{"id":2353,"date":"2024-02-20T22:15:34","date_gmt":"2024-02-20T21:15:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/voneff.de\/?p=2353"},"modified":"2024-02-20T22:33:34","modified_gmt":"2024-02-20T21:33:34","slug":"taylor-swift-wordpress-website-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/voneff.de\/en\/taylor-swift-wordpress-website-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Just one of us after all? A closer look at Taylor Swift\u2018s new website"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What do NASA<\/a>, the White House<\/a>, Angry Birds<\/a> and Rafael Nadal<\/a> have in common with Taylor Swift? All of their websites run on WordPress<\/a>. In Taylor Swift\u2019s case, a wider audience recently became aware of this fact when her website<\/a> was temporarily unavailable during the past Grammy Awards and visitors were greeted by a WordPress logo instead<\/a>. Of course, this didn\u2019t go unnoticed within the WordPress community \u2013 which also prompted WordPress chief Matt Mullenweg to offer tech support<\/a> to Tay Tay to avoid future outages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What all examples show: Despite all the badmouthing, WordPress can definitely be the foundation for websites that attract enormous amounts of traffic. With such a prominent topic, however, is\u2019s quite interesting for me to find out how such a project is implemented. Time for a look at and under the hood of taylorswift.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Caution \u2013 it’s going to be smartass and quite WordPress-nerdy! \ud83e\udd13<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who and when<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

According to the site\u2019s Terms page<\/a> (appearantly last updated in April 2019), the website is operated by an arm of the record company, namely UMG Commercial Services, Inc. on behalf of Taylor Nation, LLC, presumably a business structure of the artist herself. A look at the style.css<\/a><\/code> of the active theme suggests that an English agency called Push Entertainment<\/a> was commissioned to create the website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The website in this form is fairly new; according to the Wayback Machine<\/a>, it was probably launched on or around February 5, 2024. The previous version, shown here on February 3<\/a>, was already running on WordPress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is also an online store, of course, on the subdomain store.taylorswift.com<\/a>, but it runs on Shopify. Perhaps Mr. Mullenweg would like to take the opportunity to pitch Woo?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Design<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The design of the website is quite minimalist and is fully in line with the design of the new album titled \u201cThe Tortured Poets Department\u201c, which will be released on April 19, 2024. Beige tones, grainy backgrounds and photos, as well as a fairly classic-looking font selection with \u201cBig Caslon<\/a>\u201d and \u201cNitti Typewriter<\/a>\u201d \u2013 all quite coherent and pleasing so far. And a bit lame, but that might just be me. Matching favicon and open graph image are there, so nothing to complain about here. \ud83e\udd78<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A look at the previous version of the website<\/a> shows that they obviously want to strike a different note than before, even compared to the rather pompous design of the ongoing “Eras” world tour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a logo in the top left corner, which I stared at for quite a long time in search for a “Taylor Swift” in the compound letter shapes \u2013 until I finally realized that it was the letters “TTPD” pushed together, the acronym of the aforementioned album title.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The menu bar is sticky<\/code> at the top and is not separated by a line or a drop shadow when scrolling, which results in the content of the page disappearing behind the background of the menu bar, which is the same as the body of the page. This may work, but it’s a pretty lazy design choice IMHO. \ud83e\udd37\u200d\u2640\ufe0f<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"Screenshot<\/a>
The website at first glance<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Screenshot<\/a>
The TTFD logo and the disappearing content<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Structure<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

On the surface, the website consists of a fairly simple one-pager, with a few linked subpages for Terms<\/a>, Privacy<\/a> and Accessibility<\/a>. However, a glance at the sitemap<\/a> reveals a few more subpages, such as landing pages for the upcoming “Eras” tour in the US<\/a> and worldwide<\/a>, as well as a thank-you page<\/a> for new subscribers to the newsletter. So far, so unexciting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
The index sitemap from taylorswift.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What’s more interesting, of course, is that the sitemap here reveals two custom post types with the slugs video<\/code> and gig<\/code>. And the single posts of these CPTs are publicly accessible, see for example \u201cLavender Haze<\/a>\u201d or the even more accident-looking gig<\/code> post \u201cHard Rock Stadium<\/a>\u201d. In the case of video<\/code>, there’s even a rather unorganized public archive page<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"Screenshot<\/a>
video<\/code> single post<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Screenshot<\/a>
gig<\/code> archive page<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Screenshot<\/a>
gig<\/code> single post<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Is that intentional? Hardly so, I guess. \ud83d\ude1c<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stack and infrastructure<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As you can already gather from the sitemap, the well-known Yoast SEO plugin<\/a> is running here, as is always visible at first glance in the source code. The often criticized code comment \u201cThis site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1\u201d also gives us a hint about the update discipline: version 20.2.1<\/a> was released on 2 March 2023. One or two updates must have been released since then, right? \ud83e\udd37<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Screenshot
Yoast has always had a slightly more aggressive marketing approach<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Things are not quite as dramatic when it comes to keeping the WordPress software up to date: Taylor Swift is currently on version 6.2.3<\/a>, which is from October 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The WP Core blocks are extended by the Kadence<\/a> suite of blocks (as it has already been observed<\/a>). The CSS of the website is (at least partially) optimized with Autoptimize<\/a>. In addition, an old culprit loads its assets: Contact Form 7<\/a> \u2013 even though there is no contact form on the website. There is a newsletter subscription form, but this is provided by the newsletter service provider, as far as I can see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

References to several other plugins can be found in the source code:<\/p>\n\n\n\n