These are a list of resources and other people I trust with my life in the WordPress community. Should you have an issue that I’m either too busy, don’t want to, or can’t handle for you…please check out these folks!
Speed specialists:
- PagePipe (Steve Teare) – there are few people as obsessed with speed as I am. This is one of them and he’s been messing with it for longer than I have. He’s probably the OG of website speed back in an era (20 years ago) when very few small-site owners cared about it. I’ve exchanged really pleasant emails with him and amusingly, we both agree with each other on many philosophies regarding speed, design, development, and business in general.
- WP Speed Matters (Gijo Varghese) – Gijo is a real speed fanatic. Also runs a helpful FB group. I imagine him being really busy managing his awesome speed plugins…Flying Scripts, Flying Analytics, Flying Images, Flying Pages. (Lol, and we keep pingpong-referring clients back to each other.)
- Alentejo Web Design (Fred Vd Meijde) – Fred is an official admin for Swift Performance plugin and also another experienced speed specialist.
- woorkup (Brian Jackson) – well-known community speed fanatic and former Kinsta blogger. Built several cool plugins (PerfMatters & Novashare) so I think he’s quite busy, but there’s no challenge he won’t turn away from.
- Kinsta (blog) – I’m not a fan of their webhosting service but they do have super helpful blog guides written by the one and only Brian Jackson himself.
- LiteSpeed web server and cache plugin – really helpful team on the forums and support channels. Do contact them if you’re on LiteSpeed server!
- WoOSH.dev (Daan van den Bergh) – the maker of useful speed optimization plugins like CAOS, OMGF, HELL. He also does speed optimization as well.
Server admins, engineers, dev-ops:
- WP-Bullet (Mike Andreasen) – extremely knowledgeable systems engineer/admin on all server stuff (NGINX-diehard). I love arguing all day with him about whether NGINX or LiteSpeed is better. What I like most is that he has experience with every stack, even the ones he doesn’t like as much. A true master server-tweaker who specializes in WordPress and WooCommerce. Hire him on Codeable.
- MC2.dev – I think they are formerly Martynas IT. They have a good and long history in admin community.
WordPress developers:
- WP Allied – Walter is one of our in-house developers. Does an incredible job on all custom WordPress development and also has maintenance plans. Trust him with your life. However, he can be really busy at times.
- Sridhar Katakam – runs a massive membership tutorial site for Genesis, also another one for Oxygen pagebuilder. Awesome guy. I use him for all our “code laundry” when our in-house developers are busy.
- Christoph Herr – another awesome WordPress/Genesis developer. I use him for our “code laundry” as well.
- Seekmid – plugin developer who loves doing complex computations.
- Yin – one of our internal developers.
- Travis Smith – A-level developer and former WP theme/plugin repo team. $150/hr.
Web designers:
- Swoon & Creative – nice gal who’s done work for some of my clients. Reasonable rates for professional work. Don’t go any lower than this.
- House of Grays – pricey and they’re always too busy but good quality work.
- Melissa Yeager – sexy sexy!
- Makeshift Creative Studio – this is my friend from college. She’s great. Sexy classy hipster artsy.
- Dribbble – go find the other ones yourself! 🙂
Full service agencies:
- Soulheart – really nice folks. Great for small companies. They will take care of you and stress out about your business for you.
- Chillybin – are you a big company that needs someone who can do super polished/professional stuff on an enterprise level?
People/Stuff I liked reading:
- Julia Evans (developer, some admin) – also her clever funny education WizardZines.
- HaydenJames (Linux systems analyst) – great Linux stuff
- INTERNETINGISHARD – fun resource on HTML/CSS.
- Varvy – free resources and textbook explanations on page load and speed optimization.
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