This talk is aimed at freelancing WordPress professionals and small WordPress agencies who want to grow their business into something bigger than a one-man band. Linda Gunn will share her story and lessons she’s learned over the decades – focusing on hiring staff, managing stress and creating processes to set yourself up for success as a scalable WordPress agency.

Linda began her company in her living room in the 1980s, as a single mother who needed to find a way to take care of her children. Now, her WordPress agency has 35 full-time employees working out of a beautiful two-story office in North Long Beach.

• Saturday, October 5
• 9:15 – 10:00 am

New to WordPress? Ever wondered what difference is between WordPress.com and WordPress.org? Then this is the session for you! 

Join Justice Anderson to learn the difference and get tips on how to build your first self-hosted WordPress Site. 

• Saturday, October 5
• 9:15 – 10:00 am

Everyone in the WordPress community is talking about the new editing experience in WordPress. Wherever you fall in defense of or against the new editor, it changes how we interact with WordPress from a content editing and a development perspective.

In this talk, Chris Reynolds will explore some of the ways Gutenberg changes how we build things as well as the types of things we can build to enhance and improve the WordPress editing experience.

• Saturday, October 5
• 10:15 – 11:00 am

WP-CLI is the official command line tool for interacting with and managing your WordPress sites. You can use it to speed up maintenance and deployment tasks, and to aid in theme and plugin development. Join Diana Thompson to learn more about this powerful tool for managing and developing WordPress.

• Saturday, October 5
• 10:15-11:00 am

You built a plugin. It was fun — until it wasn’t. Now the support takes away from your family time. If you stop supporting the plugin, it can weigh you down with creator’s guilt. So, what are your options? We’ve seen big products sell like iThemes to Liquid Web and Sucuri to GoDaddy, but is your product worth selling? Mike Demo breaks it down.

• Saturday, October 5
• 11:15 am – 12:00 pm

One of the most confusing (and exciting) features of using WordPress is plugins! And if you are not a developer or coder, how do you know for sure which ones you need and why?

In this session, Christina Hills will walk you though, step-by-step with lots of visuals, the Top 10 plugins you need and how to properly evaluate them. You’ll also learn the exact steps to take when a plugin goes “bad” so your website is up and running in no time. Attend this non-techie session and you’ll walk away understanding the Wonderful World of WordPress Plugins!

• Saturday, October 5
• 11:15 am – 12:00 pm

At a WordPress Meetup presentation, an attendee turned and punched Joe A. Simpson, Jr, in the arm saying, “accessibility makes me so angry!”

We’ll debunk common misconceptions designers, developers, and business owners have and learn how advocating for access to all improves your site SEO, design, user experience and function through interactive examples and discussion.

• Saturday, October 5
• 2:00 – 2:45 pm

Anastassia Zukova will discuss the impact site builders and builder themes have on quality, creativity, and dignity of the web design profession and the future of automation in digital design.

• Saturday, October 5
• 2:00 – 2:45 pm

Everywhere you go, you hear about it: data is everywhere. Data about us, our tastes, our health, our friends and relationships. The implications to privacy and security are obvious, but we also need to talk about attention (our ability to process data has not grown nearly as fast as data have multiplied), memory (should databases ever forget?), comprehension (how do you keep up?), and truth (critical reasoning matters).

The first half of this presentation will be dedicated to data literacy – what everyone (especially tech professionals) should know about data. The second half of the session will review tools you can use to manage your attention and decision-making in light of all this data flying around everywhere. Then, speaker Evan Volgas is gonna bring it all back to a WordPress neighborhood near you and go over five things you could immediately start doing to work smarter with data and WordPress.

• Saturday, October 5
• 3:00 – 3:45 pm

It’s a site owner’s worst nightmare: a site stops working completely and someone is panicking. Often, a configuration change or backup restore fixes things quickly. But what happens if a quick fix doesn’t work? What do you do when the site is absolutely wrecked? Recent backups are corrupt, data is overwritten or lost, and the quick fix isn’t an option. Often, a closer look may show the site being compromised in some way, and standard methods of recovery aren’t working.

In this session, Ramuel Gall looks at methods and techniques for finding what went wrong and how to fix it, from the most basic (such as replacing core WordPress files and using the Wayback Machine to get a better idea of the site’s prior state or recover assets), to intermediate (analyzing debug logs, determining which plugins and themes were in use so you can replace them), to moderately advanced (repairing damaged databases and Premium plugins and themes).

• Saturday, October 5
• 3:00 – 3:45 pm

Why should you forget about the scores if you want to speed up your website? Why would using CDN might not help you improve your site speed? How do you get to know your hosting is fast enough? Why does Twitter with all its funny GIFs load lightning-fast and your visitors have to wait for ages while one single kitten gets loaded? How do you make video and images on your website load really fast?

Join Sabrina Zeidan for answers to all of these questions. You will want to take notes!

• Saturday, October 5
• 4:00 – 4:45 pm

Everyone wants more enterprise clients, right? Seemingly endless budgets, cool projects, and on time payment of invoices without any question … or is that just a myth?

Roy Sivan talks about his experience(s) using WordPress in the enterprise sector, and what that looks like as a full-time employee, as well as what it may look like for a contractor / consultant. There are many great reasons to work with enterprise, but there are some things you should know first.

• Saturday, October 5
• 4:00 – 4:45 pm

Jonathan Wold will talk about the history of WordPress, its current state, and its future through the lens of serving as an Operating System for creating on the Open Web.

• Sunday, October 6
• 10:00 – 10:40 am

WordPress is set apart by its vibrant, passionate community of enthusiasts and stakeholders. As WordPress continues to grow, the community will continue to grow with it. There will be things we might have to sacrifice to build an even larger tent, and things we will allow to constrict our growth — in order to preserve our culture. Andrea Middleton will outline a few of the choices already made, and some choices we’ll need to get ready to make in coming years.

• Sunday, October 6
• 10:45 – 11:25 am

Internet privacy is more important now than it’s ever been. In 2017 the Department of Justice approached DreamHost with a problematic subpoena for customer data. When the request was refused, an avalanche of international media attention followed, bringing the issue of internet user privacy to the global stage.

In this case study, Brett Dunst will discuss how one company used its core values to turn a public dispute over website logs with the DOJ into a wildly successful global campaign for internet privacy, and why open platforms like WordPress are so important to preserving a free and open internet, especially in times of crisis.

• Sunday, October 6
• 11:30 – 12:10 pm

Successful consultants will always recommend the right tool for the job. This is how you elevate yourself from a vendor to a trusted partner. If we stay huddled within our own community, without paying attention to what is going on outside the WordPress community, we’ll be out of touch with customers and prospects. Knowing your preference (WordPress) is different than understanding all your options. Understanding the difference is critical to staying competitive in today’s industry.

Steve Zenghut will discuss the current landscape and the process a prospect goes through when evaluating a WordPress proposal, including a brief look at some of the competitors for content management, eCommerce and SaaS platforms.

WordPress now powers over one third of all websites on the internet. The decisions that the WordPress community makes ripple out and make an impact on the ways people use the web, how web developers and designers do their work, and influence future technologies and development. That’s a lot of power in our hands – are we using it wisely? We have a responsibility to lead by example.

Natalie MacLees explore the influence our community is having on accessibility and inclusive design, the things we’re neglecting, the impact that our decisions are having on people across the globe, and what we could be doing better.

• Sunday, October 6
• 2:15 – 2:55 pm

Gabriel Mays will explore the conditions of WordPress’ success (it’s not what most people think) and why that won’t work for us going forward to reach 50% and beyond. He will also explore the core elements he feels is holding WordPress back–complexity and fragmentation–and ways we could possibly resolve it.

• Sunday, October 6
• 3:00 – 3:40 pm