Issue #155 Loop

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Hi, friend. 👋

Welcome to Issue #155 of Loop WP!

Last week, we looked at one of WordPress 6.8’s new features, Speculative Loading, and explained why you might not want to enable it.

This week, we look at Ollie 2.0 and the most joyful WordPress onboarding experience I’ve ever had. I also make a clarification on Speculative Loading.

Let’s go! 👇

Ollie 2.0 - Wow!

I did a raw walkthrough of the Ollie 2.0 onboarding experience using InstaWP, and honestly, it’s really impressive.

🧠 The whole process of setting up a site and obtaining templates and pages is smooth, fast, and well-thought-out.

The Site Setup Wizard stands out especially. It takes care of plugins, layouts, typography, and pages all in one place.

🎉 Ollie 2.0 is how native WordPress should be, and WordPress should take note of this.

Check out my Loom video for a detailed walkthrough. 👇

Ollie 2.0 - Initial Thoughts

🚨 No time to watch the video, friend?

No worries, here are my initial thoughts. 👇

• The onboarding experience was smooth and intuitive.

• The templates are excellent! I grabbed the “Creator” one and set up a newsletter page. (It looked great out of the box.)

• Ollie WP remembers your settings (fonts, colours, etc.) even after creating a child theme, which was a nice surprise (although there were some quirks).

• Clean interface and native-feeling design.

• The Pro Tips, performance-friendly options, and plugin suggestions also added polish without being overwhelming.

🚨 The Live Preview throughout the onboarding is brilliant. If you don’t get a chance to test Ollie 2.0, be sure to watch my video above.

Some Quirks and Feedback

There are a very few minor rough edges.

✅ The onboarding checklist isn’t interactive. It would be nice to tick things off as you complete them.

😵‍💫 The child theme gets auto-activated, which caused a brief panic when the styling vanished (I explain this more in the video).

🤔 Additionally, when I re-ran the setup wizard, it duplicated some pages, which is somewhat annoying (albeit my fault) and could potentially confuse beginners, but it’s not a deal-breaker.

It would be great if:

• Users were warned about potential styling loss before activating the child theme.**

• Prevent duplicate page creation or detect existing ones when re-running the onboarding wizard.

• Make checklist items trackable or tickable for clarity.

** This might have been a caching issue, and I simply needed to refresh the browser. I will clarify in next week’s newsletter if needed.

Ollie 2.0 - Concluding Thoughts

Despite those niggles, it’s genuinely hard to fault the experience.

Ollie 2.0 is easily the best theme onboarding experience for WordPress that I’ve tried.

🚀 Ollie offers an exceptional WordPress onboarding experience. It’s fast, smartly designed, and intuitive, especially for users exploring block themes.

A few minor UX issues aside, this is how modern WordPress should feel.

Mike McAlister and Patrick Posner have done a stellar job! 🎉

🧪 If you’re interested in taking Ollie 2.0 for a spin, head over to the Ollie website with the dedicated instructions and have some fun!

Speculative Loading Clarification

Last week’s newsletter covered a new feature in WordPress 6.8 called Speculative Loading, in which I mentioned “potential” data leakage issues.

The awesome Felix Arntz, who is responsible for the implementation, asked me for more information and provided some clarifications.

I provided Felix with an additional article, which I forgot to include in the original newsletter (which I will update).

The article from Planet Performance provided Felix with additional context, and below is his direct response regarding data leakage (bolded text is my own emphasis and I’ve added a couple of emojis). 👇

• Both server load and data leaking “can” be a problem with speculative loading under certain circumstances.

• In terms of data leaking, browser defaults are in place to prevent it.

The way that WordPress Core's implementation works by default though, there is hardly any risk for neither server load nor data leaking.

Here's why:

1. URLs are only speculatively loaded once the user clicks on the link. This makes it almost 100% safe the user will navigate to the page.
   
   For example, ask yourself: How many times do you click a link but then move the mouse somewhere else before you let go of your finger so that the link URL is not actually loaded?
   
   Of course sometimes we do it, but extremely rare probably when you think about how often we click on links overall. So the higher server load is still theoretically possible, but realistically if anything it should be <1% higher.
   

2. URLs are only prefetched, diminishing the chance for any data leak, since any client-side code will not be executed.
   
   Even more importantly, combining that with the above point on only speculatively loading on click of a link, it means there's probably a ~99% chance the URL will be loaded anyway.

So I (Felix) think there's very little justification to disable speculative loading in WordPress Core in its default behaviour.

⚠️ It is worth noting that, if a site opts in to more "aggressive" (and more performant) configurations, the risk on the above increases.

🚨 So then it becomes more of a trade-off. But as long as a site uses the WordPress Core default of "prefetch" with "conservative" eagerness, there's hardly any risk.

Sponsorship Opportunities

🚨 The Google Doc contains all the details if you’re interested in sponsoring the Loop WP Newsletter.

That’s It For This Week 👋

⏭️ Remember, at the end of last week’s newsletter, I mentioned that Matt said all accounts will be unblocked?

That doesn’t appear to be the case for everyone, and you can read more in detail in The Repository article.

See you next week! 😀

Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• No Stress DNS - Currently $50 off the eventual full price--just $97 instead of $147 (a 34% saving). This special offer ends on Wednesday, April 30th at 11:59pm Pacific (Dave Foy)

• Elementor 4.0 - A closer look at Global Classes in Alpha. (WP Tuts)

• 🚨 Must Read - PressConf Recap - Why Showing Up Matters in the WordPress Community. (The Repository)

• Call for Participants - Help us understand checkout block adoption barriers (WooCommerce)

• It’s Now Possible - ThemeSwitcher Pro Multiple Themes, One Website. Upgrade your website, one page at a time, one step at a time. (Brad Williams)

• Free Tickets - Page Builder Summit 8.0 - FREE Access to 35+ Industry Experts Helping You Build Better WordPress Websites Faster. (Page Builder Summit)

• Lessons from My Journey - Building a WordPress Career Without a Map. (HeroPress)

• WP Security 101 - Take your WordPress security skills to the next level. (Tim Nash)

• Repeat Business - Clients Who Never Stop Referring You. (The Admin Bar)

• Cache Performance - Big changes coming in WordPress 6.9? (Jonathan Harris)

• This is cool! - WooCommerce “Blueprints” are coming. (James Kemp)

• Automattic AI - A growing suite of powerful tools to make WordPress ready for the AI-first web. (Automattic)

• Business Bloomer - How Rodolfo Productized Revenue and Mastered WooCommerce Analytics with Metorik. (Metorik)

• Add to Cart - Affirm and WooCommerce bring longstanding partnership to the UK. (WooCommerce)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, reply, and I will answer you as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,