My name is Farley Grubb. I'm a professor of economics at the University of Delaware. Also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, which I should say built us about anything I have to say. They're not responsible for that. What I'm going to talk about today is a book I have forthcoming that you have the front page of the continental dollar, how the American Revolution was financed with paper money. And in particular, I'm going to focus on two things. One is, how did Congress make all these decisions about how to create and structure this paper money. And then also in the process, how do we know what we know. So let me begin by saying, when the Second Continental Congress got together in May of 1775. Things were running ahead of them in the sense that the battles of Lexington and Concord had already happened just a month before. And it was clear that hostilities had begun. And I believe the second day of the Second Continental Congress, Massachusetts showed up, and they presented Congress with a piece of paper, and they showed them, we're issuing these pieces of paper by the Massachusetts government, Massachusetts Pounds. It was a bond type currency, in order to pay for the militia and the supplies we need to fight the British around Boston. And Massachusetts asked the Second Continental Congress, if they would make this Massachusetts paper money, a currency throughout the other states throughout the other colonies, have the other colonies to collect it as paper money in order to help them fund fighting around Boston. So this was an initial, you know, Congress is thinking we're going to make ourselves. Kind of the national government fighting the revolution here how are we going to fund this how are we going to pay for troops pay for supplies. Massachusetts showed up and said, well, just make our money, a kind of money that's used throughout the colonies. This would be like a currency union. Now all the individual colonies and then states issued their own paper monies. And what Massachusetts was basically proposing was creating a currency union, where the individual states would each have their own paper monies but they would accept each other's paper monies in a kind of currency union fashion. And that would then fund the revolution. So this was a choice they had to face now if you look at what was their decision on this. It's hard to find what their decision was they they didn't do that they didn't create a currency union they didn't propose that Massachusetts paper money be accepted by all the other states. Why. Well, this comes back to how do we know what we know. And one of the primary sources is the journals of the Continental Congress. There are 34 volumes of that that were published. And they have available was published in the early years of the 20th century. You can get it online from a library of Congress but the online version is really hard to use, unless you know these specific dates, or things that you're looking for. Well, I went out and purchased a full set all 34 volumes from a library in New Jersey. That was decommissioning it for over 1000 bucks. They sent it to me. It had never been opened. You had to raise or open the pages in order to read it, but it gives you a chance to read in continuous fashion. All the things going on in Congress. Another thing is, is that the journals to Continental Congress give you the revel, resolutions that were passed. Some of the votes, they give you some of the presentations but they don't give you that deliberations or the decisions, how Congress debated and decided on certain things. And in fact, in the journals of Continental Congress they make clear that the delegates were pledged to secrecy that they would not discuss the deliberations, the debates. All that you'd get was the end decisions. So it's hard to figure out how they chose or decided what they did what they did. Now another primary source besides the journals of Continental Congress are the letters of the delegates to Congress. This, this was compiled by Paul Smith, starting in 1976 into the 1990s. There are 21 or 24 volumes of that I purchased all those and set down and read them. The delegates were really honorable they never talk about the deliberations and the discussions and the arguments in Congress. So it's really hard to figure out how they decided and chose amongst alternatives. Now, for this first choice, do we form a currency union. Do we form all the paper monies of the individual states, or do we do something different. That I ran across when I read Jared Sparks in 1832 published the life of Gouverneur Morris for volume three volumes I think. When you read through the first part of that. He includes letters from Gouverneur Morris was a delegate to the Continental Congress from New York. He includes letters from the New York Assembly to their delegates in Congress. And in those letters. It says, first of all, keep these letters secret don't tell anyone else. Don't tell them what you're doing. But what we want you to do is dissuade Congress from forming a currency. Do not obligate us to accept other colonies or other states paper money. We don't want a currency. Instead, try to get Congress to issue its own paper money, or its own, you know, and obligate us as a group to servicing that new paper money. In essence, that's what Congress did. They didn't form a currency union. They kind of ignored all the paper monies issued by the individual states. And they decided to issue a new money, the continental dollar. Let's go forward forward a couple slides for those continental dollars. So here's a couple pictures of continental dollars from the first emission. And from the second emission. So we get these pieces of paper and this is one artifact that tells you what this stuff was like. But again, this was a new money didn't exist in the individual colonies or any place else. So this is something they had choices over to just figure out how it was going to work. There were 11 separate emissions of continental dollars between 1775 and 1779, when the last emission was done. In total, there was roughly 20 million net new continental dollars emitted. If you look at the emissions here. You can tell a few things one you can tell the denomination. The first one says it's a $20 bill. And then also what is it denominated in this denominated in Spanish mill dollars those are silver dollars so Spanish silver dollars. And all of them are similar in that they have a denomination, they say they're denominated in Spanish silver dollars, but they don't tell you much more. They say and every one of them has a date on it. So the first one here has the date of the first emission in 1775 and it says basically to figure out what this is you have to go to the resolutions of Congress past the 10th of May and 1775. And if you go to each emission, you'll see the same thing it's, you know, you have to go to the resolution passed by Congress on the date printed on the bill. And you have to go back to the journals of the Continental Congress and there is the resolutions that give you all the information about how this is going to work. Now, given that this is a new money, they had lots of decisions to make that we have to maybe infer what it was or why they did it. Because they don't tell us in the journal journals of Continental Congress or in the letters of the delegates. And of course the papers of the Continental Congress. Most of the papers of the Continental Congress I've access to that on microfilm and the dark basement of my library on a manual microfilm reader. Most of the papers are simply accounting tables and things like that they don't present the deliberations of congressman. They come and we say well they have to make a lot of choices they're going to create a national currency. The first thing is, are we going to create a national bond currency, or like a fiat currency. Well, that's pretty simple they didn't know what fiat money was no one had created a fiat money. Like what we supposedly have today, all the kinds of paper money being created by the colonies before the revolution and during the revolution were bond like instruction constructures. In other words, you create this piece of paper, and it was like a bond that would have a payoff at some future date. So in some sense, it was paper money very much like. A bonds bond or a US Treasury bond. That was the kind of paper money that they create. Once you do that once you say we're going to create a bond type paper money we have a lot of choices to make that Congress had to have to engage in. First of all, when would the bond be paid off. What was this maturity date. Well, if you read, if you look at these pieces of paper they don't tell you got to go to the resolutions and the first two resolutions, or the first two emissions of paper money the first two that you see here on the slide, had explicit payoff dates. And those were four to seven years into the future. In other words, this was this money was not redeemable on demand, or next year. It could be redeemed at face value only four to seven years in the future. Exactly why they don't say but we got a little bit of an inkling of this. Congress was an extra legal revolutionary body with no structure. They did things by consent. They had no powered attacks. They had no power to enforce their agreements. They could only govern by consent and voluntary association from the states. So, looking at that since they can't tax they can't get money to pay the stuff off and tell some time in the future and they turn to the states and they say you got to pay the stuff off. We can't do it now because we're in the middle of a war and we can't export our products and you get several statements by people like Thomas Jefferson who say, Well we farmers can't sell their produce we can't export our goods so we can't pay a tax we got to wait till the war is over, then we can pay it off. So, they had to push the redemption or the payoff of these bonds till one they thought the war would be over. Silas Dean delegate from Connecticut said he didn't expect the word to last more than seven years. So I kind of explains the distance. The next thing they had to do was to choose. Do we redeem these bonds at in one year at a point in time or do we spread it out over a year of what I call a window of years. Let's go forward to slides. This is simply a listing of the first two emissions and in those first two emissions they listed when the stuff would be redeemed. So you can see the stuff in issued the first emission 1775, they're going to redeem one quarter of it in 1779 another quarter and 1780 another quarter and 1781 another quarter and 1770. In other words, they created a four year window in which they would redeem the stuff at face value. Now, who's going to redeem it. The individual states are given quotas for them to redeem it and then send it to the continental treasury to be destroyed. And they create a window of years, not a one point. Now, else in the book I talked about how problematic that is in terms of making this stuff a usable medium of exchange, or tradeable money. Clearly, if you're going to get a face off payment in the first year of redemption 1779 that's worth more than getting a payoff in 1782. So, having a four year window makes the money not have the same value depending on what year you think your dollars are going to be redeemed at face value. They create no mechanism to indicate which continental dollars will be redeemed in which year within the window designated. So again that creates a little bit of a problem so you wonder why did they do this. I go through and I show the only sensible explanation I can find for why they created a four year window was to keep annual taxes low enough that people could pay them. So if you stream all three million issued in one year tax would be way beyond what people were used to paying and they probably couldn't pay it, even once the revolution was over. And so by spreading it out over multiple years, you kept tax rates within a feasible range, and thus people could expect that they would be paid at face value, and it would give the system what we call fiscal credibility. That's why we get a window now this was done in the colonial period when the colonies issued paper money. They usually had it redeemed over a window of years not at a fixed point in time. I think only Maryland had a fixed point redemption for its paper money all the other colonies had, you know, four six eight year windows where things were redeemed in equal amount. So that's one kind of choice they had to make and they chose a window of years, not a specific redemption point. The second thing was who's going to redeem this stuff well Congress can't tax anyone they don't have that power. So they turn to the states and they say well states are going to have to redeem this within these within these years. And which states are going to redeem it well they basically looked at a portioning this, roughly based on the population of each state so each state would be given a quota quota, based on its relative population share in the union, and they were expected to redeem this paper money in 1779 and send it to the continental treasury to be destroyed. How a state redeemed the money was left up to the state what taxes could be paid in this money. And at what rates that was all a state issue to be dealt with individually by states. And what they had to do was also decide well, there's a lot of continental dollars are going to be spent in certain states, and some not in other states so when states have to bring in their portion and send it to the continental treasury in some states will have a lot more continental dollars than what they're required to do. Well, what, what the Congress did in its resolution was to say okay. There's going to be a redemption option at the continental treasury. If you get to 1779 and your state has already collected all the continental dollars that are owed but you have some leftover. You can go to the continental treasury and say if you have any gold and silver in the treasury, you have to pay me face value for this continental dollar. That's a species redemption option at the continental treasury. And the thinking here was some states don't have any continental dollars at all because they weren't spent there they weren't spent on troops there weren't battles in those states. Take a state like North Carolina, early in the war, very little continental dollars are spent there. Most of the continental dollars are being spent in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, because that's where most of the wars fought early on. So if, if you're in North Carolina you're saying well, we're required to give these continental dollars to the national treasury we don't have them. So we're going to have to send in gold and silver coins instead. The continental treasury has these gold and silver coins and the people who have an excess amount from other states can come in and claim those. So it rebalances. Who owes what that was well understood that's how individual states rebalanced obligations to pay paper money to state government. So if you had the excess of paper money than what you owed in taxes, you could go to the treasury and cash those in for the golden silver that was paid by citizens who didn't have paper money to pay their taxes but had to pay in so some is well understood by colonists that there would be a species redemption option. So this kind of thing they had set choices to make that another choice to make and that was after the first emission it was clear this was not going to be a one off affair they're going to have to issue more paper money to pay for continuing troops and supplies. So they're going to have more emissions and the question is when we do a next emission. Do we have the same redemption window or do we move it forward in time. So you see in the slide here is the second mission they decided to move it forward in time the redemption there wouldn't start until after the redemption of the first image so it begins in 1783 and runs for four years to 1786. Now, it turns out, how do we know the discussions here. And the letters of the delegates don't tell us anything. But within the letters of the delegates to Congress, Paul Smith included some entries from Richard Smith from his diary. So it's not a letter, but in this diary Richard Smith was delegate to Congress from New Jersey. And he recorded the debates over certain monetary issues that took place. And what he said was with the second emission there was a debate over when it should be redeemed. And James Dwayne delegate from New York proposed that it be redeemed in the same set of windows as the first emission. So from 1779 to 1782. And Richard Smith says, well, we debated that there was a brisk debate over this. And we decided, no, that the redemption would begin in 1783 after the redemption of the first emission so be staggered forward in time. So that tells us that there was a debate over this and there was options. And they decided that they would stagger each emission forward in time in terms of when redemption would take place. Now, they don't say why. But again, when I calculate out the taxes needed. It seems clear that what they were debating or deciding was to keep the tax levels, the same or near the same in order to make this fiscally credible so people could pay their taxes. That if you redeemed the second emission in the same period as the first dimension that would double the taxes needed. And that was beyond what people had ever been used to paying, and they probably couldn't pay it. So it looks like they were thinking about, well, we got to spread these taxes out over time to do this. Now Richard Smith also engaged in a reported on another thing in his diary. And he ended up talking about there was a committee put together after the second emission so after November 29 1776. Another committee to put together and look into what they're doing. And this committee had all the great luminaries on it, Benjamin Franklin and a handful of others, and they came back with a set of proposals. And their proposal was to call in the first two emissions and issue a new emission for the $6 million continental dollars that were even bigger in denomination than what they issued, and that they also pay interest yearly interest on this stuff. And Richard Smith and his diary says this was debated we debated all this and decided we can't pay interest on these continental dollars. Yeah, they're not going to be paid off and tell sometime in the future, but we can't pay yearly interest because we have no interest, or at least that was a thinking. And so we were going to keep these things as what we'd call zero coupon bonds there's no interest paid. It's not like a US Treasury bond. That's more like a US savings bond you buy us savings bond, and the face value you don't get until some future date, but you don't get any interest payments in the meantime, you know. So, they basically debated whether to make this an interest bearing bond, or a non interest bearing bond, and they decided to keep it as a non interest bearing bond. So, why don't we go ahead a slide. This kind of shows Richard Smith was involved in New Jersey paper money. And here we kind of see as New Jersey issued more paper money to fight in this case, the French and Indian War. They staggered it forward in time. As each mission came out they had redemption move forward and forward in time, and they spread each mission had, you know, a two to six year window. They kept moving it forward in time. But if you look down at the bottom line they kind of keep taxes, the amount of taxes needed to redeem this constant. So that was kind of how people thought yeah they're going to issue more of the stuff. It's going to be paid off further and further in the future, so that tax levels would stay pretty constant going into the future so that we could, we could pay these. So this is an example of New Jersey's paper money issued during the French and Indian War. If you look at it, you can see Richard Smith is one of the endorsers down below that's his signature in the middle there. So he knew a lot about paper money his brother, Samuel Smith was the treasure of New Jersey and involved in issuing New Jersey paper money. New Jersey paper money also had the silver content to be paid off printed on it. You know, so it's very much like the continental dollar you print what the silver content would be the resolution tells you some future data be ill that it would be paid off. So anyway, Richard Smith knew a lot about this needs the only person I found commented on a lot of the decisions being made. Let's move forward one more slide. This you can't really read unless you blow it up but Congress issued like how did people know all this Congress issued a broad side for the first submission, June of 1775, and it listed the resolution and in that resolution. They listed list the amount of paper money being issued. It's denominational structured and they also list what each state owes at these future dates starting in 1779. And it lists the species redemption up in other words it lists all the information, and I went through and this broad side besides the broad side being issued. I was picked up by most of the newspapers in the colonies and reprinted in full. And I went through all the surviving newspapers, and at least in the northern states. You know, over half of them printed this broadside people knew what was what was being designed here. Not as often found in some of the newspapers in the southern states. But if you go from the middle states north. This information was out there. In the second emission that gets printed in newspapers as well like the Pennsylvania evening Gazette. And it also gets revealed when they publish the proceeds of the journals the continental Congress. Okay, let's look at some continental dollars here. The other things they had to decide so they had all these decisions to make. They had to decide what the stuff be illegal tender or not. A lot of controversy during the colonial period over making colonial paper monies illegal tender or not. The colonies tended to make their individual paper money, illegal tender, the British parliament didn't like that. They passed resolutions prevent the colonies from making their paper monies illegal tender. The new continental dollar and does the continental Congress decide to make it illegal tender when the issue. No they don't. The initial resolution said nothing about legal tender. Exactly why I don't know. As far as I can tell, Congress may have thought it didn't have the power to make these pieces of paper a legal tender starting, you know, kind of middle of the Revolution. 1777 Congress turned to the individual states and asked them to make the continental dollar a legal tender within each state. Now why they did this again was a little unclear. Initially, most of the continental dollars were being used to pay troops. And they set troop pay in 1775. And soldiers had to take these as pay they had no choice here this is your soldier here's this pay. So you didn't need a legal tender law there. But by the time you get to 1777. Most of the continental dollars are now being spent, not necessarily on troop pay, but on supplies in the marketplace are going to purveyors and vendors and others and they're saying we need food for the troops. We need clothing, we need firearms we need gun we need to buy stuff. And the problem they face there is purveyors in the marketplace could refuse to accept the stuff now we don't want to take it. And I think they had to move turn to the states and so you got to make this a legal tender so we can force people to accept it in payment for the goods that that were where we need for the for the army. An individual states moved and did this and by the time you get to the eighth admission. At the end of 1777. The northern states had made this stuff a legal tender, and that's it could be used as a currency throughout all the states. The last thing I'm going to discuss and it's something that no one's really talked about much is they also had to. This is a new money they had to make a choice over denominational spacing and denominational size. It's a little bit of an esoteric topic, but we're going to create a new money. How do we count in it. What are the numbers going to be. So let's go forward three slides. There we go. I went through and I in the resolutions, they list the denominations that they're going to issue this paper money in. As far as I can tell, so this is a choice they had to make this is a new choice. As far as I can tell, they chose the most bizarre and unusual denominational spacing I've ever seen and any money historically or current effort. What are they doing most these people had been involved in monetary issues and their colonies before the revolution. But if you look at here in terms of the denominations in terms of Spanish silver dollars. Most of the emissions come in in in denominations of a $1 bill $2 bill $3 bill $4 bill $5 bill $6 bill and then $8 bill. And you look across the core that's where most of it is. There's one emission number three they have some fractions of the dollars the only time they do that. And then they have a few issued and larger denominations like a $20 bill or a $30 bill. But this, you know, from one to eight units. So our money today. When people analyze the denominational spacing so we got a one penny a 5 cent, a 10 cent, a 25 cent, a 50 cent than a $1 bill a $2 bill, a $5 bill a $10 bill a $20 bill a $50 bill $100. The spacing there people look at that spacing and say well why do we get that spacing we don't have a, you know, a $3 or $4 or $5 or $6 bill. So it has to do with how you divide things out and how you make change how easy it is to make change with this stuff. In addition, they point out that you tend to focus on units that are easily divided by five and 10. So they'll study this they said well you know it has to do with the convenience of making change and being able to divide by units of five that's why we have a $1 bill a $2 bill than a $5 bill than a $10 bill and a $20 easy division. So trying to figure out this is they don't talk about it anywhere no one says why they did this. In addition, the denominational size and a lot of people haven't looked at this is very large. That lowest denomination and most of these the $1 or the $2 bill.  Just to give you an idea, a $1 bill $1 continental bill paid for an entire week's room and board for a soldier in Philadelphia. That's how big it is. So if you're going to use it as money and buy anything other than something really big, you got to make change, but you'd have to make change in something else. You couldn't make change in continental dollars. You had to make change and either state money, or in this case colonial, each state issued his own paper money, or in some kind of barter good or book credit or something like that. It's very difficult to use at a medium of exchange, given that the smallest unit is a really big piece of money. So I spent a lot of time looking at, well, why did they do this, why did they do this is very bizarre they had to choose to do this. And they knew better, unless they had some purpose. And I think and again they don't tell us this we have to deduce it. I think the purpose was most of this is being spent on soldiers pay, especially early on. And what they're hoping is that soldiers are simply hold this money until after the Revolution, and then redeem it at face value that they won't spend it as currency. That's very difficult to spend this currency. Now, when they start buying products in the marketplace, food, clothing for soldiers, then it has to be spent more as money and they have to make it a legal tender but it's still pretty big money. And but when they make it a legal tender, it means you can make change in in state paper monies. So when you make it a legal tender, you're going to spend this continental dollar even this $1 bill is a big piece of money, and they're going to make change say in Pennsylvania pounds or in Virginia pounds, which is in smaller units. And so I think what's going on is they're trying to engage in kind of a market separation where the day to day currency is the individual states paper money. And the continental dollar are these big unit paper monies that people will tend to hold and not spend too long. So I think that's part of what their goal was. Let's go to the next slide. I went through and I looked at all the paper monies from the individual states during the revolution during the first couple years of the revolution. And also the paper monies issued during the seven years war which is a comparable kind of by war problem for money issued during by the individual colonies and I tried to contrast that to the continental doll. What you see down below is the content. This is based on the percentage of units above a certain value. So I put all this into 2012 US dollars to give you some sense. If you look at this one, there's no continental dollars that are smaller than I say a $5 bill today. The continental dollars are in really large units. So it's like walking around with with continental dollars and and they're like $50 bills or $100 bills in your pocket really hard to spend, unless you make change in something else. If you look at the other states, the states issued money in much smaller denominations. New York and Pennsylvania, New Jersey, they have a huge percentage of their money is like below a $10 bill. So it's, it's in small units so it's easy to use and day to day transactions. So I think they were initially trying to enter a world where day to day transactions were in state paper monies. And these continental dollars were like big bond units that people would hold on to. And the only state that was different than this and you can see it in the picture is New York. During the seven years war during the seven years war in New York issued paper money that was really big and not small, no small units and I, and yet during the Revolution, New York issued a lot of small unit paper money. It's something never been noticed before. So I think maybe New York and this delegation and Governor Morris and James Dwayne and so on were saying, Well, we got to issue these big units like what New York did during the seven years war. And since they're doing that during the Revolution, New York can issue small units for trading, but it really makes the continental dollar very different and distinct kind of money. Okay, let's go back to the pictures the continental dollars. There we go. So they had all these choices to make and a lot of the choices have to do with this, you know, richness diary and then deducing what the tax rates might be. Now I'm going to finish up here by saying okay. They initially made these choices. And they're made by the whole Congress sitting as a group. And after the second emission they kind of break out into subcommittees and through the cracks decisions aren't made at all. After the second emission. And then says when emissions, like three through eight are going to be redeemed, not until you get to 1779 when the Congress is a whole city and says oops, we never said when these other emissions are going to be reading. And so individuals have to kind of forecast and guests, based on the patterns they saw in the first two emissions, what, when this future stuff is going to be reading. And if they're guessing farther in the future. That means the stuff is going to slowly lose value present value as the redemption gets pushed farther and farther in the future. So what happens is the continental dollar declines and in present value up through 1779 because the forecast is the future emissions won't be redeemed until 1020 30 years in the future. So like a US savings bond today the current value is very low and it's only 20 years from now that it's going to pay you the present value.  Now, up through 1779 my by my accounting is that about 77% of congressional spending were these continental dollars. But as they issue more and more of these dollars and the expectation is they won't be redeemed until way out in the future. The first thing power of these dollars is getting lower and lower until they get to the point where they just can't keep doing this, and thus the last they kept the last emission in 1779 and they say we're not going to issue any more than 20 million of this stuff. And that means after 1779 they have no way of funding the revolution. They try a bunch of different schemes but boy they're they're relying a lot on foreign gifts. And it's really the French and the Spanish and the Dutch that come in that kind of save the funding of the revolution after 1779, and some of the work by Robert Morris as superintendent of the finance because the continental dollar basically run its course by 1779 it lost its purchasing power, because any new emissions wouldn't be redeemed until sometime way in the future. I think I've run my course and I'm going to stop here. There's a lot more in the book, a lot more in the book than what I talked about. In particular, there's a lot dealing with how they engaged in thinking about and pricing the continental dollar over time, and how it really didn't depreciate until after 1779. It's current value decline. But people didn't expect a loss of principle the face value they thought was going to be paid off it just wouldn't be paid off until way in the future. So present value was a lot lower. Realize and start thinking oh I'm going to lose principle they're not going to pay off even the face value in the future until Congress started altering the rules in late 1779 and 1780. And then people started thinking, well maybe they're not going to pay off on this at all. And we start getting true depreciation in terms of a loss of expected principle pay off. And that's actually what happened when you get to the 1790 funding act where they say well, we'll convert this into interest bearing bonds but only at 100 to one on the dollar and people thought you're not going to pay off on the principle. And that's where it ended up. I'm going to stop here I'm going to thank you thank the audience for tuning in.


Once you have decided on a local development environment, you will also need to install the WordPress core files to set up a working WordPress site on your computer. Tools like localWP, DevKinster and VVV all include a way to automatically create a new local site and install WordPress for you. To do this, you'll need to check the documentation for your chosen tool and you can skip this lesson. However, if you decide to use something like MAMP or SHAMP, you will need to install WordPress yourself, which is what you will learn in this lesson. While knowing how to install WordPress manually is not an essential skill, it is a good idea to understand the process if you ever need to do it. Before you can install WordPress, you will need to know the following details about your local development environment. The location of the document root or webroot folder. This is the folder that your local development environment uses to serve files to the web browser. The database details. This includes the database server name, database name, the database username and the database password. On local development environments, the database server name is usually localhost and the database username is often root. The database password is either blank or the word password. You may need to create a new database for your WordPress site. The URL of your local site. This is the URL that you will use to access your local site in a web browser. It's a good idea to refer to the documentation for your chosen local development environment to find out this information before installing. The first step is to download the WordPress core files. You can do this from the Get WordPress page on the WordPress.org website. Click on the Download WordPress button to download the latest version of WordPress, which is available as a zip file. Depending on your browser, you may be prompted to save the file or it may be downloaded automatically. It may also default to being saved in your downloads folder or a custom folder if you have one set up. If you are on a Mac using Safari, the zip file may be automatically extracted for you. If not, you will need to extract the files from the zip manually.  If you open that folder, you'll see all the core WordPress files. The next step is to copy the WordPress files to the document root of your local development environment. Once you have copied the WordPress files to your local development environment, you can now install WordPress. To do this, browse to the URL of your local site in a web browser. This will start the WordPress installation process. The first step is to choose a language. Once you've chosen the language, click on the blue Continue button. You will be presented with a screen that explains what information you will need to complete the installation. Click on the Let's Go button to continue. You will now be asked to enter the database details. This includes the server name, database name, username and password. You will also need to choose a table prefix or accept the default value. Once you've entered all the details, click on the Submit button. If the database details are incorrect, you will be presented with an error message. You will need to check the database details and try again. If the database details are correct, you will be presented with a screen that confirms the installation is ready. During this process, a WPconfig file will be created in the root of your WordPress installation. This file contains all the database details you entered and is used by WordPress to connect to the database. Click on the Run the Installation button to continue. WordPress will use the database details to connect to the database and create the database tables. You will now be asked to enter some information about your site. This includes the site title, admin username and password and the admin email address. A secure password will be generated for the admin user but you can change it if you want to. You can also choose whether to discourage search engines from indexing your site but this is largely irrelevant on a local site. Once you have entered all the details, click on the Install WordPress button to continue. This process will create the admin user in the user table, admin user ID one and it will also set up the default site options. You will now be presented with a screen that confirms the installation is complete. You can log into your local site using the admin username and password you entered previously. Congratulations, you've successfully installed WordPress on your local development environment. For more information on this process, you can refer to the how to install WordPress section in the developer documentation on WordPress.org.


So me and a friend were chatting the other day and we got into the topic of package fried noodles and two in particular that we were talking about, Pasecaton which is a package fried noodle which is hugely popular in the Philippines and Migore, which is another popular fried noodle in Indonesia. So we got chatting and eventually the bakeup kind of heated and my friend was like, Migore is so much better than Pasecaton and of course me being the Filipino got a little bit offended and I was like no Pasecaton is so much better than Migore and I can prove it to you with science. So I had 12 participants and I had them try both Pasecaton and Migore and I had them vote on which one they thought tasted best. They didn't know which one was Migore and which one was Pasecaton. Lucky me is Pasecaton and Indomie is Migore, two of the biggest fried noodle brands from Southeast Asia. Who will win? All right, have you ever had Pasecaton or Migore before? Migore, yes. Yeah? Yeah. No. I had Migore. What? You haven't had both? No. No. What is that? I've only had Migore. We don't have this in Korea. No. I've had both. What? What? Just Migore. I haven't had either. Jump into it. Go with A. Which one's A? Left side. All right. Or right side. You're right side. All right. Okay. Looks like no flavor though. Okay. Well, that's what you get when you get white and brown. It looks like- White is no flavor. Brown is flavor. Okay. Okay. Very juicy. It's so bad. It's pretty good. I like my noodles. How I like my woman. So you're like white. Oh no, you're like brown. Long and stringy. I kind of like things white. Do you have like a fork? Bro, you don't want to use chopsticks? Thank you. Is it nice like after a kick? It sits on the tongue really well. I have to feed this to my baby. Kind of dry. It's a little bit dry. Yeah. It's pretty dry. Yeah, that's why she's crusty. Bruh. Where'd you even grow up? It doesn't taste like anything.  Tastes pretty good. It's a bit plain though. It's like me before a tan. Land, no personality, you know? Nice bouncy texture. Whoever cooked it, good job they didn't overcook it. I just love noodles. Pretty good. I liked it a lot. I gave like 9 out of 10. Do you really not know how to use chopsticks? Dude, I- It doesn't matter what you used to eat. It's actually pretty bad. It's like 1 out of 10. I'll give it like a 3 because my tongue was entertained. Okay. Okay, try me. Okay. Oh man, this is like sparkling with joy. It's just like flying on a rainbow. Yeah. There's a significant difference, I think. The flavor like pops in your mouth. There's no taste like coffee. Oh, spicy coffee. I definitely like this one better. It has a coffee smell. That one has a mushroom.  Not before school though. No. Noodles is like a lunch or dinner meal. You don't eat noodles for breakfast. This is how I like my woman with bite. So good. I can't have it get enough of this, This one's better. I like B. B. B. B. 12 out of 10. 12 out of 10. Yeah. Um, B tastes better. If I had to choose between A and B out of B. But this one, it's just got like more of a experience. Yeah, it's more flavor. It's more flavor to it. It's brown. Both are browns. Flavor town. Brown is flavor town. And the winner was... So this experiment went a little bit different than I thought it was going to go. An incredible 12 to 0 voted on migoring. So yes, I was wrong. There you have it. According to at least this sample size of 12, migoring is the better fried noodles. Anyways, I'm a little bit salty. Not as salty as migoring. Hit like, hit subscribe, and hit that notification bell. And until next time.


Hi again, in this lesson, we're going to talk about that how to create an NAMPi array in Python programming language. First, what we need to do is to import NAMPi module. So we will say import NAMPi. If you do not have this module already installed on your computer, you need to open your command prompt and type command pip install NAMPi and press enter and after few seconds installation of this module will begin and you will install NAMPi module to your computer. Now what we want to do is to create an array. So we're going to call our NAMPi module and to call array method, in which we will put a list of integers. For example, let's say 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Okay, let's make it 10 and when I press enter, you can see that our array of integers is being created. In Python, array cannot contain different elements of different types. So if you want to put integers, you can't put any other data types. That's all in this lesson. Thanks for watching. Bye-bye.


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But welcome to speeding up WordPress. So before we get started, real quick, I do quite a bit of things. So since we're late, I'm not going to dive into all this. But I teach web development. And I also own an agency that we create digital marketing products, such as plugins and various SaaS apps as well as an agency side where we have clients. So let's get to the actual why we're here. So why does speed matter? Has anyone heard that speed matters for SEO? Has anyone heard that before? OK, yes. That's a huge factor. When it comes to SEO, almost every search engine optimization, almost every search engine, almost everything out there has speed as a factor. So that's a really big factor. But maybe you don't care about that for whatever reason. It also, many, many studies have shown that your conversion rate is also dependent on speed. So for example, if you're selling something or you're trying to get someone to sign up for your email list or you're trying to get them to download your e-book or do something on your website, for every second you have a drastic decrease in the amount of people that do what you want them to do. So in today's session, we're going to go over things you can do to speed up your website. So I already mentioned that. So we'll go on. So when it comes to conversions, there's a few stats I just want to throw at you real quick. Walmart found that when page load increased to four seconds, conversions decreased dramatically. So even four seconds reduces your time frame. Now Google hopes you to be loading under a second. That is what they look for. A lot of us are probably not there yet. But that is the goal is to get it loading less than a second. Now, 79% of dissatisfied customers will not come back if the site is slow. So if you have a slight site and it sounds really interesting, they try to go to it and it's really slow, four out of five people will not try to go back later. They'll see it. They're like, oh, I don't want to go that site. That's site slow. They'll move on. 47% of customers expect pages to load within two seconds. So if you test your site and you're at three or four seconds, then you're losing over half the people that could be going to your website. And then lastly, 16% are willing to wait up to five seconds on a mobile page. So if your site is taking a while to load, most people on mobile phone will leave your website. So those are some numbers to help back up why we care about speed. So hopefully that's somewhat convincing since we're rushed to that part. But if not, it is really important to have your site fast. And that's why we're focusing on it today. So the very first thing we need to do before you can actually know what you need to do to improve your site is to figure out how fast it is and what it's currently performing at. And to do that, there's a few tools we can use to figure that out. So on the screen, I have a couple tools that are listed. These are my personal favorites, but there's actually hundreds of them. If you were to Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo website speed test, you're going to find hundreds of them. But the ones that tend to be the better ones are the ones listed on the screen. So we have Pingdom. And this is a nice free tool. It's tools.pingdom.com. GTmetrics is nice. It's gtmetrics.com. They also have a WordPress specific test. So if you enable the WordPress option there, they'll give you some data and tips based around WordPress sites. So that's really handy. Google page speed insights. This is really nice because it's by Google. So they know what they're looking for for their search engine. So probably the things they're highlighting there is probably things they care about in their search results. So that's one that I like to use as well. Lastly, if you're somewhat familiar with the developer tools in most browsers, they also have a speed test there. That's a little bit more technical, so I'm not going to go over that part today. But we are going to look at Pingdom in just a moment. Does anyone have questions on those before I dive into one of those? Any questions so far? Great. So if the internet's going to play, I'm going to attempt to run through one of these. And while that's loading, if it loads, most of these work exactly the same way. You just type in your URL, and then hit Scan. And they'll come back with a grade rating. So usually it's A, or B, or C, or D, or E, or F. Sometimes it's on a 0 to 100 scale, and it just gives you a number. Yes? Yes. So the Google developer tools, I don't think that's going to load, but the Google developer tools, what that does is just reloads the page using the browser itself. So your internet speed will play factor there. Whereas these other three tools, they use their server to run it. So you're going to get slightly different numbers depending on what your internet connectivity is. It's good to probably do both. If you know how to do both, it'd probably be best to do both. But does that answer your question? OK, great. So we'll let that run. We'll just jump back to the slides for now and see that ever comes out. So when it comes to these numbers or grade scale, they're going to give you a variety of things that you need to look into. And we're going to go over some of those terms today. But the very first thing that matters when it comes to speed is your host thing. If you go and find host thing on a provider that advertises $0.99 a month or free, you're probably not going to have a fast site. So speed matters a lot. And hosting providers know that. And the really good ones maintain their servers. And they give you really good resources. They do a lot of things. But if you're paying for really cheap hosting or free hosting, they're not doing that for your site. So that's something to consider. Now you can get inexpensive hosting for relatively cheap from good companies. Most of the sponsors here have plans starting at $5 or $6 a month. So you don't have to spend hundreds to get good host thing. But if you're spending $1 or $0.99, it's probably not going to be good hosting. And when it comes to this, I'm not going to get super technical right here. But when it comes to hosting, when you're looking at it, things like the bandwidth levels, the resources, the RAM, the memory, even the site storage and the type of storage it's on, all of those numbers matter. So if you're looking at hosting and you're comparing different numbers, and one says maybe two cores, one says eight cores, you don't have to actually understand how all these work. But knowing the higher the number is usually better means more resources are behind your website. So for example, you might not know exactly how the memory works, but if something says, oh, you have 512 megabytes, and the other one says you have 5 gigs, that's good. Usually the higher is better. Same thing with the cores, same thing with a lot of the other numbers. So looking for higher capacity servers in your hosting plan will help tremendously in the long run. A lot of the things we're going to go over is going to help a lot. But having good hosting should always be the very first step. Does that make sense? Does anyone have questions on that? Does anyone want to ask about a particular hosting provider? I don't want to recommend one because I know there's a lot of people, but yes. They're OK. I've had really bad experiences with them, but they are a really good sponsor in this space, so I don't want to say really bad things. But they're OK. They're definitely not the worst, but they're OK. Luckily, the ones that I consider the worst are not sponsors today. So I can say the I-page and one-on-one tend to be the worst in speed tests and security tests and everything else you can think of. And they're the ones that advertise $0.99 a month. That's why I throw out those. But as long as you're not on those two, usually you're at least a step up. Yes? That's a good one. It's a little bit costlier. So I don't know. That might not be in everyone's budget. But WP Engine, if you're looking for the best, the managed WP hosts tend to be really good. So Pagely, WP Engine, Flywheel, A2 host things starting up their own version. So those tend to be really good on the higher end, but they also are a little bit pricier. So that depends on your budget. Does anyone have a yes? I'm sorry? LiquidWeb's really good too. So most of the ones that you see around the WordCamps tend to be really good. So we see LiquidWeb a lot. We see DreamHost is OK. And we see it. So most of those tend to be OK. Pressable's a really good one. Yes? That's a good mid-tier one. So for the price, it's really good. So that one's OK. Hey, Frank. Yes? So what's interesting is, so we look at this lower one, and we go, wow, $3.95 a month. Well, the middle one, that's $6.95 a month. That's like double the cost. $6.95. I mean, come on, people. Let's spend $10 a month, or $15 or $20. You're paying for better performance. And so we think, well, this one's twice as expensive, and we're talking about dollars here. When it comes to, depending on your budget, that's why I try to throw in a variety of options. Like SiteGround starts off $6.95 a month, and then DreamHost and Bluestar like $4.95 a month. So if your budget's non-existent or really small, those are going to be OK. If that's what your budget is, those are fine. But if you can, if this business matter is super important to you, and you're making some money off of it, get it going on a slightly higher plan is probably a good idea. But I'm not going to say you have to do that, because not everyone has that kind of budget. So just to clarify. So there's a lot of terms with hosting. And I've given talks on this before, and it's like entire talks around types of hosting. So I'm going to just send a quick soundbite answer. You have a variety of different types of hosting. So you have shared hosting, you have VPS, you have dedicated, virtual, they have a whole other term for it. They manage hosting and dedicated servers. Each one has an extra level of resources and dedication to your site. So when you're on shared hosting, such as on HostGator or the lower tiers of Bluehost and Dreamhost, then if you have some site and a person next to you has some site, and they have a lot of traffic one day, they're using some of your resources, slowing down your website. So that's where shared hosting is can be a downside, but they're also the cheapest. So depending on your budget, it's a great place to get started, as long as you're on an OK host. And then once you can move up to something such as the use cloud, but almost technically all of these are in the cloud, so it's a loose definition there. But if you can transition up to a more virtual system, so SiteGround has dedicated virtualization, so your resources aren't being used by other people's resources. And some of the higher plans on Bluehost and Dreamhost, they have those as options. So that would be where you would move up into one of those better ones, depending on what your budget is. But when you see the word cloud, that's such a thrown around term that some people even label shared hosting as cloud, or dedicated servers. So don't worry about that term. I would ignore that term in those cases. Any other questions on hosting before we go to the next? Oh, yes. So WordPress.com is a slightly different beast when it comes to hosting. They're really good in terms of, if you had to have a map of all the different hosting providers, WordPress.com would be at least in the middle, if not higher. So they're an OK one, depending on what your goals are with the business. Last one. That was a really fun one. It's a little bit more technical, so not everyone's going to be able to jump into that one. But that's good. Usually when it comes to S3, SES, and light sale on all the Amazon properties, they tend to be really good. So after you establish some hosting provider that you are comfortable with and you think they're going to be fast, the next major factor is your theme. And this is a fun number. If you have a good theme and you have a bad theme, a bad theme can make your site four times as slow as the good theme equivalent. So that's massive. If your site could be loading under a second, and you switch to a bad theme, now it's loading at four seconds. Now 84% of the mobile users are leaving your site. So that's a dramatic change that's really important. So when it comes to themes, you want to select a good theme. Finding quality theme providers. So I listed three, but these are just three out of hundreds, so I don't feel like you have to use these exact three. But I want to list some examples. Finding a good theme developer or a good theme agency is very important. Now when it comes to repository, if you're finding a free theme, it's not something that you could easily be like, oh, who's this developer? What's the quality? There's a little bit more to it than that. So the thing I suggest is running the theme demos through one of those speed tests. So almost every theme you find, whether it's on theme forest or repository, they usually have a site somewhere set up as a demo. So if you run that through a speed test and compare that to another theme's demo, you can speed test both those and see if maybe one's potentially faster. Now the issue is that there's a lot of factors that play there. There's their own hosting provider. Maybe some options they have. So it's not an exact one-to-one test. That's a great way to get started in comparing themes in terms of speed. Does that make sense, everyone? Yes. I haven't played with it yet because it's fairly new. But when it comes to studio press, usually I trust most of the things they do. But I haven't personally played with it, so I don't have any data for you. Any question on testing a theme or what to look for? Yes. Yes, the Divi builder line. So the company's elegant theme, so I just list that so most of the themes there tend to be really good as well. So a few slides ago, I had the four listed. So you could do the Pingdom and enter the URL from the theme demo is what I'm referring to. Yeah, so there's a plug-in and a couple of things out there that test the quality of code.  But if you're interested, we can maybe chat afterwards. So the theme now, when it comes to the actual theme features, since there's so many different themes and they all have different functions, I can't dive into every single particular theme right now. But the first thing to test is that speed test and then going from there. And then a couple of things to remember is usually if a theme has more features and more customizations, there's a lot more processing going on the background, meaning they'll probably be slower. So when it comes to themes and you're picking out themes, it's better in most cases to choose one theme that does something really well, like a photography theme, and they only have photography, as opposed to a general purpose theme that has thousands upon thousands of options. Because when you configure all those different options, now it has to process all those options when you're loading the page. Now, not all things. Some things do things really well. The Avada theme, for example, has thousands of options. And they do things a little bit different, so they're better than some of the more general purpose themes. So that's not all themes are bad in that case. But it'd be something to consider. More features it has means more processing it has to do, meaning it generally could be slower than a single purpose theme. Does that make sense? Yes? So AVAD8, one of the most popular premium themes out there, and yes. I don't personally like it, but I know it's so popular, so I try not to say anything bad against it. But what's nice, they're much better now. Two years ago, they had all the code would run all of the time, so it was a really bad theme. But since they have more modularized it, so you can turn off entire feature sets. So that's a good step. They'll never be faster than a single purpose theme, though, because of those options. But they are when it general purpose, they're one of the better ones. Any questions on that before I? Yes? Oh, sure. So the three examples I had listed were studio press, elegant themes, and i-themes. Now i-themes has started to discontinue their themes. They're moving away from themes. But those are three as an example. Usually those are good quality. But there's lots of good quality ones out there, too. So any questions on themes before we? Page rollers are a really big topic right now, so I don't want to say too many negative things there, but it could, depending on how much you have going on the site. So some of them, if you went crazy and built out a massive page with page rollers that all have all these extra options and all this, it could have an issue, as opposed to something that's just typed into the regular editor. But it really depends on the page roller and exactly what you're creating. So not always would be the answer there. Any questions on themes before we go to the next? You're saying that the page roller is not bad. Well, Divi is technically two different things. So there's a Divi theme system, and then there's a Divi builder. So the Divi builder is one of the better page rollers. I'm not saying page rollers are bad. Page rollers are OK. I was just, it could be used incorrectly if you went crazy with it, is my point there. But any questions on themes before it? Yes. Page rollers are a really lengthy conversation. It really depends on how you're using it and what specifically page rollers you're using. In general, page rollers are OK. I don't want to say page rollers are a bad idea. In general, they're OK. I want to get carried away with all the different configurations you could do there. Would be my only warning there. But in general, they're OK to use. Just to clarify, did that help the answer there? Did that give you an answer? So the page builders, they kind of sit on top of the theme. So usually, as long as your theme's OK, there's not a significant difference between using one theme or another with a page builder. That doesn't usually make much of a difference as long as it makes the difference theme-wise but not interacting with page builder-wise. So that aspect wouldn't matter as much as comparing two themes against each other. So does that answer your question? OK, great. Anything else on themes before we go to the next? OK. So the next question I get asked all the time is how many plugins are too many? And I'm sure you've had that question. Or you've heard that question. That's a really popular question in the WordPress space. And the answer is there is no right answer there. Because every site is different and every plugin is different. So for example, if you had a plugin that gives you a single shortcode, it's a really small plugin. You could have hundreds of those and it would barely affect your performance. Whereas if you have something like WooCommerce or Jet Pack or something that's much more meatier and you had 100 of those type of plugins, your site would be so slow no one could use it. So it really depends on the type of plugin. An average site averages around 20 to 30 plugins. So if you're well under that, then you're probably OK. Now if you're well over that, then you probably want to ask this question, do you need that plugin? So almost every plugin you have out there, I'm sure you could say, oh, I really love that. I love that someone can see an animated icon. As I go, you probably don't need that though. Every plugin you add adds a performance issue with your website, even if it's a really tiny one. But it does have something there. It loads extra files. It loads extra processing. So every plugin you add can affect your performance. So the least amount you can use, the better. Now you don't have to delete all your plugins, but having less is better than having more. But there is no right answer to how many should I have. I think I pretty much said that. So if you do not use a plugin often, deactivate it. So if it's something that you use once a year or once every six months, don't even leave it running. If you can avoid it, you could just deactivate it. And that way you don't have to worry about it until you go to use it again, depending on the exact plugin. So for example, if you have a plugin that manages a contest for whatever reason, and you only run that contest once every six months, then there's no reason to really have that performance conflict on your site all those other times when you only run it that one day every six months. Depending on the type of contest, naturally. So and then the other thing is that if you don't use it at all, go ahead and just delete it. So all the code on your site, if you leave it active and you're not using it ever, then just go ahead and delete it. There's no reason to have that going against your performance. Does that make sense? I know saying there is no right answer is not the best thing you're probably looking for. But is that any questions on maybe plugins or what you're after? Yes, sir? So there's a few different answers there. In terms of speed, no. So in terms of speed, if it's not active, that code's not being run, it's not doing anything processing. But in terms of security and all these other things, it's probably best practice told to delete it if you're not using it. But in terms of speed, there's no performance thing. Yes? A little bit, we're going to go over a couple things in just a moment that are directly applicable. But when it comes to WooCommerce, there's a lot of other factors at play. So there's a little bit more things you could do beyond the stock. But there's quite a bit in the rest of the stock that are still directly applicable. Any questions on plugins before we? So when it comes to after we worry about our hosting, we worry about our themes, we look to the plugins a little bit. The next major step is something called caching. How many people have never heard of caching before? Is that a thing that some people? OK, do you know exactly what it is for those who don't? OK, a little bit. OK, so in caching, unfortunately, it's this word that people use a lot in a lot of different settings. So it doesn't always mean the same thing. But in a very basic definition is that it creates versions of a page and resources that can load a little bit faster instead of having to run through processing. So there's a lot more technical jargon that I could throw in there. But in a very basic version, it creates a copy or some version of resources that don't have to run through processing. So for example, every time you go to your website, if you went to your home page right now without caching, then it has to load up. It has to pull out the data from the database. It has to pull out the content of the page. It has to bring out the title. It has to process your layout. It has to do all this processing stuff in order to show that page. So caching at a few different levels will run all that processing and then create a copy of that and go, hey, here's the final version. So anytime that anyone goes to your website, they go, oh, here's the final version. We don't have to go through all that processing again. So it can remove all that processing step and only show them the final version. So that's a caching in a nutshell. Does that make sense before I go into some more examples? OK. So when it comes to caching, there's a few different levels of caching. So for example, there's server level caching. So this is sort of what I was just explaining, where something makes a copy of the final version of your page. So depending on who you host with, they may have this enabled. This is not something that we usually do ourselves unless you're managing your server environment yourself. But a lot of the higher end hosting providers will do this set for you, but not always. And so what server caching will do is almost exactly what I was saying, where they monitor your pages and they make direct copies of it. And then if someone tries to go to a particular page, they'll send them that copy instead of having run through all the processing. And then when you make a change, sometimes the server caching will do something called purge the cache for that page. And that's where they'll run through that process again to create a new copy of that page to make it much faster just sending that page instead of running the processing. Does that make sense? Is that confusing to anybody? OK. So if you have the option, server cache is really great because it's outside of the WordPress ecosystem. But most everyday hosts, that's not an option for most people. So if you have the option, that's a great thing to look into, like varnish and memcache. And it's a bit technical, so not everyone can do that route. There's some hosts, like I said, some of them will do it. And that's a great avenue to pursue. Now if you can't do it, there's some plugins that'll do this at the WordPress level. So they'll do this same exact concept, except whereas the server, how the server is different, is that the server doesn't have to load WordPress to send that copy. Whereas a plugin, some of WordPress still has to load in order for the plugin to load to send that copy. So there's a slight decrease in speed between server caching and plugin caching, but not much. It's a very nominal amount. And it really depends on the exact server configuration, a plugin configuration, which is well beyond the scope of this talk. But the three plugins that you probably have seen at least one of these at some point, it's W3 Total Cache, Super Cache, and Breeze. All three of these do pretty much the same exact thing, where you turn it on, and they'll start processing and creating the cached copies of your pages. Now some of them have more finer controls, so such as W3 Total Cache and Super Cache have a bit more controls that you can say, well, this page, Never Cache, or this page, always flush when I make a change. You have a little bit more control where it's something like Breeze. It's usually you just turn it on, and it starts working. So it depends on what level you're looking for. You might want to experiment with the three different plugins. But most of them, the end goal is almost exactly the same between the three plugins. Do you have a question? Well, the thing to remember is when you purge cache, it has to run that process again. So it depends on how often you're editing and what you're changing. If you make changes, it's OK to go and just purge the cache, and for that page. If you purge all the cache through the entire site, that's not something I would recommend doing often, depending on how much changes you're making. But usually, most of these and most servers, you can have just purge the cache for an individual page. So you make a change on a page or a post. You would purge the cache for that, so it would remake that cache version of it. And because these are done fairly quickly, it's not something that you'd have to schedule, oh, I need to wait until 2 AM to purge the cache. It's not that level. So you could do it as soon as you make the change, purge it, and then move on. Unless you have a really heavy traffic site, if you're talking like thousands of visitors a day or tens or hundreds of thousands, maybe you do it a little bit different, but for most people, you could just purge it once you make the change. Yes. I'm going to mention that in a few slides, actually. OK. Any other questions on that part so far? So the last one I wanted to briefly mention is browser caching. So I know it's not up there on the slide for a second, but browser caching isn't something that most of us have control over. But how browser caching works is when we open, in this case, Safari, or Chrome, or Opera, or Internet Explorer, or Edge, or any of the other ones, some of them will do browser caching. And what this does is it downloads some of the files from your site and keep them within the browser. So the next time a user goes to your site, they only use the files local, and they don't have to redownload them from your website. This is a natural process. Most browsers do this automatically. So it's not something you can really do or change. But that might, every now and then, you might make a change. And a user is like, oh, I don't see this change. And you'll have to ask them to empty their browser cache. And that's how that system works. It's not something that we usually interact with. These are something browsers do all themselves. But it's something to be aware of. Just in case you do make a change, their browsers might still have the old change, depending on what you changed. So that'd be another thing to consider. Does that make sense with caching? Yes. So that's slightly more technical. So do you have a specific question about it? Or are you just asking in terms of, so it's probably at plug-in or server level? So the network level, it's not something. There's lots of extra caching out. There's actually object caching and database caching. There's a lot more to caching than this brief example. So it could be at a variety of levels. But that would be a question for your hosting provider, and just be like, hey, what's going on with the caching here? I can't seem to purge it. And they'll probably, because they have giant logs, they can just go, oh, well, this is what's going on, and we can fix that. That's probably where you should start with that question. Depending on how you have it set up, by default, most of them will think to purge content when you change it. But if not, most of these add a little purge cache button, either on the page or in the admin toolbar, or somewhere that you can see when you're editing the page. So you would just click that button then. Well, unfortunately, none of these systems, you would think they talk to each other, but they don't. All these are independent caching. So if you have a, where's this cache at question? It could be a variety of places. So in most cases, it'd be just like clearing the plug-in cache and then checking the server cache and just clearing out until you find it. And that's, yes, sir? Oh, I thought you had some feedback to that. I thought you had another. Yes. Yes. Now, we're going to mention CDNs in a moment, but yeah, that's another spot. So there's caching everywhere. So unfortunately, most sites that are just getting started, they only deal with these couple ones. But once you get to a more advanced level where you're doing it at your own and stuff, then you start dealing with all these extra level caches. And unfortunately, there's no easy system to find out which one's still cached. I know it's probably not the answer you're hoping for, but we do, definitely, because I experience that same issue all the time. Any other question on caching before we move to offloading? OK. So offloading. So like caching, so with caching, we have this system that pre-processes everything, creates this cached copy that it can send to the browser.  So for example, what is it for? There. So for example, a CDN, if you've never heard this term before, this is an awesome system, but this is a content delivery network. This would be an example of offloading. So how content delivery networks work is they have a variety of servers across the world where they make copies of some of your files and store those all around the world. So for example, if I'm here in Atlanta and I have a site hosted here in Atlanta and someone from Jacksonville, Florida tries to access that site, it just goes down the road and goes, here's the content. Well, if someone from Seattle or Japan tries to load the website currently, then it has to send that data all the way to Japan from Atlanta or all the way to Seattle.  Here's your content here. So it makes what they're receiving get received much faster than coming from your own site. So the CDN network just makes copies of these various files and stores them at various other servers around the world, whichever is closest to whoever's trying to view the content. Now, you can offload a variety of items. So the most popular thing is usually images. But if you have maybe a lot of PDFs or zips that you, for whatever reason, they can download or buy from you, that'd be another thing you could also offload. You could also do maybe styles or scripts if you do a lot of heavy styling and scripting and things, you could also put those into CDNs or any other place. And so these would be examples of things that you could quote unquote offload. Now, there are a couple plugins that help you with this. So Amazon S3 and WPS3 offload, that's a huge mouthful, but that would be a really good option. That would offload it to the S3 system, which is in Amazon. So has everyone heard of S3 before? Is that a new term for anyone? Okay, so S3 with Amazon, they have this huge giant ecosystem of e-commerce where you go and buy stuff. But in reality, behind the scenes, they have this massive web development circle of tools. And one of these tools is something called S3, which is pretty much a collection of servers that can house files. So think of like a Dropbox or Google Drive, but for web development purposes mostly. So this is a network of these servers and they call it the S3. So that's a place that you can store some of your files. And there's quite a few plugins. This is one of the plugins that I use, Amazon S3 and WPS3 offload. But if you search in the WordPress repository, there's lots and lots of plugins that do this sort of system. Now, depending on your hosting provider, some of them will have a CDN that you could use instead and they'll handle that step for you. So for example, a flywheel, site ground, and a couple of the others, you just turn on the CDN option and then they'll start doing this for you. So if you're interested in this, that would be the first step I would recommend is looking at your hosting provider and see if they offer that option. Some of it's for free depending on what plan you're on. Some of the times it's just an extra upcharge. It just depends on the hosting provider you're with. But that would be a great first step. And then if they don't offer that, then find some offloading plugins such as the one that's listed there. Yes? Yeah, depending on, so for example, I'm gonna mention like Cloudflare and Cloudfront and a couple of those. So if you're using anything of like those, they also have this caching and CDN quite a bit that built in. But we'll get to that in just a moment. Thank you, yes. Usually they're on special servers that are configured just for like sending files. So they're not worrying about all this extra processing going on. So they tend to be faster inherently just because that's exactly what they're focused on. Not by like massive amounts, you're not gonna offload and instantly be 20 times faster. But it's because of their single use purpose. They're inherently a little bit faster and the proximity as well. Yeah, so they're still beneficial, just not as beneficial. Does that answer your question? I just gotta get that caching involved when I do. But that's right, it could be in Colorado and let me reach that guy in L. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it. So it makes sense. It's simple, it's switch, turn on the switch. I think you had a question, Chris. So the WPS3 is the foreman that offloads your stuff to Amazon, is it? Yeah, the WPS3 offload plugin. Do you have a question? Yeah, we have a client. Even if the client's gonna be local or whatever, server hosting providers, they might be in California. Yeah, if you choose a different host. So for example, GoDaddy's Phoenix, I think. I wanna say they're in Phoenix.  So that'd be another thing to consider. Thank you. Yes? So wordpress.com, there is a CDN option, I wanna say. I haven't used them recently, but I wanna say they have a CDN option switch, just like most of the hosting providers. So you would check with them first and then if not, then you would look into other CDN options, such as going to S3. Another popular one is Max CDN. Max, yes, Max CDN. That's very popular in the wordpress space. So that'd be another one to possibly look into as well. So the next big factor is images. And if you want to quickly speed up your site and you're very image heavy, then this step would be the answer. So the big question is, do your images have to be that big and almost always the answer's no. So in reality, three quarters of your users are viewing it from your phone and it's about 400 pixels wide. So if you need to load the 5,000 pixel wide image, you probably don't need that. So when it comes to images, the smaller the image file, the faster a page will load. So for example, if you go out with your nice brand new Nikon camera or Canon with that extra zoom and all these pixels, you take a picture and it's like, wow, it's only 4.5 gigabit file. We're just gonna upload that and then every user, it'll only take a half an hour to load my page. So you don't wanna do that. So the smaller the file, the less data has to be transferred to the browser, the faster your page will load. So now there's no recommended number. Now a good number to aim for is like 100 kilobits or 200 kilobytes, but that's, it really depends on your site and the type of image you're after. So if you're trying to display a photo gallery and they're really high quality or a photographer, you probably want a little bit higher quality. If you're somewhat, if it's just like icons, then that, you know, it really depends on exactly what it's after. But the number to aim for is like 100 to 200 kilobytes or smaller, preferably much smaller. That'd be a number to aim for. Definitely not anything megabytes. That would be massive. You probably don't wanna do that. Do you have a? So parallax is done usually mostly in front end code. So it's all within the browser. So depending on when that process gets started, it could be a factor, but it's not usually the image with the parallax that's the issue. So parallax and images, there are slightly different systems. They just use images. So changing the image size won't affect the parallax per se. They're loosely tied together. Does that sort of answer your question? Well, it could be both.  Whereas the parallax usually doesn't get started until the page is loaded, that the system that powers that. So usually these are at two different stages of loading. Depending on how the parallax system is built. So that just, it really depends on the exact system. But usually it's images come in, get loaded and then parallax. Unless you have some other features we'll get to in just a moment. So they're not always inherently tied together. Yes? All this bossy stuff about, you don't need any of the images up there, so I'll just put that one on. The sort set's a good point. That's a bit of what technical, so I don't want to dive into that right this second. The issue is, it is, except the themes have to actually use it the right way and the plugins have to use it the right way. So I wouldn't rely on that. So theoretically that one should be good, but it doesn't mean all the plugins you have that are displaying images are good. So that'd be something to consider there. But. So when it comes to image, but thank you for that great point. So when it comes to images, if you're asking how to get smaller files, the very first step is just smaller dimensions. That's usually the massive part. So if you have something that's 5,000 pixels wide and you only need probably like six or 700 pixels, just reducing the size of the image, the dimensions, will massively cut down the size of the image. So there's a few different ways you could do that if you have Photoshop and computer that's not everyone does, but you could even use like paint. You could use Gimp, GIMP, that's a free tool as well. There's a lot of different photo editor tools just to shrink the image down. Now within WordPress, they have a few different like you can crop and scale and stuff. So you could do a little bit there. If you have a lot of images, it'd be a real pain to do it that way. But technically there's some tools built into WordPress as well. Now from there, the second step of yes ma'am, that's a whole technical conversation. Really depends on a lot of factors that you're after. Are you asking about like the screen resolution or just what you should be aiming for? So it really depends on what you're trying to put up. If you're putting up like icons and stuff like that, but 72 is good, get started. Couple, what's the high Mac? I wanna say they're higher. I wanna say it's like 150 or 300 or that high one. I don't know that number off the top of my head, I'm not. Yeah, but they're higher version. They have that really new high one. What is it, 300? Yeah, it's up there. So it really depends on what you're after and what you're trying to display. But that would be another factor as well. Now naturally, the higher the image sizes will correlate as well. Now, so to piggyback on quality on there then, the lower the quality is, the smaller the file. Now obviously you don't wanna upload an image that's like terrible looking. So I'm not saying like, oh, make it the worst quality ever, so save space, that's not what I'm saying. But when it comes to quality of file, and you can do this in a lot of photo editors or some photo editing tools online as well, and WordPress has a somewhat okay tool. So most visitors, if you look at most the conversion studies and studies that are done on this, most visitors can't even tell the difference on most images between 70% and 100% quality. Now those percentages are the percentage of quality, so 100% is like the normal image, and then decreasing the quality down by 30% would be that, where's that 70% number come from? And most visitors can't tell the difference on most images. So there's not reason and always to use 100%. Unless your focus is like, you need super high quality photos in a certain setting, then you might wanna only decrease a little bit or not at all, but in most cases, it would be better to decrease it a little bit and to save all that extra processing time and loading time. Does that make sense, a little bit? Yes sir? I was gonna know just about the quality. I was actually about to get to that. But yeah, if you have clients or you have end users, that would be a great suggestion that first thing we mentioned, because they will not listen to what you say. You can tell your client or your users, they're like, hey, aim for this, and you'll go on and it'll be like 50 megabyte images. So any tool that restricts them is always a good one to use, definitely. What was the name of the one you recommended? And we're almost out of time, so let's just get to the last couple of slides and then we'll regroup on that. So I just wanna mention, there's our tools that help with this optimization process. So WP Smush, it's now called Smush Image Compression and Optimization. It's a really long mouthful of a name because I don't remember, they just recently changed the name, I wanna say. But that was one of the tools, this is a plugin that you can use on your WordPress site. The caveat there with plugins, you're gonna find a lot of plugins that do this. The issue is that this is running on your WordPress site, so it's taking up resources and processing power. So if you have a lot of images or you're doing a lot of stuff, it could affect some of your performance of your website. So that'd be the caveat, the throw there. Now an external service is kraken.io. This one's not free, the first one's free, the second one's not free, so depending on what you're after. But kraken.io, it starts off at fairly cheap, I wanna say like $10 a month, 15 somewhere in there.  That way the processing's not happening on your WordPress site, slowing your site down. So that just depends on where you're at and what you're trying to do. That'd be two things that you wanna consider there. So since we're almost out of time, I'll just bring up a couple of these real fast. Optimizations, so when it comes to a lot of the caching stuff that I mentioned earlier, there's a few other things that kind of play in that. That could be a little bit technical, so I just wanna briefly touch on those. So the first, the main two is concatenation and minification. So when it comes to all the different things on your site, every plugin probably has its own styles. The theme has its own styles. They all have their own scripts and they're probably all over the place with file sizes and what's going on in them. So these two steps is the process of condensing those files down and sometimes combining them into much smaller versions of themselves. So that's not something, if you're not technical, it's not something you probably do yourself, but there's a lot of plugins that do this and even most of the caching plugins, the three I mentioned earlier, W3 Total Cache, Super Cache and Breeze, they both have an option that you can turn on to enable this process. The caveat there is that not all plugins and themes will work well with these processes. So it's something you would wanna test and make sure everything still works when you turn on and then if not, turn it back off. So it'd be a caveat to consider there. Now if you're not using a caching plugin, if you're using maybe their server cache, maybe your host doesn't want you to use caching plugins, you could use the auto-optimize plugin. There's only one O in there and I always say it wrong. I don't know how they actually say it, but that plugin does this set for you without all the actual caching process. So that'd be a plugin to consider. It's actually really good. That'd be a good one to use if you wanna use these and not the caching components. So last, we have about a minute left, so last slide. So this is the keep your site tidy. So if you log into your site and you look at maybe your comment section and you see there's about 70,000 spam comments, or you look at some of your other content and there's all this extra content all over the place, this isn't each one of those, doesn't massively slow down your site, but when you're talking about hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands, these are all in the database and how WordPress works is there's a database that stores all this data and when it goes to pull out this data, it has to go through this database to find the right data. So, and most of these are very fast transactions. We're talking about fragments of a millisecond, so it's not usually something to worry about, but when you have so much of something, it does have to go through all those to find the things it's after. So can inherently slow down your site? Not by much, this is probably something you do towards the end or just something you do over time, just keep it up, but it's something to consider if you have a massive amount of spam comments or a massive amount of anything in there, it is extra things it has to go through slowing your site down. Does that make sense? And so last I just wanna bring up a slide of all the tools I mentioned. The only one I didn't mention is WP Sweep. This is a really handy one that you install and then deactivate and get rid of. What this does is it goes through the database and finds things that were created by plugins or things you no longer use and tries to remove some of that content. So that's a nice plugin to toss in there as well. That one's called WP-Sweep. Can everyone see that okay? Is that, do I need to move out of the way? Okay. And I wanna say this on my last slide. So I don't think we have time for questions. I think we have like a minute. Frank, are you gonna be around? Yeah, I'll be around here. Tomorrow you're gonna be around. I'm here all weekend, so. Because you're all weekend, so if you have any specific questions, good job, very important to issue some of it. Thank you, everyone.


Hi everybody, my name is Hogy and I'm the executive director here at Bedford Playhouse. I'd like for you to join me in making a gift and celebration of our 75th anniversary so the Playhouse can continue providing world-class programming and a welcoming space for our community to gather. As always, we appreciate your support and look forward to seeing you at the Playhouse soon.