May 10, 2019 — The ability to customize with ease is one of WordPress’ best features. But customization often impacts performance. Add too many bells and whistles and you may end up with a site that’s sluggish and painful to use.

Decoupling, or using WordPress on the backend only, is an effective if somewhat drastic way to improve site performance. In this session we’ll learn a limited version of decoupling WordPress: a headless home page. Decoupling the home page gives you a functional, fast home page that displays WordPress content without invoking WordPress (and without the load time!). We’ll cover different approaches to serving WordPress content outside WordPress, how to seamlessly integrate a headless home page into the rest of the site, and challenges to look out for.

August 17, 2016 — Whether you’re redesigning an existing site or starting from scratch, content that puts the user first leads to happier users and better return on investment. User testing helps you understand your users and structure your content for them. It doesn’t require a large team or expensive resources. You can do it yourself, and WordPress makes it easier. We’ll cover card sorting, tree testing, prototype testing, understanding the data you collect and using it to design your content.

Take aways:

How a small team or individual can run effective user tests.
How WordPress makes user testing easier.
How to interpret user data to build a user-focused site.