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Tag: Automattic

  • WordPress VIP Buying Parse.ly to Increase Enterprise Analytics

    WordPress VIP Buying Parse.ly to Increase Enterprise Analytics

    WordPress VIP (WPVIP), Automattic’s enterprise subsidiary, is buying Parse.ly to provide enterprise clients with content analytics.

    WPVIP currently offers enterprise-grade WordPress services to some of the biggest names in tech. Much of those services revolve around providing consultation, products and services to help clients get the most from WordPress.

    The acquisition of Parse.ly is a natural fit for WPVIP, adding powerful content analytics for the enterprise. WPVIP’s Nick Gernert highlighted some of the benefits:

    Over the years, we’ve been fortunate to see firsthand the impact of Parse.ly’s content analytics platform. Parse.ly isn’t simply capturing traditional traffic analytics. Instead, the platform goes deeper—revealing exactly how individual content pieces are impacting traffic in real-time. The upshot for content marketers? Rich reporting with detailed insights into the business impact of their content.

    With Parse.ly, the workflows that WPVIP customers use every day will surface insights that move beyond page views and visits. For example, commerce brands will understand which content converts visitors into buyers. They will also be able to deliver content recommendations for top-performing products.

    According to Parse.ly’s co-founder Sachin Kamdar, all of the company’s employees will now join WPVIP. Meanwhile, all of Parse.ly’s customers will gain access to WPVIP.

    Kamdar emphasized the further innovation that will result from WPVIP’s investment:

    Parse.ly’s open source WordPress plugin is already the most popular way to deploy Parse.ly to websites. And we have lots of ideas for how Parse.ly’s dashboard and API can improve enterprise WordPress sites. But, that’s not the only (or even the primary) place we’ll be innovating in 2021 and beyond. Our desire was always to make Parse.ly the top content analytics system on the market, and solve key real-time and historical analytics needs for editors, journalists, corporate marketers, and content marketers alike.

    With investment from the WPVIP team, and with wider product innovation support from the Automattic team, this dream will be a reality. You, our customers and prospective customers, will benefit directly from this investment.

  • HTTPS Launched For All Custom Domains On WordPress.com

    HTTPS Launched For All Custom Domains On WordPress.com

    Automattic announced that they’re launching free HTTPS for all custom domains hosted on WordPress.com. WordPress.com has supported encryption for WordPress.com subdomains since 2014, but now it’s being expanded to over a million custom domains.

    The company says users will see secure encryption automatically deployed on every new site within minutes.

    “We are closing the door to un-encrypted web traffic (HTTP) at every opportunity,” writes Automattic’s Chief Systems Wrangler.

    As he notes, encryption provides more than security.

    “Protocol enhancements like SPDY and HTTP/2 have narrowed the performance gap between encrypted and un-encrypted web traffic, with encrypted HTTP/2 outperforming un-encrypted HTTP/1.1 in some cases,” he writes.

    Google announced HTTPS as a ranking signal in 2014. Back in December, the search engine started indexing HTTPS versions of URLs by default.

    Earlier this year, Moz found that HTTPS URLs made up 25% of page-one Google results across 10,000 queries.

  • WordPress.com Adds Support For WebP Image Format

    WordPress.com Adds Support For WebP Image Format

    The WordPress.com image service, which delivers the images bloggers use in their posts to their audiences, now supports the WebP image format.

    With this addition, served images can be reduced by up to 34% in file size compared to a JPEG image of the same quality. This means images will load faster and annoy users less.

    Here’s the comparison WordPress provides:

    Screen Shot 2015-12-07 at 11.01.07 AM

    “While WebP isn’t currently supported by all browsers (see the WebP FAQ for more details), you don’t have to worry about anything,” says David Newman on the WordPress.com blog. “We auto-detect which browsers your readers are using to make sure they can enjoy your travel photography, family pictures, or recent illustration work at the best possible quality. Our system will always serve your viewers the best image format at the highest speed possible.”

    For more on the format, Google has a study comparing compression between WebP and JPEG here.

    Images via WordPress.com

  • WordPress.com Gets A New Action Bar

    WordPress.com Gets A New Action Bar

    WordPress.com has a new action bar, which makes it easier for readers to follow blogs of interest and for bloggers to make changes to their own sites.

    If you’re a blog visitor, and you’re on a WordPress.com blog that you’re not yet following, you can click the “Follow” button that appears in the bottom-right hand corner so new posts from that blog will appear in your WordPress.com Reader. If you click on the three dots that appear on the button, you’ll get more options such as the ability to add the blog’s theme to your own blog, copy the shortlink, report the content, or manage the sites that you follow.

    follow

    following

    options

    If you’re on one of your own pages, you’ll have “Customize” and “Edit” options. You can use these to go to the customizer where you can adjust your site’s appearance, change themes, change settings, etc, or go to Edit to make changes to your actual content.

    The action bar will appear on the desktop, tablets, and smartphones. You can minimize it if you don’t like it.

    Images via WordPress.com

  • WordPress Has ‘Reinvented’ Its Video Feature

    Automattic announced a big update to VideoPress, its service that powers videos on WordPress.com and Jetpack-connected self-hosted WordPress sites.

    It describes the new generation of VideoPress as “dynamic, responsive, and lightning fast”.

    “Out of the box, the new VideoPress is lightweight and responsive for beautiful playback on any screen, from smartphones to desktops,” explains Guillermo Rauch on the WordPress blog. “VideoPress works on all modern browsers and devices, and gives blog and site authors the power to engage their audiences no matter where they are. Not only do videos look amazing on WordPress sites, but you can also embed your videos anywhere on the web — other websites, social media, chat services — by using a permalink or a snippet of code.”

    According to the announcement, VideoPress is optimized for speed, taking up far less space. Posts with video content should laod faster, and that should only help blogs in SEO. Search engines do like fast sites. It should help mobile users a great deal too, particularly when their connections aren’t running as well as they’d like.

    “The new VideoPress puts your content front and center. The player is ad-free and unbranded to ensure your videos look and feel like an integral part of your website or blog, not like they belong to a third-party video platform. Unlike other video hosting services, VideoPress starts and ends on your video, keeping traffic on your site and giving you full control over the content to which your visitors are exposed.”

    There’s also a new feature called “Seek” that lets you skim through videos:


    They’ve also made it easier to share and embed videos with new options, including starting playback at specific times, looping, and autoplay:


    VideoPress is available under Premium and Business plans.

    Image via WordPress

  • WordPress.com And Automattic Just Turned 10. Here Are Some Stats

    Automattic reminded us on Friday that it just turned ten years old along with WordPress.com. Come to think of it, that sounds about right as we recently celebrated ten years of YouTube.

    Naturally, the company has released a video and is sharing some stats to celebrate.

    “In addition to building a world-class publishing platform, our company has redefined what it means to be a global company working on the internet: we have nearly 400 employees, working from home (or their preferred coworking spaces), around the world,” writes Automattic’s Mark Armstrong in a blog post. “We use our own p2 sites to communicate with each other, and we all spend time doing support rotations with the people who matter most: Our users.”

    “And we’re just getting started: 24% of websites on the internet now use WordPress to power their sites, and we believe there’s more for us to accomplish together to continue to make WordPress.com the engine that powers your creativity, your thoughts and ideas, and your business,” he adds.

    So what about those stats?

    – 2.5 billion posts written with WordPress.com and Jetpack

    – 137 languages used across those posts

    – 3 billion comments

    – The longest title on a WordPress.com post has 19,176 words

    – The longest post ever published has over 10 million words.

    – There have been 2.3 million total support messages between customers and “happiness engineers”.

    We recently spoke with WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner about how and why so many businesses are using WordPress. Check that out here.

  • Guess How Many WordPress.com Blogs Were Created In 2014

    We may be nearly a week into January, but there are still some interesting year-in-review posts coming out from major Internet companies. On Monday, Amazon gave us a look back at third-party seller performance in 2014, for example.

    Now, Automattic is sharing some numbers for WordPress.com blogs, and they’re quite “Im(Press)ive” as the company puts it. There were a total of 18,300,771 new blogs created throughout the year. That’s up 12.5% compared to 2013. In case you’re wondering, that works out to nearly 50,000 new blogs per day.

    Wow.

    Now just imagine how many posts there must have been on WordPress.com blogs in 2014. Actually you don’t have to, because they gave that number too. 555,782,547. That’s over 1.5 million per day with 47 million published from mobile devices.

    WordPress also gives us a 24.5 trillion bytes of data per hour stat.

    “Those bytes aren’t just little packets of code winging around the internet’s series of tubes (at least, they’re not just that),” writes Automattic’s Michelle W. “They carry stories. Memories. Voices. Relationships. Experiences. They’re your essays, your photos, your poems, your drawings. Every time a piece of what you’ve created pops up on someone’s screen, you expand someone’s universe, just a little, and they expand yours — which is the real power of WordPress.com, and of the internet.”

    She also drops some additional stats: “Behind everything Automattic does are 301 Automatticians: 66 Happiness Engineers responded to your requests for assistance 365,212 times; Every one of our 134 developers worked on the improvements and enhancements we’ve been rolling out over the past few weeks; 9 systems engineers kept everyone’s sites running fast and secure; 8 editors shepherded over 22,000 of you through Blogging U. courses; 24 themers made 96 stunning new layouts and dozens of customization improvements available.”

    As reported earlier, Automattic has launched a new in-person event series for WordPress.com bloggers, where they can learn from WordPress experts.

    Image via WordPress (Facebook)

  • WordPress.com Bloggers Get ‘Press Publish’ Event Series

    Automattic, the company behind WordPress and WordPress.com, announced the launch of a new event series called Press Publish. This will give bloggers the chance to learn and network with so-called WordPress.com experts.

    “These events will focus on inspiration and tools from WordPress.com, though people blogging on any platform will be welcome,” says Jen Mylo in a blog post. “Speakers will be a combination of awesome WordPress.com bloggers and staff members including folks from the Happiness Team, Blogging U, and the Theme Team — in short, the WordPress.com experts.”

    The series will kick off with conferences this spring in Portland, Oregon and Phoenix. The Portland event will be on March 28, and the Phoenix one will be on April 18.

    “We’re putting together the program now, and will start announcing speakers, schedule, and pricing later this month,” says Mylo. “In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you about bloggers/speakers or topics that we should have on our radar.”

    Bloggers can subscribe to the Press Publish site for further updates.

    Image via Press Publish

  • Automattic Announces BruteProtect Acquisition

    Automattic, the company that runs WordPress, announced that it has acuiqred BruteProtect, which makes a plugin and service for protecting sites from malicious logins, and saves server resources to help sites run faster.

    The plugin, according to the company, also keeps sites on the latest versions of WordPress core, plugins, and themes, lending to better security.

    While the plugin and service are already available, Automattic says it it will build their functionality into Jetpack, and retire them. The company says in a blog post:

    Though Automattic is known for its consumer-facing services like WordPress.com and Jetpack, the infrastructure behind them is the bottom part of the iceberg. Taking services to web-scale is another one of Automattic’s specialties, whether it’s the 8 billion Gravatars we serve every day, the Simperium sync service, or the countless spam that Akismet has blocked (and time it has saved).

    This is internet plumbing: when it works it’s completely invisible, and we love that. We’re now pushing 450 terabytes of data a day from 9 datacenters around the globe.

    BruteProtect says its solution has been installed on nearly 110,000 sites and has defended against over 140 million brute force attacks.

    Image via BruteProtect

  • Mullenweg Takes Over Automattic CEO Role

    Mullenweg Takes Over Automattic CEO Role

    Automattic, the company behind WordPress, is getting a new CEO. Kind of.

    Founder Matt Mullenweg is stepping into the CEO role held by Toni Schneider for the past eight years, while Schneider is taking over for Mullenweg. From the sound of it, it’s not going to be a huge change in the company’s operations.

    “He’s going to focus on some of Automattic’s new products, and I’m going to take on the role of CEO,” Mullenweg says in a blog post. “Internally this isn’t a big change as our roles have always been quite fluid, and I’ve had some recent practice filling in for him for a few months last year when he was on sabbatical. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from Toni over the years and I’m looking forward to putting that into practice.”

    “Besides, it’s obvious that no one in their twenties should run a company,” he adds. “They think they know everything, a fact I can now say with complete confidence now that I’m 30 and two days old.”

    Schneider also blogged about the change.

    “A few months ago, I started to feel a sense of completion about our early goals, coupled with a growing itch to work on some new product ideas,” he wrote. “So I turned to Matt and suggested that now felt like a good time for us to “swap jobs” and have him become Automattic’s next CEO. Matt and I have been working side-by-side, building and running Automattic over the years, and he is without a doubt one of the most talented people in tech today, so I have full confidence that Automattic will continue to thrive after we make this change. And yes, Matt did just turn 30, which makes it a fun moment in time to say that he’s finally old enough to be a CEO! As for me, I will stay at Automattic (and at True), excited to switch my focus to working on new ideas and building new products.”

    It’s unclear what new projects the company has in the pipeline. According to Schneider, WordPress.com is the 8th largest site on the Internet.

    Image via Matt Mullenweg (Facebook)

  • WordPress.com Now Lets Users Register .CO Domains

    Automattic announced today that it has added .CO as a new top-level domain option for WordPress.com users. This joins other options like .ME, .COM, .NET, and .ORG. It will cost you $25 a year for a .CO domain.

    To register for a .CO domain, go to Store and Domains in the dashboard, and type in the .CO domain you wish to register in the “Add a Domain” field.

    Add a domain

    After that, it will ask you for more details, such as contact info, and if you want to add Private Registration to the purchase (an additional $8), then you will register the domain, and make your payment. Once you go through all of that, you’ll activate it by going to Store and Domains in the dashboard, and selecting the button next to the domain, and clicking “Update Primary Domain.”

    According to Automattic, over 1.5 million .CO domain names have been registered in over 200 countries since 2010.