Yoast acquired; Automattic moves mountains of money

In the News  Everyone in the WordPress world is talking about the acquisition of Yoast to NewFold Digital. Yoast SEO, the well-known plugin for WordPress with over 12 million active installs, is the flagship product of Yoast.  I interviewed Joost de Valk on the WPMinute. The most important takeaway was that despite all of the speculation, the feedback has been mostly positive. Like many other WordPress concerned citizens, Jeff Chandler shares his initial thoughts on the acquisition on his podcast over at WP Mainline. As with all acquisitions, people are afraid that stuff will change for the worst — especially in ads or upsells. At this time, the Yoast product will not be adjusting free or premium features or adding in any other pesky upsell ads. Also keeping up with the news, Matt Mullenweg discusses the funding rounds from Automattic since last February. Automattic closed a primary funding round of $288M, bringing in some new partners including BlackRock, Wellington, Schonefeld, and Alta Park. Matt covered the buyback of $250M shares that were primarily targeted at current and former employees. Matt’s article also discusses the hiring challenge that Automattic has right now. Welcome to the club. There are lots of jobs available over at Automattic. Go check them out if you’re interested. Riad Benguella writes a new blog post about the difficult task of monitoring performance with Gutenberg and looks at the cost of several WordPress plugins – particularly loading time with blocks. Since the performance is measured with blocks by extendibility, the repository for blocks has been growing like crazy. This can often make your typical WordPress site have over 12 (or more) plugins installed. These plugins can impact performance and Riad does a great job of testing plugins with Gutenberg and reporting his findings. View the results along with the methods over on his blog. The average load times of the most popular are…well I can’t show you the graph in audio…but you have to take a look. The three top offenders are Yoast, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. Events WordCamp US will be back online October 1st. There is a call for Sponsors along with Speakers and talk ideas. Since there aren’t enough female-identified speakers in India this time, GreenGeeks is teaming up with the lead of the Diverse Speaker Training group in WordPress #wpdiversity, Jill Binder, to develop trainers who can teach others how to run the workshops at their local WordPress meetups all over India. This is happening September, 24 & 25. From the Grabbag Don’t get nervous about all the WordPress changes. Many entrepreneurs are feeling a little squeezed in the plugin space but no need to worry just yet. Go listen to the latest podcast on the Matt Report with