We’re back for another day at WordCamp Europe! If you haven’t already, check out Matt’s post to find out why we’re here and what we’ve been up to so far.
Search and sustainability
We heard Torsten Landsiedel deliver a talk surrounding issues with the native search behaviour in WordPress; it was reassuring to hear that we aren’t alone in our discontent for the state of WordPress search.
Fortunately, for many years Mixd have been offering far more powerful and customisable search experiences with tools such as SearchWP. As engineers we hope that WordPress’ own search functionality improves in the future, but in the meantime we’re confident that we can provide our clients with extensible website search performance.
Bjarne Oldrup discussed some practical techniques for Sustainable Web Development and reducing the carbon emissions of a website. This area of the industry has seen a lot more focus in the past couple of years and we were pleased to see some of our existing performance optimisation approaches mentioned here. We also walked away with a couple of new ideas and tools in our arsenal for further carbon footprint reduction.
Meeting our partners
The Expo area was a portal to meeting many of the partners we work with to provide our services. We got to chat face-to-face with some of the fantastic teams behind the tools we use on a day-to-day basis, including plugin authors and hosting providers. It was a perfect opportunity to provide feedback and get a glimpse at some new features we’ll be able to share with our clients soon.
Thinking like a hacker
Matthias Held ran a brilliant interactive session where the audience could test a variety of common WordPress attacks on their own websites. We’ve worked hard on implementing the very best security practices on our Managed Hosting infrastructure so it was exciting to put it through its paces with these test attacks. Both Matt and I were pleased to watch our Global Edge Security system block each and every test attack. Judging by a few engineers frantically exiting the room, not everyone had such great results!
Exploring Turin
Once the conference was wrapped up, Matt and I were lucky enough to spend the weekend enjoying Turin. On top of indulging in some of Italy’s best food and drink we visited the Lavazza museum, took a panoramic lift to the top of the Mole Antonelliana and watched England’s Euros win against Serbia (with some unhappy Serbia fans)!
Ciao!
Conferences like this are great for a couple of reasons. They allow us to discover new ways of working and inspire us to improve our existing services with tips and tricks from engineers all over the world. Importantly, they also give us an opportunity to check in with the latest happenings in the industry and ensure we’re continuing to follow best practices and provide the best possible service to our clients.
We’ve come away from WordCamp Europe 2024 with some exciting ideas we can use to enhance our current offerings but also with confidence that our team at Mixd are staying ahead of the curve with our approach to developing incredible websites for the public sector.
That’s all for now, but we look forward to what WordCamp Europe 2025 has in store when we visit Basel, Switzerland next year!
