Welcome back to Osom to Know! Today, we are talking about WordPress performance with Remkus de Vries, who is a co-founder of ScanFully and a notable figure in the WordPress community. Remkus brings a wealth of experience in handling websites with millions of monthly page views. In this episode, we explore the misconceptions surrounding caching plugins and address the importance of understanding performance from a fundamental perspective rather than as an afterthought. Remkus will guide us through his insights on hosting choices, improvements in WordPress core and WooCommerce, and the critical role of education in WordPress performance.

Remkus de Vries [00:00:00]:
You’re right. Analysis is the base of everything, and that begins with understanding and having the mindset that it is the analysis that you do over the data that you have available to you. You need a mindset change to get ahead instead of lagging behind. If we leave the mindset of we want to educate anyone on a particular topic from the ground up type of fashion, then, yes, you might end up in that situation where you just go, you know, but

Maciej Nowak [00:00:33]:
Hello, everyone. My name is Maciej Nowak, and welcome to the Osom to know podcast where we discuss all things related to building great websites. Today, we are exploring the world of WordPress performance with our guest, Remkus de Vries, a performance optimization specialist who began his journey in 2010 when he encountered complex WordPress implementations that pushed the platform to its limits. As a cofounder of ScanFully and a respected voice in the WordPress community, Remkus has worked with sites handling millions of monthly page views and has developed a deep understanding of what truly matters for WordPress fast being fast beyond, common misconceptions. And these misconceptions are extremely interesting because, for example, we will uncover why caching plugins don’t actually solve all performance problems, the per importance of, understanding performance from the first principles rather than as an afterthought and how to properly analyze your website to find the real bottlenecks. Remkus will share his perspective on hosting choices, the recent improvements in WordPress core and WooCommerce, and why education about performance fundamentals are critical in the WordPress, ecosystem. If you don’t want to miss new episodes and keep learning about WordPress, please subscribe to our newsletter at osomstudio.com/newsletter. This is 0SOMstudio.com/newsletter.

Maciej Nowak [00:01:55]:
If you are watching this on YouTube, please subscribe to our channel, and give us a thumb. This means a word to us. Without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Remkus de Vries.

Lector [00:02:14]:
Hey, everyone. It’s good to have you here. We’re glad you decided to tune in for this episode of the Osom to know podcast.

Maciej Nowak [00:02:22]:
Hi, Remkus. How are you?

Remkus de Vries [00:02:24]:
I’m well. How are you?

Maciej Nowak [00:02:27]:
Oh, so well, I think at least. So yeah. That’s weird answer, but I think I’m doing okay. Alright? So but I am very excited that we can, talk about, performance today. I was looking forward to this conversation. And I would like to start with the with the like, a general question. What drew you to the performance of WordPress? Because you seem to be very interested in performance. This is our discussion today, topic of discussion.

Maciej Nowak [00:02:57]:
So I’m curious what made you be interested in performance and not something else?

Remkus de Vries [00:03:03]:
That’s a good question. I think this kinda started around 2010 when, the types of clients that I was having were roughly, in the more complex type of sites. At the point at that point, we started having WordPress 3.0 which allowed for custom postdated taxonomies. And then a new client of ours had a very, very complex request, which basically meant we were implementing about 10 different custom post types, and I think about double of that in, in custom taxonomies. Now when you combine most people don’t know this, but if you wanna, for instance, if you want an archive of, tags and then combine an archive of tags, basically, you you take the slug of the archive of the tag and then you hit the plus, then you can add another term to it. So you get the combination of the two, as one archive. And we were seeing that this was causing issues. So we needed to dive into what’s going on here and how can we fix this? And this sort of primed me in figuring out what is a query.

Remkus de Vries [00:04:16]:
I know what a query was because I’d done SQL and all that sort of stuff. But, that sort of primed me into let’s let’s figure out this this performance thing before instead of fixing it the at the end.

Maciej Nowak [00:04:30]:
Alright. Yeah. That’s interesting. And now looking at this from this perspective, do you think a lot has changed since that time when you get when you initially got into performance and when and and now how do you look at this from a perspective?

Remkus de Vries [00:04:48]:
So, yes, a lot has changed. It’s a bit of a double edged sword because on the

Remkus de Vries [00:04:55]:
one

Remkus de Vries [00:04:55]:
hand, performance in general has gotten a lot better. Certainly, the the acknowledgment that this is something we need to focus on has gotten way bigger. But applications and where WordPress is an application and then plug in that extend that application have gotten more complex, have gotten more careless as well. Because if the bulk of the sites you built them for just have very low traffic, you run a good chance of never running into performance issue. However, I have quite a few clients that are doing millions of page views a month. They will know it really, really fast. Right? There’s if there’s a plugin that has a performance regression, they’ll be the first to tell me. In fact, I’ll be the first to see it because we’re monitoring for that.

Remkus de Vries [00:05:49]:
This is one of the reasons I found the ScanFully with my cofounder, Barry. But the idea behind it is you want to know now and everybody seems to understand that mindset better now than they did, let’s, you know, it’s fifteen years ago, I realize. So that the awareness being pushed by, you know, Google, indicating that performance is a is part of the mix, having things like core web vitals, having Lighthouse two hour availability. For instance, in WordPress now, for the last three years now, we have the WordPress core performance team. So there’s a lot of focus on performance now, so that has gotten a lot better. But it’s still shocking to learn that, one of the things I learned fifteen years ago is that, caching doesn’t solve your performance. Caching enhances what is cacheable, but a lot of stuff isn’t cacheable. A lot of stuff basically invalidates parts of your cache or your full cache.

Remkus de Vries [00:07:00]:
So there’s a lot of stuff that is that, you know, you should know it, but it’s just not common knowledge. So when I say the, the plug in you just installed that is supposed to solve your caching doesn’t solve your caching your performance problem, I still get get wide eyes like, what? It’s a caching plug in. Of course it is. There is a there’s a strong case to be made that it does, and there’s a stronger case to be made that it doesn’t.

Maciej Nowak [00:07:36]:
What you said that the awareness growing, I have a feeling this is very true. At the same time, like because what we have the tools. We have the page for the insight. We can very easily measure the performance of the website yet. I have a feeling, that’s my second feeling, that the performance is judged only after the website is done. So that is it’s tested by those tools. And, you know, instead of, like, looking from the perspective from, like, first principles, you know, first step is or or throughout the whole build, the performance is at the back of your head. Yeah.

Maciej Nowak [00:08:12]:
You do the website, like, not sure about, you know, the website is done, and then it’s tested then. Oh my god. Let’s do what? Cache, install WP Rocket, and and so on. So Yeah. This is my, like, maybe not very, fair judgment, but this is what I think is happening.

Remkus de Vries [00:08:28]:
I think it’s a fair assessment. What this is exactly the type of stuff that, I’m being hired to fix. There’s people who, I gave the example yesterday to somebody where I basically say, look, there’s there’s sites that I come across that have a page builder active. Sure. And, adding a page builder already means your site is slower because the plugin has to load on top of WordPress, which by pure definition cannot be faster. Now you can make it negligible, and that’s that’s what you should want to have. But then they then I see, like, five, six, seven different plugins hooking into that page builder, adding all their templating and all of the logic and all that. And then they find it weird that their site with just a thousand WooCommerce products is just slow on every single page load.

Remkus de Vries [00:09:21]:
Yeah, of course, there’s there’s four or five plugins competing for, process power to render what needs to be rendered. That that’s very much a thing.

Maciej Nowak [00:09:33]:
Mhmm. So why is this happening in the first first place?

Remkus de Vries [00:09:39]:
I think there’s, this this largely stems from that the the the the it’s relatively easy to start with WordPress. Right? We’re in certain context, we can we can almost be seen as an as a no code solution because if you don’t want to touch code, you can. And that means people start with building stuff without fully grasping what it is that they’re doing. And if you continue and then the site continues to grow because it’s acceptable what you can achieve, then you start building sites that become more popular, start generating more revenue and all that sort of stuff. It then much later in the journey becomes more evident that you’ve chosen the wrong path because you’re you’re finding yourself having to fix, you know, all the weird niggles and and and just dumb stuff that you go like, why didn’t I know this? You then have to have, the the insight that whatever you know now is not enough to bring the site to the next level, and you have to have an active mindset of this is what I want to fix. So you need somebody who wants to, embrace the professional mindset that actually goes with with it. And I think it’s the combination of those things, low barrier to entry, you can go fully no code if you want to. We have page builders that, you know, facilitate that for you, And then you end up with sites that are just not built, in a lean and mean fashion.

Remkus de Vries [00:11:27]:
And, you know, if that’s not your mindset, if that’s not part of your core belief that this is how it should be, because I’m aware of the maintenance, how I’m creating if I don’t. Then, yeah, you’re just making more complex sites than you need to. And then there’s false narratives where certainly on the performance side of things, there’s a lot if you if you Google from how do I make WordPress faster, you’ll find a bunch of tutorials who are just listing the same stuff that I wrote about in 2007/8, which is by far no longer applicable anymore. But you’ll still see the same things because, you know, nobody really understands what they’re doing. You just like to have an article out there that explains and or hints that they do. So it’s hard to find information that helps you level up.

Maciej Nowak [00:12:18]:
So to get into your senses, but why is this the case? Because of it’s easier to reproduce, you know, the same kind of content all the time, all all over the you know? And so you have a feeling of building your SEO on your website so that you, you know Yep. Must produce such content and you lack knowledge. No one has that knowledge. No one wants to share real nitty-gritty details of how to get better performance.

Remkus de Vries [00:12:49]:
It I think it’s the the the thing we have to agree that that is the conclusion we can make. Because, if you look into just core web vitals as a thing to measure, the vast majority of people don’t really understand that if they go to their browser and go to inspect and then, find the lighthouse section where they can run the five tests on their site, that what they’re seeing is a lab test. And what I mean with a lab test, it is it is nowhere near what is actually happening on your site. It is a localized on your machine lab test over the connection that you have. Yeah. You can throttle and you can simulate and all these things. But ultimately, what you’re getting is not real data. It’s a good indication of where your data is, but it’s technically possible to build a site that’s course perfectly for all the core vital web vitals, but actually is horrendous to use.

Remkus de Vries [00:13:52]:
You can build a site like that and vice versa is also possible. You can have a blazingly fast site that doesn’t register as a perfectly, five times a hundred. So if we don’t understand those types of basics, if we don’t understand that we’re when you’re generally looking at the performance of your site, we’re testing the cached version of that site. If that’s not a thing you know, then it’s very hard to then start diving into, okay, if that’s the case, then what do I need to understand better so I understand performance better and understand caching better? Caching has many, many layers and it’s a plugin that does caching, will turn your site into a static version is basically what I should say. Can most certainly aid the performance of your site, but it’s not a solution. It’s not a one stop solution. You have, there’s there’s cache invalidation. There’s a cache hit ratio.

Remkus de Vries [00:14:55]:
There’s people who are logged in. There’s people who come in through tracking parameters behind the URL. All of those things invalidate cache, and then you’re talking raw performance. And if we allow people to not understand the consequences of that, and then they have a subpar hosting, And that combination just, you know, it compounds. It becomes more and more difficult to start. Where do I start to understand what this actually is? And to answer your very first question, I that’s that’s that first example got me into performance. And me wanting to help people understand performance better is what keeps me in, which is why, last year I started more, on the education side of things and which why I’m going to double down on that. I’m I’m developing courses.

Remkus de Vries [00:15:47]:
I’m in preparation to really take off with my YouTube channel, all in, you know, in the pursuit of helping people understand their tools. And performance is a part of that. Security is a part of that. But also which tools are you using to develop? All of these things come at play at how do I create the most optimized, the most performance, the most scaling, the most the best accessible? All of these metrics that you should take into account. How do I build those sites? And people are not talking about that. They’re talking about here’s a solution, click my affiliate link, and I’m happy.

Maciej Nowak [00:16:25]:
And they are trying to solve the problem. Right?

Remkus de Vries [00:16:27]:
And then Yeah. But are you solving a problem if the if the problem is not solved at the root? Or are you or are you solving a consequence of the problem?

Maciej Nowak [00:16:38]:
I read that some somewhere over, over Twitter that you can sell vitamins or you can sell ibuprofen, you know. And one is helping you, you know, grow better body, let’s say, or, you know, it builds you. Right? And and the other one, covers problems.

Remkus de Vries [00:16:57]:
And and I would go even further and say, start fixing what you put in your body as in real food, unprocessed raw food as much as possible because you’ll get more in starting from there. Then you’re not adding disruptors to the mix because food is a wonderful, example of how you can basically screw up your entire system. Most people don’t know that however they’re feeling during the entire day, week, whatever, is based on how they’re feeding themselves. So whatever’s in your gut is what determines how you feel. And the same can be drawn as a parallel to WordPress. If you don’t know what you’re feeding it with, what the basis is of what it uses. So from server level to plug in level and to, you know, whatever is in front of there, all of these things determine how healthy you feel.

Maciej Nowak [00:17:48]:
And then you have to eat a lot of ibuprofen to to get your day by. Right?

Remkus de Vries [00:17:54]:
And at a certain point, when ibuprofen doesn’t work anymore, you may wanna switch over to diclofenac.

Maciej Nowak [00:18:00]:
Of course. And then the spiral Exactly. Gets only faster. Exactly. So we are most of the time, we are landing in a situation that there is a problem that we need to solve because, you know, ibuprofen is no longer an option. Right? So we have what we have. We have a slow website. And now the mindset to apply to that problem is analytical mindset.

Maciej Nowak [00:18:25]:
Right? So you have to understand what’s causing this pain so that you can backtrack and come to a solution where you have to, you know, change your diet, let’s say. But what I’m trying to say is that if you come to a situation where you have a very slow website as, you know, you are help helping client or or whatever, you have to do the analysis. So let’s say you are switching that, that caching plugin. And what do you do? Like, how people should think where to look for problems in because we talked about the Lighthouse. This is lab test. Real performance is different things, and by different thing and vice versa. So how to start looking at this from the analytical perspective so that you can draw right conclusions and look for traces of problems that you can, attack?

Remkus de Vries [00:19:17]:
You’re right. Analysis is the base of everything, and that begins with understanding and having the mindset that it is the analysis that you do over the data that you have available to you. So in the case of, a lighthouse, result, you hopefully, your site has enough traffic, so it’s registered in Google’s CR UX, CrUX reports. Because CrUX reports has real user, RUM. I forget what the m stands for. But RUM measurement of your traffic is real. That means that’s what the people who visited your site actually experienced. It’ll tell you which is the slower part, and you’ll have ways to figure out how to make that parts faster.

Remkus de Vries [00:20:10]:
There’s a there’s plenty of documentation available for you to dive into that. So there’s a here’s the thing. Right? So I can I can make a long list of things that you what type of analysis you should do, but the very base of it is you are willing to dive in, you take the time and you learn more about the topic that you are discovering, this is hindering me? So CrUX is an example. Server logs, slow queries, access logs, all of these things tell you something of what’s going on. I’ll give you an example that’s fairly easy to debug. Let’s say you have a WooCommerce site. Let’s say you’ve done a lot of optimizing, you know you have a lean and mean theme, you know you’re taking care of the whole build process, remembering I’m building for performance, for scalability, remembering that when somebody is logged into their store, no, even sooner. As soon as they add something in their cart, the rest of their their their, journey on your site is no longer cached, which means my raw metal needs to be fast.

Remkus de Vries [00:21:19]:
I need to have a high performance server. All of that is taken care of and yet you have a slow WooCommerce site. So what’s going on? One of the things I find quite often is on every single page load, there’s a plug in that does something behind the scenes that it shouldn’t do on every single page load. A good example is a license check. So if you have a premium solution and the license check for that, particular premium plugin isn’t cashed for the day, the week, whatever, then you have every single page load go off to a server off-site that has absolutely nothing to do with the experience you’re having as a visitor on that ecommerce site. And yet you are slowed down because that lookup not only is happening so often, so frequently, that server is also having a hard time. Maybe they are cached on their end, maybe they’re not. But that whole journey just adds one or two seconds to every single page load.

Remkus de Vries [00:22:26]:
Now if you know that that’s a thing that can happen, it is no longer rocket science that if you discover that a plugin does that or doesn’t handle this properly, you have a slow site because that’s just the nature of the thing. If your page load includes something that needs to be loaded off-site that doesn’t directly impact you, but is there, then that’s going to have a negative impact. So the simple solution for this is understanding that you have a transience API inside of WordPress, which means anything you request from the server, from the database, from external, whatever can be stored inside your database. And hell, you can even make it a flat file if you prefer for whatever reason, if you don’t wanna bother the database. But you can store whatever you retrieved for a predetermined period. And then instead of doing that lookup for the license, that’s done once. And then if you’re using object caching, which I hope you are, then it’s a no brainer. That license check lives in object caching is only retrieved once per day, freed up once per day, and then queried again.

Remkus de Vries [00:23:40]:
So that’s the next twenty four hours. That lookup is no longer a problem. So thinking in those terms is a mindset and is an understanding of how things work. And for that, you need to have the understanding to look at your logs, to look at, the network tab on, on your inspector. Most people just kinda look at what they can change in CSS, and maybe if they’re told look at console for bugs and errors, but that’s you know, it’s not even half the story. There’s just so much more information there. So, one of the ideas I’m playing with, and I’ve kind of decided already, is that I also wanna do a course built around how to actually use that, DevTools, Chrome Inspector, however you wanna call it. Because there’s so much information in that thing alone, and that’s not even taking care of the the log information that you have.

Remkus de Vries [00:24:34]:
But, you know, those are two examples of how you have, problems that some of them are documented, some of them are just realizing what it is that’s actually happening. And from there you start building your knowledge. But it’s this type of knowledge is quite known for agencies that are doing, enterprise, big business type of sites. Because the first thing they’re going to see if they don’t is that their site goes down as soon as they, switch it, to production. Right? So as soon as traffic starts hitting, we’re very fast to learn that this was not the most performant solution. Within five minutes, you’ll have signals, within the hour, you will know for sure. So agencies that are very much accustomed to this, they know this, they have internal knowledge, they have some you write the code, somebody else checks it, all those things. If you’re not in that position or if you have a small team, it means you need to rely on external information for the most part.

Remkus de Vries [00:25:40]:
And I, you know, I’m jumping in this this gap because I see it, and I see it. I’ve seen it for for over a decade now. The information being shared by people who actually understand what they’re doing is just is just scarce. It’s just it’s not for some reason, it’s never been given a high priority.

Maciej Nowak [00:26:03]:
Or or maybe it’s the secret sauce and it’s not being shared because it’s

Remkus de Vries [00:26:07]:
not Possibly. Yep. Yeah. That’s that’s a good one. I think that’s that’s a very fair, assertion to say that we don’t want we’ll happily share stuff, but we don’t share this, because that’s part of our secret sauce. This is how we make our servers fast. No. This is how you build fast, period.

Remkus de Vries [00:26:27]:
But, yeah, it’s it’s things like that that make it very difficult, for if you are a small agency, and you’re heavily reliant on whatever stack that you build as tools that you use, and you’re heavily reliant on stuff that just you kinda click your way through, it it allows you for for you to never really touch the the problem because you’re depending on the solution to fix the problem before you’re aware that there is a problem to be fixed. This is this is a difficult thing. It’s it’s why for instance, in the lighthouse, one of the things that they look for is diffitis. So how many diffs are you using for that little button you added? If there’s 10 diffs just to make sure you have a button in a specific place, Lighthouse will tell you. You have your structure is too deep. It makes zero sense. But you know

Maciej Nowak [00:27:23]:
And this is a skill issue for developers creating such a layout that is Yeah. I think ending up in such a huge nest. Right?

Remkus de Vries [00:27:31]:
It it I think the skill issue actually starts with those who are building the tool. If you’re a marketing company and you figure out there’s a technical solution to facilitate your marketing efforts, you end up building a product. And that product is perfect, but it’s from a marketing perspective. If you do not have somebody on your team who has a hardcore and deep understanding of performance and best practices and all those things, how are you gonna know? You’re not. So you’re building a solution that’s perfect for marketers. It’s shiny, it’s bright, and does all these things. And then you have everybody everybody else copying you, but you end up with a subpar project because it was never built from a performance first perspective.

Maciej Nowak [00:28:16]:
And I have a feeling that there are only two options there, like, two ways. You end up with customer base selling that product to with a customer base that is not big, not huge. Right? They are not big accounts that have big traffic because, otherwise, it invalidates the whole product. You just remove the product, you switch to another provider, or you ramp up your game and do the performance, of the product correct. Like

Remkus de Vries [00:28:45]:
And that that that just requires, an entirely different mindset. You know, I strive to do the best version of the work that I can do. I’m human, doesn’t always work, but that’s how I’m built. That’s how I’m wired, and that’s how I’ve taught myself to continue to do what I do. Again, I make mistakes just like the next person, but you need to sort of agree with yourself that you want to try and find the best version of you, of your product, of your, you know, if you if you’re talking to someone and you’ve explained them in three different ways and they still don’t get it, that means it’s most likely The

Maciej Nowak [00:29:25]:
teacher is the problem. Exactly.

Remkus de Vries [00:29:28]:
So, if but if you if you go like, no, no, I am the teacher. I’ve told you in three different version and you don’t get it, so you’re dumb. You know, there’s two people losing out. You in how you teach and them in never receiving the information they they desperately wanted to have because they tried two more times. So, yeah, it’s it, you know, it’s an education thing. It’s a it’s a it’s a mentality thing. And in some cases, you know, you can argue that I ran into it, and that is what triggered me. But I think if you’re doing this work for and this being building websites for a variety of different types of clients, You’ll find within the year, you’ll find something that wasn’t performant.

Remkus de Vries [00:30:15]:
Like, I have no doubt that you’re coming across it. So if you then just offloading it and just patching it, whichever way you’ve discovered that that’s acceptable, Yeah. It’s hard, to leave that mentality and then go, like, no. Let me fix this proper.

Maciej Nowak [00:30:30]:
Mhmm. And and fixing and doing this the the right way is also, like we discussed before, more costly. It takes time, more skills, Or no.

Remkus de Vries [00:30:40]:
I think it’s costly to a point. So is it Of of course.

Maciej Nowak [00:30:44]:
But, yeah, but what I want try and want to say is that initially, until like, it’s only in the future. Like, unless I know I will have a very big store with a lot of traffic, maybe or maybe not, I will hit the problem. So let’s cut all of the corners and, worry when we will have customers, which is a good problem to have. Right?

Remkus de Vries [00:31:06]:
Yep. Yeah. And I’m I mean, in a way that makes sense to approach things because that’s a very pragmatic way to go about it. That said, if you don’t educate yourself on the subject matter, irrespective of what you’re encountering in your work, then you’re always a couple of steps behind. Not one step, a couple of steps behind. And this is this is the when you want to level up. This is when you say, no, I am a professional, which means I am taking care of my education. Yes.

Remkus de Vries [00:31:36]:
I’m aware there’s a lot of information coming my way. Yes. This means I need to read change logs. Yes. This means I, you know, I employ different ways of validating the things that I think that are the facts. You know, you have to have a curious mind, and if you don’t have a curious mind, you need to find your curious mode. But you need to have something of, I don’t know this yet. Good.

Remkus de Vries [00:32:04]:
That means that’s something I need to start exploring.

Maciej Nowak [00:32:07]:
But, like, I have a feeling that the curiosity is the like, this car’s most car’s ingredient in human nature. I don’t know. May maybe I’m somehow biased, but all of what you say, I totally agree. And it’s not like I’m, you know, saying let’s cut corners. Like, the the opposite way, we optimize our clients too. What I have a feeling is that to find that inner curiosity, how to do stuff better is so rare. It’s it’s extremely rare.

Remkus de Vries [00:32:39]:
I agree. I agree.

Maciej Nowak [00:32:41]:
Because this is natural, like, through the such curiosity, you get better. You are in a constant improvement mode because it’s not it’s like, this is the way you get better. Right? Your curiosity drives you to do things differently, and you learn from the experience. If you don’t have that, you can be forced. You can be pointed to resources. You may be forced to learn. And and the speed of that learning is totally different. It’s like replaying something instead of recording that that’s something for someone else.

Maciej Nowak [00:33:17]:
You know? It’s like maybe better better, parallel, but, like, it’s so much different when you are driven by that curiosity. The effects are, like, enormously different than if you’re forced to do anything. That’s why I’m I was referring to this because it’s so rare that, like, I have a feeling that, like, this is perfect recommendation for someone who is already on a level that you don’t have to teach that to that person. You you you know what I mean?

Remkus de Vries [00:33:49]:
Yeah. Yeah. I totally get what you mean. So, I’ve known since I was about 11, I think, 10, 11. That’s when I first started. I was 10. My mom said to me, there’s this, typing course that’s going to be, in town. I think you should do that.

Remkus de Vries [00:34:12]:
And I was like, why would I need to learn how to type? I have no desire to become a secretary or, you know, anything like that. She goes, no, but I have a feeling that these computer things are going to be huge. And this is 83.

Maciej Nowak [00:34:26]:
Prophet mum.

Remkus de Vries [00:34:27]:
Yeah. So she kinda forced me there. Once, you know, first, second lesson, I kinda got it. It’s kinda cool to be fast and not having to look. So I learned blind typing. Very shortly after that, I learned that I have something that most people don’t have. I have the curiosity on wanting to understand how that thing worked. And, oh, there’s this indeed this computer.

Remkus de Vries [00:34:50]:
How does that work? So I started doing things with the computer nobody else was doing, and there was zero information. You had a few books here and there, but there were no online forums. There were no people you could talk to. You had to figure it out. So I would spend hours and hours applying. After the typing course, I did the basic course for the, at the same company. That’s how I learned how to play with. So if you’ve learned that you have a curiosity in you, then there’s ways to make sure that curiosity stays active and how you build upon it.

Remkus de Vries [00:35:24]:
If you find yourself like, I want to, but I don’t really put time and effort to it. You have a discipline problem. You have curiosity, but you have a discipline problem. So how do you fix discipline? Start lifting heavy weights. Very simple answer, but doing anything with weight in an ever increasing fashion, that will teach you discipline. If you then still find yourself like, I, yeah, I know I need to do this and I do this regularly and I force myself to, but I can’t find myself, then you’re probably not doing the work you should be doing because you’re just not having enough energy and you’re not being energized by it enough. Now I’m I’m being very generic, right? It’s not, 100%. This is the only option out there.

Remkus de Vries [00:36:08]:
But at a certain point, you have to make the conclusion that if you’re not actively teaching yourself to learn, then you are one step behind all the time. Now can you do can you make an honest living with that mindset? Sure. Until you don’t. I think we’re slowly but surely entering the phase where the professionalism that kind of started in my mind around, you know, about ten years ago, it sort of started pushing in that direction. And I feel we’re moving faster and faster in that direction now. But it’s probably gonna take more than, you know, anywhere between five and ten years for that to become the dominant mindset that if you do not treat this thing from a very serious mindset, then you’re just not gonna be able to jump in. Because that, that combined with, no code solutions, I think, is the split we’re going to see.

Maciej Nowak [00:37:11]:
Not to mention not to mention all of the LMS helping you code. Yeah. VibeCode as it’s recently called Yeah. To vibe code your think, without making, you know, syntax mistakes and, you know, second comment would be to optimize But

Remkus de Vries [00:37:31]:
you can say the same problem there. Right? If you’ve never been diving deep into what is a prompt and what is the presupposition that goes into the prompt that is actually being executed in the context that you meant it. If you didn’t write that out in like, you know, two pages, you’re not really doing what you can be doing. So you’ll see the same divide happening there. There’s people who can just and they can just sort of happenstance themselves in the solutions. But if they’ve never told the, the AI to say, look, I want you to build me this, but I want you to keep performance in mind. I want you to do, don’t repeat yourself, type of approaches. And, I want you to have security and, you know, all of these things.

Remkus de Vries [00:38:14]:
Then you’ll still end up with a subpar project which will still end up with the problems you have now. You need a mindset change.

Maciej Nowak [00:38:23]:
What I was what I was trying to say is that instead of like, maybe I’m delusional, but instead of hiring subpar developers, subpar freelancers, you that will build you a website that is very mediocre. I have a feeling that, you know, that subpar people will be replaced by marketers on the client side doing their work by coding and having the same results, but not paying for weeks of development, encapsulating this in a, you know, one day session with LLM, vibe coding their, website with the same problems as they would get by, you know, three years earlier doing this with a subpar developer. So I’m not saying that that yeah. So quality is the same. The cut is, you know, not halved. It’s, you know, seven, twenty times less, you know, effort to build the same thing as three years ago, let’s say.

Remkus de Vries [00:39:27]:
Yep. Yep. I think you’ll see the same problems arise in, smarter tools. You need a mindset change to get ahead instead of lagging behind. And, AI is a good example of how you can perfectly mask that you are still behind. Because if you don’t know how to explain the thing, by using, good design principles on both the UX side and the code side of things, then what are you really doing? You’re creating something that if it gets successful, you’ll end up having problems because you didn’t build it to be successful. You build it to do at bare minimum what you told it to do. And, yeah, and that and, you know, that that is basically the same problem, but just in a different, but it’s

Maciej Nowak [00:40:17]:
I think this is the same thing that, some campaign companies are suffering from right now. It’s just one level like, there’s one layer removed, which would be the, sloppy developer. You know? You end up with the same problems. It’s just someone else is the creator of that solution because it couldn’t happen before. Now it can happen, and we would be having the same conversation, but not about the developers that are not wanting to learn and improve and improve their stack, improve their, you know, skills, but rather marketers who would be or indie makers or people who would be operating these tools or for for their companies or for their startups. So they would be the, the the the object of our conversation, and this conversation would be aimed for how to make them more, educated. And and then we will be talking about the future, which will be totally different, and then I don’t know what would it would it be.

Remkus de Vries [00:41:18]:
No. I agree. I agree. I think that’s that’s that’s exactly what it is. It’s, we’re just moving around in what is the problem area. So as with anything in life, you don’t if you don’t understand what the root cause of it is, you’re never going to fix the root cause. And it doesn’t really matter how you then do whatever you do, and this does not just pertain to code, this is life. If you don’t actively wanna look for how do I fix my problem before looking back at the food, you know, if you stuff your mouth full with, you know, a lot of additives that fifty years didn’t even exist in food, it’s no wonder at some point you’re going to find yourself with certain illnesses that are attributed to the ingredients you ingested.

Remkus de Vries [00:42:04]:
If you don’t care to fix that

Maciej Nowak [00:42:06]:
You mentioned to you mentioned that you have to have that knowledge about principles, about what can be a root cause. Now we are in a situation where a lot of development is done by people who are curious, wants to invest their time in exploring these LLMs, Coursera and all of that stuff. And there are two groups of people from what I observe is that there are developers who are professional developers and doing site gigs, you know, trying to explore stuff and doing real projects, like, 100 times faster, you know, for a small demo, but they leverage their understanding of development principles. And the second group that has zero knowledge, don’t care about anything, and, write prompt and hit enters. Write prompt, like, doing nothing else, and they might be achieving similar results. And now what we are now discussing is how to improve what is done in a bad way for which you have to have the understanding of the root, let’s say, principles, like, of how to build stuff that is accelerated by AI and other lens, where these younger generations will get that knowledge if only what they will know will be a lens, like prompting and so on. So where do you get that understanding of the world, of the first principles if you can do so much so quickly that to invest in back backtracking, to where we are right now that takes years, and you can do so much stuff such quickly.

Remkus de Vries [00:43:55]:
I get it. I don’t I so everything you mentioned is is basically the, dependent on the educational process that goes before that. Meaning, if, if whatever level of education you’re doing, and it does not touch the reality of the world right now and, helps you wrestle your mind through the decision that have to be made before you actually start writing your first line of code or your first line of prompt, whatever you wanna call it. If you don’t understand what you’re doing, you’re never grasping it. So that needs to be part of the education, if your intent from a young age is to do this work. Now the vast majority of certainly my generation, I’m 51, they didn’t start with the ideas I’m going to do computer science or computer studies or develop or whatever you wanna call it. There’s still a very large contingent of people who are stumbling upon this work, liking it, and then decide to do a career change and progress. That is of all the ages, I think, from what I’ve seen.

Remkus de Vries [00:45:20]:
At some point, we’re going to have to agree that if we’re doing this, we’re going to say to ourselves, we wanna do this as professional as possible, and there is no shortcut for that. So that means in some way, we need to, as educators, people talking about the topics, talking about the, the principle of understanding the root of all, that we need to sort of say to each other, look, if you’re teaching here and but you’re not explaining that, you are not a good teacher. So the the the thing that’s going to start taking off, in my opinion, is educators will become much more of a determining factor in the trajectory of whomever is, you know, walking in a particular direction that has, code involved. Does that mean the educators should say, look, hold on. Before we actually dive into it, this is the reason why we’re doing it this way. Yeah, exactly. That is exactly what is needed. So a lot of if you look on YouTube, there’s a bunch of tutorials where you just straight jump into so here’s where you install the plugin, activate it, and let’s look at what the plugin does.

Remkus de Vries [00:46:38]:
Now hold on, hold on. I know it’s less sexy, but if we don’t explain why we chose this particular plugin to solve that particular problem, then what are we really doing? We’re just, you know, we’re just spending time on explaining something for views or for clicks or whatever. We’re not educating. So I think bottom line, everything is dependent on, the quality of the education. Whether that is officially in school, college, university, all that, or somebody doing a course, somebody doing, explainers on on on, you know, bottom layer topics. So you get to work yourself through bottom layer all the way to the top like, okay, but this is what I’m experiencing. And so, okay, now I know how to trace it back because I’m aware that there’s a root cause that I haven’t seen yet or haven’t touched yet. If we don’t explain that principle, how are people going to know?

Maciej Nowak [00:47:35]:
I was listening today, to a podcast with with a gentleman who is why a combinator, partner, and let’s say, he’s not in deep in the AI. But what he said is because of the situation he’s observing, he said that he has nothing to teach to his children. He has one or two children. And he was discussing this with his wife, and he said, we don’t have anything we can teach our children except for attitudes. So curiosity, that you they that that he can act on what they want. Like, these type of, like, fundamental behaviors, but no knowledge. Like, maybe it’s far fetched, but it made me think

Remkus de Vries [00:48:30]:
I don’t agree. Yeah. No. I don’t I think, as a parent, I have three kids. All of them officially adults now. The teaching never stops. It’s still ongoing.

Remkus de Vries [00:48:43]:
So they’re 18, 24, and 25/26. I’d whatever information is out there is just part of means of getting information into somebody. Sure. You can tell your kids, learn how to do critical thinking, And this is what critical thinking is. But to then go, okay, hands off, just figure out the rest because they’re the information is not as available. That’s that’s I’m not

Maciej Nowak [00:49:17]:
I don’t think he he he was feeling like he doesn’t have a job to do the teaching with their kids. It’s rather all of the, like, useful things he can teach them in a couple of years’ time won’t be as relevant. Like, this is his stance, right, that I’m opposing to your stand where the teaching has to be in a fundamentals. Like, what what he said is that if you have a set of proper, behaviors and life attitudes, you will be good because we will help you. Like but you can’t teach a craft to no one these days because before they get to the, let’s say, market, this will be either obsolete or not useful, let’s say, or it can be done 10 times faster or whatever. Right? So, like, because now everything accelerates so fast, we don’t know like, for example, I have a one and a half year daughter, and I’m talking to her in English because I believe that it will make her life easier, that she will get a better start, you know, with a second language, let’s say. What what I heard, you know, exactly the same, like, week I, I started doing that, is that there is zero point in teaching our our children English. We do this from from, like, from a psychologist, I think it was.

Maciej Nowak [00:50:48]:
But he said that but this is what we know and we want best for our children, but this is totally irrelevant in fifteen year fifteen years’ time because this problem will be solved, and this will won’t be ever, like like a point of discussion. Yet we’d all we do these kind of things because we want best for our children, and we don’t know what will happen. We can’t envision that future, and we want to pass to to our, you know, kids what we know. And we know only this. Right?

Remkus de Vries [00:51:22]:
For me, that’s a very, minimalistic, very, scarce way of looking, a nonholistic way of looking what teaching is and certainly towards kids. Just you interacting with your kid is something your kid needs. So, you know, regardless of what the topic is that is being discussed and being taught, if we if we were to say, you know, we only need to do this on a behavioral level and then the rest of the information is is less relevant because it will be irrelevant. I don’t believe that’s the case. There’s also a very large, you know, difference in topics some folks enjoy and some folks don’t enjoy. There’s plenty of craftsmen. We are certainly seeing on, on school level that there’s a lot more returning to craft work back again. You know, will it be the same as it was twenty years ago? No.

Remkus de Vries [00:52:29]:
But it certainly isn’t so that, everything, that we learn now is going to be obsolete in five, ten, fifteen years. I don’t believe in that theory. Not one bit, which is why I am still of the opinion and still acting on if we leave the mindset of we want to educate anyone on a particular topic from the ground up type of fashion, then, yes, you might end up in that situation where you just go, you know, but now you only need to know this. But, this is a worst case scenario, but what if we have an EMP pulse and all electronics is gone? How will you manage then? Will you survive? I know for a fact that I will because I’m teaching myself how to do things that are not related to this thing that I’m looking at right now. You know, I think that’s a mindset thing. As a principle, I just don’t agree with, eliminating in any way, shape, or form the types of education that you can do. Mhmm.

Maciej Nowak [00:53:33]:
Yeah. Like, I’m not sharing these opinions. Like, I’m trying

Remkus de Vries [00:53:37]:
I know. I know. But I’m saying I’m I’m processing what you’re saying as a as a point of view of looking at the world. I don’t agree with that world. Yeah. Maybe it’s an age thing. I was born in the seventies, so I’ve seen other stuff. I’ve seen a world without technology.

Remkus de Vries [00:53:54]:
I’ve lived in it, and and even though this is my bread and butter now, I’d be just as happy to do something that has absolutely zero to do with the computer. It’s one of the hobbies that I had that turned into work, and, you know, I like doing it, but there’s other hobbies as well.

Maciej Nowak [00:54:14]:
Mhmm. Yeah. That’s that’s that’s fair enough. Yeah. And I find this interesting to be able to bounce off these ideas, which are, I would say, on a very, like the if you look at the spectrum, they are very derived. Right? So they are very, far on the spectrum of what you can do and how you can approach the education problem. Right? So this is very for me, this is very interesting to be able to have a chat about this with someone who is, maybe not a professional teacher. Right? But in the mindset of teaching, professional things.

Maciej Nowak [00:54:58]:
Yep. Yeah.

Remkus de Vries [00:55:00]:
Before I did this work, I did a lot of professional teaching. So Oh. Just not at school.

Maciej Nowak [00:55:05]:
My mistake. No.

Remkus de Vries [00:55:08]:
No. But I’ve done many courses and trainings, teaching them. So, from simple stuff to learning how to work with Microsoft Project to project management itself to Excel, and Word for advanced users, you know, some of them are technology related. Some of them have to do with time management. Some of them have to do with, mind mapping. All different type of topics that I’ve for years was the primary thing of what I did. So Alright.

Maciej Nowak [00:55:38]:
Yeah. So I wasn’t aware about I it.

Remkus de Vries [00:55:42]:
That’s something I talk about, all that much in the workers’ world. So, you know, you would have have to you would have have had to dive deep in my LinkedIn probably. I think there’s there’s some evidence of their,

Maciej Nowak [00:55:55]:
evidence. I like the word. Yeah. The the the there’s the evidence. Alright. But we have went into the AI leg, which I like doing, very much. But I think we haven’t exhausted the performance, area. And I’m thinking about, like, a little bit, like, pragmatic things.

Maciej Nowak [00:56:19]:
For example, imagine you’re a CMO. You are, you know, a marketer in a big organization, and you might even have an external agency instead of your own team inside the company. But what would you say to a CMO with ecommerce platform to look for or how to judge the agency work? Like, being not very, like, rooted in technology, because you are a marketer, you have some kind of knowledge. But what would you say to such a person? How how to evaluate their their, ecommerce platform?

Remkus de Vries [00:56:56]:
Hire a specialist.

Maciej Nowak [00:56:57]:
Okay.

Remkus de Vries [00:56:58]:
It’s very simple. Because, I’m going to have to assume that if by now, at that level of being a CMO, you haven’t dived into the technical side of things you’re never going to. And if that’s, you know, if that’s what’s happened, then, you you also need to come to the conclusion that you need to hire a specialist to do that for you.

Maciej Nowak [00:57:17]:
You have to realistically assess your capabilities. Like, I’m not yep.

Remkus de Vries [00:57:23]:
Yeah. Yeah. If you don’t understand where your boundaries lie in terms of what you understand of what you have an interest for, then, you know, you can assume and you can be cocky and you can go for it, but you’ll never have the insight that somebody that has lived through it, trained for it, optimized all the facets of that work, not even the outcome of it, but the actual how do I do my things. So if a CMO says, you know, I’m the one to determine this, then, he’s missing the opportunity to look for a CTO.

Maciej Nowak [00:57:58]:
Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah.

Remkus de Vries [00:58:00]:
I’ve worked at very large, companies, 15,000 people. And you would have just on on the IT side of things, you would have a software architect. You would have a systems architect. You would have a process manager. You would have a application, designer. You would have a UX designer. You would have all these small subtasks divided into core, job defined, roles where you would actually have one, two, three, four people just doing, software architecture. If you’ve never looked into what a software architect does, you’ll be, you know, you’ll be surprised that the the level of depth that they go into that particular topic.

Remkus de Vries [00:58:53]:
And for a CMO to assume that he understands he or she understands that particular role and all the implications is ludicrous. So, yeah, I’m I’m I have a very simple mindset in this particular type of scenario. If you find yourself being limited by knowledge in an area where you don’t know and don’t care enough to add it to your, itinerary of things to to learn and to to to control and manage and all that, then hire somebody who does. And there’s plenty of people who will be the part time CTO for your company if that’s something you can only have, you know, sixteen hours for somebody to do. That that shouldn’t be the issue. If you wanna improve, then you need to understand where your boundaries are, your company’s boundaries, what your teammates can and cannot do. If you do not have that sort of self assessment, I don’t think you’ll ever be a thriving business to begin with. So

Maciej Nowak [00:59:53]:
Mhmm. Yeah. That’s you can’t lie to yourself, basically. You have to

Remkus de Vries [00:59:58]:
You can. And then you can fill your life with that. But, if you’re being truly honest to yourself, then you’ll know you’re hitting boundaries and limits, and it must feel uncomfortable in more than one way.

Maciej Nowak [01:00:11]:
Mhmm. I wanted to also like, I wanted to switch gears a little bit and go a little bit back to the technology side of things because I’m curious about your opinion on the full site editing. Like, we talked a little bit about, you know, theme and and and vice versus, some kinds of a page builder. And how do you assess, you know, the plain, like, not plain, but the the full site full site editing? How do you think what’s your opinion? Like, broad opinion on the, from the performance perspective.

Remkus de Vries [01:00:50]:
So it’s it’s the most performant, I think it’s two versions back, six five. WordPress 6.5, I think started making, full site editing themes faster than classic themes. So from a performance standpoint, and assuming the theme is actually built according to standards, that is an important clause. I think full site editing is fast and faster. It’s a wonderful tool to work with. It’s unfortunately not fully mature. It’s mature enough. You can build complex sites with, the full site editor, the site editor.

Remkus de Vries [01:01:36]:
That said, there are many UX things, things lacking, things unclear, or high maintenance high effort to build. For instance, if there’s a, you know, if you thought of a different way to do the the the biography of an author at the bottom of, of an article, then right now you most likely need to duplicate the existing one, recreate it, extend it, and add all the things. That’s a lot of extra overhead in a way, and you’ll need to build it in a way that I don’t like doing, for instance. I don’t like React based. I don’t care for React. I don’t care to dive deeper in JavaScript. That’s never my thing. I understand it’s fine, but I don’t like building in it.

Remkus de Vries [01:02:26]:
If that’s acceptable to you, you know, because because you’ll build it in most likely ACF and and, you know, have have your blocks just built in PHP as I think it should have been in the first place. Then, site the site editor is is a is a perfectly acceptable place to build, a site in, understand its limits in its current state, then you’ll be hard pressed to find scenarios where you say, no. I’m sorry, but I can’t build this. So if you can still use PHP, you can use conditionality, you can properly build complex PHP based, flexible solutions inside a block because it’s still PHP then if you use ACF as a base for your block generation. Then, yeah, SiteAdder is a is a is a wonderful product with all the caveats that I just explained.

Maciej Nowak [01:03:27]:
Of course. And I heard, like, I read recently that, for example, from touching on the core performance, team being active, there was also a huge improvement in the WooCommerce, you know, number of queries, like, you know, reduced from hundreds to 20, maybe.

Remkus de Vries [01:03:49]:
Yeah. We 9.7 has a has a tremendous performance gain in, what the editor does as well as what the application as a whole does. It’s a it’s a huge step. And from what I know, talking to some of the WooCommerce crew themselves, this is just the first of many things they’ve identified in how to optimize Woo even further for performance. Yep.

Maciej Nowak [01:04:12]:
Mhmm. But, like, when I think about, you know, a hundred queries that could have been reduced to a handful or two hand two handful, let’s say, 2,000. Yep. It doesn’t like, I don’t know about, you know I’m picking on the word identified. Like, it’s like you identified the Mount Everest, for example, that that was standing in front of you.

Remkus de Vries [01:04:34]:
So this is one of those things. Right? If, if it’s acceptable in a way for that to exist and it does not hurt you in the way that it could hurt. So it’s it’s just hitting that threshold. So the amount of queries is not necessarily the issue because what is a query is the same question as what is a house. If you live in a house that’s five by 10, for some people that’s acceptable. Other people need to have, four fifty by 50, huge ass villa. Right? So the the query itself is not the issue. It’s the efficiency that is being done.

Remkus de Vries [01:05:09]:
So can you simplify things? Well, oftentimes, you can, but at what cost? We’re currently in a state where WooCommerce has identified, I think WordPress as well, with, previous query optimizations that have been done and the caching related to the queries. So, WPQuery has gotten a lot more efficient over the last, let’s call it two years. Johnny Harris is, for instance, somebody who’s done a lot of, let me figure out if we can optimize this. So all of these things are known, but some things are only, you know, you only come across it because you’re hitting a limit. And it’s, you know, it’s it’s time and and attention that you can give it. So if you’re aware there’s an issue, but you there’s higher priorities elsewhere, then that’s what you do. You build it out. WooCommerce now focusing on this.

Remkus de Vries [01:06:06]:
WordPress now focusing on it. I, you know, I think it’s a lovely thing to see because I think we’re we’re getting to the stage where, and, you know, this is this this hearkens back to one of your earlier questions like, is it different now? Are people perceiving performance differently? Yeah. Yeah. They are. They are take treat taking it and treating it more seriously. Building lean and mean sites, having sustainability in the back of your mind, not wasting resources, doing things they really ought not to do that often, that heavy, that, you know, that’s become more of a forethought instead of an afterthought. And I like it. I mean, what’s not to like? It’s just making our applications snappier, faster, less prone to issues in other integrations into that particular function.

Remkus de Vries [01:06:56]:
Everything just becomes better. So

Maciej Nowak [01:06:58]:
Mhmm. So we’ve discussed a lot about the software layer, let’s say, and I think we have to discuss the hardware layer, let’s say. So what would be the, like, a proper hardware stack for, I don’t know. I know, like, how much is a car question, but, like, for our listeners to understand, like, you know, again, maybe first principles about thinking about, you know, hosting because it’s the the the market is so saturated with all kinds of hosting providers. Yep. It’s hard to decide. The proposal like, the offering is also, like, there’s a table for pricing tier, this, this, this, and this, this number of, you know, space, bandwidth, stuff like this. Like

Remkus de Vries [01:07:45]:
It’s an interesting thing, because it goes back to this the thread of this this this conversation, and that is you need to look at the root. First thing is this, what does the site need? I don’t have many videos on my YouTube channel yet. This is one of them where I basically discuss. This is how you determine what hosting you should use. Because there’s there’s like three, maybe four levels that you can look at or where you can identify and say, this is a level that matches what I need. I’m a purist. I will pretty much always go for the fastest that I can find. But there’s, you know, that isn’t necessarily exactly needed for all scenarios.

Remkus de Vries [01:08:33]:
So my dad’s site gets, what, 20 hits a view a week? It’s fine. It doesn’t need to be I can optimize through caching. For him, there’s not gonna be a logged in person. And if somebody just happens to visit his site and it’s, you know, slightly less fast than it can be, it’s not gonna hurt anybody. So that’s the bottom line. So there’s hosting that matches that perfectly. Then there’s, slightly more needed. Let’s call it the, let’s say there are four layers.

Remkus de Vries [01:09:06]:
Then there’s the layer where there’s a little bit more going on with the site, and it needs to be somewhat fast and all that. So there’s a different layer of hosting companies that serve that layer. Then there’s the what we begin to start calling the premium hosting companies. And let’s say that the the the monthly rate for is about $30.35 a month. That’s where good hosting starts. And then there’s lastly, there’s there’s the the ultimate hosting, and that roughly starts at at around a hundred bucks, a month. So I’m hosting at the last at the latter. I have some sites in the mid tier, and I have some sites in the second tier.

Remkus de Vries [01:09:51]:
I have no sites at the base level, because you get what you paid for. Simple as that. The the way to determine whether a hosting company is the good fit for you, in my mind, should be performance first. Now in certain cases, if your knowledge is not up to par what happens on a server, the things you need to debug and all that, then you might be extremely reliant on support. So if the hosting company has excellent support, but kinda okay hosting, it’s going to be perceived as one hell of a host. It’s going to be a really good host because their support is absolutely fabulous. I don’t care for support to be super fast or have an answer within three minutes because my questions are never going to be answered in three minutes. So I have a very different need for and and determination of what is a good host.

Remkus de Vries [01:10:47]:
So the way I measure is where do I when does this site need to go? Now my preference is in the highest level because it’ll just solve my problem on so many other levels as well. But the thing to do is to test bare metal. The thing to do is throw a site on there that you know to be complex and difficult on any platform, and you’ll able to tell how the raw metal behaves. The, there’s a, Kevin Ohashi who does a yearly roundup tests in a very proper scientific way of actually raw testing your performance, under the name review signal or WP hosting benchmark or something. He has he has two domains basically. But the result of that is that you give you get an honest, not affiliate driven, because that’s very important to mention. You get an honest review of the actual performance of your site, the raw performance. What does it actually perform like? And that’s, in my opinion, the way it should be.

Remkus de Vries [01:12:01]:
Now the rest is marketing. The rest is support. The rest is all these extra things. And I’m not saying that all hosts need to be at the level of the absolute blazingly fastest. But I think you mostly need to be aware that there’s different levels servicing, different crowds, basically.

Maciej Nowak [01:12:21]:
Mhmm. I have him. I will dig deeper into this. This is very interesting.

Remkus de Vries [01:12:28]:
I have it on my, I’m recording a podcast with him, next week. So anybody listening to this one, do subscribe to my newsletter at withinWP.com. And in the newsletter, I will highlight the podcast as well. So

Maciej Nowak [01:12:43]:
Very good. We invite everyone to Remkus, newsletter. Alright? So this will be very interesting extension to what we touched upon, like, very extended version probably of of which you can, think about, your, hosting. Alright? Yeah.

Remkus de Vries [01:13:02]:
Because and you should. Because that’s basically the way it works. Right? There’s thinking of any solution on the web being a one size fits all, that just that’s that’s just not the case. Same goes for for for plug in solutions. Same goes for backup solutions. Same goes for whatever topic you can think of. If you know, if your approach is that it has to be this one tool and that it’s going to fit everything, that’s just not how things work.

Maciej Nowak [01:13:34]:
Mhmm. Alright. Remkus, thank you very much for the discussion.

Remkus de Vries [01:13:38]:
You’re most welcome.

Maciej Nowak [01:13:40]:
Yeah. And and, yeah, maybe we will see each other, you know, on some kind of, you know, some some WordCamp or, hopefully.

Remkus de Vries [01:13:48]:
I’m sure we will.

Maciej Nowak [01:13:49]:
Alright. Thank you once again, and take care.

Remkus de Vries [01:13:52]:
Alright. Bye bye.

Lector [01:13:54]:
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