Miriam Schwab Interview – “Let’s Solve Some of the Major Issues Related to Performance and Security in WordPress”

Miriam Schwab is the mastermind behind Strattic, a company that turns your dynamic WordPress website into a static one. That might not sound too enticing at first, but the idea has been known for a while, and it’s actually a great way to make your site work a lot faster.

Miriam Schwab:

After giving birth to my fourth kid I realized that I needed more flexibility and opportunity in my work. I wanted to be able to take time off to attend school events, or take care of my kids when sick, and work when I could outside of standard work hours, like after the kids went to sleep in the evening. I also wanted to work in a field that gave me an opportunity to keep learning and work with interesting people. So instead of going back to my job after she was born, I quit and went freelance.

At first, I worked as a copywriter and translator for companies, but my passion was always tech so in parallel I started to teach myself to build websites. Eventually, I felt confident enough to start offering website building services and it quickly became clear to me that I needed to give my clients the ability to edit their own sites.

I started exploring the options at the time and found the Open Source direction particularly appealing. After trying out the three big Open Source CMSs – Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress – I fell in love with WordPress and started offering WP development services to my clients.

I was one of the first in Israel to offer WP services for businesses, so when companies started proactively moving to WP I was well-positioned to take on that business and I grew from being just me to being an agency.

Miriam Schwab:

For me, productivity means staying on top of everything and keeping projects and processes moving forward. I also aim to be as efficient as possible. Here are some of the tools I use to automate and offload headspace:

• Google Calendar – if it’s not in my calendar, it’s not happening. I have two calendars – one for business and one for personal, and as soon as something needs to be scheduled, it goes in there.
• Gmelius – this app for Gmail resurfaces emails that are waiting for a response to remind me to follow up.
• TextExpander – shortcuts for text that I use repeatedly, like my email address, our website URL, my bio, etc.

I try to make sure I sleep enough, since I get up at 5:30 am every day. I also go for a walk every morning which gives me energy for the day, and I try to make sure to take breaks when I feel like my productivity is going down after sitting for many hours in front of my screen.

Miriam Schwab:

I don’t really think about whether I am successful or not. But when I have a positive impact on those around me, whether it’s my family, friends, coworkers or customers, I am happy with where I’m at. I’m very grateful that I love my work and am constantly learning new things. It’s a journey, and the journey continues to be fun and interesting, and enjoying my work feels like success to me.

Miriam Schwab:

I always laugh when people ask me what my hobbies are. I am the co-founder of a growing startup and a single mom. So I don’t have much spare time. When I do, I love to spend it with my kids, family, and friends, whether it’s taking my kids to the beach, or meeting friends for coffee.

Miriam Schwab:

I recently saw someone describe WordPress as the largest no-code project on the web. It’s true! People are always looking for the next great no-code solution, and WordPress gets overlooked even though it has persisted and grown as the most popular and widely used no-code solution!

Also, the community is awesome. It makes working with WordPress even more enjoyable.

Miriam Schwab:

Friendly.

Miriam Schwab:

Well, I created Strattic to solve some of the major issues related to performance and security in WordPress, so there’s that 🙂

Miriam Schwab:

WordPress has always been on the right track in terms of continuing to be a flexible CMS with a very robust ecosystem. However, usability was becoming an issue as drag-and-drop web builders were proliferating and WP’s editing experience started to feel really old-school and clunky.

I think the push to make Gutenberg a priority was the right strategy for strengthening WP’s position and future.

Miriam Schwab:

Get to know the communities around WP. The community is very diverse in terms of location, experience, background and business models and you can learn so much.

Miriam Schwab:

Ha, that’s the million-dollar question (literally!). Strategies and tactics that worked yesterday may not work today, and there’s a constant need for testing and adjusting. One person’s product may resonate with one type of user, while another product doesn’t speak to them at all.

So there’s no one-size-fits-all direction. Having said that, there’s one tactic that seems to always be effective, one way or another, and that’s creating quality content.

Miriam Schwab:

As I mentioned, I founded a WordPress development agency and built custom websites for companies for many years. Over the course of those years, the sites started demanding more and more of our ongoing attention in terms of security, maintenance, and performance. At a certain point, I started to wonder if continuing to work exclusively with WordPress was the right approach for our clients.

I started exploring other solutions and came across an emerging trend of static site generators (later referred to as Jamstack, headless and decoupled). I got really excited since those sites solved all the issues I mentioned above – static sites are prerendered so they are fast, WP and the server stack are gone so there’s virtually nothing to hack, and they scale infinitely.

But when I looked into what it meant to build these sites, I realized that they’re incredibly complicated, and using them would mean reinventing the wheel on a lot of things. And not only are they expensive and complicated to build, maintaining them demands a lot more developer resources.

So I came to the conclusion that WordPress is still the best CMS out there. Yay! And then I thought – well how about turning WP into a static site generator so we can get the best of both worlds – all the usability, familiarity, and tooling of WP with the speed, security, and scalability of static sites. And thus Strattic was born. 🙂

Miriam Schwab:

I don’t really know, since I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else. I’m very fortunate to have an amazing partner, Josh Lawrence, and we work on all strategic matters together. Our CTO is Zeev Suraski who co-created PHP and brings a lot of experience and wisdom to the table.

We’ve worked hard to hire amazing, smart, nice people to our team and create a friendly, supportive work environment for everyone, which makes all the difference in our day-to-day experiences.

Miriam Schwab:

We sometimes refer to our culture as “nice and nerdy”. 🙂 It’s very important to us that our work environment is respectful and supportive. We are also very family-oriented – as family people ourselves we get that your family deserves attention too and not only are we very flexible from that perspective, we see that as an integral part of our team’s lives that must be recognized and supported.

Miriam Schwab:

A quality WordPress website is one that is lean and effective. It’s a site that is efficiently built and is also strategic in terms of how it’s structured to support organizational goals.

Miriam Schwab:

I’ve always been, and continue to be, a huge fan of Yoast SEO. A site should be as optimized as possible and Yoast SEO is an amazing, forward-thinking tool that puts a lot of power in the hands of website managers.

Miriam Schwab:

At Strattic we love all our customers, for real. We love that they embrace cutting-edge technology and are excited to try a very new, different and modern approach to deploying their WordPress websites. We love how engaged so many of our customers are with us, and the questions they ask help us always learn to be better and serve the WordPress ecosystem further.

Miriam Schwab:

Don’t run WordPress live 🙂. What? Yup. If you run your site on Strattic your live production site is completely disconnected from the WP server and backend, which means there’s basically no attack surface. That’s the most secure way to run WP.

Miriam Schwab:

WP has been under development for eighteen years by the community so it’s constantly moving in a direction that serves a large swath of users. As a result it continues to be the best-in-class CMS thanks to its open source nature, extensibility and tooling, and active community.

Miriam Schwab:

I’ve always been passionate about supporting other women in their careers. I volunteered for many years on the Steering Board for a very active professional women’s community, and I mentor women who are looking to take the next step in their careers or pursue founding a venture. I also speak at events geared towards empowering women, particularly in tech.

Miriam Schwab:

I’m passionate about bringing static and headless architecture to the WP ecosystem. I believe it helps people do their jobs better, and makes the internet better for everyone. I also love my team and love that I get to learn something new every single day. It’s incredible.

Miriam Schwab:

Finding the time to do all the zillions of things I’d love to get to. On the one hand, I know I need to be realistic. On the other hand, it’s frustrating that I can’t accomplish more in a day.