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35 Best WordPress Articles of 2023: A Curated List of the Most Impactful Stories of the Year

Hello, fellow WordPresser! As we embark on a new year and set our sights on achieving fresh goals, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past 12 months. Specifically, we wanted to highlight some of the standout WordPress articles that our community published throughout the year. As you gear up for the exciting possibilities that 2023 has in store, we hope that these best WordPress articles will provide some inspiration and guidance along the way.

In order to gather the most resonant headlines, we reached out to some of the best WordPress blogs and also used our own monthly roundup of news and stories, carefully curated in-house, as a guide.

Best WordPress Articles of 2022

Let’s see what stirred the pot or produced sparks inside the WordPress community each month of 2022. You’ll see at least one impactful story per month.

Best WordPress articles of 2022

To make your browsing experience seamless, we’ve arranged the top WordPress content of 2022 in a simple, chronological order based on the month of publication. Get ready to journey through a year’s worth of expert insights and tips, all at your fingertips!

January

Best WordPress articles: convesio

The Convesio team had big plans for 2022. After a successful funding campaign, the company worked on innovating its enterprise-grade WordPress hosting. Did they succeed? It seems so.

February

Best WordPress articles: block protocol

Smashing Magazine wrote about Matt Mullenweg’s plans to integrate the Block Protocol into the WordPress editor. This specification allows for the use of blocks that can be easily transferred between different applications, which could mark a major shift in the way we interact with WordPress.

Best WordPress articles: GDPR fine

There’s this thing called the GDPR. It’s a ruling in the EU that requires websites to be transparent about how they collect user data and what they do with it. If your site doesn’t comply, you risk some serious fines, even up to €20 million. Granted, in this case, the fine is not as dramatic, but still.

Best WordPress articles: Future for plugins

WordPress.com is experimenting with selling products right from the dashboard. It’s a new feature that will allow you to instantly purchase plugins, themes, and even services directly from your dashboard. Under development, stay tuned!

Best WordPress articles: DigitalOcean

CSS-Ticks, one of the most loved front-end development websites, started a new chapter last year by joining DigitalOcean – the hosting giant. But don’t worry, this won’t affect the site’s quality content. Their words.

Best WordPress articles: YITH acquired

Newfold Digital, a top provider of web and commerce technology, has acquired YITH, one of the biggest sellers and developers of WooCommerce themes and plugins. This acquisition was made possible with the support of Clearlake and Siris Capital Groups.

Best WordPress articles: WordPress.com pricing

Concerns emerged in the community when WordPress.com changed their pricing plans and storage limits. The previous five plans available had been consolidated into two, while the storage offered on the free tier had been reduced from 3GB to 500MB. Fast-forward; it’s back to normal now. Pheew!

May

Best WordPress articles: market share

According to W3Techs, the market share for WordPress has been steadily decreasing, with a 0.4% drop in popularity since February 2022. This is a significant shift in the CMS landscape, and it will be interesting to see what the future holds for our platform.

Best WordPress articles: websites tracking us

New research has revealed that an eyebrow-raising number of websites are collecting data while you enter it into online forms. This happens even before you hit the Submit button, since the sites begin collecting data as you type.

June

Best WordPress articles: Delicious Brains

The WP Engine family has just gotten stronger with the addition of Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), WP Migrate, WP Offload Media, WP Offload SES, and Better Search Replace. This is exciting news for the community, as WP Engine continues to be the go-to destination for WordPress developers.

Best WordPress articles: WCEU

David Bisset of Post Status shared his thoughts on the most impactful and noteworthy moments from WordCamp Europe 2022, as seen remotely by live stream.

Strattic acquired

It seems that acquisitions went through the roof in 2022 because Strattic also found themselves under new management. Specifically, they’ve joined team Elementor. The goal of the project going forward is to provide more innovation in the static WordPress space.

Elementor lay offs

Speaking of Elementor, not everything was great for them in 2022. Elementor has made the difficult decision to lay off 60 employees, which is about 15% of its workforce. This happened due to the current economic climate, with rising inflation and falling unemployment rates.

GoDaddy vs Matt Mullenweg

Spicing things up a bit with some controversy, here’s one! Matt Mullenweg took to Twitter to express his strong feelings about GoDaddy, calling it a “parasitic company” that poses an “existential threat to WordPress’s future.” Well, GoDaddy responded.

Disparities

Is WordPress enough as it is now? In this editorial, Matt Cromwell wonders how much better the product would be if it included a few more features as standard. For example, robust user editing features or post-type generation.

July

sitecare

Another one bites the dust. Jokes aside, SiteCare acquired Maintainn – their long-time competitor.

WPLift

What a fruitful year 2022 was for business! This headline here is not only about the fact that WPLift was sold, but it’s more about the selling price, which was considerably cheaper than what the site was worth a couple of years ago.

Pandemic

This is our own roundup of the impact the pandemic has had on the WordPress community. In it, WordPress community leaders share insights on how their businesses changed and what the consequences were.

FSE

How does “full site editing” sound to you? Too complicated, maybe too technical, or just too long? The WordPress team initiated this brainstorming to get ideas for friendly names for the term.

August

Cloudways accquisition

The headline speaks for itself, so we’ll just reveal the goal of this acquisition: to improve the range of products and services available to small and medium-sized businesses.

how to WordPress

How hard is it now to build a WordPress site from scratch using the full site editor? Are all the official WordPress tutorials, guides, and docs outdated? Geoff Graham address this concern in his editorial on CSS-Tricks.

WP-Optimize

There were claims that the WP-Optimize plugin was blocking the loading of certain JavaScript files when users ran performance tests on their websites. Not very ethical of them.

September

BackupBuddy

The Wordfence Threat Intelligence team discovered that a vulnerability in BackupBuddy was being exploited, which could have led to around five million attacks. Had they not blocked the hacking operation, massive damage would have happened to tens of thousands of WordPress sites.

MetaSlider

In this short post, the PublishPress team briefly announced to their followers that MetaSlider – the lightbox plugin – will be taken under their umbrella for new exciting projects.

wp.cloud

It looks like Automattic might be working on creating a new WordPress hosting company! It’s possible that they could even be building a hosting solution specifically for WooCommerce. Matt Medeiros recorded a podcast on this topic.

gas prices

Okay, this doesn’t sound like a WordPress-related story in itself. However! The post has a really cool design, which shows us firsthand how the block editor can be used for practical, user-friendly content presentation that also looks great.

October

plugin stats

Another exciting discussion that generated a lot of buzz was the removal of the plugin active installs from the WordPress.org repository. This change did not sit well with many plugin developers.

coders automating

While using AI is a very high-level form of automation, there are much less intricate levels of automation that can be achieved through intelligent code design. What happens, though, when companies hire programmers to do a job and those programmers figure out how to write scripts that do the job for them – on autopilot?

end of programming

CEO and Co-Founder of Fixie.ai, Matt Welsh, who’s also held leadership positions at both Google and Apple, thinks that we are on the cusp of a serious programming makeover. Could the same fate be in store for WordPress development?

November

site editor name

Remember the discussion around a friendlier name for the “full site editing” or “full site editor?” Months later, here’s the conclusion. It will be called “Site Editor” – simply.

twitter

The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk for a staggering $44 billion has certainly turned heads and sparked discussion. The WordPress community has a strong presence on Twitter, so it will be interesting to see how things play out and how this acquisition might impact the way the community operates on the platform.

December

ChatGPT

That moment when Artificial Intelligence gets scary smart. 🤖

WordPress hosting survey

We’re closing this post with the results of our big survey on WordPress hosting. We believe it provides a better context for choosing your next host beyond reading yet another subjective recommendation on the web. This survey covers responses from more than 3,400 actual users of various WordPress hosting platforms.

Wrapping up 2022!

And that’s our selection of the spiciest, most popular, interesting, and best WordPress articles of 2022. Now, we are looking forward to seeing what the new year will bring to our ecosystem. But before you leave, we are genuinely curious to hear your favorite WordPress stories of 2022.

If you think that we missed something important, feel free to complete our list by sharing more stories in the comments section below. Have a great 2023!

Don’t forget to join our crash course on speeding up your WordPress site. Learn more below:

 

Layout and presentation by Karol K.

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Adelina Tuca
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