Blog
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Optimizing the WordPress REST API for Performance and Scalability
The WordPress REST API is a powerful tool for building custom WordPress-powered applications. It enables headless setups, mobile apps, third-party integrations, and increasingly, large parts of WordPress core itself. But it can also become a performance bottleneck if you treat it like a simple data pipe. In this article, we’ll go beyond surface-level advice and…
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Are you paying attention?
Every so often we see these clickbaity hot takes claiming WordPress is dead, done, and over. No future. Nothing left. First, as a community, we engage far too much with these posts and feed the algorithms more than we should. We really need to stop doing that. Second, it could not be further from the…
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A New Direction for My Agency: Northbound
This year marks twenty years since I started running a WordPress agency. What began as building WordPress websites gradually evolved into something much broader. Over two decades, Truer than North has handled high-performance builds, complex WooCommerce implementations, infrastructure decisions, performance optimization, scaling challenges, and long-term client partnerships. The work has always been technical at its…
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Not From Holland
I work internationally. That means I introduce myself to people from all over the world on a weekly basis. At some point in almost every conversation, someone says something like: “Oh, you’re from Holland!” And every single time, I respond: “Actually, I’m from the Netherlands. More specifically, from Fryslân.” It’s never said with irritation. It’s…
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Performance Plugins Layers Explained
I hear this a lot. Someone tells me they’re using a performance plugin, so they don’t need anything else. Caching is on, scores look decent, and the assumption is that adding more would either do nothing or make things worse. That conclusion makes sense if performance were a single switch. But it absolutely is not.…
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Why Cloudflare Free Caching Is Not the Same as APO for WordPress
There is a persistent argument that you can rely entirely on Cloudflare’s free tier caching for WordPress and ignore Cloudflare APO. On the surface, that argument sounds reasonable enough because Cloudflare’s free plan is genuinely good at what it does. But it also stops short exactly where WordPress performance problems actually begin. The difference between…
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Scaling Is Capacity, Performance Is Efficiency
At the heart of the “we need to scale” idea sits a confusion that is a basic misunderstanding of what scalability actually does. Scalability does not make systems faster. It makes them endure more load. Performance, by contrast, determines how much work a system must do for a single request. These two concerns operate in…
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Your Attention Is Leaking
We all know them. Friends, colleagues, maybe even family members whose phones light up constantly. Badges everywhere. Notifications stacked so high they have become visual noise. Unread emails, unreviewed Slack messages, app alerts, system prompts, settings that still need configuring. And almost always, the same response when you ask about it: “I don’t care. I just…
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Lessons Learned, Course Building Edition
Over the years I’ve built plenty of courses in various forms, but they’ve all been quite small. More like tutorials with some screencasts. Building Make WordPress Fast, the first full course I’ve ever launched, and probably the most ambitious solo thing I’ve attempted in a while, has already taught me plenty. If you’ve ever thought…