 And without much further ado, our next speaker is Noel Tok. He's a digital nomad. Most of you who have visited any other word can probably know of him or have even seen his talks. Today, he's going to talk about WordPress in 2020, right? Not 2021. And yeah, please applaud Noel Tok. Cool. Thank you, brother. Thank you very much. Yeah. Thanks so much for that. Can you guys hear me all right at the back of the room? Great. Cool. So before we get talking about the future of WordPress and what we need to keep an eye on for next year, I think it's worth maybe going back a bit in time. I built my first website in 1995, which is quite a while ago, but I only made the jump from hobby to professional much later on. And WordPress was a really big contributor to that. This was the wordpress.org website back in 2010. And even though I began playing with WordPress around 2008, I'd say, I think 2010 was the big year for me because that was the turning point when custom post types were introduced. And to me, that was like the future at that point. Because I wasn't interested in blogging, but I was interested in, wow, custom post types. I can do anything I want, which is really cool. So that feature probably had the single largest impact on my career in WordPress maybe back then, which is quite cool. But you can see that the pitch back then was WordPress is a state of the art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. So the scope was also limited to blogging. It wasn't necessarily about websites. If you look at the WordPress website today, it says, hey, this is for blogging, this is for websites, and even applications, which is pretty crazy in terms of how broad this has all become. And keep in mind, WordPress was already 11% of the web at the time. Now, I've dug this out of the archives. This is my website at the time almost 10 years ago. And some things will give away the age almost immediately. I think the green check marks with the gradient are a pretty dead giveaway of probably terrible design. I'm showing this here. I didn't even realize this was a slider till yesterday when I noticed the three circles at the top. So great user experience there. The lighting and the shadows and everything are all completely different. I mean, all in all, I'm quite happy. But that wasn't the largest shock factor. I think that the largest shock for me was the language. So I was looking at this, and I used words like stunning and look great, similar to how WordPress.org talks about being aesthetic. There was this large focus on the visual. And that makes a lot of sense back then. SEO and marketing was quite easy. Like you'd publish a page, it would get ranked, you get traffic, and everything was OK. Bit different story nowadays. And to me, that era, the goal was to, in many ways, was to exist. It was to have a website online to go from zero to one. So if the restaurant down the street had a website and the other restaurants around it did not have a website, it was winning. That was kind of the name of the game back then. So that was very interesting at the time because there was no competition. So going online was both the process and the goal and result in one. And we'll come back to this topic after. So today, as Martin already mentioned, WordPress is already 33% of the web. Oh, cool, thanks. So WordPress is already 33% of the web. And at face value, that's an incredible number. There's no CMS, other CMS, or other tool or application with that kind of brand that even comes close. And looking at that journey over the past decade, custom post types, thousands of plugins, an easy, a theming engine which connects the back end to the front end, all helped to really fuel that growth, which we've seen. And that's why many of us are here today. We had this easy ability to just go online and produce something. But I'd argue that this 33% that we see today isn't just more of the same. It isn't just that, hey, there's more plugins, there's more themes, and we're going to more work camps. That's why the number went from 11 to 22 to 33%. I don't think that's the case at all. Or rather, that it's just not as simple as that. So to help us with that, I made a little chart. And this chart shows us on the left side the Google Trends data. I think most of you are familiar with Google Trends. It shows you interest for a particular topic. And that's wide, wide-ranging interest. So in the case of Google, it's mostly search volume and how interested the population at large is. And we can see that a number 100 in this case is the most interest that WordPress would have ever gotten at a certain point in time. So if we look at, let's say, 2012, we can see that from then on, the market share has doubled. So we've gone from 17 to 33%. But this consumer interest around this global brand called WordPress has halved, which is very interesting. And I'd like to be able to dig quite a bit deeper in that today to help understand how that's come to be and what that means for us going forward. So the first thing I'd like to talk about is the greater web ecosystem that WordPress is a part of. When a goal for a website was simply to exist, you used to be able to build an entire website in WordPress. That hasn't changed. You can still build an entire website in WordPress. It's just not as competitive as it used to be. And that's because the people, you might not be able to engage people as frequently as you used to. It might mean you're not able to discover new people to come to your website as you used to. So you have to grow beyond WordPress and acquire other tools and be part of a larger ecosystem. And together, those various tools then form the new solution. And a great way of understanding this is by, I think looking at some of the core features or main plugins that we used to use, or sometimes still use today, but are slowly transitioning out to third-party solutions. So let's look at a few examples. Search, who uses WordPress search on their website? Anybody? Okay, a few of you. Okay, cool. Martin, I'm surprised. We'll have to talk about this later. But search is one of these interesting things because if you have a small website and you have great content architecture, you don't really need to have search, right? There's not a large point because otherwise you're trying to make up for a deficiency. If you have a very large website, you probably do need search, but the problem is that, or no, no, no, it's a good problem to have, but search nowadays, the expectations from the consumer have become much, much larger, right? We've been using Google for, I don't know, how many years. All of us in this room, 99%, I'd assume, have been using Google to a certain extent. So we expect that kind of search experience to occur on large websites that we visit. We expect to be able to type in something like an electronic vehicle and then also see results for Tesla. We expect to be able to make a typo or a mistake and for the search engine to automatically kind of assume what we're looking for. We also assume that the website will make prioritized rankings and weightings based on what is generally most looked after. And in that case, basic search from WordPress just doesn't really cut it in that regard anymore. So a lot of people back in the day moved over to Elasticsearch when they had a larger website. And then from there, all the learnings that happened in Elasticsearch were then productized in companies like Algolia where you just connect your WordPress site and also you have Search, which is, I'd say, a lot smarter or intelligent than the default Search. And Search in that regard is not a core competency of WordPress. Another example is conversation. We have WordPress comments. Comments have become a lot more elaborate than they used to be. And comments in some way are this extension of guest books. Did anybody ever have a guest book on their website? I did. Yeah, cool. It's like three people. We should bring guest books back. But conversation nowadays again is hitting this wall because we have discussed, we have live fire, we have WordPress comments and none of them are really able to hit that next level of conversation and engagement. I've been using discuss for a while, but I'm already sensing like, where is this going? I'm happy that there's automated moderation. I'm happy that there's new ways of commenting, like inline commenting, which might come to Gutenberg to a certain extent. But a lot of these things generally don't belong inside of WordPress because they again need intelligent systems around them in terms of social logins, in terms of moderation and things like that. Another noteworthy one here is the Coral Project, if I haven't mentioned it from Mozilla. Analytics, again, who had a dashboard inside their WordPress site that just showed how much traffic they were getting day to day. Yeah, basically like all of you at some point, I'm pretty sure. And that was analytics to us, like number went up, good, number went down, bad. And that's how simple analytics was. But this has become so much more complicated over time. It's just not that simple anymore. You can have, you can receive little traffic from a great audience or a lot of buyers, which is very valuable, or you can get a lot of traffic from a lot of people who are not relevant. So again, we're trying to figure out through lots of different tools, what is the best way to do things? So we had a lot of analytics plugins inside of WordPress. These are kind of dying because they're being replaced with Google Analytics integrations, they're being replaced with hotjar, decibel integrations, God knows what. Same with email. You know, my first small business customers that I had in 2010, 2011, I'd set up their newsletter inside of WordPress. It didn't mean that I was sending automatically blog posts every week or something like that that were being published. It was a separate newsletter tool inside WordPress. And if we're sending out to 1,000 or 2,000 people, emails would send out every two or three seconds, right? Like it was on a cron job, just kind of running like that. And again, here we see that these kind of tools are living somewhere else now, like MailChimp, SendGrid, CampaignMonitor, because they're intelligent, because they have lots of data because they're able to say, hey, you know, this person's in this geographic region based on past behavior. They'll be online around these hours. So for that particular person, we'll send at that time. That's just not something that, you know, we can figure out for our own little site. So the growing ecosystem is an important one. I think you're sort of understanding the point I'm trying to make in that there's a lot of core features or larger plugins inside of WordPress that are now, you know, slowly moving outside of WordPress and becoming part of SaaS solutions or third-party solutions. The nice thing about that for the economy or for organizations, for clients, for businesses, for whoever, is that a lot of these solutions are very user-friendly. Right, they're there for non-technical people. So a client doesn't have to come to you and say, hey, I need to send a newsletter or, you know, I like to tweak the search weightings or something like that. They, as a business power user, can go in and do that themselves. And last but not least, we're seeing a lot of these different solutions really focus on actual business value. So if you look at a few of these examples, Discuss says, express yourself. HotJar says, the fast and visual way to understand your users. And MailChimp says, put your people front and center. None of them actually talk about the solution, they just talk about people. You know, this is the new game in terms of trying to focus on the actual outcomes as opposed to the technical implementations. So along with the replacement of these core features that we're seeing, or these larger plugins that used to exist, we're also seeing the entrance or emergence of completely new technologies as if the web wasn't complicated enough. So technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, or the latest JavaScript framework, I'm sure like three new frameworks came out this morning that we haven't even heard of yet. They're all very exciting, they're all here to stay, but they do come with a lot of implementation challenges. And I wanted to, I mean, this kind of sums up a lot of what we tend to see nowadays. There's a lot of hype around things like artificial intelligence and machine learning, but at the end of the day, when it's actually implemented, it's a lot simpler and it's a lot more, I don't know, a lot more human in that regard. There's no big machine running around. But nonetheless, there's a couple of examples I wanted to run through for you guys. I guess all of you know Cervus. Yes, okay, great. So we're the WordPress partner for Red Bull Media House in Salzburg. And they've now gone with Gutenberg across multiple properties. So how many of you have already started using Gutenberg? Yeah, very cool, that's great. It's a daunting task and it's really cool, but it's really amazing. And in cases like this with Red Bull and Cervus, like these are large organizations that are trying to do, they're trying to centralize things and are trying to think more in terms of blocks rather than pages. The concept of pages to a certain extent is even becoming outdated. That's the kind of time we live in, content lives in fragments and is then distributed through various channels. It's kind of a scary thought, but that's the new world we live in. And in this case, Gutenberg is scaled across multiple different properties, so the same block can have different styling on different pages, but essentially we use the same custom block. Another example is TechCrunch, which we help rebuild from scratch. So the TechCrunch that you see online today is completely headless, which means that it has WordPress on the backend and then uses React on the front end. How many people have used React or View or Angular? Okay, fair few, wow, cool. So you'll know, it's great technology, we talk about it a lot, you see it a lot in web design news and conferences and things like that, but there's a lot of implementation challenges. Like I'm rebuilding my own personal website and React and I'm wondering why I started down this path now because there's not much value on a very personal level to go down that path, but for large organizations there certainly is. In the case of TechCrunch, there's no more page switching, so you don't click on a link and then have a blank page that loads up. You just seamlessly transition from one page into the next and for them that's increased engagement by the upper sort of double digits in terms of percentage, which is quite an impact for a business that has this much traffic. And lastly, the last thing I wanted to talk about or an example I wanted to provide was Siemens. So we've been working with Siemens and in this case, we've ripped out Gutenberg from the backend and we've put it on the front end and then we've connected it to a bunch of artificial intelligence APIs, which is quite fun, but that is really like the forefront. And in the case like this, what it's doing is it's doing simple things like checking for grammatical mistakes and then making suggestions, but it's also helping find more SEO friendly synonyms. So if you have something like digital city, it might say, hey, smarter city is a term that's more looked for, maybe consider using this instead. And even makes headline suggestions in that regard. So it's even engaging not only in natural language processing, but then also natural language generation. And this happens all the way to the hashtag recommendations. It makes based on trends that are happening more or less in real time. So in this case, you can see the header in the back, which is how can digitalization relief pressure on cities? And the first hashtag recommendation is Expo 2020 Dubai, which is pretty much a perfect fit in terms of hashtags to use. And that's all coming from places such as Twitter, medium.com, Reddit. That's how the headlines are being generated or how to sample is being created. That's how data and topics are being brought together. It's quite advanced. And this is a tool that for an industrial company or a history of being very industrial, it's quite ambitious in that regard. These sort of initiatives. So this is the interesting thing about a lot of this. And before I talked about how some WordPress features are being replaced by third parties, but at the same time, we're also seeing this increase in what WordPress is truly known for, which is content and publishing online. Like that's the focus. It's not necessarily having a search functionality. It's not necessarily having a templating engine necessarily, publishing online and the core of actually creating content is probably the biggest focus point of WordPress, which is why Gutenberg is such a massive project. Gutenberg alone has had more commits in the last year than Drupal has as a whole project, which is crazy. Gutenberg in that sense is its own application. It's its own sort of project and it is very heavy because of the user experience that's required to elevate something like that to a standard that helps all of us actually feel like it's a tool that we can put in front of users. And technologies in that regard try to, like it makes more sense to try and do one thing well, as opposed to many things poorly. And WordPress was great in that regard 10 years ago. It was, let's try to do everything because none of these tools are available. So let's use all the plugins and create everything on WordPress. And now that a lot of these best ideas, these best sort of lessons learned have come out and have been built into SaaS solutions, there's not necessarily a massive need for that to all occur inside of WordPress. So being able to be part of this larger ecosystem is so important nowadays. And it is a real thing. Like I for a lot of years was more or less stuck inside this kind of WordPress bubble in terms of, hey, always use plugins, always do this and that at some point, you realize, hey, to be able to compete, we really have to use the best of both worlds. And in all the cases I mentioned before, you know, in the case of Red Bull, it's mixing Gutenberg with Red Bull's incredible sort of video power, so their own APIs and their way of doing things and their technology behind that, that's proprietary. In the case of TechCrunch, that's mixing WordPress with React, in the case of Siemens, that's mixing Gutenberg and AI. And by combining these different technologies, you often unlock these sort of new sources of value for businesses. And as I've mentioned before, like the implementation is a big challenge. So we might see a lot of hype around AI, machine learning and all these things, but what you're seeing here is, you know, I'd say it's probably the forefront of these kind of projects, mostly because there's a big difference between what you can build as a proof of concept and, you know, as a build in terms of theory and as a demo and what you can actually put into production for many, many users. So I feel like we've been talking a lot about, you know, fragmentation and specialization in that regard, but it's also important to consider how our own roles play into it. So 10 years ago, I feel like anybody could have been mildly successful if they just put the hours into being a web designer. It didn't really matter, you know, the skill didn't matter all too much and I guess that's also because just getting a website out there was the biggest goal. And I certainly, you know, described myself back then as a web designer, but, you know, does anybody still describe themselves as a web designer today in this room on the actual LinkedIn profile? No? Well, exactly. So that's, I guess that's part of the point, but, you know, like I certainly do sometimes meet people who, you know, still have the web designer title and generally they're a sole proprietor, so they work alone, so they're a self-ständic. They, you know, probably work with small to medium-sized businesses and lastly, they're probably coming at this more from the marketing angle than the development angle. And this is also, you know, reflected when we again look at Google Trends. It's kind of crazy when you look at it now that web designer as a term has come all the way down to the point that it's matching in terms of popularity with UX designer. I mean, 10, 15 years ago when you said UX designer, no one was ready to pay any money for that. And here we are. It's kind of crazy. The funny one too is a product designer because you see it was a bit more popular in 2004 but then I had a dip and kind of came back. I do wonder if, and this is kind of reaching, but I do wonder if a product designer back then was more about physical objects and then that sort of died down with the advance of the internet and that has kind of come back with product development online and product design. So it's very interesting to see how these, you know, titles are being broken down. But again, you know, like here we're seeing these challenges also in the WordPress space. So if you're in WordPress today and you build websites for customers, chances are you'll have to specialize more in the future. You'll have to decide on the path, so to speak. Some people go more into development. So that could be, you know, JavaScript, the front end frameworks like ReactView on the development side, building APIs, GraphQL, whatever, or on the other side, you could be on the product and marketing side. You can say, hey, you know, like I'm someone who's bringing all these different tools together to drive the actual, you know, business outcome or values that we're looking for. What is the business trying to achieve? And that's what I'm gonna push for. But I generally feel like that one person in the middle will slowly, you know, seize to exist in that regard. So where does that all leave us in the end? Well, if we come back to the beginning where I talked about the purpose of many websites back then in terms of just simply being there to exist, then I think that we have to understand and gain an appreciation for the purpose we serve today. You know, do we develop for the sake of developing? Do we design just to design? We build websites just so that there's a website online. Are these all like zero to one switches? Of course not. Building a website today is implicit, right? It's a commodity. Anybody can do so by going on Wix or a Squarespace to build a website. That's not hard. The focus today in that regard is still all over the place though, right? Many websites exist, but they don't deliver results. Many websites have analytics, but they don't really have meaningful insights coming out of them. Many websites do A, B testing, but nothing changes as a result. And my favorite is many companies decide to do a full redesign, but never look at past data or lessons learned to determine what's the new thing is that they're gonna build. So in this day and age, as digital becomes part of everyone's lives, results and outcomes are becoming or are being talked about a lot more. And this will become increasingly important as we go into the new decade. And this also shapes how you and I use and perceive WordPress. So most of the conversations I have with clients nowadays revolve around these sort of topics. They're not necessarily about design or development or a particular tactical strategy. Digital has permeated in all our lives. It's part of all our roles. It's part of our jobs. So there's this real hunger or sort of truth seeking for what is actually driving results from my website. What is the outcome for my brand in terms of long-term strategy? How am I actually getting there? So as you move forward with this year, ask yourself how WordPress and other tools, ideas and experiments together help drive real value for the projects you work on. And today is packed with great sessions. I looked at the schedule. It's quite amazing. There's everything from new technologies, from there's two Gutenberg sessions right after this. There's a session on SaaS. There's a session on subscriber models. There's all the basics in terms of SEO, content strategy and so on and so on. So there's really a great sort of diversity of sessions today that help try to push you forward. So I hope you'll learn a lot from it and more importantly, meet with a lot of new people and in that regard, thank you. So we also have a couple of minutes for questions if anybody has any. Please raise your hand and somebody would come with a microphone to you. And if not, we're going to switch to our... Okay. Just a second. Hello. Thank you for the talk. Could you please go a little bit deeper into the question of pages are obsolete and we now have to start to think in blocks of content? Yeah, for sure. That's a great question. So just to reiterate, this is about pages becoming somewhat obsolete. I think right now they're not like obviously pages exist. They have a very important role in terms of SEO because there's a link in terms of content being archived to a certain address on the web. The concept I'm talking about is probably more on the back end. So you'll always have a page that is generated on the front end. But when you look at marketing nowadays, with the advance of AI and machine learning, marketing is trying to pursue personalization. So you go on a website or use Spotify. Or most of you probably use Spotify to some extent. You have Discover Weekly, you have other playlists that are made for you. And at the same way, pages are being made for you. So they take content from different places and say, hey, based on his behavior or her behavior or whoever's behavior, this is the content we're going to show this person. And that is the aggregation of blocks which then make up the page. So you're not designing a page necessarily, but you're designing the content and you're having a content architecture and strategy around fragments or blocks of content. That are not only delivered through an API to, let's say, like a web front end, but they might also go to a watch. They might go to a phone. They might go to voice. Who knows what. So that's the sort of fragmentation in terms of we're not necessarily starting with, hey, I need six pages for my website in the future. That's the difference I'm talking about, where it's much more content-driven. Does that answer your question? Cool. Any more questions? We've got a couple more minutes. All right, then applause for not talking. I think you will be able to find him around after this session somewhere in the hip. Thanks so much. Go for it.