 Hi everyone and welcome back to The State of the Web. In this episode we're doing something a little different. As you can see we're out of the studio. Tonight we're hosting an event between two groups that normally don't mingle, the New York Web Performance Meetup Group and the WordPress NYC Meetup Group. We're hoping to have a kind of cross-pollination of knowledge between the groups. Maybe the WordPress folks will teach the Web Performance folks a little bit about the CMS SQL system. Maybe the Web Performance folks will teach the WordPress folks how to keep a fast website. So I'm really excited to kick this off. Let's get started. I am here tonight with the WordPress Meetup. I'm just looking to learn everything I can about WordPress and be able to speed up my website to help out my clients and people come into the site. I want to learn more about SEO and I just really want to learn more about the back-end applicable for people who do not design and code. I am not a developer so I have to teach myself all the WordPress tricks. I'm hoping to learn how to optimize the site so the user performance is more enjoyable. Hopefully it won't be over my head. Alright, so I'm here with the co-organizers of the Meetup, Winstina Hughes and Sergey Cherneshev. So Sergey, how long have you been with the Web Performance Group? Well, I started the first Web Performance Group in the world so since the inception What were some of the tools that came up tonight that you would recommend to WordPress developers? Even Web developers as a whole? I feel the most universal tool I recommend all the time is to measure performance. It's a web page test. It's an open source tool we use all the time. It lets you know what's fast, what's not because as a regular person you cannot know what's inside the computer. What are some challenges of being a community organizer? First I'd like to say that there are so many opportunities. The opportunities that we have are through WordCamp Central. We really do have a support system, both financial and both experience. Another opportunity is being part of such a welcoming meetup group. We have about 6,600 members and so the challenge becomes creating spaces for our meetups. It's really expensive to hold meetup events in New York City and just finding a venue alone is our biggest challenge. Even if we had some members who are not very technical, they still hopefully came out of this event. Understand performance without necessarily being technical themselves. How can they evaluate and work with the developers on making the website faster even if they cannot do it on their own? So let's talk about the topic of the night, WordPress. Can you give us a sense of how popular is WordPress? One out of every three websites is WordPress. WordPress is definitely expanded to the point in which it's one third of the web. It's pretty exciting. So does that mean that there are so many WordPress developers? Are there people who might not have expertise in web development that are also making WordPress sites? It means that there are a lot of WordPress fanatics. You could say that there are a lot of people who are inspired by the open source software. You don't have to be a developer. You don't have to have like a computer science background in order for you to build a WordPress site. Well, thank you both so much for helping to organize this event. I think it was a success. I think people took a lot out of it. And to the viewers, thank you for watching. If you have any insights or comments about the intersection of web performance and WordPress, be sure to leave a comment below. Thanks for watching.