As a media partner for WordFest, it is my great pleasure to let you know what WordFest, the festival of WordPress, is all about, and that it’s starting next Thursday/Friday (depends on your timezone!). Let me get this giant pet peeve out in the open, every time I see the title of the event I get instant trauma from watching football players announce their alma maters by over emphasizing THE, especially where is doesn’t belong, sorry it’s Ohio State University not THE Ohio State University. I get strange looks from my wife when I complain about these things. I’m used to it.

What is WordFest?

WordFest Live 2021 is an inclusive, one-day virtual event with speakers from around the world. For a continuous 24 hours, speakers will present on one of four stages and most from their home region. The event is staffed completely by volunteers with all donations going to support Big Orange Heart, enabling the further development of the 4 Health Hubs.

Big Orange Heart? Four Health Hubs? Well this event is about two things, WordPress, and mental health. I wrote about Who is Big Orange Heart, and I highly recommend taking a deep dive into the organization but suffice it say that Big Orange Heart covers the mental health portion of the event.

WordPress is the main focus and the speakers are a who’s who of the WordPress economy. I’m not going to play favorites on the speakers – well because they are all great and worthwhile to see – but I do have a handful of sessions based on my needs (and folks that I’ve never seen speak before) that I’m really looking forward to attending and participating in the Q&A on the schedule.

Sessions

Because of a slight obsession with Zapier, Extending WordPress For A Complete Business Solution from Danielle Zarcaro is on the list as is Automating WordPress Workflows From Scratch by Arun Bansal.

This session by Pritesh Vora is a no-brainer given my work in open source media (aka my blog and #MorningCoffee), The Growth Mindset: How Our Blog Went From 0 To 1 Million Visitors A Year!

I’ve written a lot about WordPress performance with regards to my setup of Convesio and Supervisor as well as The Art of WordPress Load Testing, Speedy WordPress, Cloudflares Up, GTmetrix Adopts Lighthouse, etc. so Sabrina Zeidan’s 5 Most Popular Recommendations To Speed Up Your Website That Don’t Work is a must.

Finally the ecommerce side we have How to Internationalize Your eCommerce Store from Thomas Fanchin. Not sure if this will touch on WooCommerce specifically and/or email marketing like Omnisend in a global world but looking forward to it none-the-less.

Remember this is just my list of must sees based around my needs. There are so many other topics covered it’s pretty amazing. So Register for Free Today!