in the MailHog inbox but they don’t work when you’re using a live website, your web host is likely causing the problem. In that case, you may want to use a third-party email provider to handle WordPress emails.

3. Check for Broken Links Using the Link Checker Add-On

Local offers a number of add-ons, some of which you can use for debugging purposes. The Link Checker add-on enables you to check all of your site’s links and find ‘broken’ entries. That is to say, links that no longer work.

To enable the add-on, you’ll need a free Local account. Open the Local application and go to the Add-ons tab. Then, select the Link Checker option:

On the next page, click on Install Add-on and wait for the process to complete. Next, click on Enable & Relaunch to start the add-on:

That option will restart Local with the add-on running. To use Link Checker, select a website, start it, and then go to the Tools tab.

Now, there should be an option called Link Checker inside. Go to that tab and click on SCAN FOR LINKS. In the example below, you can see the add-on running:

The process can take a while depending on how many pages are on your site. The add-on will return a list of broken links including what pages they’re located in, so you can remove or update them if they are causing issues.

Conclusion

Using a local WordPress environment to debug a website is always a safer option than doing it in production. As far as local WordPress development tools go, few applications offer as many built-in debugging tools as Local. Plus, you don’t need to pay for the software or be a WP Engine or Flywheel customer to use it.

To review, here are three ways you can use Local to help you debug a WordPress website:

1. Analyze Local error logs to identify issues.
2. Use MailHog to troubleshoot WordPress email delivery failures.
3. Check for broken links using the Link Checker add-on.

Do you have any questions about how to do basic WordPress debugging using Local? Ask us in the comments section below!

The post A Guide to Basic WordPress Debugging With Local appeared first on Torque.

One handy way of earning revenue on your website is to display banner ads. And there’s probably no more popular way of facilitating this than by setting up Google AdSense on your WordPress site. Here, we’ll spend some time talking about what Google AdSense is, then offer up a step-by-step for signing up for an account, connecting it with WordPress, and seeing ad revenue start to roll in. 

By the end, you should have enough info to get started. So with that in mind, let’s dive in. 

What is Google AdSense?

There are many advertising networks out there, but AdSense is one of the biggest and most profitable ones. It’s the display ad network run by Google that offers several ad types you can automatically show on your website.

Once active on your site, AdSense shows ads based on the browsing history of your visitors (but with strict family filters). So, in fact, you don’t really put the ads themselves on your site, it’s more like you rent out ad space that AdSense automatically fills in for visitors. This makes it more likely that they will fit the user interest so they will click and earn you money. Available formats range from simple text ads to image-based advertisement to even videos.

What’s cool about it is that once you sign up and configure AdSense to work with your website, the rest pretty much happens by itself. Ads are automatically selected for you, you get paid automatically, and it’s altogether a pretty hands-off process. 

To use this method, it’s usually good if you have a healthy amount of traffic. Site monetization via ads is very much a numbers game. Payout per click is quite low, so you need to get a lot of them in order to earn something worthwhile. If that is not the case for you, you might be better off finding other ways to make money on your site like selling your own products, offering a service, or else.

How to Sign Up for an AdSense Account

First thing’s first, let’s discuss how to sign up for an AdSense account and activate it. The process works as follows: 

1. Navigate to the AdSense signup page and click Get Started. 
2. Sign in to your Google account (create one if you don’t have one yet).
3. Input the URL of your website, decide if you want Google to send help and performance suggestions, and pick the country where you live and wish to receive payment.
4. Once it appears, go over and agree to the terms and conditions. 
5. Click the Start using AdSense button. 

Prerequisites for Using AdSense on Your WordPress Site

Before you can begin using AdSense, however, they service needs to approve you. After you submit your account application, it can take a while for Google to review your site and see if it’s a good fit.

Why is that?

Google wants to make sure that their ads appear on a high-quality, user-friendly website. For that reason, make sure your site adheres to the Google Webmaster Guidelines and that you follow all AdSense rules, policies, and procedures. Otherwise you might find your account banned, suspended, or face other disciplinary action.

What is a high-quality and user-friendly website?

One that has good, non-plagiarized content and no security issues. If either of those is an issue on your site, you might get rejected. However, if you get an email saying that they couldn’t approve you at this point, it will also list the reasons why. In that case, it’s on you to fix any issues that they had with your site. When you have done that, you can apply again.

Once approved, it’s time to activate AdSense and add it to your website. That’s what we’ll discuss next. 

How to Connect AdSense to WordPress 

Again, before you can start displaying ads on your website to earn income, you need to enable the feature in the first place. There are two ways to do this: manually and via plugin.

1. Manually

To connect Adsense to WordPress by hand, first go to the Connect your site to AdSense menu and copy the code snippet you find there.

After that, you need to add this to the <head> section of your WordPress site. One way is to log in to your WordPress dashboard and go to Appearance > Theme Editor > Theme Header. Then, paste the code you copied directly above the </head> tag.

If you have disabled the theme editor for security reasons, fire up your favorite FTP client and log in to your server instead. There, find the header.php file in your (child) theme folder and add the code to the same place.

Voila! Your AdSense account and your WordPress site should now be connected. 

2. Via Plugin

Another way to achieve this is to use a plugin. This also has the benefit that it won’t eliminate the code snippet when you change themes. One that can be helpful here is Advanced Ads.

Once installed, go to Advanced Ads > Settings > AdSense and click Connect to AdSense.

When you do, it will go through process of logging in to Google (use the same account as for your AdSense account) where you need to give permission. When you do, it automatically populates the settings page with your data. All you need to do is check the box that allows the plugin to add to your site’s <head> section and save.

Alternatively, you could also use a plugin like Head, Footer and Post Injections to add the code to your site. Here, you copy the code manually but you use a plugin to add it to your site. It’s a bit of a hybrid solution.

Creating Ad Units

Before you can put any ads on your WordPress site, you first need to create a so-called Ad Unit. That’s a piece of code that you place on your site (more on that below) that displays an ad in that position. Basically, it’s how you create the banner space that Google AdSense fills in.

The ability to do this is available under Ads > By ad units. Select the type of ad you want to create: text and display, in-feed, or in-article. 

The first type usually goes into a sidebar, header, or similar. In-feed ads appear between different articles on a blog page or in an archive. In-article ads, on the other hand, show up in the middle of a blog post in between paragraphs.

Choose which one you want, give your Ad Unit a name and then select the format: horizontal, vertical, or square.

Then, pick the size you want it to display in. Responsive is usually your best bet. That way, it’ll adjust to the size of the space the ad has available automatically. Once done, click Create.

3 Ways to Insert AdSense Ads Into WordPress 

Now, we can explore the three ways you can insert the AdSense ads into WordPress. 

1. Use an AdSense Plugin

The first method we’ll discuss is using a plugin to set up and configure AdSense for use on your WordPress site. We’ll be using the Ad Inserter plugin in this example as it gives you control over where the AdSense ads appear (beyond just widgetized areas). The great thing about this plugin is that it supports more than just AdSense, so if you ever wish to expand, you have that option. 

To get started, simply install the plugin on your WordPress site via Plugins > Add New. Once installed and activated, navigate to Settings > Ad Inserter. 

From here, you can select from a variety of options for inserting ads into your website. To do so, you first need to copy the code for your newly created Ad Unit and paste it into the Ad Inserter plugin’s settings.

After that, you can select precisely where you’d like the ad to appear on your site including before specific paragraphs that you designate. You can then apply this standard across all posts and pages if you wish. 

Repeat this process for all the different types of ads you want to insert. And again, you can use this plugin with Amazon Native Shopping Ads, Media.net, and Infolinks, too. 

A few other plugin options out there include aforementioend Advanced Ads and Woody Code Snippets if you want to shop around.

2. Turn on Auto-Ads

Another way to get ads on your website is to turn on the auto-ads feature in AdSense to automatically place advertisements.

To do this, you’ll need to: 

1. Sign in to your Google AdSense account then navigate to Ads > Overview. 
2. From there, find your website’s URL and click the Edit button next to it. 
3. Under Ad Settings turn on Auto Ads. Configure the type of ads and their format under Ad formats. Then, under Ad load, pick how many pieces of advertisement you want to allow AdSense to place on your WordPress site.
4. Select Apply to site then choose Apply now and Save. This will make it so Auto Ads begin appearing on your site immediately. 
5. Alternatively, you can opt to run an experiment first to see how the ad performs before committing. 

This actually brings us to our final means of getting ads to display on your WordPress site. 

3. Manually Place Ads

We’ve touched on this method a bit already, but this is the most common way to insert ads into WordPress. It’s the good old-fashioned way – manually! 

For this method, you’d follow the same steps as you did in the option for using a plugin described above. Login to your AdSense account, create a new Ad Unit, etc. Copy the code snippet for the ad you’ve created, then log into your WordPress dashboard. 

Go to Appearance > Widgets and create a new Custom HTML Widget. Place it in the area where you’d like it to appear, i.e. sidebar, footer, etc. Then, paste the code snippet into the content field.

Press Update when you’re done making changes. Then, visit your live website to see the results and ensure the ad widget appears where you wanted it to. 

Another option is to include the ad code in your theme template files or via action hooks. If you feel like your skills are up for that, consider giving it a try.

A Few Tips for Using AdSense in WordPress 

Though the above covers all you need to know to start using AdSense in WordPress, there are a few nuances you should be aware of. Especially if you want to make the most of your ads and earn real revenue from them. 

1. Don’t overwhelm your website with ads. Just because there’s a widgetized area available, it doesn’t mean you need to place an ad there. Nor do you need to insert ads after every paragraph in your blog posts. When all else fails, think of your own experience visiting websites and at which point you would consider a website too cluttered to stick around.
2. Place them in the right location. Choose positions where your ads are visible but won’t be the center of attention. Your content should be the main focus, not the advertisement.
3. Don’t click on your own ads. This is a huge no-no and could result in an account ban. AdSense considers these clicks fraudulent, so don’t do it! 
4. Remember to conduct experiments when you can to see which ads perform the best. 
5. Keep tabs on ad performance and swap those out that underperform with new options regularly. 

Keeping the above tips in mind as you experiment with creating and placing ads on your website will help you avoid common obstacles and see results faster. 

AdSense and WordPress – Final Thoughts

If you have a website, inserting ads can earn you a little extra money once you have a lot of readers. It’s a great way to diversify your income stream. Even though it may not become your primary mode of earning money, it can still serve as a piece of the revenue puzzle. 

And with AdSense, the whole process of placing ads has never been easier. First of all, Google makes it super simple with auto-ads. Then, there are third-party plugins to help you with the task as well. Or, you can insert them manually if you’d rather.

No matter the route you choose, just know that a little trial and error can go a long way to making the most of AdSense. But most of all, you can’t be afraid to try. Good luck!

How do you use AdSense in WordPress? Any additional plugin recommendations or tips? Share your experience in the comments!

The post How to Easily Use AdSense in WordPress (Manually & Via Plugin) appeared first on Torque.

One solution to this problem is Local, formerly known as Local by Flywheel. This is a tool that streamlines your offline WordPress development workflows. While plenty of other solutions do this, Local is particularly easy to use, and offers many time-saving features. Best of all, it’s completely free.

In this post, we’ll explain what Local is and discuss its advantages for freelance web developers. We’ll then look at four of its key features and explain how they can save your valuable time. Let’s get started!

What Is Local?

Local, now owned by WP Engine, is a local development tool that simplifies and speeds up WordPress design and development. By using many of the application’s time-saving features, you can have a WordPress website set up in under a minute.

Unlike many competitor solutions, Local is user-friendly while still offering many powerful features. You can create as many staging and development sites as you need, and monitor the status of your existing sites in a central location. You can also access your sites’ dashboards, databases, and directories quickly.

This application is available for Windows and Mac, and is free to download. There is only one paid feature in Local: the ability to push your sites a live server. This requires a hosting account with either WP Engine or Flywheel, although it is free if you already have managed hosting with one of these providers.

The Advantages of Using Local for Your Development Projects

Having a local environment is essential for WordPress development. Editing your website live is risky, and can appear unprofessional to visitors if they’re faced with in-progress changes. Without a safe place to test changes and perform troubleshooting, you risk taking your website offline or making features inaccessible to those trying to use them. 

A local tool also means you’re not not limited by your physical environment or internet quality. You can work on your sites offline, which is especially handy if you tend to travel a lot.

There are many tools for local website development, with XAMPP and WAMP perhaps being the most widely known. However, Local’s primary advantage is that it focuses exclusively on WordPress development. Its features are therefore uniquely tailored to what WordPress developers need, ensuring that WordPress deployment is both smooth and quick.

4 Key Features of Local That Can Free Up Your Time

Local provides a lot of features. On the most basic level, it will set up WordPress sites for you. All you have to do is enter a little basic information, and then opt for the default settings or customize the environment to your liking.

However, this tool can do more than simply create staging sites. Let’s take a closer look at four of its key features, focusing on the functionality that will save you the most time.

1. Blueprints

First up, Blueprints enable you to save an entire WordPress installation as a reusable foundation. A Blueprint contains all of a site’s data, including theme and plugin files. It allows you to build exact replicas of the site, acting as a foundation for future projects.

This feature can save you a lot of time, because you won’t have to install everything manually. For example, you could create a standard blog Blueprint if your clients request a lot of blogging websites. You might also create a membership site or eCommerce Blueprint. The possibilities are endless.

To use Blueprints, you’ll first need to create a site in Local and install whatever themes and plugins you wish to be part of your base blueprint. You can also add pages at this stage, such as a default home page, About section, or Contact page. In addition, you might want to delete the sample content and customize your WordPress settings.

When you’re satisfied, go to Local and right-click on the name of the site you just created:

You should now have an option to select Save as Blueprint, and then name and save your site.

The next time you wish to create a WordPress website using this foundation, open the Advanced Options on the site setup screen, and pick Create from a Blueprint:

Here you should see a list of any Blueprints you’ve created. Choose the one you want to use, and click on Continue. What you saved will now be imported into your new site, and you can proceed to customize it as needed.

2. Local Connect

The Local Connect feature allows you to move your site between Local and your web hosting provider. Creating a copy of your site with Local lets you quickly and easily create a sandbox environment. Once you’ve finished making changes to that sandbox, you can push it live, or move it to a work-in-progress staging area so you can receive feedback from colleagues and clients.

As we mentioned previously, this only works with Flywheel and WP Engine hosting accounts. To access the feature, click on the Connect Host button in the bottom-right corner of the Local dashboard. You will either need to log in to your Flywheel hosting account or input WP Engine’s API credentials:

After that, in place of the Connect Host button, you should now see that you are connected. Next to that information, you will see the push and pull icons.

Meanwhile, in the Connect menu in the sidebar, you will now be able to pull your sites into your Local environment. The option is located next to your site’s name, and Local will give you the option to either pull the data into an existing site or create a new one.

3. Site Defaults

Similar to Blueprints, Site Defaults enable you to install default WordPress installations quickly. You can set default settings for new sites you’ll create, including choosing your preferred PHP version, web server, and admin credentials.

Creating new site defaults is easy. Open up the Preferences section in Local, and you’ll see the option to create new site defaults. Here you will be able to set the default email, Local site path, and domain suffix:

You can also set environmental preferences such as the PHP and MySQL versions, and choose whether to use Nginx or Apache web servers.

4. Live Link

Last but not least, Live Link turns the site you’ve created locally into a working test environment with a direct connection to your machine. It can save you a lot of time by creating editable credentials and allowing you to send direct links to your clients or co-workers.

Live Link eliminates the need to create a secondary live staging area and deploy your files there. It will also allow you to test and debug your website on multiple devices, so you can ensure a positive user experience.

You’ll find the Live Link option in the bottom-left corner of the Local screen:

Clicking on Enable will create a new link for your current site. Once your client or colleagues have finished viewing, you can select Disable to make the link unavailable.

Conclusion

Local development is key to creating WordPress sites efficiently and effectively. You’ll just need the right tool, and for many developers Local is a solid solution. It makes creating and setting up new WordPress sites easier and quicker. That extra time saved can be of huge benefit to your freelance web development business.

To recap, here are the key features of Local that can save you time as a developer:

1. Blueprints: Create basic sites that you can use as the foundations for future projects.
2. Local Connect: Move your site quickly between Local and your hosting provider.
3. Site Defaults: Set up the defaults that will be used for new sites.
4. Live Link: Allow colleagues and clients to see your work in progress.

Do you have any questions about how to start using Local? Let us know in the comments section below!

The post How Local Frees You to Focus on Your Freelance Web Development Business appeared first on Torque.

Fortunately, you can use an Application Performance Management (APM) tool to help optimize the performance of your WordPress website. In doing so, you can mitigate any issues with your theme and plugins and improve your site’s User Experience (UX). 

In this post, we’ll explain what APM tools are and how they work. We’ll then discuss why you may want to use an APM tool for your WordPress website. Let’s get started!

What an APM Tool Is

An APM (Application Performance Management) tool helps optimize an application or website’s performance. It provides monitoring, tracking, and analytics data on the front and back end.

For example, New Relic is a freemium full-stack monitoring tool with detailed analytics reports, infinite tracing, and real-time code visibility:

An APM tool will send alerts for various issues, such as bottlenecking, downtime, and failed transactions. Therefore, you can efficiently identify and correct issues to enhance UX and overall web performance. Plus, you can typically monitor everything from a single dashboard, making the data easily accessible.

How APM Tools Work

APM tools monitor transactions related to speed, reliability, and other performance metrics to provide an overview of potential bottlenecks and interruptions in service. According to Gartner, APM tools include these elements:

• Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM): The interactions between users and your website. An APM tool uses DEM to ensure a consistent, user-friendly experience. It identifies the issues that create outages, downtime, slow loading times, and otherwise disruptive web experiences.
• Application Discovery, Tracing, and Diagnostics (ADTD): APM tools use ADTD to monitor metrics and address technical issues, such as response times.
• Purpose-built Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI helps support the automation and machine-learning needs of APM tools.

Furthermore, APM tools perform various tests to identify issues within your website. They typically use Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to pinpoint the cause of the problems.

They also use load testing, which places demands on a system to measure its response times. Additionally, APM tools will utilize different tests to scrutinize user behavior, such as Real User Monitoring (RUM):

This type of monitoring analyzes user sessions and interactions to identify patterns and see where you can make improvements.

APM tools also simulate user behavior and measure performance using Synthetic Transaction Monitoring (STM) testing. They can identify UX issues and obstacles within a controlled environment so that you can improve your application for visitors.

Why You May Want to Use an APM Tool for Your WordPress Website

Some WordPress hosting providers have APM tools integrated with their services. For example, many of WP Engine’s hosting plans include New Relic’s APM Pro.

New Relic’s tool provides core-level visibility to quickly troubleshoot problems, develop solutions, and optimize the WordPress experience. You can view your site’s performance and set up alerts:

However, if you’re using a different WordPress hosting provider, you might consider investing in an APM tool. It’s ideal for eCommerce stores, high-traffic sites, and even blogs.

Now let’s look at a few key use cases for APM software!

1. Identify Issues with Plugins and Themes

APM tools provide a one-stop solution for monitoring plugin and theme performance. You can pinpoint the exact cause of an issue at the code level and quickly correct it.

This function can be essential if you use many WordPress plugins or are experimenting with new software on your site. Even though most plugins and themes receive frequent updates and patches, they can slow down or cause problems on your website.

If you find issues with plugins and themes using an APM tool, you can deactivate them, try to solve the problems yourself or reach out to the developers for assistance.

2. Find Unnecessary Processes

You can use an APM tool to monitor user interactions. Then, you can identify and eliminate redundancies in your web design. In doing so, you can create a streamlined and user-centric website design.

Providing a smooth UX is essential to the success of your site. A user-friendly design can enhance your Core Web Vitals scores and potentially improve your rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs):

Plus, visitors who can find content easily and quickly on your website are less likely to leave it for your competitors. Therefore, streamlining your site’s processes can also increase visitors’ Time on Page and encourage them to return in the future.

3. Scrutinize Response Times

Response times indicate how quickly your server can receive and respond to user requests on your website:

Users may become frustrated and leave if this process takes too long, increasing your bounce rate. Additionally, slow response times can hurt your position in the SERPs.

Fortunately, APM tools can measure your response times and detect how, when, and where a slow down occurs. Based on your findings, you can better understand what causes your suboptimal page loading times and determine how to boost site performance.

4. Detect Downtime

Server outages are annoying and expensive. According to Gremlin, the largest online retailers lose millions of dollars every hour their websites are down.

When your website is offline, users can’t access it or purchase from your online store. Plus, they might not return in the future if they consider your site unreliable.

An APM tool can monitor your web applications and server’s availability, uptime, and response times. Then, you can quickly detect what causes downtime and resolve the issue to get your site back online. You can even reconfigure your server or applications to avoid similar problems in the future.

Conclusion

Managing a WordPress website can be time-consuming. However, Application Performance Monitoring (APM) software can help reduce issues and improve user experience. 

An APM tool can be an excellent choice to quickly identify and mitigate WordPress issues such as downtime, UX problems, and server response times. Moreover, some WordPress hosting options, such as WP Engine, automatically include APM tools to optimize your site.

Do you have any questions about using an APM tool for WordPress? Let us know in the comments section below!

The post Should You Use an APM Tool for Your WordPress Website? appeared first on Torque.

In my previous article in this series, I covered the three primary reasons — ethical, business growth, and legal — why your clients should care about website accessibility, and I explained how I make the case for website accessibility to my agency’s clients. These arguments are enough to convince most to invest in website accessibility.

However, some clients may have lingering tactical questions or concerns that you’ll need to address before they’ll commit to accessible web experiences. Here are some that I frequently hear from clients, and how I respond to each.

How do you explain the added cost of accessible websites?

I don’t.

My agency doesn’t charge an extra fee for building a website that is ADA-compliant, because every site we build is designed from the ground up for accessibility. It’s the same way we handle mobile responsive websites. Both are non-negotiable for us. If we build your website, it’s going to be responsive, and it’s going to be accessible.

This means it does take longer, and therefore will cost our clients slightly more, but that’s the only way we build websites, period. We can’t point to specific billed hours and say, “That’s where we made the site accessible,” because it’s all integrated into our total effort. I highlight this in part by including a line item for ADA-compliance on our invoices, and the cost is $0.

What if a client says they’d rather deal with accessibility later?

After-the-fact accessibility has two fundamental problems:

• It’s never as good.
• It ends up costing more.

In the early days of ADA compliance for the physical environment, wheelchair ramps were retrofitted onto buildings that had not been architected with accessibility in mind. These bolted-on remediations solved the problem of bare legal compliance, but the truly elegant transformations came when architects started designing buildings from the ground up with universal accessibility in mind.

As I’ve written earlier in this series, it’s the same with websites. Simply put, web experiences are best for all when accessibility is prioritized from the beginning in both blueprints and content.

They’re more cost effective too. Consider the cost of not building a house to code, then having to go back later to tear down sheetrock and alter framing. You may pay a little more on the front end to design a code-compliant house or an ADA-compliant website. But the cost and trouble of going back later to retrofit compliance is ultimately so much worse.

What if a client wants to use a plugin instead?

I once had a client from a major brand ask me for a quote to make their site accessible. So I studied their existing site and offered him a reasonable price for the remediation. He decided instead to go with a much cheaper plugin.

A couple years later, the brand hired a new digital director who got in touch with me and said, “Hey, I think this plugin might not protect us from litigation.”

He was right, and I told him why. I explained some of the deeper problems I’d seen with their website’s accessibility, and how the plug-in failed to address them. They needed a more fundamental rebuild. Then I gave him a new quote he agreed to, and we got to work.

To be fair, high-quality accessibility plugins can enhance your site’s compliance. They are, however, almost never a sufficient solution in themselves. They’re attractive shortcuts because of their ease and (sometimes zero) cost.

But plugins can’t write helpful identifying alt text for your images. They can’t add the right ARIA labels if your site doesn’t provide enough context to guide those choices. Plugins can’t fix a confusing navigation experience or compensate for a poorly considered user journey. They can’t rearrange befuddling content architecture.

When used as standalone shortcuts, plugins often render hacked, ugly, brand-inconsistent encounters for those selecting the separate-but-not-equal “accessible” experience. And, unlike truly accessible web design, plugins do nothing to create a better web experience for all.

Once you build me an accessible site, can I forget about accessibility?

Accessibility is an ongoing process, and your clients’ sites can easily slip out of compliance as multiple parties add new content and front-end features.

As your clients add new images to their sites, are they avoiding using pictures of text? Are they including descriptive alt text with each image? As designers build new creative assets for your clients’ sites, are background colors providing enough color contrast with overlaying text?

In order to keep a site ADA-compliant and accessible, your clients should educate all the people who contribute new material to the site. You can offer to help.

Consider creating an accessibility checklist to be used for all new content and features. Better yet, help your clients explain the “why” behind accessible content and design. Once their people understand the importance and spend enough time creating compliant content, accessibility should become second nature.

Remember the Why of Accessible Design

As I wrote when I started this series, accessible website design is about so much more than basic compliance and litigation avoidance. Let’s embrace a bolder vision of what the web can be, then work together to make it real. As the architects, developers, designers, writers, and agencies of the modern web, let’s empower all people with the abundant resources and capabilities of our connected world. Let’s make the web better for everyone.

The post The ADA and Universal Design: How to<br>Answer Common Client Questions and<br>Concerns About Website Accessibility appeared first on Torque.

Therefore, when it comes to creating your website, you don’t want to waste any time setting it up. Thanks to Local, you can create and publish a WordPress website with ease. In just a few clicks, you can have a beautiful and responsive website that showcases your products and services to the world. 

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at Local as a web development tool. Then, we’ll show you how to use it to get your website up and running. Let’s get started!

An Introduction to Local by Flywheel

Local by Flywheel is a local development environment designed for WordPress users:

It enables you to create WordPress sites on your computer, without the need for a live server. This means that you can work on your site offline, and make changes without affecting the public version of your site.

Local has some great features, including automatic installation, one-click admin, and MagicSync. Automatic installation means that you don’t need to manually set up WordPress every time you want to create a new site. Additionally, the one-click admin feature lets you quickly create a WordPress administrator account so you can start working on your site right away.

Meanwhile, MagicSync enables you to automatically sync your local site with a live server. This means that you can make changes to your local site and then push them live with just a few clicks.

How to Get Your Site Up and Running Quickly With Local (In 5 Steps)

As we have seen, you can create a site with Local and test your content before making your changes live. This way, you can make sure that everything is working as it should before launching your business site.

Let’s look at how to get your site up and running in just five easy steps.

Step 1: Install Local and Create a New Site

First, you’ll need to download Local on your computer. The program will ask you to select an operating system:

Then it will run the installer. When prompted, choose a location for the installation:

Once the installation is complete, you can launch the software and create a free account:

Once you’ve set up a Local account, you’ll be taken to the dashboard:

Here, you’ll be able to access any sites that you set up. To get started, click on the Create a New Site button.

Step 2: Configure the Settings of Your Local Site

Next, you’ll need to configure the settings of your local site. First, you’ll want to give it a name:

If you click on the Advanced Options link, you can modify your domain and site path:

If you navigate to the Site Info section, you can specify the URL for your site, and choose whether or not to use HTTPS. Under Database Settings, you’ll need to select a name for your database, as well as a username and password.

In the WordPress Settings section, you can enter the username and password for your admin account. If you leave these fields blank, Local will generate random login details for you. When you’re ready, click on Continue.

The next step is to set up your development environment. Local offers two options: Preferred or Custom:

We recommend going with the first option if you’re a beginner. If you choose Custom, you can further customize your environment by choosing a PHP version, web server, and more.

Step 3: Set Up WordPress

After choosing your environment, you’ll be prompted to connect to WordPress. This can be done by simply entering your WordPress login details, which you created in the previous step:

Then, click on the Add Site button and wait for Local to generate your site. This may take a few minutes.

Once your site has been created, you’ll be taken to the Local Sites section in your dashboard:

Here, you can view your site’s details. To access your WordPress site, simply click on the Open Site button.

Step 4: Customize Your WordPress Site 

Now that you have WordPress installed, you can configure your site’s settings and preferences in the dashboard:

If you navigate to Settings, you can change your site’s title, write a tagline, and more:

Besides setting up your site’s preferences, you can also customize its appearance. To do this, simply click on the Appearance tab and select a WordPress theme:

Once you’ve chosen a theme, you can start adding plugins. These tools add extra features to your site, such as contact forms and social media buttons. Simply click on the Plugins tab, then select Add New and search for the tool you want to install:

Once you’ve found a plugin you want to use, you’ll be able to install and activate it. You can then navigate to your plugin’s page in the dashboard to configure its settings.

Step 5: Publish Your Site

One of the best things about Local is that it makes it very easy to push your site live. In fact, it can be up and running with just a few clicks.

First, however, you’ll need to purchase web hosting. You can find a variety of hosting plans for WordPress sites at providers like WP Engine and Flywheel.

Once you have your hosting sorted out, log into your Local dashboard and navigate to the Connect page:

Then click on the Connect to a Platform button, and select either WP Engine or Flywheel, depending on which hosting plan you purchased. You can then log into your hosting account to publish your site.

That’s it – your site is now live! From now on, you can test any changes to your content on Local before publishing them to your public site.

Conclusion

Local by Flywheel is a development tool that enables you to create WordPress sites locally. It offers an intuitive user interface and a range of features to help you manage your content more efficiently.

In this post, we showed you how to create a site with Local and publish it in just five easy steps:

1. Install Local and create a new site.
2. Configure the settings of your local site.
3. Set up WordPress.
4. Customize your WordPress site.
5. Publish your site.

Do you have any questions about setting up a website with Local? Let us know in the comments section below! 

The post How to Get Your Site Up and Running Quickly With Local (In 5 Steps) appeared first on Torque.

After being postponed twice, this year, thanks to vaccines and masks, we could finally meet in person again. As usual, I packed my bags to attend, which is why you are getting a WordCamp Europe 2022 report from me right now.

Below, I have summarized my favorite sessions and some other information about the camp for all those who could not attend.

Opening Remarks

WordCamp Europe 2022 actually marked the 10th anniversary of WCEU. The first one happened all the way back in 2013. After three years in the making, this one finally managed to bring the community back together.

Attendees could look forward to the usual presentations and workshops. Besides that, there was a wellness track with yoga and meditation. In addition, you had the possibility to take a rooftop tour of the Super Bock Arena where the event was taking place.

Of course, safety was a major concern, which is why there was a strict mask mandate inside the venue. Attendees also received stickers to indicate your approachability and personal mask policy. Also, and I can’t stress this enough, there were free-running peacocks at the venue!

Unfortunately, I didn’t actually see the opening remarks. That’s because, like a total WordCamp noob, I got my dates mixed up. It seems that, in the excitement of going to WordCamp again, I marked it wrong in my calendar back when the dates came out. Being under the impression that it was happening from Friday to Sunday, consequently, I arrived on the second day of the conference.

So there’s that.

As a consequence, I had to use the online stream recordings to catch up on the sessions of the first day, including the opening remarks. So, the only lesson you can learn here is that I am an idiot and then we can dive into more interesting things.

Recommended Talks

Usually in my WordCamp Europe report, I summarize a few of my favorite presentations. However, this time will be slightly different as I will mainly talk about just two of them: a discussion panel and the Q&A session.

The reason for that is that these two talks already yielded so much material that I had to cut the rest for time. However, in order to give you a few pointers as for what else you should check out, I will try to quickly summarize a handful of other talks that I really liked and give you a link to their livestream timestamp.

Security Lessons Learned From 2021

This is a presentation by Victor Santoyo of Sucuri. He talks about trends in security threats visible in 2021 and what they mean for this year and how to protect yourself.

Some of the main takeaways:

• Vulnerable plugins and extensions now account for more website compromises than out-of-date core files.
• Hacktools are on the rise, particularly one named Anonymous Fox.
• Credit card skimmers that steal payment information from e-commerce websites are another growing threat.
• Protect yourself from the above through monitoring and plugin best practices.

You can find the beginning of the talk here.

The Block Pattern Revolution

A presentation by Sean Blakeley, who is a technical director at a large digital agency. He talks about how block patterns allow you to build websites that are good, cheap, and quick instead of having to pick only two of these adjectives.

His presentation shows how they allow you to move a lot of the effort of designing and developing websites into WordPress itself. He also explains how to use design studio sessions to work directly with clients in making decisions, align expectations, and give them a sense of ownership.

You can find his presentation under this link.

Building Data-Driven Content Personas

Vassilena Valchanova’s presentation on how and why to create reader personas. Personas allow you to better understand who your readers are and how to adjust your content better towards them. Basically, a persona is an aggregated version of the perfect content consumer.

The presentation is a step-by-step rundown of uncovering the demographics, goals/needs, interests/influences, and content preferences of your your personas. She also provides tools as well as templates and a detailed guide on her website. The link to the presentation is here.

WordPress and Web3 Trends (Disruption, Challenges, Opportunities)

David Lockie, who has had several appearances at WordCamp already, now works at Automattic as the lead for Web3. His presentation gives a rundown of what Web3 is and what disruptions it offers for the web in general and WordPress in particular.

He talks about how blockchain and other technology can help people get paid for their creations, allow for more personalization and security, as well as how Web3 offers tools to have a positive impact on the world. If you have never actively looked into this aspect of the web, prepare to have your mind blown.

The presentation starts at this point.

Discussion Panel: Acquisitions in WordPress

One of the most interesting sessions of the entire WordCamp Europe 2022 was the discussion panel on acquisitions in the WordPress space. The last two years have seen quite many of them. WP Engine buying Delicious Brains and Pippins Plugins going to Awesome Motive are just two examples.

To shine a clearer light on what happens behind the scenes of these deals and what this trend means for WordPress as a whole, Taeke Reijenga sat down with the following panelists:

• Joshua Strebel, the co-founder of Pagely, the first managed WordPress hosting platform. The company sold to GoDaddy in November 2021.
• Marieke van de Rakt, former owner and CEO of Yoast. The company went to Newfold Digital (owner of Bluehost, among others) in August 2021. Yoast has also been on the other side of acquisitions, e.g they bouthg the Duplicate Post plugin.
• Shane Pearlman, partner at Modern Tribe, a WordPress agency bought in November 2021 by Liquid Web. He was also involved in buying a number of other companies as well as selling plugins that Modern Tribe had created.
• Devin Walker, creator of GiveWP, also bought by Liquid Web in 2021. He has also sold and bought smaller plugins before.

As you can see from the above, most of them have experience on both sides of the table. Let’s see what they had to share with the rest of us.

What Makes a Business Look Attractive for an Acquisition?

Here are factors that matter when trying to sell your company:

• Clean books, good standing with the government, no back taxes, etc.
• Clear ownership structures, including investments you might have brought in.
• Quality of your product, number of views, quality of support, annual recurring revenue, profit, etc.

Basically it’s a mix of things that makes a business attractive or not. In addition, depending on who your potential buyer is, they might prioritize things differently. For example, here are a few different types of buyers:

• Strategic – Someone who has a business plan where your business fits in well.
• Financial – See your business as an investment where they want to try to get more money out of it.
• Internal – This could be a business partner or even the staff.

Generally, if your business is profitable, that’s a much better position to be in as it means a lot less pressure. You can also sell a business that is floundering, however, this gives you less power at the negotiating table.

What Convinced You to Sell? What Led to That Decision?

The decision to sell your business can come from different places. For example, over time your priorities and motivations might shift, identities change, or maybe you need more flexibility. It’s also important to note that the persons who built the business are not the same people as those who decide to sell it.

Ideally, you build a business you actually want to own, keep, and have. A business is a vehicle for the life you want to live and you should set it up accordingly. For Modern Tribe, there were several offers over the years but none of them promised a better outcome than owning the business was already delivering. Only later did an opportunity come along that offered a new interesting challenge, which can be a great motivation to move on.

In addition, you might want to become part of something bigger. Being a part of a larger company opens up new opportunities. For example, you might be able to give your team better benefits and career options or simply improve the product beyond what you are capable of on your own. At a certain level, you need to either accept investment in exchange for equity or become part of something else.

In case of Yoast, financial aspects also played a role. They are a European company, so most of their expenses are in euros while most of their income is in dollars. With the political instability during the pandemic and the bad exchange rate, the pressure to make sure they can take care of their team of 120 people increased. Deciding to sell was in large part to keep the company and team safe (also, apparently Joost was bored).

How to Prepare for Selling

In contrast to the other panelists, Yoast actively reached out for help to get acquired and talked to a lot of people before making a deal.

Pagely hired an advisor to go through the deal and that person was vital to the success. Having someone there who keeps their eye on the prize, is an advocate for your interests, and more objective really helps, especially when talking about money and valuation. So, hiring experts is a good idea.

Modern Tribe did not do this. However, they talked to some experts in their network, then reached out to people who might be a good strategic fit for acquisition. It’s worth having those conversations if you know anybody. This is especially in order to understand the formal process of selling, not so much the negotiation about price.

Devin talked to some lawyers and mentors. He also stressed that personal relationships in the WordPress sphere really helped along the way.

How Long Did It Take to Finalize the Sale?

There is a surprising amount of steps involved in selling a company. For Yoast and GiveWP, getting there took 6-7 months. However, it can also be quicker, e.g. selling the Events Calendar plugin only took Modern Tribe 40 days.

Here are a few things that buyers will want to know about:

• Finances
• Customer base
• Churn
• Proof of income
• Software audit
• Business model
• Past vulnerabilities
• Debt

What’s a really big factor in this is how well organized you are in your day-to-day. If your books are clean and you have your information up date, it really helps with the due diligence process.

The good news is that the tools that will give you answers to the questions that will come up during the acquisition also help you run a successful business. Therefore, it’s good to make this part of how your un things from the get-go.

Take note, however, that having your ducks in a row can be a lot harder when you are a service company rather than a product company. There is a lot more paperwork involved in dealing with clients than selling products.

It’s also important to keep in mind that there is no guarantee the sale will go through until everything has been signed and sealed. You might go through all that effort only to have the deal rescinded at the last moment. You might also have to go through it several times until you find the right fit and it’s a lot of work.

What Does the Increase in Acquisitions Mean for the WordPress Ecosystem? Is This a Good Development? Should We Aim for That?

The increase in acquisitions is a sign of WordPress growing up. Usually, you see mergers and buyouts when an ecosystem matures and new lines of business open up. Acquisitions legitimize the work that a lot of people have done and for the WordPress sphere as a whole.

In addition, there is not necessarily such a thing as the WordPress ecosystem. It actually consists of a million different ecosystems. The big players will only go for those channels where they can think they can make a massive amount of money. That leaves all the other channels open and a lot of spaces for people to still build something and be successful with it, even if you have more big players now.

Contrary to what some believe, the pandemic probably had no big impact on this trend. In fact, the panelists agreed that lockdown might actually have slowed it down, otherwise a lot of this would have happened in 2019/2020 already.

Do You Think Products and Services Improve Through Acquisitions?

For Devin and GiveWP, that was actually one of the main goals. Being part of a bigger company means more resources to grow and do better things, including working with more people.

Be clear about what about the outcome you want beforehand. Do you want to join a bigger team? Walk away? What does success look like for you? All of these goals will lead to different conversations.

What is the Impact of Acquisitions on the Team?

Yoast involved their team in the process. They wanted to do what is right for their employees and had a lot of conversations with them in order to do so.

In the case of GiveWP and with the legal framework in the US being different, they only involved the key team managers. However, everyone got bonuses and better benefits, so nobody left.

You can’t always tell your team beforehand, some people only hear about it on the day of the acquisition. However, you need to keep in mind that the team didn’t ask for this, it just happened to them, which is a heavy responsibility. So, you need to ask yourself the question how you can make sure that everyone who bet on you gets something in return.

Pagely did a lot of work beforehand so they had something to show their employees right out of the gate. However, not all acquisitions come with people, some also just come with products. A lot of small acquisitions run very differently than the above.

What Do You Wish You Had Known Beforehand? What Are Things That Went Wrong?

Several of the panelists said they wish they had known how slow big companies work before they became part of them. So, be careful what you wish for.

Because so many things can go wrong, it’s important to pick a good partner who has your best interest at heart. You might have to resolve problems with them after the ink is already dry.

You also have to think about earnout (meaning extra money you can get if the company you sold achieves certain financial goals in the future). It’s important to think about it not just in terms of potential income but also what you think will be best for the company, customers, and team in the future. Sometimes it’s better to take less money but stay true to what you want.

In addition, not having an earnout stipulation can make you more free. When you are not obliged to stay, your new parent company has to treat you well and you have more flexibility.

Alright, that was it. I hope you feel ready to sell your own WordPress company now.

In Conversation: Matt and Josepha

The second highlight of this WordCamp was the annual Q&A session with Matt Mullenweg, co-founder and project lead of WordPress. For a few years now, he is regularly joined by Josepha Hayden Chomposy, who is the executive director of the WordPress project. Matias Ventura, lead architect of the Gutenberg projectm was also supposed to be there but did not make it.

As is customary, the first thing they showed was a video of the new Gutenberg features in WordPress 6.0.

After that, it was time for questions from the audience.

What Does the Documentation Team Have to Do to Get More Help?

The documentation team does not have enough people. However, it is an important diversity initiative and a way to get people into WordPress and help them learn it. Even if a lot of people don’t see how hard it is to have good documentation, keep it up to date, etc.

So, this is a call to companies who want to sponsor some people for documentation Get in touch with the documentation, especially Milana Cap, who asked the question. A great reminder to get involved!

Why Do We Need to Wait for Phase 4 of Gutenberg to Get Native Support for Multilingual Sites? Especially in Terms of Deciding on a Data Format?

We want to keep the future user experience in mind when creating the architecture. This is a problem we encountered with the REST API, which was implemented without fully using it. Then, when it was time to starting using it in Gutenberg, we found a bunch of gaps.

For multilingual we want to avoid this and not bet on the wrong horse. The next phase, after Full-Site Editing, is workflow, meaning simultaneous editing and version control. This needs to come first because multilingual needs a bunch of workflows in order to work. Especially, you need to give people the confidence to go back to an earlier state in case something goes wrong.

At the moment, we already have a bunch of plugin solutions that you can use. Once multilingual becomes part of Core, they will, most likely, offer a migration path or a type of integration. However, that’s probably a 2024/2025 thing. We want to get the other things done really well first and only have so much capacity.

If you want to get started now, you have the possibility to do it as a plugin first. Just like Gutenberg, it could become the basis for the Core feature. When deciding how to implement multilingual for Core we will definitely look at existing solutions as well as their pros and cons first.

Overall, multilingual capability will probably be one of the most complex things ever to hit Core.

We Are Seeing More Breaking Changes in Gutenberg, Which Erodes Trust. We Are Also Making Fewer Decisions and Instead Giving More Options. Is this a Step Away From the Original Core Principles?

Gutenberg itself is a breaking change as it necessitates everything to be rewritten. But it’s going to be worth it because it gives a lot more power to users. If there is a reversion, it’s most likely a result of a gap in the testing process. That can be improved.

As for options, the idea of Gutenberg is to give people a lot of them and great control. It’s kind of fundamental to the idea of the block editor. Decision wise, we are trying to make the defaults really great and use good markup to give users a solid base to start from.

We are also currently reinvesting in the testing team to get in more users and work on end-to-end testing.

What Do You Think WordPress Should Do to Be Among the World’s Fittest Marketplaces?

For a marketplace to thrive, it needs to have clear and fair rules and expectations. These also need to be applied across the board. In other places, like app stores, that doesn’t always apply and they often favor the owners of those marketplaces.

What we choose to do with the WordPress marketplaces is different. We are not trying to have everything and you can’t sell anything on there. Instead, we are setting and enforcing standards to ensure quality. After that, plugins and themes can have monetization models but we are not selling on WordPress.org directly. There are also no plans to change that for the foreseeable future.

What Blocks Are You Most Excited About in WordPress 6.0? What Didn’t Make It in Yet That We Can Look Forward to?

Matt is excited about the meta stuff like global styles and the ability to change styling either globally or locally. This also poses a big challenge in terms of user experience and interface. Having a unified experience across all of WordPress really helps with that.

In addition, he really likes the duotone feature and the options for styling images.

Do You Still Believe WordPress Should Be All JavaScript at Some Point? And How Would You Convince the Developer Community of the Benefits of That?

There are more and more parts of the WordPress interface you can just administer in Gutenberg without going to a different screen. This allows you to create really fast performing and responsive interfaces. You don’t have to reload the page, can call data via API, etc. It also opens things up for third-party apps and services.

In general, you can create better interfaces with JavaScript. In addition, you can learn the language relatively easily, which is why it’s increasingly taking over WordPress. While the back end will be PHP for the foreseeable future, the front end and interfaces will be increasingly JavaScript based.

People Want to Learn WordPress in Their Own Language. How Do We Help Them Do That? How Can We Further Support the Learn Team and Help WordPress.org to Continue Evolving?

One of the main things that makes this hard is that we currently don’t have that many languages that are 100% translated at release, which is where the focus lies at the moment. It’s also hard to find ways to thank people for doing the everyday translation work and the WordPress project could be doing a better job at that.

In addition, there are initiatives that take precedence right now, like videos for learn.wordpress.org. The logistics are also difficult and hard to balance because of the scale. However, Josepha promises to put more energy into it.

As for updates to WordPress.org, a redesign is making it across wordpress.org. You can see a preview here. However, other parts of the site might follow slowly since they are are so massive in scale.

What Are You Hoping to See the Community and the WordPress Project as a Whole Do to Encourage More Diversity?

There is an increasing separation between people who can and can not travel to events. Thankfully, we created an emergency recovery plan a while back in case we can have no more in-person events. A lot of what it contains (online-first approach and hybrid model) is applicable in order to help people be active and engaged in the community even if they can’t physically attend.

One area where we are struggling in terms of diversity is recruitment of new members especially of underpresented voices. There is a WP Diversity Initiative that tries to help with that and everyone can support them by sharing what they do.

Overall, we have the resources and knowledge to get better at this. We need to get more people on board and focus our efforts in the right direction.

Was It a Conscious Choice to Make the WordPress Privacy Features Only Very Basic?

Yes, because a lot of the information you need to use here depends on how your site is run and if there are any plugins or third-party integrations that are collecting data on it. WordPress itself doesn’t collect very much and you can also turn most of it off.

In addition, privacy laws differ among countries and are also evolving constantly. Plus, it’s hard to add single solutions for global issues, which is why we kept it simple.

Is There an Opportunity How WordPress Can Contribute to Sustainability?

In 2019 a whole group of people brought this up to Josepha and then, for unfortunate reasons, she couldn’t follow up with them. A first step in that direction is that is now a Sustainability channel in the WordPress Slack. Here, you can raise issues and make proposals for how WordPress can help with sustainability. This could also become a team that proposes guidelines for how we can do better and maybe we can include them in the documentation.

WordPress’ Market Share is Not Growing as Fast as It Used to. What Can We Do to Make Sure That in a Few Years It is Over 50%?

In terms of market share, Gutenberg could actually make a bigger contribution to the world than WordPress itself. It is a piece of standalone software that is being integrated into other projects, like Drupal and Tumblr.

(By the way, there is a possibility that all Tumblr blogs will move over to WordPress since it belongs to WordPress.com now.)

In addition, the market share will get wonky over the next year. W3Techs, which has been the main tool to determine this, does not have good data anymore and might move to a different information source. Therefore, the numbers will change.

It’s also important to keep in mind that the market share stuff is not a goal but a result. We need to continue to create good, accessible software in as many languages as possible, build a great community, and be responsive to how the world and technology is changing. That’s the reason WordPress is still growing, most software does not last this long.

In addition, Matt and Josepha are looking into research to see what the market share really is. Once they have some confidence in the accuracy of their numbers, they will put them on Make.

Will You Come to WordCamp Asia 2023 as Well?

Yes.

Why Are New Versions of WordPress Still Supporting PHP 5.6?

Backwards compatibility is very important to us. This is particularly for those who are stuck on older versions because they might not be able to afford getting out of there. This is often due to lack of access to better hosting.

There is a not-small number of people who are still on these older versions that we don’t want to leave behind. We do want to turn it off someday but until then we will do a little more work.

In addition, WordPress uses their pull to advocate to web hosts to get users on older PHP versions upgraded. Everyone watching and reading this should also check and update their PHP version. Your performance can literally double when you upgrade.

Final Thoughts: Report from WordCamp Europe 2022

And that’s it, another WordCamp Europe done (or, half a one for me). It was a great success with 2,300 attendees from allover the world and also saw the largest ever Contributor Day with 800 people attending (yay!).

Thanks to everyone involved with making it happen, the many organizers and volunteers who gave their time so that we could attend!

Finally, WordCamp Europe 2023 will take place in Athens. I promise to not confuse the dates at that point.

What was your highlight of WordCamp Europe 2022? Anything else you want to share? Please do so in the comments section below.

The post A Report from WordCamp Europe 2022: Porto – At Last! appeared first on Torque.

It’s simple to put WordPress on your computer, clone your site, and even publish content straight from your local machine with this easy-to-use and powerful tool. Plus, you can push your website live with Local integrations.

In this blog post, we’ll show you how to easily start a new freelance project with Local. We’ll also offer helpful tips to make the process run as smoothly as possible. Let’s get started!

An Introduction to Local (And Why You Might Want to Use It)

As a freelancer, you likely have to juggle many different projects at once. If you’re working on WordPress sites, that means constantly updating themes and plugins, adding new content, and making sure everything stays compatible. It can be a lot to keep track of.

That’s where Local WordPress development comes in. By using Local, you can ensure that your changes won’t affect your live site until you’re ready to push them live. Additionally, you can use Local to test new plugins and themes before making them public. 

Moreover, a local WordPress site enables you to prototype client websites and projects before making them public. Then your clients can give you feedback and work to develop the perfect final product.

There are many benefits to using Local, including: 

• One-click WordPress installations
• Support for domain-validated SSL certificates
• The ability to access your local sites’ root files using Secure Shell (SSH)
• Shareable demo URLs to showcase your site

Fortunately, it’s also easy to set up a local site. We’ll explore this process in-depth in the next part of this post.

How to Start a Freelance Project with Local

You’ll need to do a few key things when starting a freelance project with Local. Let’s take a look at this entire process!

Step 1: Install Local

To install Local, you’ll need to download it from the website first. After that, choose your platform and follow the prompts. The whole process should take less than a minute:

Next, run the installer file and follow the prompts to install Local on your system. Depending on your platform, you may need to enter your admin password or confirm some settings:

Go to the start-up screen, hit Create A Free Account, and Local will take you to the screen to set up your account:

Once you create your account, you will be taken to the Dashboard screen:

From here, you can start creating a local site and connecting your WordPress account.

Step 2: Build Your Local WordPress Site

Next select the + Create a new site button:

In the simple setup wizard, give your site a name:

Next, choose your environment — either Preferred or Custom. We recommend selecting the Preferred option if you’re a beginner, as it is simpler and easier to use:

If you are more experienced or want greater control over your site, you can choose the Custom option. 

Now enter a WordPress username, password, and admin email address. In Advanced Options, you can select whether you want to install a multisite WordPress file:

When everything is configured to your liking, click on Add Site and log in to your local WordPress site. From here, you can begin working on projects that will help grow your business.

Step 3: Learn More About WordPress

If you’re new to WordPress, we recommend taking some time to learn the Content Management System (CMS). This process can involve exploring the dashboard, choosing your theme, and installing plugins. After all, your livelihood may depend on using these tools effectively!

We recommend exploring official WordPress learning materials, such as the Learn WordPress resources, community support forums, and technical documentation. You also might like to check out our handy resources for getting started with WordPress.

Once you feel like you have a good handle on the basics of WordPress, you can start exploring more advanced topics. By taking the time to learn now, you’ll save yourself time and headaches down the road.

Step 4: Export Your Site and Make It Live

You now have the option to export your site and make it live. You won’t need to follow this step if you simply need a local environment for testing purposes. However, this process is essential if you want to make your content public.

Assuming you’ve already deployed your site locally and are ready to launch it, there are a few more steps you’ll need to follow. To begin, you’ll need to export the local site and then import it to your host server. 

The process of importing and launching a website varies depending on the hosting provider. WP Engine, for example, needs only a few clicks to transfer your local website online.

Start by ensuring that the site you want to export is running. Next, click on the cloud icon from the left panel. From here, select Connect to a platform and choose WP Engine:

You’ll then need to sign in to your hosting account, choose the site where you want to push your changes, and confirm a few settings.

If you don’t have WP Engine hosting, you’ll need to install a plugin, export, import, and zip some files while ensuring that your migration worked correctly. 

Alternatively, Local by Flywheel’s Local Connect feature enables you to quickly relocate a site from a local environment to a live one:

Again, you’ll need to log in to your Flywheel account to connect the service. Once this is completed, you will have successfully exported your local site and made it live!

Conclusion

As a freelancer, being able to quickly and easily create a new local WordPress site is highly beneficial. This setup enables you to get started on your projects immediately without worrying about setting up a remote server or using a live site.

Fortunately, you can use Local for your freelance projects by following these steps:

1. Install Local on your computer.
2. Build the local WordPress site.
3. Learn more about WordPress.
4. Export the site and make it live.

Do you have any questions about starting a freelance project with Local? Let us know in the comments section below!

The post How to Easily Start a New Freelance Project With Local appeared first on Torque.

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David Vogelpohl: Hello everyone and welcome to Press This, the WordPress community podcast on WMR. This is your host, David Vogelpohl. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and I love to bring the best of the community to you here every week on Press This. As a reminder, you can follow me on Twitter @wpdavidv, and you can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, or download the latest episodes at wmr.fm. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about what business owners are really looking for when building websites and joining us for that conversation. I’d like to welcome to press this. Mr. Irwin Hau. Irwin, welcome.

Irwin Hau: Thanks for having me.

DV: Excellent. Excellent. So glad to have you here. Where are you joining us from here? Today?

IH: I was gonna say sunny Melbourne in Australia but it’s actually quite cold today. So cold Melbourne, in Australia.

DV: Cold Melbourne. I liked that. I liked that. You know the one time I went to Melbourne. It’s no right after I left it was this new store because a few years ago if you ever been to that, or at least south of there, I guess was where I was. I don’t know. I just remember seeing like videos of kangaroos jumping through the snow

IH: was not that cold today, which is great.

DV: Excellent. Well thanks for joining us for those listening. What Irwin’s going to talk about Aaron’s from a company called chromatics. But he’s going to talk about his 13 years of experience discovering what business owners and marketers really want beside belts and optimizations we’ve all been there. That client asking for that thing and it sounds weird and wondering like what they’re really going for. There. But Eric Irwin is going to share his thoughts around the common motivations behind stakeholder asks examples of how stakeholders often ask for the wrong things to achieve their outcomes. They wouldn’t do that and how your team can create a more collaborative approach that delivers. This is really neat. Alright, or whenever they ask you the same first question I asked everybody else, which is to briefly tell me your WordPress origin story. When was the first time you used WordPress

IH: Good question actually, I did do some digging but in my head 2000 A night a friend asked me to help him with use a website and back in the day. There’s a few tools out there but you know, blogs were all the rage and were perceived to be the right choice. I landed on WordPress, it was easy to use. Everyone seemed to be making websites in WordPress and a couple other names and stuff but I was doing some looking WordPress now makes 40 plus percent of all websites in the world and so glad I made that choice early on, but I’m not gonna lie. I pretty much stumbled across it. And I fell in love with it. And I haven’t fallen out of love with it ever since and the rest is history.

DV: What were you doing in 2008 that your friend felt confident that you could help them with a website?

IH: I’m not gonna lie I actually got I just got made redundant from an ad agency. And I was sitting at home with nothing else to do having come from digital. And he said not only trying to give you a break, but which I really appreciated. That was actually the start of this whole business or entrepreneur kind of a journey. So he really gave me up for a shot. So I really, if John if you’re listening. I owe you one buddy. So thank you so much. That’s it.

DV: It’s fantastic. It’s always great to have his people in our lives. And of course 2008 would have been an exciting time although you probably didn’t recognize it at the time, but we just come out of shortcodes and widgets hitting core and other elements and you know, really progressing WordPress to be even more than a blogging platform. But that would have been a crispy with days with all that. Can you tell me a little bit about chromatics and we helped you?

IH: Yeah, well, chromatics is a business I’ve been running like you mentioned for the last 13 years. We’re actually a web conversion design agency in simple terms where we do web design web development with a real focus on using User psychology in technology to drive for greater sales conversion. And so after 13 years, we’ve picked up a good 80 Plus awards and mentions and we’ve got a nice team of 12 in house just helping us out shared insights.

DV: Oh, that’s excellent. And congratulations on the girth over the years and web conversion sounds like a wonderful niche to focus on or at least focus your efforts around. And you mentioned the psychology of marketing in the psychology of the user kind of visiting you’re experiencing the site they’re getting some of your these words in your mouth, I guess a little bit, but you mentioned that word psychology. It really has me thinking about the psychology of stakeholders. And so I could see where you might be using these skills creating you know, a web experience leveraging how people think and what motivates them with how you deal with your clients. I’m wondering if there’s a connection there, but maybe I can kind of kick into my first question around the kind of topic du jour which is what’s really on these business owners and stakeholders minds clients minds. What do you think are the common motivations stakeholders have when making it out of a web optimization team?

IH: Well, I think people usually come to me and we get that many leads through multiple channels of various business we run our projects is just one of many we run a neon bright which is a conversion copywriting agency and rundown consulting and wouldn’t help calm and also we’ve got a new startup coming up called conversion. And I see that theme of conversion coming through but the question we always get no matter which channel we get personal statements like we’re embarrassed about our website that doesn’t really reflect that site doesn’t reflect the awesomeness of our business. Or the fun. What I’ve realized is Oh, they’ve realized is during COVID, you can’t go offline. So everything’s gone online. And so I now need to depend on my website a little bit more. The other one is, maybe they’ve been now operating their business for so long, and they realize it’s time to scale. And referral partners can only sort of go so far and so they need to push into digital marketing. So their website needs new traffic methods. And that traffic method really, really relies on a website if you think about it, or their website says advertisements being you know, a while 1954 I got this first website and now I really have to upgrade it because I realize it’s not just about having a website. It’s having a website that actually works.

DV: you’re talking a little bit about how the different motivations you felt that people were coming to you for this project. So and one of the ones you mentioned was that people might be embarrassed about their site. And I’m just wondering is that like, actually the motivation behind that like what’s deeper than being embarrassed? Like, what are they really asking for?

IH: Yeah, so the embarrassment comes because firstly, they think they need to look a bit better to see in a style on someone else’s website and it’s better. I think they want to win an award. They want some fancy functions or the next shiny thing but at the end of the day, it really comes down to maintenance, really, they want more business, they need more leads. They need to focus more on the business side of things in the purpose of what the website does, because I don’t think anyone woke up out of bed going, oh, I need a new website. I think the real pain points I actually do want to make more money and get more leads. I need more turnover, more revenue, more customers. And so it’s just trying to give them that mind shift to go well, let’s start with the end in mind. Let’s focus on even business outcomes first, and then make choices that match that business.

DV: So to your point, like it’s not like they’re sitting like they’re thinking like my website, I don’t like the design. So I just want it to look like something I like really what they’re asking for, of course, is something that better represents the brand and helps them achieve their financial outcomes. So they’re not sitting on a call with you thinking about spending money, because they want something that’s pretty, they want something that converts and of course, this is where we get into the client kind of self prescribing the solution is they talk to the expert in that but I can talk about that a little bit. I like some kind of fun examples even but we’re gonna take our first break.

DV: Hello everyone. Welcome back to Press This WordPress community podcast and WMR, this is your host, David Vogelpohl. I’m speaking with Irwin out of chromatics. What business owners employers are really looking for your site builds or when right before the break we were talking a little bit about some of the common motivations and you talked about people being embarrassed about their design, depending on their site needing to scale and thinking like well, what is the real root business motivation they’re trying to go for here? And I kind of had this kind of bridging statement where I was like, Well, okay, fine, if they’re coming to you almost these prescriptions of being embarrassed about the design, they’re kind of implying that they kind of think they know what’s wrong. And so I’m just wondering, maybe you can give us some kind of clear examples of as stakeholders might be making that might be countered in it.

IH: Ya know, I think a lot of the time websites are visual tools. And so every comment that we usually get, the first round is usually more to do with visuals, you know, what kind of colors what kind of effects, what fonts to use, branding and all that it’s very important, but you have to see your website holistically. So we’ve kind of worked out there’s kind of 67 key areas to look at. When you look at a website, you’re gonna have to consider all 67 without breaking a sweat. If one can only see the first one, which is just design. We have to look at design, in line with development like the CMS platform, how easy it is to obtain for the customer. how user friendly is for the marketing manager to do what they need, but also for the user to interact with. Can they find what they’re looking for? How secure is the site or faster this Does the site SEO implications of what you’re choosing, but unfortunately, even based on all those points, the user only sees what the customer in this case only sees the first part of the design. And so they have to look deep and given we have even talked about those business problems that you’re using to solve with, which is really, how do we get more profit to our customers? It’s having that mindset shift.

DV: And so the client comes in and they have a preconceived notion of what’s important and you had mentioned design I remember for my agency days I ran an agency ended up you know that around I do the genome show every now and then, but we were full service and we do marketing and so we do paid search organic, and we’d have people come in and ask for organic and Emily are you doing paid and they would say no and I was like okay, do you want leads tomorrow or three years or six months from now? Tomorrow? Sounds great. I like awesome. Let’s try that first. And but it was really the salient point that we just come up over and over and over and over and over again. And we would you know, kind of direct people in that other way. But like when someone comes in and their focus is on the design and the colors and making it pop or dynamic or whatever. How do you think about like getting them to think about the situation differently? I mean, isn’t the customer always right? How do you how do you convince them? Maybe going down the wrong path there?

IH: Right. We always start by talking about sometimes people when they bring us in, or you don’t really sound like a web designer or web developer. Is someone like a business coach, or a psychologist, you know, because you’re asking business questions. And so the thing we love sharing at the very beginning of every call, is do you know that one formula that pretty much summarizes how you get going to get customers in a really simple way. And so we usually share with them that traffic times conversion rate equals customers. And if you understand that principle now helps to separate the SEO, the AdWords the paid with the website and then if you understand how traffic times conversion rate equals customers, plays into Wait a minute conversion rate, I didn’t say that word website, I said conversion rate, the conversion process, which really if you think about it in simple terms, it’s just really the sales process. The websites is usually the start of that and so we normally try to make it as clean and simple so people understand who is playing what, which part. We segment, each section, and we kind of go well, we just we’re just playing this part. Now the web convergence site, if we can undo or Nola block this or unblock this bottleneck I think you’re gonna get a more likely chance of getting customer and then we usually challenge it more. It’s your sales team. What’s the rest of the sales process like? And once we’ve established the understanding and the flow of how traffic comes to you to come to your website, and talk to your sales guys, you have a proposal company a couple meetings in between, and they sign up. And that’s pretty much it. Once they understand that process. Then we can kind of start and usually kind of takes the focus away from what’s pretty and now on to how does business. And so that’s usually how we go about it. So yeah,

DV: I like that kind of clarifying position of like traffic times conversion or at people’s customers and I could see where that would really help to set the stage for more difficult decisions later when the client might be saying we need this giant video on the page and you’re like, yeah, the page might slow down and I can cost this conversions and then they’re like, Okay, maybe I need to think about that a little differently. Or maybe I can live with a shorter video. There’s something you can do that but I can see where that can be really clarifying and helpful kind of later in the process. Now you talked a little bit about how some of the feedback you’ve gotten in how you do your interviews is, you know, maybe a little surprising for people that have worked with web designers in the past. And I’m just curious, like, what your recommendations would be on how teams can what teams can do questions to ask for assistance to have to get the better understanding of those needs, from their stakeholders, like what is that consultative or psychology type approach? What are some examples of how you all do that?

IH: Yeah, well, I think firstly is a mindset shift for the designer or the developer. For a moment, you can’t be a designer developing Can I have to act like the business owner, think like the business owner, and what problem do you think they come with? And it’s usually not a design one or a coding one. And at the end of the day, it’s more to do with the business and so it’s having that kind of mindset shift, firstly, for yourself? I think so

DV: Sorry, I was just gonna say Do you feel like the mindset shift is away from like, I’m building a web page and what kind of web page Am I trying to build to thinking about it from the business owners perspective, is that the mind shift you’re gonna think

IH: Yeah, well, actually, sometimes I even say to actually even say to the customer, I’m going to pretend that I’ve owned your business with you. I’m like your virtual business partner. What decisions would I make? Because if I owned your business, I wouldn’t actually think about colors. I would think about again, business outcomes, and how that changes things and how often you know, go to that bottom line, and I’m gonna help the profit line, the the turnover line, the that sort of thing. So it’s a real mindset shift in that way.

DV: So sitting in there from their perspective, you know, it’s interesting the from their perspective, we talked about the obsession with design elements. One thing that really stood out to me as I thought about the clients perspective, was they ended up showing that website to their friends, a lot of the times, especially small business owner and family, and like the design actually is a reflection on them as a person in a lot of ways and that made me really think differently about how clients, you know, obsess over design and how important that is because it is reflection on them as a person and maybe it shouldn’t be but like it is, it’s really interesting, but I don’t know I felt a lot of value in that approach to working with clients and stakeholders of any other areas. Getting inside the head to better understand their needs. I really like to pretend you’re the guy.

IH: Yeah, no, it’s really not your point. Because you can’t say to someone, actually, thanks for your design opinions. I’m just gonna throw them up and let’s go to conversion. I think it’s important to number one, acknowledge what they like and say, not in still incorporate it into the peace. But like a dance. You can’t both lead one has to lead. So I usually say Well, are we leading leading by the purpose of the website which is this conversion by the way, there’s two types of conversion I should actually say. In all these polls, when people are not ecommerce, add to cart and buy those shoes instantly. Now our product takes six months, one year, two years before anyone considers us. There’s a relational conversion and there’s transactional conversions. But at the end of the day, it’s still convergence on building confidence, selling confidence.

DV: Yeah, no, I mean, I think it’s really interesting. Obviously, to your point, especially if you’re trying to keep your clients you can tell them that was a horrible idea. I didn’t like that notion of the dance. And you know, because you need to keep the client happy you can keep them coming back and buying more and I definitely have taken the conversions only matter approaching the stakeholder who is all about design, it did not turn out well everywhere, and I can I can attest to that. I do remember that experience quite quite specifically. And realizing it wasn’t necessarily my main for your realization, but it was a huge part of understanding that there’s more to it than just the conversion. There’s the relationship I have with the stakeholder, the client or whatever it is, being cognizant that hey, it is important, but I’m never gonna give up engines. Core values is designed better. So like it definitely matters. But to your point, the design is going to do its job. It’s got to meet the needs of the business. I have more questions on the stakeholder side because like, you know, how do we help them ask better questions and make better asks, but we’re gonna take our last break, and we’ll be right back. Time to plug into a commercial break. Stay tuned for more pressing this in just a moment. Everyone welcome back to press this the WordPress community podcast and the DMR. We’re talking about what business owners really are looking for with site builds with or when, how, or when, or right before the break. We were talking a little bit about how to build teams can get a better understanding of the needs of the stakeholders, you know, sitting in their chair, you said pretending to be them, all these different ways of training, get a better understanding there. But I’m trying to curious like, how can we train these clients? How can we train these stakeholders to make better asks, I really liked the formula and approach you took earlier but any anything else in that vein you you’d like to mention?

IH: Well, we always try to focus more on the purpose of the website and understand not making what’s on because you have nothing to do. You’re here to because you want to try to get someone’s attention. And you want them to take action. And then we usually focus on what is the action points that you want people to take. And so we know, usually list them down. It’s usually the usual suspects of phone number, email, Contact page, about a chatbot or whatever it is. And then we kind of continue to keep drilling. Well, how do we get people to focus on doing that? How do we keep focusing on getting people to that point? But also just seeing things from the customer specific the target market specifically, but still with the business in mind? Because the thing we get the most is people go, Oh, you know, UI UX as a UI UX. Let’s make it look user friendly. And let’s help use it. But you know what the best user journey is sometimes David, it’s, I’m gonna jump on your website. I’m going to find your pricing, get that pricing, learn everything you need. I’m gonna go to your competitor, and I’m gonna sign up with them. That’s a great user journey for me. But that’s not this business outcome. At the end of the day, it’s as much as it is important to you what UX still remember the website, what’s the conversion points, the action points, and then making sure work decisions. Just bring everything back.

DV: That’s to me, consulting with someone comes to you with an ask that you feel might be counter you may be perhaps could be countered to the objective or not supported or that maybe getting in the way of something else. That’s more material. Do you like put the question back to the client and say, What are your thoughts on the effectiveness of that suggestion or asked to achieve our objective? Do you try to train them that maybe the objective might not be the right thing? How do you how do you typically approach it when they may come in with an assets counter to what you’re trying to achieve from a business perspective?

IH: Yeah, for sure. Well, at the very beginning because we’ve we’ve set the stage for what is the purpose of the website? why did why did you think engage with us and and what what would a successful campaign or successful website look like if we had, so we always do that in the very beginning? Everything that is thrown out, including my design team, including myself as the strategist, including, you know, a third party, I come back to the weird read the very beginning. Again, I don’t force an agreement. I said, do you agree with us that this is what we’re trying to do to achieve and that this will be the shining light? This is what’s going to guide us to be successful? Is this true and everything else to not be secondary? Doing? Yes. So maybe we can refine it. And we do that before we move into this. So if they suddenly come back and say, Well, I would like jumping on my homepage, because my competitor does that and it looks really animated and dynamic, and has movement. I’m saying, Well, the key sounds like a fantastic idea. Number one, does it agree with what we kind of established at the very beginning? Number two, does your target market even want this stuff? And so really, there’s the purpose that sets the scene. There’s an understanding of the target market, which I guess is, you know, part of that is always challenging. The client doesn’t see it as that because else it’s just opinion versus opinion, in my opinion, this is their opinion or who’s right, maybe they are correct. Maybe jumping into it would actually be the correct answer, but I just want them to make sure that we’re all on the same page. That is no you versus me, it’s actually us versus the purpose that we had set up. And that usually ends up being a fantastic outcome and also helps I know third parties as well. They operate or they will get a copywriter or photographer or videographer or someone else is involved in the website processes.

DV: Yeah, it’s a good point. It helps abstract out the personal opinions and relationships. I’m guessing you all are doing quite a bit of AV testing to along the way.

IH: So we have a bit of a framework that we have ourselves already that we already know works, because a lot of clients come to us Oh, do you specialize in b2b or b2c? And I’m saying and I usually say none, none of the above. We focus on b2b Ah, isn’t that a human? We look at the human psychologist. I don’t really mind if you’re a business or consumer, or if you’re is 70 or seven years old, or whatever language you speak, as long as I can use human psychology principles and think more about human behavior. I think we’re in the right place.

DV: Right? Well, if I was your client, or when I would tell you to ship the dancing kitty website every single time. Any case, this is awesome. Erin, thank you so much for joining us today.

IH: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

DV: Of course if you’d like to learn more about what Erwin is up to, you can visit chromatic chromatix.com.au. Thanks everyone for listening to Press This the WordPress community podcast on WMR. Again, this has been your host David Vogelpohl. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and I love to bring the best of the community to here every week on Press This.

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