Within WordPress

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About

Headshot of Remkus de Vries

Hi, I’m Remkus de Vries, and I run Within WordPress (WithinWP).

I’ve been using WordPress since late 2004 and working with it professionally since early 2006, which means I’ve seen this ecosystem evolve from a simple CMS into one of the most complex, interconnected publishing platforms on the web. 

WordPress captured me because of its freedom, openness, and the strength of the community around it. That curiosity became a long-term engagement — contributing, building, teaching, and continually learning how the system works at every layer. 

My work sits at the intersection of systems thinking and practical WordPress mastery. I don’t just optimize sites; I trace how decisions ripple through performance, tooling, infrastructure, and people. I help WordPress Builders and Developers understand why things behave the way they do, not just what to fix next. That means looking at performance as a system, evaluating tools in context, understanding incentives in the ecosystem, and teaching how to make decisions that hold up over time.

Over the years I’ve contributed across the WordPress project, shaped community initiatives, and built long-standing relationships with many of the key people driving WordPress forward. That depth, technical, social, and strategic, is what informs everything I share here.

Through Within WordPress, I help you move past surface-level tactics and toward structural clarity on performance, security, tooling, and the broader ecosystem that powers WordPress.

I’m also the co-founder of Scanfully, a startup I launched with Barry Kooij. Scanfully is your centralized Performance & Site Health monitoring service for WordPress. With just one dashboard, it gives you uptime monitoring, SSL certificate tracking, performance alerts, Site Health change notifications, and off-server activity logs—all in real time.

Why WordPress?

The TL;DR?

Came for the software, ended up with a family™.

I didn’t stay with WordPress for two decades because it was easy. I stayed because it is one of the most interesting systems on the web.

WordPress is not just software. It is infrastructure, economy, community, governance model, hosting ecosystem, plugin marketplace, and business engine — all layered on top of open source code. That complexity creates friction, trade-offs, incentives, and opportunities.

That’s what keeps me engaged.

I’ve always been wired to understand systems. Before WordPress, I worked across business IT, human resources, project management, and organizational structures. I’ve taught structured thinking tools. I’ve led teams. I’ve operated between technical and operational domains. WordPress became compelling because it combines all of those layers in one evolving ecosystem.

It rewards those who understand how things connect.

When I talk about performance, I’m not just talking about faster load times. I’m talking about architectural integrity. When I talk about tooling, I’m not just recommending plugins. I’m evaluating systemic impact. When I discuss hosting, DNS, email, or infrastructure, I’m looking at how decisions cascade through the stack.

WordPress is open, flexible, and powerful. But that flexibility also invites unnecessary complexity. My work is about helping you recognize what truly needs to exist — and what doesn’t.

If you understand the system, you make fewer mistakes. If you make fewer mistakes, you build stronger foundations. If you build stronger foundations, everything else gets easier.

That’s why WordPress, and that’s why Within WordPress exists.

WordCamps & Community

I’m one of the co-founders and co-leads of the first two WordCamp Europe conferences (Leiden and Sofia), which helped catalyze the European WordPress Community. We went from 832 tickets in 2013 to over 1,100 the following year—and haven’t looked back since. I’ve continued to help shape and support WordCamp Europe through subsequent editions in Sevilla, Vienna, Paris, Belgrade, Berlin, Porto, Athens, Torino, Basel, and now Kraków.

In the Netherlands, I helped organize the very first WordCamp Netherlands in 2009 and led four more editions after that. I also initiated WordCamp Noord-Nederland, a regional event born from the collaboration between the Groningen and Fryslân meetups.

I’ve lost count of how many WordPress Meetups I’ve attended or spoken at. These small but mighty gatherings have always been the heart of the WordPress community for me. Currently, I’m co-organizer of the WordPress Fryslân Meetup.

I was also proud to be invited to the inaugural, invite-only WordPress Community Summit in 2012—a gathering of the 100 most influential WordPress Contributors at the time.

Polyglots, Translations & Forums

From 2012 to 2014, I served as Global Polyglots Team Lead, succeeding my good friend Zé Fontainhas. I’ve also been the lead for everything Dutch on WordPress.org since 2008—translations, forums, releases. For a very long time, I even zipped and shipped the Dutch release packages manually. (Things have thankfully improved since.)

I also single-handedly translated WordPress into Frisian. Why? Because there’s nothing more satisfying than working in your native language. Even if you’re the only one doing the work.

I continue to oversee the Dutch support forums and help maintain a high standard there—especially by keeping spam and chaos at bay.

Other Roles & Recognitions

  • Admin of the Dutch WordPress forums
  • Admin and lead translator for nl.wordpress.org and fy.wordpress.org
  • President of Stichting WP Nederland, which supports Dutch WordPress events and infrastructure, and the Dutch WordPress Slack team.
  • Former Head of People & Partners at Servebolt
  • Former Manager of Partnerships at Yoast

I’ve also spoken at WordCamps across the globe, including:

  • WordCamp US
  • WordCamp London
  • WordCamp Switzerland
  • WordCamp Netherlands
  • WordCamp Vienna
  • WordCamp Norway
  • WordCamp Sevilla
  • WordCamp Transylvania
  • WordCamp Sofia

Within WordPress

Through this platform, WithinWP, I continue to share everything I’ve learned over two decades in the WordPress ecosystem. It includes:

If it makes WordPress faster, safer, or more scalable, I probably have an opinion on it, and a way to help.