Join the Adventure!

Join WordPress developers from around the world for a must-attend virtual conference on May 22nd, 2019.

Brought to you by WPSessions and Pantheon.

Aw, you just missed it! But don't sweat it! Become a WPSessions Member and you can watch recordings of every session. Plus, claim a sweet WordSesh-only discount.

Scroll on to see the event speakers, schedule, viewing parties, and more!

Meet the Speakers
Ahmad Awais, @mrahmadawais
Brandy Lawson, @theFieryFX
Carie Fisher, @cariefisher
Courtland Allen, @csallen
Joe Casabona, @jcasabona
Katie Sylor-Miller, @ksylor
Keri Jacoby, @kerijacoby
Kyle Van Deusen, @OgalWeb
Lindsay Halsey, @linds_halsey
Maedah Batool, @MaedahBatool
Michelle Wiltshire, @michellewasabi
Rahul Bansal, @rahul286
Shane Pearlman, @justlikeair
Taylor Lovett, @tlovett12
schedule

With 17 sessions in this year's schedule, there is a lot to see and learn. Every session brings a valuable lesson and perspective to the table, so you should make time to watch them all.

The first four sessions are unique: they have all been pre-recorded. Consider them the Asynchronous Business Track. They were designed this way so that all of you whom need these lessons most can make time at some point during the day without having to free a specifically scheduled time from your business calendar.

Select your timezone:

All Day!

Choosing to Enjoy the Ride: 3 Ways to Embrace the Entrepreneurial Roller Coaster

Brandy Lawson

Welcome to the ride! Even though you can't fully control the ups and downs, you can choose how you ride.

In this session, Brandy will provide you with three tangible strategies to embrace the roller coaster and truly enjoy the ride you're on. Come learn from Brandy's experience as an entrepreneur and growing up with entrepreneurial parents.

All Day!

Overdelivering: The Art of Exceeding Customer Expectations

Kyle Van Deusen

A WordPress agency relies on a few things to be successful: repeat customers, recurring revenue, and referrals. How do we ensure we provide an experience to our customers that turn them into advocates for our brand?

By overdelivering the entire way though.

While many people think overdelivering means giving away things for free, working longer hours, and charging less— that couldn't be further from the truth. Kyle will help you overdeliver on every project by implementing (or improving) six actionable items in your business.

All Day!

GutenBOOM: How Being First To Market Powered the Most of My Year

Joe Casabona

At WordCamp US 2017, Matt Mullenweg announced that he believed WordPress 5.0 would be out in April, with the brand new editor Gutenberg. With that news, Joe decided to be proactive and develop the first Gutenberg user course. In this talk, Joe will discuss how being first to market in January 2018 transformed and powered his business for a large part of the fiscal year.

All Day!

The Rhythms of Distributed Teams

Shane Pearlman

Does your team actually understand what it takes to succeed on a project? What is the definition of success that you're going to use to make decisions when nobody is around to tell you what to do?

What you'll learn:

  • Why every process and deliverable requires a single owner
  • How to build a meaningful backlog
  • Creating a successful communication policy
  • What information should be communal vs private
  • How to create a thriving environment
13:30 UTC

Meet & Greet

Join early and say hello!

13:45 UTC

Opening Remarks

Brian Richards & Drew Gorton

Take 15 minutes to learn about everything that is going on today and get to know your host.

14:00 UTC

Selling WordPress to Enterprises

Rahul Bansal

Rahul's WordPress journey started with working on small projects as a freelancer. Over the past ten years, Rahul founded and grew his agency rtCamp to reach the other end of the spectrum, regularly handling large, enterprise WordPress projects.

At this scale, the rules for “selling” WordPress change. WordPress’ traditional advantages don’t necessarily apply anymore.

How do we sell WordPress to Enterprises?

15:00 UTC

Agile Marketing + Pantheon = Great

Matt Cheney

The best websites are the ones that change regularly. Successful websites come from development teams who regularly collaborate, experiment, and iterate. Pantheon offers a WordPress development platform that can help build workflows so your development process can be agile - and get results.

15:20 UTC

WordPress Acceptance Testing: SOLVED

Taylor Lovett

Automated testing is an important part of every web application. When building WordPress plugins, themes, and websites, there are a plethora of different frameworks for unit testing, integration testing, and acceptance testing. While many of these frameworks are useful, most of them are hard to use, ineffective at stopping regressions, not scalable to a team of developers, or not easily integrated with CI pipelines.

WP Acceptance, is a toolkit that empowers developers and CI pipelines to test codebases using version controlled acceptance tests and sharable environments. This talk will explain the motivation behind WP Acceptance, how to use it, and why it’s the most effective way to test your WordPress applications.

16:20 UTC

Happy Browser, Happy User

Katie Sylor-Miller

Performance is fundamentally, a UX concern. Sites that are slow to render or janky to interact with are a bad user experience. We strive to write performant code for our users, but users don’t directly interact with our code - it all happens through the medium of the browser. The browser is the middleman between us and our users; therefore to make our users happy, we first have to make the browser happy. But how exactly do we do that?

In this talk, we’ll learn how browsers work under the hood: how they request, construct, and render a website. At each step along the way, we’ll cover what we can do as developers to make the browser’s job easier, and why those best practices work. You’ll leave with a solid understanding of how to write code that works with the browser, not against it, and ultimately improves your users’ experience.

17:20 UTC

Continuous Integration with Pantheon

Andrew Taylor

Pantheon is more than just WordPress hosting. Their developer tools allow for simple integrations and advanced workflows. In this quick session, Pantheon Developer Programs Engineer Andrew Taylor will be showing how GitHub, CircleCI and Pantheon work together to bring automation to WordPress development.

17:40 UTC

Fast Web with Gatsby and WordPress

Maedah Batool

Gatsby is a blazing fast React-based static site generator that has won the hearts of many. Maedah is going to show you why it has become such a popular tool by demonstrating how you can leverage Gatsby to supercharge your next WordPress site.

18:40 UTC

VSCode Power User Workflows

Ahmad Awais

After 10 happy years with SublimeText, Ahmad switched to VSCode. Since then, he has spent over 1,000 hours perfecting his setup.

In his session, Ahmad will provide you with a bunch of shortcuts so that you can run the ideal WordPress development workflow through VSCode. He'll cover debugging with Xdebug, auto-formatting your code, docs searching, code linting, and more.

19:40 UTC

Learning From Success

Courtland Allen

Courtland is the creator of IndieHackers, a community of founders who help each other create profitable businesses. In these past two years, Courtland has interviewed more than 100 successful business owners who started their journey alone (and many of whom are still wildly successful companies of one).

Sit in on an exclusive interview and learn about Courtland's journey, the lessons he's learned, and the timeless advice he has for anyone who wants to create their own profitable and independent business.

20:40 UTC

What's Next for Pantheon?

Josh Koenig

You'll have to come to the live event to learn more about this one.

20:55 UTC

Raffle Drawing

Josh Koenig

Pop in and see if you're one of the lucky winners of the Nintendo Switch or Pantheon Care Packages!

21:00 UTC

Building a therapist directory with React and Headless WordPress

Michelle Wiltshire

This talk highlights the significant technical details of building a membership directory using React and WordPress as a headless CMS. Along the way, Michelle will divulge challenges she faced as a newbie, some successful moments, embarrassing decisions, and a few inner narratives from a developing Full-stack Product Designer.

22:00 UTC

Accessible Patterns from the Ground Up

Carie Fisher

Digital accessibility can be difficult or frustrating to a lot of people, but it doesn't have to be. By making small changes to your everyday workflow, you can have a huge impact on making the digital world more inclusive - without crushing your creativity or sacrificing your sanity!

In this talk, we will walk-through the process of creating an accessible pattern from design to development, while focusing on accessibility best practices at each step. We will start with a wireframe/sketch, process that into a design, translate the design into code, and finally, retest for accessibility. We will also talk about the different kinds of patterns out in the wild and which are the most accessible to the widest range of users.

The audience will leave the talk with a deeper understanding of accessibility best practices and will have take-away action items to help them start building their own accessible patterns!

23:00 UTC

Win Clients & Customers Through Stellar Support

Keri Jacoby

Successful businesses are built on a strong foundation of satisfied customers. Every interaction you have with an existing customer or client has the potential to impact your business. If you're not meeting your customers expectations through stellar support there will inevitably come a day when they'll find someone who can.

24:00 UTC

SEO for Freelancers

Lindsay Halsey

Site speed, great user-experience, and quality content - sound familiar? As a freelancer, you are likely already doing SEO for your clients by designing and building fantastic websites. Take credit for the value you provide and consider adding SEO to your services. Grow your recurring revenue and create long term relationships with your clients.

In this session, we will focus on the three aspects of adding SEO as a service:

  • Process: How you will provide the service.
  • Pricing: How you will get compensated for the value you provide.
  • Sales & Communication: How to talk to your prospects and clients about SEO
01:00 UTC

Closing Remarks

Brian Richards & Drew Gorton

Stick around for some exciting announcements!

Thanks, Pantheon!

This year’s conference has been made possible, and is completely free to you, thanks in large part to Pantheon – the beloved, workflow-focused, developer- & agency-friendly host!

Run your personal and client sites on Pantheon and never worry about your hosting infrastructure again. Every site on Pantheon comes standard with separate development, test, and production environments – plus workflows and command-line tools to match – so that you can deploy confidently and effortlessly.

Do you have a need for speed? Pantheon provides lightning-fast hosting and includes all the features you expect, from global CDN and free managed HTTPS to smooth scaling that lets you handle any traffic spike without breaking a sweat.

Local viewing parties

Join some friends and watch WordSesh together at a local viewing party! Below is a list of all the viewing parties we know about.

Want to host a viewing party? You can host your own event at no cost (to you or attendees). Send an email and include your location and meetup name and we can work out all the details.

Win a Nintendo Switch!
Illustration of a Nintendo Switch

This year we have a very special treat. You can win a Nintendo Switch® and some of our favorite swag from Pantheon! No purchase necessary. You must attend the live broadcast to enter, but you do not need to be present during the drawing to win.

One lucky winner will take home a brand new Nintendo Switch and two secondary winners will get a very nice care package from our friends at Pantheon.

The drawing will be held live, immediately following the What’s Next for Pantheon session, at approximately 20:55 UTC.

Hallway Track

No good conference is complete without the opportunity to chat and network with your peers. This year, WordSesh has multiple built-in opportunities for you to connect with other attendees, talk shop, swap notes, and make new friends from around the globe.

swag

Event Swag

No, we won't have any stickers, pins, or t-shirts, but we will have plenty of useful gifts for every WordSesh attendee! We've made special arrangements with many awesome companies in the WordPress space to provide exclusive digital swag.

WordSesh, a WPSessions Event

For the past six years, WPSessions has been recruiting remarkable presenters to teach what they know.

WPSessions is home to more than 140 hours of exclusive content to help you write better code, find better clients, and deliver better projects.

If you're hungry for WordPress training, and one full day of WordSesh just isn't enough for you, WPSessions is ready feed that desire year-round.