UnlimitedWP’s WP Roundup has now reached its fifth edition. This is where you’ll find all of the latest and most important things happening in the WordPress industry. In this edition, we’re covering some of your questions about Web Vitals, multipurpose WP themes, security options, and agency tools.
News to Know
- Delicious Brains acquiring ACF: The season of WP product acquisitions continues. We have used ACF in hundreds of websites and are happy to see it move to Delicious Brains, whose own family of high-quality plug-ins have earned great recommendations between other agencies and our ow
- WP Engine 2021 Summit on June 24th: WP Engine announced registration is open for its signature event, Summit/2021. Now in its sixth year, this premiere global conference for developers and marketers will be a digital event on June 24th. Get ready for engaging content and dynamic expert speakers with a mix of live-streamed and on-demand content, as well as valuable networking opportunities.
- Web vitals coming up in June 2021: Core Web Vital Scores are a set of search ranking factors that impact the user experience a web page offers. Google established these scores as its top priority for its newest algorithm update, meaning websites that optimize for these scores will rank higher than those that don’t. Learn more in our recent blog.
Best Multipurpose Premium Theme
We are comparing three of the most widely used multipurpose themes on Themeforest. Each has multiple demos and their own page builders.
- Avada (57 demos) : 4.77 Stars (24,321 ratings). One of the most evergreen WP multipurpose themes. For newcomers to multipurpose themes, Avada is the best option.
- X Theme (36 demos): 4.76 Stars (6,639 ratings). X Theme offers the best user experience, particularly for front-end editing.
- Enfold (27 demos) : 4.81 Starts (10,293 ratings). Enfold features a built-in style generator and has a considerably greater focus on creating unique websites.
Security Plugins
- Cloudflare: A world-class CDN with 200+ data centers makes this one of the leading providers. It can combat severe DDoS attacks, traffic spikes, code injections, and more, but offers no malware removal service. Free version to try and Pro starts at $20/month/site.
- Sucuri: This service blocks suspicious traffic. It can block a single IP or an entire country, and disable the malware. Sucuri offers a free version of its service, which is useful but limited. Its Basic plan starts at $9.99/month/site. Malware clean-up is included on Platform plans only, which start at $199/year/site.
- Wordfence: This is a free WordPress security plugin that includes an endpoint firewall (WAF) and a malware scanner. Upgrade to the premium version for $79/year/site, with an additional malware clean-up service that costs $490 per website. This service includes more advanced login page protection, rule-based blocking, and more. Unlike Sucuri, Wordfence is a localized firewall. It stays on your web server and is not a cloud service. Hence, it can perform server-side scans at a deeper level and provide full end-to-end encryption.
Agency Growth Tools and Resources
- Lighthouse 8.0 : Google announced the release of Lighthouse 8.0 with a mix of stricter and easier scoring. The changes are estimated to make it easier for most sites to achieve higher page speed scores. Cumulative Layout Shift scores will likely trend higher while other metrics become stricter.
- Care Market FB Group : A Facebook group all about providing quality Website Care and Support to clients!
- BuiltWith helps brands understand technologies used by websites across the Internet. Just put a website URL and know which CMS it is built on. Understanding the technologies used by websites helps brands find more targeted leads and enter conversations armed with important knowledge about their technology spending.
Thank you for reading this edition of UnlimitedWP’s WP Roundup. We do not have an affiliate relationship with any of the third party sites, services, or products mentioned above on this page.
