Learn about the features provided by WebPageTest and how to use that
information to improve the performance of your website. This will
include the general structure of WebPageTest, the performance features
that are tested, and tips on how to setup a private instance of
WebPageTest.

Do more with WordPress than you ever thought possible. Harness the power of user-generated content and quickly build complex applications including job boards, rating systems, and searchable directories. Use your imagination to create virtually anything you can dream up so you can not only complete sites more quickly, but also take on bigger clients and bigger projects. You’ll receive a free Formidable Pro license so you can work along as we build an application to kick start your imagination.

I will be going through examples on how you can use Advanced Custom Fields to easily create custom fields for posts, page templates and option pages.

The day of your new product launch isn’t when you want to find out that your website can’t handle high levels of traffic. In this talk, I’ll go through a series of WordPress optimization techniques, and how to get your site performing well on a server with very little resources.

Then I’ll take the talk to the next level and share loads of data that I’ve collected over the years showing tools you can use to test your website at scale, and how to determine where your site starts to breakdown when the load becomes too much to handle.

In my talk I will go over the various aspects of WP-CLI. In my opinion, most developers don’t understand the power of WP-CLI and the ease it can bring to many administration tasks. Many developers worry about how they should be backing up their sites. This can be done very easy with WP-CLI and a couple extra commands. Worried about menus being in the Customizer? You don’t have to go there, WP-CLI can do it for you. You can even write your own subcommands to make your life easier.

While at Bluehost I have had extensive experience with WP-CLI and want to share that knowledge with the community.

Many people add a Google Analytics snippet to their website to track visitors and pageviews. Some people even know how to interpret some of the many reports available in the Google Analytics dashboard. In this talk, I’ll show how you can open up a whole new world of data about your users and hook into a whole new world of marketing tools with a few small changes to your site.

Internationalization is a pain. It’s hard to understand, and it’s even harder to support. We’ll look at technologies available to you TODAY and how, with a small user base, you can translate your entire product with no effort on your part.

We’ll leverage the power of Transifex, MakePot, and Grunt/Gulp to make it possible for you to translate your plugin/theme by the power of the community.

It has never been easier.

• Sans-serif vs Serif, pros and cons
• Responsibly using @font-face
• HTML tags and SEO
• Examples of nicely paired Sans-serif + Serif combos
• Typography styles for Blogging, News, eCommerce, Marketing

In this talk, Lindsay Bayuk will cover the core concepts for building a great product and how to apply them to your WordPress site. Learn how to optimize your WordPress site and increase conversion with better targeting, positioning, messaging, personas and testing.

I’ve found through my time that a lot of people want to contribute to open source projects but are usually intimidated or think it’s only for programmers.

In reality everyone has something to offer an open source project. This presentation will talk about:

• Who should contribute?
• Why should someone contribute?
• How do I contribute?
• How do I know what’s needed?
• Why everyone can (and should!) contribute to the projects they use.

Communities—like the one we have in WordPress—don’t just happen overnight. For them to be successful, they take people to show up, contribute back, grow with it and most importantly to incorporate new people into the fold. It is ongoing, it requires attention and it needs people like you and me to speak up. A small fraction of people carry the weight of helping it thrive, but the great thing is that despite all that, we all benefit from the community no matter who contributes. In this talk I will cover some known, and unknown tips and tools for making the community work for you and your business, and also help to put back more into the community than what you take from it.

Using the Media Explorer plugin for better embeds from Twitter, Instagram and Youtube, adding your own services, and creatively reusing components for other purposes.

What if there was a developer tool that made it easy for users to create custom layouts out of template parts that you created but hard for them to break it? That’s the premise behind WDS Simple Page Builder, a plugin that can be used in conjunction with a custom-built theme to give your clients and users flexible layouts without headaches. This presentation will introduce you to the Page Builder, how it works, why it exists, and why you might want to use it in your projects.

Did you know your WordPress website can be hacked without your knowing it? You usually won’t find out your site is hacked until things get really bad, such as when:

• Your web host shuts down your site because it is distributing malware (though often they won’t notice)
• You get an email from someone across the globe asking you to please desist in using their domain in an email spam campaign
• Visitors to your site are warned that it is a “phishing site” and is stealing information from people
• Google warns people to not open your website because it is infected with malware

Without knowing it for months or even years, your website could be promoting porn, pharmaceuticals, or pay day loans; infecting your friends’ computers with viruses, trojans, or other malware; or participating in a botnet that is infiltrating sites across the world. Security scanners and plugins like Sucuri and Wordfence do not pick up on many of these hacks. So, even if the site shows as “clean” that doesn’t meant it is.

Why should you care? Because getting off the phish tank list is hard. Your search engine rankings could tank. You could lose clients who are angry that your site directed them to a site that infected their computers. And, well, caring is the ethical thing to do as a business owner.

Attend this talk to learn how to spot a hack in your WordPress files and dashboard, clean up a hacked site, and prevent hacks. Cleaning up a hacked site can take a lot of time and expense. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. This fast and furious presentation will leave you wishing you’d never heard it but so glad you did.

I bluffed my interview for my first ‘real’ job in tech. I knew I was smart, I knew I could learn quickly, but I didn’t know their systems. Yet. That set me down a road that landed me with a job in WordPress, but it didn’t absolve me of my fears of Imposter Syndrome. I still have it now. But I can work through it and not let it stop me from success. And so can you.

One of the most important elements in any Open Source project is constant, thoughtful communication, and WordPress is no exception.

As I’ve watched issues or arguments arise over the years, they almost always stem from a lack of empathy, listening, or a total breakdown in communication.

In this talk I’ll be addressing all of the following:

• How not to be a jerk on the internet
• Contributing in a meaningful way, without stepping on toes
• Preparing your contributions (plugins, themes, core patches) for mass adoption by going out of your way to explain your use cases and how you envision the code being used from a high level
• How to respond when communication breaks down

These issues aren’t new, but do seem to have been exacerbated in the WordPress community in recent months. Hopefully this talk would give attendees some optimism about progressing forward with the WordPress project in a spirit of collaboration.

The life cycle of the average WordPress user has many phases. Each user journeys through hosting, installing, themes and plugins until they find what they want and have a successful WordPress site. I will share insight from years of working with millions of WordPress users on what their behaviors are and what they are looking for. WordPress is a great open source product and I look forward to sharing how businesses and users can better understand what the entire ecosystem entails.

If you are a theme developer, using Sass or Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets is a time saving way to write your code and it is easy to learn once you are familiar with CSS. In this session, you will learn how to harness the power of variables, nesting, and mixins to take advantage of everything that SASS has to offer to write awesome code. In order to get the most from this session, you must have a good understanding of HTML and CSS.

You’ve discovered a great theme, but it has one major flaw: it doesn’t match your branding. How do you add your logo to the header? How do you adjust the colors? What about changing the fonts?Learn the answers to these questions and more from industry expert, Jessica Barnard (aka The Pixelista), who has been customizing WordPress themes professionally for 7 years. Join us to get a behind-the-scenes look at the toolkit and efficient workflow Jessica uses to execute beautiful WordPress theme customizations, and walk away empowered with the knowledge to do it yourself.

Dre has a lot of experience building businesses from the ground up. Dre was the founder of Cubic 2, a custom web design & development shop that provided custom solutions for WordPress clients. Then he started Sucuri Security, and turned it into a very successful multi-million dollar, 30+ employee company that services millions of unique monthly scans, monitors thousands of websites, and makes sure that 100′s of websites are cleared of malware daily.

Dre is going to be drawing from his wealth of experience in business management to talk about growing your business. Starting a business is hard, but it can be fun and extremely satisfying as well. This presentation will relate back to a lot of Dre’s own personal experiences in the field and he will be giving tips and pointers for those working hard to build their business today.