Category: Technology

What you need to know before you AMP

Posted in Strategy, Technology by Rob Stinson

The AMP HTML framework continues to gain attention and the v1.0 release of the official WordPress plugin has made it even easier to implement AMP on WordPress. Even though the plugin provides the ability to just flick the switch, AMP implementation should be carefully planned for. For projects that we work on, there are a series of things that we consider and understand before we kick off any development.

The following is a summary of these things. If you’re looking at AMP, take note of these points and build them into your planning.

1. Understand your existing site performance and what could be reasonably achieved with AMP

Performance is as performance does. Benchmarking performance on the existing site and understanding:

  1. Where it sits as far as bad<—>good goes
  2. How much AMP could realistically move the needle

This will give you an idea of the gap you may be able to bridge with AMP and whether or not the investment is worth the potential return. I.e. moving from a 7 to a 9 performance score means something quite different than moving from a 3 to an 8.

If you’re looking for modern tools for assessing performance (amongst other things), we turn to:

Each of these tools provides agnostic metrics that you can use to track your performance trends over time. We recommend learning the nuances so you can master each of them.

2. Understand the different implementation types of AMP

With the AMP for WordPress plugin, there are 3 different modes for implementation. These are:

  1. Classic
  2. Paired
  3. Native

Each implementation has a different impact on the way your site will operate. Native and Paired modes use your theme’s templates and styling. They often look just like your non-AMP URLs. (Classic mode uses a template bundled with the plugin. Based on changes to SEO best practices and the lack of a “canonical” experience with Classic Mode, we don’t recommend you use Classic Mode.)

The value these 3 different modes bring varies and the choice between them can often be influenced by the technical limitations of how your site is set up. Understanding these will help frame your thinking as you move towards more technical discovery.

The AMP Modes & The WordPress Plugin section on this page cover these 3 modes in more detail. You can also read more over on the plugin’s documentation.

3. Audit asset optimization infrastructure (CDNs, Caching, etc) and define what could be removed and what could conflict with AMP

There are a thousand ways to skin a cache. Asset optimization takes many forms and their friendliness with AMP varies. Auditing what you have active on your current site means that when you move into testing AMP compliance, you’ll be better equipped to identify where issues (if there are any) come from and how to resolve them.

4. Understand performance-related revenue streams

This is different for every site. Revenue streams can come from:

  • Ad revenue: Both programmatic and manual
  • Subscriptions
  • Ecommerce
  • Affiliate and Sponsored Content

Review how page performance, and the resulting user experience, can influence conversion rates and technical implementations on these.

5. Audit current Ad-Tech implementations

AdTech implementations deserve their own point here as it varies greatly and is usually Javascript heavy. AMP offers AdTech-specific components for working with this, but the implementation can vary. Understanding your AdTech stack will help you:

  1. Determine how to implement the ads in AMP, like with amp-ad
  2. Help inform you on how you should go about testing AMP and its impact on ad revenue

6. Audit current Javascript

From tracking codes to frontend features, Javascript is everywhere. Knowing the what and how of it on your site will help you determine:

  1. What you can actually say goodbye to (you’ll be surprised how often we are able to remove JS from sites we work on without impacting functionality or integrations)
  2. What you can reimplement in AMP, like with amp-bind, amp-ad, or amp-analytics

Once you get to testing, the simplest first step is simply turn off JavaScript in the browser and get a sense of how your site functions without it.

7. Audit tracking/cookie implementations

This is part of the JavaScript step as well but can be considered on its own. Tracking snippets on websites are easily one of the biggest contributors to poor performance. We’ve seen many cases where turning off tracking, without doing anything else, has improved page performance by more than 50%.

However, tracking is an important component of modern website management. An audit of what you have though can help you determine:

  1. What could be safely removed from your AMP pages
  2. How to leverage existing components like amp-analytics, amp-bind, and amp-list

AMP have components available to help facilitate tracking. The Google Tag Manager service actually has AMP specific features to help implement tracking while maintaining AMP compatibility.

8. Audit the total amount of CSS on URLs. The plugin can remove unused CSS, but it can still exceed AMP’s maximum of 50KB.

One of the restrictions AMP places on a page is a maximum file size for CSS of 50KB. The AMP for WordPress plugin through a feature called tree-shaking reviews a page and produces a minimized file of only the required CSS. However, this feature doesn’t guarantee that the file size will be under the threshold. Reviewing key page templates, particularly for complex pages, will help you scope the project around the need to refactor CSS on the site.

9. Your current state of AMP compatibility

This actually falls into more of the discovery stage of a project but is actually something that can be done, at least at a high level, quite easily. S0 if you’re in the exploratory stage of looking at AMP, doing this can give you a serious head start.

The process basically involves working on a staging/testing/alt version of your site, installing the AMP WordPress plugin and using its features to identify validation errors.

The step-by-step for this can be found here.

10. Understand the Roadmap for AMP & the AMP Plugin for WordPress

Knowing what’s coming, even what’s just around the corner, can help inform your decision around an AMP implementation. A no-go factor about AMP or the plugin may actually be something that could be resolved in the near future. The Roadmap is public and can be easily reviewed over here.

 

These 10 points are what our teams move through when scoping an AMP implementation project. Considering, understanding, even implementing them yourself will mean you’re highly informed about AMP and its potential value for your website.

With Google, we’re the lead developers on the official AMP for WordPress plugin

If you want to know more about what AMP, or performance gains in general, can do for your website…

let’s talk.

 

How Tech Companies Should Invest in WordPress

Posted in Strategy, Technology by Rob Stinson

This article is the second in a series where we unpack WordPress and the space it should occupy within a tech company’s product strategy. The first article looked at why WordPress should be on the radar in the first place, and this article looks at how a WordPress project should be approached.

A brief recap

WordPress should be considered by any web tech company wanting to grow their market impact and influence on the Open Web. It makes sense because:

  1. Customers are already there and they don’t intend on leaving
  2. Leveraging the strengths of WordPress frees a company to focus on its own strengths
  3. WordPress integration factors in to the decision making progress of site owners
  4. Investing in WordPress means investing in the Open Web

So how should it be done?

Being in WordPress is not enough. Having a plugin in the WordPress.org repo will only get a company so far. There are nuances to what works (and what doesn’t) when engaging an ecosystem as broad and diverse as WordPress. There are over 55 thousand plugins in the WordPress.org plugin repo, many solving similar problems in unique ways (just do a WordPress.org search for Marketing Automation). Standing out in this crowd takes careful planning and a commitment to ongoing execution. With this article we cover 5 things, identified through our work with technology clients and partners, that should be considered carefully when investing in WordPress.

1. Committing (and staying committed) to Best Practices

Following established best practices is a common denominator amongst the most successful WordPress plugins. These plugins have found users through their reliability, as well as the features they provide. In contrast to closed proprietary systems, the open nature of WordPress means there is a wide variety of installable packages of code. Coding and user experience best practices set a baseline that, when adhered to, significantly improve the performance, stability, security, and accessibility of a WordPress site. Straying outside these guidelines increase the risk of a plugin conflicting with others and putting the site at risk.

Coding and user experience best practices set a baseline that, when adhered to, significantly improve the performance, stability, security, and accessibility of a WordPress site.


Source: The WordPress Coding Standards

With the addition of Tide to WordPress.org, code quality will be even more visible to site owners and weigh heavier on their decisions.

2. A Native WordPress Experience

WordPress historically hasn’t had a standardized design system for the WordPress admin. This means there’s a massive variety of interfaces provided by plugins. Many of these adopt the branding of their parent company and, sometimes, conflict with the native experience. There are efforts by our team and others in the ecosystem to develop and define a common design language that can be reused within admin interfaces and across plugins. In the meantime, plugin authors can improve user experience by considering how their plugin interface can adhere to existing WordPress design patterns.

Variation examples of in-Admin UI from some of the most popular WordPress plugins.

By adopting familiar WordPress admin design patterns, you can:

  • Reduce the design/development burden
  • Rely on established, user tested, and refined UI components
  • Encourage user adoption through a familiar interface
  • Reduce onboarding friction
  • Contribute back to the larger WordPress & Open Source UI narrative

3. An Integrated Experience

The more WordPress site owners can engage with a product within the space they are already in, the greater the value they’ll receive from the product. The nuisance of context switching (switching back and forth between “places”) gets in the way of product adoption and ongoing use more than any other factor. Most users will use only a handful of applications day-to-day, so rather than compete to take one of these few spots on the roster, a better and easier route is becoming part of one of them.

An integration where the value of a product or tool is delivered directly within the WordPress admin will accelerate adoption and ongoing use.

4. Engaging the Community

WordPress has a strong and vibrant community of developers and users, and success in the ecosystem is largely informed by the perception of this community.

Support Forums

Every plugin in the WordPress.org plugin repo has a support forum. Companies can make the mistake of ignoring this space, preferring to shift support focus to another platform. This makes sense for general support, but WordPress users are familiar with the WordPress.org support forums and will, as well as submit tickets here, review the activity within them as part of their assessment of a plugin.

INDUSTRY EXAMPLE

Google recognized the importance of engaging with user feedback on a plugin (the AMP Plugin) that at launch had quickly become a lot more successful than was expected. There was a lot of feedback coming in and not enough support to go around. The positive side of this was that it offered the perfect reference point for understanding the real needs and desires of WordPress users. The support forum heavily influenced the build out and prioritisation of the v1.0 project backlog.

Addressing and responding to the needs of the support forum was also identified as a necessary step to demonstrating care and support for the plugins users and the larger ecosystem.

“We strive to make our open source projects successful and getting them into the hands of the largest possible number of users. Such success depends in good part on how we address the needs of our users, and how we steer the direction of our projects towards satisfying those needs as the project evolves. In WordPress, achieving this requires the proper handling of the support forums, and the right level of engagement with our users in them. In the context of the AMP plugin for WordPress, we assigned a high priority to this goal, and doing so paid off because it allowed us to, in turn, prioritize the resolution of issues and the execution of feature requests.”

– Alberto Medina, Developer Advocate at Google

Example Plugin Support Forum

WordCamps & Meetups

WordCamps & WordPress Meetups are local WordPress focused events where users and developers gather to learn, share, debate, and contribute back to the project. More than any other corner of the ecosystem, WordCamps and WordPress meetups are the most visible examples of the nuances of what is unique about WordPress. I.e. try and find another 2 day tech conference where, in the name of accessibility, tickets are only $50 apiece.

Web technology companies looking to break into the WordPress ecosystem and engage at these events should understand what effort it takes to refine, refactor and grow loyal customers. Hard sells, unstrategic sponsorship, and swag alone don’t cut it, and sometimes might scare away potential businesses looking to integrate with technologies.

Give first. Always!

WordPress is and always will be a flag-bearer of the Open Web and Open Source software. Efforts in the space should have the intention of contribution back to and increasing the quality of the larger ecosystem. Efforts otherwise are quickly identified and largely seen as unfavorable.

WordPress is GPL licensed. Unless there’s a great reason not to, we believe all code in this ecosystem should be shared onward for reuse, examination and repurposing. That last mile of integration is likely to have many people interested in helping shape it, so let the community help. Further, there are quite a few examples of open source plugins that extract premium business logic and features outside of the core plugin: Premium offerings can be compartmentalized, but as much as possible should be given away.

5. Integration with other Plugins

Your plugin definitely won’t be the only one installed on a users site. There are often ways to integrate with other plugins that move beyond simple adherence to code best practices. The potential of Open Source is truly multi-dimensional and offers opportunities no closed-source platform could. Integrating with WordPress Core is good. Integration with other Open Source plugins is even better.

Examples of how some web technology products could be integrated with other plugins include:

  • Marketing Automation apps that integrate with popular WordPress Form building plugins
  • SEO apps and services that integrate with popular SEO plugins
  • CDN’s that integrate with AMP and media compression plugins
  • Web hosts that integrate with backup and dev workflow plugins
  • Plugins with tracking codes optimize for performance and reduce reliability on Javascript to become AMP compliant

Wrapping things up

There are plugins and there are plugins. Success in WordPress depends on so much more than having a plugin that connects a product or service with WordPress. Understanding and working with the nuances of the WordPress ecosystem, across development practices, community, and user experience, contributes towards engaging WordPress users.

If you have questions about specific use cases, our team are more than ready to have a chat.

An Introduction to Native AMP

Posted in Technology by Rob Stinson

Remember m-dot sites? You know, the ones where you would design and build a whole separate site for your mobile visitors and serve it under a subdomain (e.g. https://m.xwp.co). Two sites; one for desktop visitors and one for mobile visitors. Sure, in a world getting its feet wet with mobile devices, this got the ball rolling for better mobile experiences. However, it certainly didn’t represent DRY development.  Now we can be thankful for modern responsive design and development. Single sites that deliver content to all screen sizes.

The technology evolved to serve the changing needs of the market.

Almost 3 years ago, Google announced the open source Accelerated Mobile Pages project (AMP). A clearly defined set of development practices that, when adhered to, produce a highly performant experience for site visitors. Through a clever layer of caching, Google began both encouraging and facilitating the adoption of AMP, with a natural focus on the publishing industry.

The experience of AMP these past few years, particularly with WordPress, has been like those ye olde m-dot sites. You would have your regular site and your AMP site. Sometimes called Paired Mode, AMP WordPress plugins have let users set up an AMP version of their site that delivered AMP compatible content, under the right circumstances, to users with the standard non-AMP site ready in the background to fill in the gaps.

There have been a few problems with this.

  • Like with m-dot sites, 2 sites needed to be maintained.
  • The upside of AMP was only available for certain content types under certain circumstances.

AMP is designed to offer an optimized performance experience for end users, achieved through strict adherence to a set of coding and performance best practices. The upside of AMP, blazing fast performance, isn’t something site owners just want for a select few pages for select mobile visitors. They, we, want that for the whole site!

A single site, built on AMP, for all device types and all visitors. Blazing fast across the board. Yes, please!

This is what Native AMP is.

Native AMP is the application of AMP across a whole site. This has been technically possible for some time, but only recently have we (web developers) been able to both work with AMP as well as adhere to the unique frontend styles of our brand. Additionally, AMP now provides several components that allow us to create the rich interactive experiences that we otherwise would typically have to build using custom JavaScript. When custom scripting is required, there is amp-bind which provides an increasingly-familiar way of creating state-managed reactive interfaces. The gap between what can be done with AMP and what web developers would like to do is reduced to the point that the upside of AMP performance often offsets any lost functionality.

The follow-up question, I hear coming from the developers, is

“That’s great, but are we going to have to refactor our entire WordPress theme to bring it inline with AMP standards?”

Nope!

V1.0 (currently in beta) of the AMP WordPress plugin does something special. It includes a post-processor that converts a theme’s templates and stylesheets into AMP-compatible templates.

In principle, it’s (almost) plug and play. If you enable AMP and do nothing else, the baseline experience is as if the user has visited your site with JavaScript turned off; so if you have no-JS fallbacks then these are served in AMP.  Practically, there will need to be a few tweaks and changes, but the barrier to a site achieving AMP compatibility and realizing the serious performance gains has been significantly lowered.

One of our team architects Thierry, alongside Alberto Medina from Google, has given a couple of fantastic presentations at AMPConf and at WordCamp Europe in recent months, demonstrating these capabilities.

Native AMP, the ability to build an entire site in AMP, is now possible and offers site owners a fantastic path to better performance. Evidence? This site is Native AMP. We’re writing up what the experience was like of taking a theme that wasn’t initially built to be AMP compatible and how through working with the plugin and some minor fixes we were able to get up and running on AMP within about 10 hours of dev time.

The documentation for AMP is here, and the documentation for the WordPress plugin is here.

We’ve been working with Google and Automattic on this plugin for several months, and if you have questions, feedback, or need further direction, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

P.s. 1.0-beta of the plugin ready now for testing.

GDPR: What businesses need to know

Posted in Strategy, Technology by Rob Stinson

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will be enforceable THIS May 25th! The implications for businesses that operate in Europe and collect user data are significant and are certainly not something to be taken lightly.

Great, another confusing legal acronym.– Hopefully not you about GDPR

For the uninitiated, the GDPR is designed to harmonize data privacy laws across Europe, to protect and empower all EU citizens data privacy and to reshape the way organizations across the region approach data privacy. For industries like online publishing, the way user data is collected and managed is about to change. In a big way!

Brendan Woods, one of our Team Leads, has been leading our research on this and how it will be impacting our clients. As part of this, he ran an internal training session. Seeing how widely relevant these laws are to the industries we serve, we’ve recorded it to share with you.

For those who want the TL;DW, the rest of this post breaks down the incoming changes and what they mean.

Who does GDPR apply to?

GDPR applies to any company processing the personal data of subjects within the European Union. Let’s make this very clear from the outset. It’s not just for companies in Europe, but for any company that collects or processes data on European Union (EU) subjects. The net is very wide!

There are a combination of factors that define whether or not a company is targeting European subjects. These include things like:

  • Offering European languages on a website
  • Offering European currencies for purchases
  • Localized content
  • Giving international services to people in the EU

It’s interesting to note that as the law was passed pre-Brexit, it will most likely stand and remain relevant to the UK.

What happens if the rules are broken?

These new laws have some serious teeth. The previous iteration of the law had fines of up to £500k pounds in the UK. The GDPR allows for up to €20 Million or 4% of global revenue. Whichever is greater. Keep in mind that for Google, that’s about $3.5 Billion.

Each EU state is required to set up a data protection authority to oversee the enforcement of compliance within their state. They will have powers to do things like access premises, give binding orders, administer fines, hand out suspensions, etc. Not only are the penalties large and clearly defined, each member state will have an organization specifically set up to issue them if compliance is not met.

Modern governments are well adjusted to working across international borders so their will certainly be precedence for having these laws enforced on companies outside of the EU.

Litigation

The more you understand about GDPR, the more you recognize the room it will create for a whole new class of litigation. These laws significantly increase the rights of data subjects to take civil action if they believe their rights to data privacy have been breached. You can expect to hear of class-action settlements that even exceed the above penalties.

Companies affected

With GDPR, almost every company type will be affected. Within the documentation, the terms controller and processor are used. Controllers are companies that dictate what data is collected and how, where processors are companies that process that data according to the directives of the controller. Previous iterations of similar laws effected mostly controllers, where GDPR broadens the requirements to include processor type companies.

5 Big Changes for Businesses

1. ​ The New Guy

Companies will be now required to appoint Data Protection Officers (DPO). These will be executive level positions responsible for enforcing compliance across the company. It’s expected that approximately 75,000 DPO jobs will be created off the back of this new legislation.

2. The Types of Data

The types of data that are included within the protective rights of subjects are increased from what was included in previous laws. These data types include:

  • ​IP Addresses & Mobile ID’s
  • Geolocation Data
  • Sensitive Personal Data
    • Racial/Ethnic origin
    • Political association
    • Religion/Philosophy
    • Trade union membership
    • Sexual orientation
    • Biometric/Health data
    • etc

When collecting these data types, companies must now explicitly define the reason why they are collecting the data. Companies for many years, under the potential returns of big-data mining, have had a “collect it and we’ll figure out what to do with it later” attitude. This is no longer allowed.

3. ​Consent

Consent for data collection must now be explicit. Vague reasons such as “for marketing purposes” or “for research” or even “to improve user experience” are no longer acceptable. The company must specifically define and communicate to the user what their data will be used for.

It also must be active consent. Consent through silence or even pre-ticked boxes are off the table.

On top of being explicit in requesting consent, companies must also make it just as clear and easy for consent to be revoked.

The final piece of the consent puzzle is that pre-GDPR collected data is subject to these changes. So if consent has been collected in the past through a method that doesn’t adhere to these new standards, a company is required to re-request consent. We can expect to see many email sequences going out from companies in the coming 12 months with these kinds of requests.

4. Data Breaches

It seems that every other week there is a story about a major data breach from some large company. Within the GDPR, companies are now required to respond in a particular way if this occurs. Specifically, they must:

  • ​Report the incident to their relevant data protection authority within 72 hours
  • The incident must be reported to the affected users “without undue delay”

This means that companies will need to update their relevant policies and procedures. And with the hefty fines and potential litigation, they will be very motivated.

5. New Personal Rights

With these new laws, individuals will have new legal rights. Summarised, they will have:

  • ​The right to erasure (deletion of all personal data)
  • The right to restrict the processing of their personal data
  • The right to data portability. E.g. “Give me my data Mr Insurance Company so I can take it with me when I move to another insurance company”
  • The right to knowledge of profiling

The way data is stored and the interfaces for engaging with it have been and will need a lot of attention for many companies. We are working with some of our clients on implementing solutions to facilitate these kinds of data related requests from users.

GDPR and Publishers

We work with a number of large international publishers so we’ve been thinking a lot about how these laws will specifically impact them. Walking through some standard work flows and user experience flows we begin to see how the GDPR will touch on a lot of their points of user engagement, such as:

  • Requesting newsletter subscribers
  • Profiling subscribers
  • Accepting submissions for contests
  • User account creation
  • Data collection for remarketing/retargeting
  • Account creation
  • Premium editorial content subscriptions

…and the list goes on. Making updates to the user flows and internal interfaces is where we are seeing the most pressing needs.

An Opportunity

At face value, these changes appear incredibly intimidating. Big fines and big operational changes are something most business operators don’t particularly want to be thinking about. However, we see a very positive opportunity within GDPR. It gives businesses everywhere a clear framework for how to go about the collection and use of personal data with integrity. As technology companies, our users trust us and GDPR lays a clear path for how we can repay that trust. For companies like ours as well, it gives us an opportunity to provide value to our clients and walk with them to help achieve compliance.

In summary (of this summary), GDPR is coming in May and it’s going to impact the way businesses operate online perhaps more than most people realize. Taking the time to understand the implications and preparing a path towards compliance is very important. We have been and will continue to work with many of our clients to update their websites and platforms to adhere to these new standards.

Do you have anything to add to this? There’s a lot to cover, so please let us know if you think we’ve missed anything important in this overview. Additionally, if you believe your company needs technology support in achieving compliance with GDPR, please get in touch.