Bob Dunn updates on Open Channels FM’s recent developments, including a homepage redesign, the launch of “Do the Woo” as a standalone podcast, and upcoming features like Open Channels FM Live.
Home Blog
Matt: Assorted Links
Sometimes you have to just start with beauty.
Listen to Jon Batiste’s Beethoven Blues, then relish this interview, where he plays and talks about it. I can’t wait for Black Mozart, which is already starting to trickle on Spotify.
Forget all that Ferrari stuff, what Jony Ive did with his LoveFrom Sailing Lantern is divine. I’ve now seen it in person, and it’s the light at the end of the tunnel.
That led me to discover how awesome Balmuda is, and stumble upon the Japanese word Monozukuri, which, according to Google, “(ものづくり) is a foundational Japanese philosophy that translates literally to ‘the art and science of making things” It goes far beyond standard manufacturing or production, representing a deep, holistic mindset that embraces craftsmanship, a relentless pursuit of perfection, pride in one’s labor, and a deep respect for materials.” Look at how Toyota embodies it.
Om has a beautiful and prescient post on The Myth, the Mythos and the Man. It predicted some of this Fable kerfuffle.
Connection
How amazing is tethering on Android? I have a Pixel 10 Pro with a USB-C Ethernet hub plugged into the WAN port of a Unifi Dream Router 5G Max because the Qualcomm chip Unifi uses is two generations behind what’s in the phone. (Hat tip: Jesse.) How amazing are the 10,653 Starlink satellites floating above us, providing broadband from space, from a company I heard might have had an IPO last week.
I reconfigure ports, channels, and flows, as nurses do for arteries and cannulas.
Numbers Don’t Lie, Check The Scoreboard
Not just the Knicks. After a 3-year hiatus of Review Signal benchmarks, the headline was that Pressable dominated every category, and with perfect uptime. However, the real story is about WP.cloud, which is behind the top scores for not just Pressable and WordPress.com but also the Bluehost Cloud plans, beating Oracle Cloud and GCP-based solutions.
WP.cloud is our AWS; Pressable is our demo site. We want every host to offer the fastest and most secure WordPress possible. I’m happy to focus on infrastructure and let others figure out marketing and such foofram.
If you speak Danish and would like a random Radical Speed Month art project detour, check out Joen Asmussens’ Nima.
Automattic has been shipping, shipping, shipping. Start a WP.com site from the terminal with Stripe Projects. Akismet PHP SDK. Fun experiments from Radical Speed Month like Studio Code, Stattic, Workspace Mac App, Cortext, Pressship, Wapuu Studio, Studio Write, Desktop Mode, FlavorPress, Concilium, WooCommerce insights in Claude, and the kaizen of hundreds of behind-the-scenes bug fixes and improvements across our product suite.
Much of this came from those not historically in a product or engineering role, which we’re learning to navigate. I loved how customer-centric many things were. We also made a lot of rookie mistakes, but that’s part of how you learn, and I believe the acceleration of learning will be the biggest legacy of the Radical Speed Month experiment. That, and the fun games on our intranet. 
AI Hangover
I have drunk from the sweet nectar of Waymo, and now find myself calling an Uber so I can talk to 72-year-old Antoly from Azerbaijan, whom I slip a hundred-dollar bill as I step out. I weep when I see talented colleagues speak and write with words not quite their own. I masochistically Pangram everything even though it sometimes mistakes my own hand-crafted prose for slop, or is that actually my soul being sanded down by consuming too many statistically probable next tokens?
The uncanny valley of software, writing, products, and presentations so polished on the surface but built on thin foundations of understanding gives me an almost physical, nauseous reaction. I write this even as I listen to Claude FM music for thinking and building, probably Mythos-injected with subliminal messages to remind me of the hours of audio transcribed in minutes; the programs that would have taken a team months, conjured from my hand in hours; the way I feel like Neo in the Matrix, rapidly downloading new domains of knowledge.
What’s the name for the paradox, like Jevon’s, that AI abundance and polish makes you crave messy, imperfect humanity even more?
It’s good to debate and ruminate, but only in small doses. Like salt in a dish, a little goes a long way. Avoid the existential angst of charting new territory by getting your hands dirty and trying things. You learn the most from failures when you can laugh at yourself. Build one to throw away.
Write Different
Writing is not the most important thing; thinking is. But writing is probably the best way to improve your thinking.
I saw this quote attributed to me and didn’t remember it, so I thought it might be an AI hallucination, but it’s actually something I said! In this early-years podcast with David Perell buried on some corner of his site. Now David’s production quality is stellar, and he gets amazing guests like Maria Popova to discuss their craft. I’ve enjoyed his rise and look forward to following him in the decades to come.
I could edit and link much more, but sometimes you have to just press the Publish button and let go.
Open Channels FM: The Balancing Act: Freedom, Convenience, and Open Source in an AI-Driven World
So many of us are in a evolving relationship between freedom, convenience, and open source software in the world shaped by AI. The promise of freedom which is central to the open web and open source movements has to be continually weighed against the growing demand for convenience and simplicity. While open source software offers […]
Akismet: Introducing the official Akismet PHP SDK
For twenty years, Akismet has kept spam out of WordPress. But spammers don’t care what your site runs on and neither do we.
Last month we launched the official Akismet Drupal module. Today we’re introducing the engine that powers it: the official Akismet PHP SDK, a first-party client that brings Akismet to any PHP application.
What it is, and who it’s for
The Akismet PHP SDK is a first-party PHP client for the Akismet API. It’s built for the platforms the WordPress plugin doesn’t reach: custom apps, SaaS backends, and PHP frameworks like Laravel, Symfony, and Drupal. (The plugin is still the way to go for WordPress.)
Under the hood it’s built to feel at home in a modern PHP codebase:
- Covers the full Akismet API, from comment-check and spam/ham submissions to key verification, usage limits, and account stats.
- Works with any PSR-18 HTTP client you already have (Guzzle, Symfony HttpClient, and the like) through auto-discovery.
- Ships a typed exception hierarchy that redacts your API key, so credentials never leak into your logs.
A two-minute quick start
Install it with Composer:
composer require automattic/akismet-sdk
Then check a submission:
use AutomatticAkismetAkismet;
use AutomatticAkismetDTOContent;
use AutomatticAkismetEnumContentType;
$akismet = Akismet::create(
apiKey: 'your-api-key',
site: 'https://your-site.com',
);
$content = new Content(
userIp: $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'],
userAgent: $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],
body: $formData['message'],
authorEmail: $formData['email'],
type: ContentType::ContactForm,
);
$result = $akismet->check($content);
if ($result->isSpam()) {
// Reject it, flag it, or queue it for review.
// $result->shouldDiscard() marks the blatant spam you can drop outright.
}
That’s the loop: build a Content object, call check(), act on the result.
Already running in production
The official Akismet Drupal module is built on this SDK. The SDK handles the API contract and type safety, while the module handles Drupal’s service wiring, queues, and moderation UI. That’s the pattern for Laravel, Symfony, and anything else you build: the SDK owns the Akismet integration and your framework owns the glue.
What’s new in 1.5.0
We have just released v1.5.0, which is about giving Akismet more to work with, and giving you more back:
- Richer content signals:
Contentnow carries the site’s language and character set, plus the surrounding conversation context, so every check has more to go on. - More insight into every verdict:
CheckResultnow surfaces the error and classification Akismet returns, so you can log and act on why something was flagged, not just whether it was. - Extended multi-site reporting: For keys that span many sites, the new extended key-sites data adds per-site metadata for cleaner reporting and account hygiene.
Get started
The SDK is open source and live on Packagist today.
- Install:
composer require automattic/akismet-sdk - Packagist: automattic/akismet-sdk
- Source and docs: github.com/Automattic/akismet-sdk-php
You’ll need an Akismet API key to make calls. Akismet’s Personal plan is pay-what-you-can and free for personal, non-commercial sites. If you’re running something commercial, pick a paid plan that matches your traffic. Either way your code stays identical, since the plan lives with your API key, not in the SDK.
SEO for Membership Sites: 7 Strategies to Rank Gated Content in 2026
If you’re running a membership site in WordPress, then you’ve probably run into a frustrating problem: you publish great content, but it doesn’t show up in Google.
That usually happens because your most valuable content is hidden behind a login page or paywall. While that’s great for protecting your work and your revenue, it can make it harder for search engines to understand what your site is about and rank it in search results.
But you don’t have to choose between SEO and content protection.
With the right setup, you can help Google discover and rank your teaser content, keep your premium content safely behind a paywall, and drive more search traffic to your membership site.
In this guide, I’ll show you how SEO works for WordPress membership sites and share the strategies I use to help gated content rank the right way.
💡 Quick Answer: How Do You Do SEO for a Membership Site?
There are many ways to improve SEO for a membership site:
- Use teaser content: The best way to get your protected, members-only content indexed by Google.
- Use content dripping: Ideal for keeping members engaged over time without hurting your site’s SEO.
- Publish free content: The main strategy for attracting new visitors who are searching for your topic.
- Strengthen technical SEO: A foundational step to ensure your site is fast and easy for search engines to crawl.
- Noindex low-value pages: Helps Google focus on your valuable content by hiding pages like “login” or “my account.”
- Use internal links: The key to guiding visitors from your free articles to your paid membership offers.
- Optimize for conversions: Essential for turning the traffic you get from search engines into paying members.
Understanding the SEO Challenge of Membership Sites
Membership sites come with a unique SEO challenge: your most valuable content is often protected behind login pages, subscriptions, or paywalls.
While this is great for protecting premium content, it can make it harder for search engines to understand and rank your pages. This is because Google can only index content that it can access.
As a membership site owner, you need to find the right balance between making your content visible in search results and keeping your premium material exclusive to members.
How Google Handles Gated Content
Google can index and rank content that is publicly available on your website, including teaser content that visitors can see before logging in or subscribing.
However, Google can’t access private member dashboards, locked lessons, premium downloads, or other content that requires a login.
That’s why many successful membership sites use a teaser-wall approach. This is one of the easiest and safest ways to improve SEO for gated content.
By making part of a page publicly visible, you give search engines enough information to understand and rank the content while keeping the full version reserved for members.
It’s also important to understand the difference between teaser content and cloaking. Cloaking is the practice of showing search engines different content than regular visitors see.
If done incorrectly, this can violate Google’s guidelines and create SEO problems.
In this guide, I’ll focus on teaser-wall strategies where both visitors and Google see the same preview content.
Before You Start: Set Up Your Membership Site Properly
Before you start optimizing your membership site for SEO, it’s important to make sure your content is organized properly.
A poor site structure can hurt your SEO efforts. If you mix free and premium content together without clear organization, then both visitors and search engines may have a harder time understanding your site.
For the best results, keep your free and paid content clearly separated. This creates a better experience for your visitors and makes it easier to implement the SEO strategies
To do that, I recommend using MemberPress. It is the best WordPress membership plugin on the market and makes it easy to organize and protect your content.
It lets you create members-only areas, restrict access to specific content, and manage different membership levels from a single dashboard.
MemberPress also includes powerful features like partial content protection, content dripping, and flexible access rules. Plus, it works well alongside All in One SEO, making it a great choice for SEO-focused membership sites.
At WPBeginner, we use MemberPress to protect our free video courses. Visitors can browse the course library, but they need to register for a free account before they can access the lessons. This allows us to protect course content while still making it easy for new users to discover our training resources.
If you have not created your membership site yet, then see our complete guide on how to create a membership site with WordPress.
Now, let’s take a look at the best SEO strategies for membership sites. You can also use the links below to jump to a specific tip:
- Strategy 1: Use Teaser Content to Rank Gated Pages
- Strategy 2: Use Content Dripping Without Hurting SEO
- Strategy 3: Create Free Content That Brings Search Traffic
- Strategy 4: Strengthen Your Technical SEO Foundations
- Strategy 5: Noindex Low-Value Membership Pages
- Strategy 6: Use Internal Linking to Connect Free and Paid Content
- Strategy 7: Convert SEO Traffic Into Paying Members
- How to Measure SEO Success for Your Membership Site
- Frequently Asked Questions About Improving Membership Sites SEO
Important: These SEO strategies work together. Before moving on, it’s important to understand that these are not separate SEO methods where you choose only one strategy.
The most successful membership sites combine multiple SEO tactics together.
For example, they use teaser content to help pages rank in search results, create free content that targets valuable keywords, build internal links between free and premium content, and optimize their site to convert visitors into members.
Think of the following strategies as parts of a complete SEO system. Each one contributes to your site’s growth, but they deliver the best results when used together.
Strategy 1: Use Teaser Content to Rank Gated Pages
The easiest way to improve SEO for a membership site is to use teaser content.
Teaser content is a publicly visible preview that gives visitors and search engines a glimpse of what’s behind your membership wall.
For example, you might make the introduction, key takeaways, or first lesson available to everyone while reserving advanced lessons, downloads, and premium resources for members.
This approach works well because it gives Google content it can read and understand. As a result, your pages have a better chance of appearing in search results while your premium content remains protected.
I’ve also found that teaser content can improve conversions. When visitors can see the value of your content before signing up, they are often more willing to become members.
SEO Best Practices for Teaser Content
To get the best results, make sure your teaser contains enough information for both visitors and search engines to understand what the page is about.
Here are a few simple guidelines I recommend:
- Include your primary keyword naturally in the visible section.
- Add important headings and summaries above the paywall.
- Make the preview feel useful and complete on its own.
- Avoid hiding all of the important context behind the membership wall.
- Aim for at least 200–300 words of publicly visible content whenever possible.
The goal is to help visitors understand the value of your content while giving search engines enough information to rank the page.
How to Set Up Teaser Content in MemberPress
MemberPress makes it easy to create teaser content by showing part of a page or post to everyone while keeping the rest available only to members.
To get started, go to MemberPress » Rules in your WordPress dashboard and click ‘Add New.’
Next, choose the content you want to protect. MemberPress allows you to restrict individual posts and pages as well as entire categories, tags, or other groups of content.
This is especially helpful if you plan to create lots of members-only content in the future.
For example, you might restrict all posts in a “Premium Content” category instead of creating separate rules for each article.
After selecting the content you want to protect, scroll down to the ‘Access Conditions’ section and choose which membership level should have access.
Next, enable content excerpts in the ‘Unauthorized Access’ section. This is what creates your teaser content.
MemberPress allows you to show a portion of the protected content before the paywall appears. For example, you might display the introduction or the first few paragraphs of an article while keeping the rest locked. When the excerpt ends, users will see an ‘Unauthorized Access’ message.
🚀Pro Tip: I highly recommend customizing this message to include a direct link to your pricing or registration page to easily convert these readers into paying members.
When deciding how much content to reveal, make sure the preview provides enough context for visitors and search engines to understand what the page is about. At the same time, it should leave readers wanting to access the full content.
For detailed instructions, I suggest taking a look at our guide on creating a paywall in WordPress.
Do You Need Paywalled Content Schema?
You may have heard about paywalled content schema markup and wondered if you need it. For most teaser-wall setups, the answer is no.
Paywalled content schema is structured data that tells Google which parts of a page sit behind a paywall. It uses properties like isAccessibleForFree, hasPart, and cssSelector to point at the restricted section.
But it has one specific job, and it is not the job that most membership sites need.
This markup is built for sites that serve Googlebot the full gated content so it can be crawled and indexed, while keeping it locked for regular visitors.
The schema is what tells Google this is a legitimate paywall and not cloaking. That mostly applies to news and subscription publishers.
With the teaser-wall setup in this guide, you do not need it. Google and your visitors see the same public preview, and the full content is never served to anyone.
So there is no cloaking to clarify, and the markup gives you no ranking or rich-result benefit. If you are using a teaser wall, you can skip schema entirely and still rank your gated pages.
The one exception is a full-content setup, where you serve the whole article to search engines but lock it for visitors. If that is you, then you can add the markup with AIOSEO‘s Custom Schema Builder, making sure the cssSelector matches the actual class of your paywalled container.
What to Do If Google Doesn’t Index Your Content
If your gated page isn’t appearing in Google search results, then this is usually caused by a simple configuration setting rather than the paywall itself.
Here’s a quick checklist I recommend working through before troubleshooting anything more advanced:
| What to Check | Where to Find It | What to Look For |
|---|---|---|
| Noindex Settings | Edit the page and scroll to AIOSEO Settings » Advanced | Make sure ‘No Index’ is disabled for the page. |
| Teaser Content Visibility | Open the page in an incognito browser window | Confirm that visitors can view the teaser content without logging in. |
| Robots.txt Rules | All in One SEO » Tools » Robots.txt Editor | Check that the page or content section isn’t blocked from search engines. |
| URL Inspection Tool | Google Search Console » URL Inspection | Test the page and see whether Google can crawl and index it successfully. |
| Request Indexing | Google Search Console » URL Inspection | If everything looks correct, click Request Indexing to ask Google to recrawl the page. |
If the page still isn’t appearing in search results, then you may want to look at our following guides:
- Why Did My WordPress Site Get De-Indexed From Google?
- How Do I Get My WordPress Site Listed on Google? (Beginner’s Guide)
- How to Check If Your WordPress SEO Is Actually Working
Strategy 2: Use Content Dripping Without Hurting SEO
Once you’ve set up teaser content, the next logical step is deciding when members get access to your premium content.
Many membership site owners do this using content dripping, which gradually releases content over time instead of making everything available immediately.
For example, if you’re running an online course, then you might unlock one lesson each week. Similarly, you could release new training modules a certain number of days after a member signs up.
Content dripping can help improve engagement and keep members coming back to your site. However, it’s important to understand how it affects SEO.
How Content Dripping Affects SEO
Content dripping isn’t bad for SEO, but there are a few things to keep in mind:
- Google can’t index content that hasn’t been released yet.
- Fully hidden lessons and modules typically won’t rank in search results.
- Dripped content usually becomes eligible for indexing only after it becomes accessible.
For this reason, I recommend creating teaser content for upcoming lessons and modules before they are released.
Even a short introduction, lesson summary, or overview page can help search engines understand what the content is about while members wait for the full lesson to unlock.
💡 Expert Tip: Optimize Your Video Content for Search
If your membership site includes video courses, then don’t forget about video SEO.
One strategy I’ve found particularly effective is creating a public landing page for each premium video or course module.
You can include a short teaser clip, lesson summary, transcript, or key takeaways while keeping the full training reserved for members.
This gives search engines content they can index and helps potential members understand the value of your course before signing up.
This allows you to build search visibility early without giving away your premium content.
How to Configure Drip Rules in MemberPress
MemberPress makes it easy to schedule content releases.
Simply go to MemberPress » Rules and edit the rule that controls access to your protected content. Next, scroll to the ‘Drip / Expiration’ setting and enable content dripping.
You can then choose how and when content should become available. For example, MemberPress allows you to:
- Release content on a specific date.
- Unlock content a certain number of days after signup.
- Create recurring release schedules for ongoing training programs.
Make sure that you also create teaser content for any lessons or membership content that won’t be released right away.
This helps search engines discover and understand those pages before the full content becomes available to members.
For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to add drip content in WordPress.
Strategy 3: Create Free Content That Brings Search Traffic
One mistake I’ve seen many membership site owners make is putting everything behind a paywall.
While that may seem like the best way to increase memberships, it can actually make it much harder to grow your organic traffic. After all, if most of your content is locked, then search engines have fewer opportunities to discover and rank your website.
That’s why the most successful membership sites don’t gate everything.
Instead, they use free content to attract visitors from search engines and then encourage them to join their membership program for more advanced resources.
Free content can help you:
- Attract search traffic from Google.
- Reach people who are new to your topic.
- Earn backlinks from other websites.
- Build trust with potential members.
- Introduce visitors to your premium offerings.
Think of your free content as the front door to your membership site. It helps new visitors discover your expertise, while your premium content gives them a reason to become members.
Use Keyword Research to Build a Membership Funnel
When planning your content strategy, I recommend targeting broad informational keywords with free content and reserving your most valuable training, templates, and systems for members.
For example, if you run a membership site that teaches people how to build and grow websites, then your content funnel might look something like this:
| Free SEO Content | Premium Membership Content |
|---|---|
| How to Start a Membership Site | Full video course |
| Best WordPress Membership Plugins | Complete setup templates |
| Membership Site SEO Tips | Advanced SEO training |
This approach allows your free content to rank in search results and attract new visitors while your premium content provides the deeper value that encourages people to join.
Decide What Should Be Free vs. Premium
One question I hear often is: “How do I decide what to make free and what to put behind a paywall?”
A simple rule is to make content free when its main purpose is attracting new visitors. Then, reserve your most valuable implementation resources, systems, and training for members.
Here’s a framework that works well for many membership sites:
| Make It Free | Gate It Behind a Membership |
|---|---|
| Content targeting broad search keywords | Advanced implementation guides |
| Beginner tutorials and educational content | Premium courses and training programs |
| Content designed to attract backlinks | Templates, worksheets, and downloads |
| Top-of-funnel educational resources | Proprietary systems and frameworks |
| Content that introduces your expertise | Member-exclusive tools and resources |
This gives you the best of both worlds. Your free content helps you grow traffic and reach new audiences, while your premium content provides a strong reason for visitors to upgrade.
Build Trust With E-E-A-T Signals
Creating free content isn’t just about getting more traffic. It’s also one of the best ways to build trust with potential members.
This is especially important because many membership sites sell access to expertise, training, coaching, or specialized knowledge. Before someone pays for a membership, they want to know why they should trust you.
That’s where E-E-A-T comes in. It stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
One of the easiest ways to improve E-E-A-T is to demonstrate real-world experience. Whenever possible, share examples from your own projects, testing, results, or case studies.
You can also strengthen trust by:
- Adding detailed author bios.
- Highlighting relevant credentials and expertise.
- Including member testimonials and success stories.
- Displaying reviews and social proof.
- Sharing real examples of your methods in action.
At WPBeginner, we do this by sharing our hands-on experience with the tools and strategies we recommend.
We also have dedicated author pages, editorial guidelines, and review processes that help readers understand who created the content and why they can trust it.
If you’re just getting started, then I recommend checking out the following tutorials:
- How to Setup Author SEO in WordPress to Boost Your Google E-E-A-T
- How to Get Your WordPress Content Cited by AI Tools (My Expert Tips)
- What Is Google E-E-A-T? A Detailed Guide to WordPress Websites
Strategy 4: Strengthen Your Technical SEO Foundations
Even the best content strategy can struggle if your website has technical SEO problems.
Some membership site owners spend a lot of time creating teaser content, publishing SEO-focused articles, and building premium courses, only to discover that technical issues were holding their rankings back.
Search engines need to be able to crawl, understand, and access your content efficiently. Here are a few technical SEO basics I recommend checking before moving on to more advanced strategies:
| Technical SEO Factor | Why It Matters | How to Improve It |
|---|---|---|
| HTTPS Security | Protects user data and is a Google ranking signal. | Install an SSL certificate and make sure your site loads over HTTPS. |
| Site Speed | Faster websites provide a better user experience and often rank higher in search results. | Use a caching plugin, optimize images, and choose a fast WordPress hosting provider. |
| Mobile-Friendly Design | Google primarily uses the mobile version of your website for indexing and rankings. | Use a responsive WordPress theme and test your site on different screen sizes. |
| Broken Links and 404 Errors | Broken pages create a poor user experience and can waste crawl budget on very large sites. | Regularly audit your website and fix or redirect broken URLs using the free Broken Link Checker plugin by AIOSEO. |
| XML Sitemaps | Help search engines discover and index your content more efficiently. | Use AIOSEO to generate and maintain XML sitemaps. |
You don’t need to perfect every technical SEO setting before your membership site can rank.
Start by fixing the basics listed above. Once your site is secure, fast, mobile-friendly, and easy for search engines to crawl, you’ll have a much stronger foundation for the membership site SEO.
Strategy 5: Noindex Low-Value Membership Pages
When most people think about SEO, they focus on getting more pages indexed.
However, an important part of SEO is helping search engines focus on your most valuable content. That’s where noindexing comes in.
By preventing low-value pages from appearing in search results, you help keep your index focused on the pages that can actually bring traffic to your website. Crawl budget can also be a factor, but that mainly matters for very large websites with thousands of pages, so most membership sites do not need to worry about it.
Why Noindexing Helps Membership Site SEO
Many membership sites contain pages that serve an important purpose for members but provide little value in search results.
For example, a login page is useful if someone already has an account. However, it doesn’t answer search queries or help new visitors discover your website.
The same is true for account pages, member dashboards, checkout pages, and thank-you pages.
When these pages appear in search results, they pull attention away from your course previews, blog posts, landing pages, and other content designed to attract search traffic.
Noindexing low-value pages helps keep your index focused on content that can generate rankings, clicks, and new memberships.
Which Pages Should Be Noindexed?
As a general rule, I recommend noindexing pages that you designed for existing members rather than new visitors.
Here are some common examples:
| Page Type | Why It Should Be Noindexed |
|---|---|
| Login Pages | Useful for members, but provide little value in search results. |
| Account Pages | Contain user-specific information and are not intended for public discovery. |
| Checkout Pages | Designed for conversions rather than search traffic. |
| Thank-You Pages | Only relevant after a purchase or registration. |
| Member Dashboards | Usually contain private content and member navigation. |
On the other hand, you typically should not noindex content that can attract new visitors, such as:
- Blog posts
- Course landing pages
- Teaser content pages
- Resource hubs
- SEO-focused content targeting keywords
These pages are often responsible for bringing new traffic into your membership funnel.
How to Noindex Pages in AIOSEO
The easiest way to noindex a page in WordPress is with All in One SEO.
To get started, edit the page you want to remove from search results. Next, scroll down to the ‘AIOSEO Settings’ area and switch to the ‘Advanced’ tab.
From here, locate the ‘Robots Meta’ settings and toggle the ‘Use Default Settings’ switch to ‘OFF’.
This will reveal the manual checkboxes where you have to check the ‘No Index’ option.
Once you’ve saved or updated the page, AIOSEO will add the appropriate noindex directive so search engines know not to include that page in their search results.
Keep in mind that it can take time for Google to recrawl your page and process the noindex directive. This might take anywhere from a few days to several weeks.
If you need more information, you can also see our guide on how to stop search engines from crawling your WordPress site.
Strategy 6: Use Internal Linking to Connect Free and Paid Content
Up until now, you’ve learned how to attract visitors with free content and protect your premium resources behind a membership wall.
The next step is making sure those visitors can easily find their way from your free content to your paid offerings.
That’s where internal linking comes in.
Many membership site owners create great blog posts and resource pages that attract search traffic, but they forget to connect that traffic to their membership program.
As a result, visitors consume the free content and leave without ever discovering the premium resources available on the site.
Why Internal Links Matter
Internal links are links that point from one page on your website to another page on the same site. They help SEO in several ways by:
- Allowing Google to understand the structure of your website.
- Passing authority between related pages.
- Helping search engines discover important content.
- Guiding visitors toward your membership offers and conversion pages.
Think of internal links as bridges between your free content and your premium content.
For example, someone might find your website through a beginner tutorial they discovered on Google. A well-placed internal link can then guide them to a premium course, membership landing page, or exclusive training resource.
Internal Linking Best Practices for Membership Sites
One of the simplest ways to improve your membership site’s SEO and conversions is to create clear paths between related content.
Here are a few examples:
| Free Content | Link To |
|---|---|
| Blog posts | Premium course pages |
| Beginner tutorials | Membership signup pages |
| Resource guides | Premium templates and downloads |
| Course previews | Full membership programs |
| Free lessons | Advanced training modules |
When adding internal links, use descriptive anchor text whenever possible. This helps both visitors and search engines understand what they’ll find after clicking the link.
For example, instead of using generic text like “Click here”, you could use:
‘Get the full training inside our membership program.’
This link is more helpful because it clearly explains the benefit of clicking through. For more tips, you may want to see our guide on internal linking for SEO.
Create a Path From Traffic to Memberships
One simple rule I recommend is this:
Every high-traffic page should guide visitors toward a monetized page.
That doesn’t mean filling your content with sales pitches. Instead, look for natural opportunities to recommend a relevant course, membership tier, premium resource, or training program.
At WPBeginner, we use internal links and content clusters throughout our blog to help readers discover related tutorials, tools, and resources.
The same strategy works extremely well for membership sites because it helps turn search traffic into paying members.
Strategy 7: Convert SEO Traffic Into Paying Members
Getting more traffic from Google is important, but traffic alone doesn’t grow a membership business.
I’ve seen membership site owners spend months improving their rankings, only to discover that very few visitors were actually becoming members.
To grow your membership site, you need a system that turns search traffic into subscribers and paying members.
Use OptinMonster to Convert Organic Traffic
One of the easiest ways to do this is with OptinMonster.
It’s the best lead generation and conversion optimization tool on the market, and we’ve used it across several of our websites to grow email lists, promote offers, and bring visitors back to our content.
OptinMonster also integrates with MemberPress, allowing you to automatically target visitors who aren’t members yet. This makes it easy to promote memberships, free trials, and premium resources at exactly the right moment.
Here are a few campaign types that work particularly well for membership sites:
Exit-Intent® Popups
Exit-Intent® technology detects when a visitor is about to leave your website and displays a targeted offer before they exit.
This can be a great opportunity to offer:
- A free trial
- A membership discount
- A free course
- A bonus resource
For example, if someone has just finished reading one of your tutorials, you could offer them access to a premium course or a limited-time membership discount before they leave your site.
Inline Content Upgrades
Inline content upgrades appear directly inside your content, making them feel like a natural next step rather than an advertisement.
For example, if you’re writing a blog post about membership site SEO, then you could promote:
- A downloadable checklist
- A premium template
- A complete video course
- Member-only training resources
Because these offers are highly relevant to the content visitors are already reading, they often convert very well.
Scroll-Based Slide-ins
Scroll-based slide-ins appear after a visitor has engaged with your content by scrolling down the page.
Since these campaigns are triggered after someone has already shown interest in your content, they tend to feel less intrusive than traditional popups.
For example, after a visitor reads 50% or 75% of an article, you could display a slide-in promoting:
- Your membership program
- A free trial
- An upcoming webinar
- Premium training resources
This can be an effective way to increase signups without disrupting the user experience.
Recommended Membership SEO Funnel
By now, you’ve seen that successful membership site SEO is about more than rankings.
The goal is to create a clear path that moves visitors from search engines to your membership program. A simple funnel might look like this:
SEO Traffic → Free Content → Teaser Preview → OptinMonster Campaign → Membership Signup
Here’s how each step works:
| Step | Purpose |
|---|---|
| SEO Traffic | Visitors discover your website through Google. |
| Free Content | Helpful articles build trust and answer questions. |
| Teaser Preview | Visitors get a glimpse of your premium content. |
| OptinMonster Campaign | Targeted offers encourage visitors to take action. |
| Membership Signup | Visitors become members and gain access to premium resources. |
Each step supports the next one. That’s why the most successful membership sites don’t rely on a single tactic.
Instead, they combine SEO, free content, teaser pages, internal linking, and conversion optimization into a complete system that attracts visitors and turns them into members.
How to Measure SEO Success for Your Membership Site
After putting in the work to optimize your membership site for SEO, you’ll want to know whether those efforts are actually paying off.
Tracking your results can help you identify what’s working, uncover new opportunities, and focus your time on the strategies that bring in the most members.
Key SEO Metrics to Track
When reviewing your SEO performance, I recommend paying attention to these metrics:
| Metric | Why It Matters |
|---|---|
| Organic Traffic | Shows how many visitors are finding your site through search engines. |
| Keyword Rankings | Helps you track how well your content is performing for target keywords. |
| Traffic to Free and Teaser Content | Shows which pages are attracting potential members. |
| Membership Signups | Measures how many visitors are joining your membership program. |
| Conversion Rate | Helps you understand how effectively your content turns visitors into members. |
| Backlinks | Indicates whether other websites are recommending and linking to your content. |
Rather than focusing on rankings alone, I recommend paying close attention to membership signups and conversion rates.
After all, the goal isn’t just to get more traffic, it’s to grow your membership business.
Track SEO Performance With MonsterInsights
The easiest way to track SEO performance in WordPress is with MonsterInsights.
It’s the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress, and we use it across our partner brands to understand how visitors find and interact with our websites.
MonsterInsights brings Google Analytics data directly into your WordPress dashboard, so you don’t have to spend time digging through complicated reports.
For membership sites, this makes it much easier to answer questions like:
- Which blog posts attract the most search traffic?
- Which teaser pages generate the most views?
- Which content drives the most membership signups?
- Where are your highest-converting visitors coming from?
You can also set up conversion tracking to measure how many visitors complete important actions on your site, such as registering for a free account, starting a trial, or purchasing a membership.
By regularly reviewing these reports, you’ll quickly identify which content attracts the most visitors and which pages do the best job of turning those visitors into members.
If you’d like help getting started, then see our guide on how to see if your WordPress SEO is actually working.
Frequently Asked Questions About Improving Membership Sites SEO
Membership site SEO can feel a little different from traditional SEO, especially when you’re working with paywalls, gated content, and member-only areas.
Here are some of the questions I hear most often from membership site owners.
Does Google penalize gated content?
No, Google does not penalize properly implemented gated content.
Many successful membership sites use paywalls and member-only areas. Problems typically come up when websites use deceptive techniques like cloaking that show different content to search engines and visitors.
As long as you’re using teaser content and following Google’s guidelines, gated content can work well for SEO.
Can Google index content behind a login wall?
No, Google cannot access content that requires a login.
Since Googlebot can’t create an account or sign in to your membership site, it generally won’t be able to crawl content hidden behind a login wall.
That’s why teaser content is so important. It gives search engines enough information to understand and rank your pages.
Will ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews surface my gated content?
No. AI search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews can’t log in or subscribe, so just like Googlebot, they can’t reach content behind a login or paywall. Your gated content stays invisible to them, and that’s expected.
Your public teaser content is a different story. These tools can read and cite it, so the same teaser strategy that helps you rank in normal search also makes you eligible for AI answers. Google AI Overviews use the standard search index and the normal SEO rules, so there’s no separate AI optimization or opt-in to set up.
Should I noindex login and account pages?
Yes, in most cases you should noindex login and account pages. These pages provide little value in search results and are designed for existing members rather than new visitors.
What is the difference between gated and paywalled content?
Gated content requires users to take an action before accessing the content. That action might be creating an account, joining an email list, or filling out a form.
Paywalled content is a specific type of gated content that requires users to purchase a subscription or membership before they can access it.
How much content should I show before the paywall?
I recommend showing at least 200–300 words of content before the paywall. Another common approach is to make roughly 10–20% of the content publicly visible.
Whatever approach you choose, make sure the visible section includes important context, headings, and your target keyword so search engines can understand what the page is about.
Will content dripping hurt SEO?
No, content dripping does not directly hurt SEO. However, unreleased content typically can’t rank until it becomes accessible to search engines.
That’s why I recommend creating teaser pages for upcoming lessons and training modules whenever possible.
Do backlinks matter for membership site SEO?
Yes, backlinks remain one of the most important ranking factors for membership sites.
The challenge is that premium content often sits behind a paywall, making it harder for other websites to link to it. That’s why I recommend creating high-quality free resources that naturally attract backlinks, such as:
- Beginner guides and tutorials
- Statistics and research pages
- Free tools and resources
- Downloadable checklists and templates
- Guest posts on relevant websites
Focus on earning backlinks to your free content, then use internal links to guide those visitors toward your membership offers and premium resources.
I hope this article helped you learn how to rank your gated content. You may also want to see our guide on using a video membership site to grow your email list and our automation tricks to reduce churn on your membership site.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
The post SEO for Membership Sites: 7 Strategies to Rank Gated Content in 2026 first appeared on WPBeginner.
How to Verify Your SEO Is Intact After a WordPress Domain Migration
Changing your domain name is one of the scariest SEO decisions a WordPress site owner can make. Done right, your search rankings survive the move mostly intact. Done wrong, you can lose months of work overnight.
I’ve audited post-migration sites where everything looked fine on the surface, only for missing redirects, stale canonical tags, or a sitemap still pointing to the old domain to kill rankings for weeks. I’m here to make sure that doesn’t happen to you.
In this guide, I’ll walk you through the full verification process: capturing your SEO baseline before the move, confirming your redirects work, checking the canonical URLs and database links that trip most sites up, and tracking your recovery.
TL;DR: Use
Duplicator
to migrate and back up your site,
All in One SEO
to verify and update your canonical URLs and redirects, and
MonsterInsights
to track your ranking recovery. Most sites recover 80–100% of rankings within 4–8 weeks when all 301 redirects are in place.
You can use the quick links below to navigate through the article:
- Why Domain Migrations Put Your SEO at Risk
- Step 1: Build Your Pre-Migration SEO Baseline
- Step 2: Migrate Your Site With Duplicator
- Step 3: Set Up 301 Redirects From Your Old Domain
- Step 4: Register Your New Domain in Google Search Console
- Step 5: Verify Canonical URLs Are Correct
- Step 6: Fix Database URLs, Mixed Content, and Broken Links
- Step 7: Monitor Ranking Recovery With AIOSEO and MonsterInsights
- Your Week-by-Week Recovery Timeline
- Frequently Asked Questions About Domain Migrations & SEO
- Additional Resources for Domain Migration SEO
Why Domain Migrations Put Your SEO at Risk
When you change domains, Google has to discover your new URLs, process your
301 redirects, and re-evaluate your content before it transfers your
existing ranking authority. That process takes time, and errors at any stage
can delay or permanently reduce your SEO recovery.
Most ranking losses after domain migrations come from three specific failure points:
- Broken or missing 301 redirects: Without a 301, Google treats your new domain as a brand-new site with no ranking signals. Your old domain’s authority does not transfer.
- Stale canonical URLs: A canonical URL tells search engines which version of a page is the “official” one to rank. If your new-domain pages still have canonical tags pointing to the old domain, Google will try to rank the old URL instead of the new one.
- A sitemap referencing the old domain: Google uses your sitemap to discover and crawl pages. A sitemap pointing to old URLs slows down the discovery of your new domain’s content.
All three are fixable. The steps below walk you through checking each one in
the right order, starting before you migrate.
Note: I built this guide to run before and through your migration, so Step 1 captures a pre-migration baseline first. If you’ve already moved your site, then skip that baseline and start your checks at Step 2.
Step 1: Build Your Pre-Migration SEO Baseline
Before you migrate your site, you should capture a snapshot of your current SEO performance.
Without a baseline, you have no way to tell whether your rankings are recovering normally after the move or whether specific pages are silently losing ground.
Export Your Keyword Rankings
Your keyword baseline is the ‘before photo’ you’ll compare against at weeks
1, 2, and 4 after migration. You’ll want to export your current keyword
positions, clicks, and impressions before touching anything on your site.
You can do this for free directly from Google Search Console, or from within
WordPress if you have All in One SEO’s Elite plan.
To export from
Google Search Console, select your site property and click ‘Search Results’ under ‘Performance’
in the left sidebar. Set your date range to the last 3 months, then click
‘Export’ at the top right and choose ‘Download CSV’.
Before clicking export, make sure to sort your data by ‘Impressions’ or ‘Clicks’ (highest to lowest). This ensures your top 1,000 keywords are your most valuable ones.
Then save the exported file in a dedicated migration folder on your computer. This CSV contains the four columns you’ll need for your baseline: query (keyword), clicks, impressions, and average position.
Note: Google Search Console will export up to your top 1,000 keywords, which is plenty for tracking your core SEO baseline.
If you have All in One SEO’s Elite plan, then you can pull the same data without leaving WordPress.
Simply go to AIOSEO » Search Statistics, where your keyword
positions, clicks, and impressions are already pulled in from Google Search
Console. For more details, see our guide on
how to see search analytics in WordPress.
Click the ‘Export’ button to download a CSV of your current keyword
positions. Save this alongside your Google Search Console export in the same
migration folder.
Whichever method you use, make a note of your top 20 keywords and their
current average positions before closing the tab. Also take a screenshot of
the overview for a quick visual reference during the stressful
post-migration period.
Make sure to keep both the CSV and the screenshot in your migration folder. You’ll open them again at weeks 1, 2, and 4 post-migration to measure recovery progress.
Crawl and Document Your Current URLs
A complete list of every page on your site is your roadmap for setting up redirects later. If a page is missing from that list, it won’t get a redirect when you move. And once its old address stops working, the search ranking that page built up is gone for good.
You can use Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free for up to 500 URLs, with unlimited crawling available on their paid plan) to crawl your current site.
Simply enter your domain in the search bar at the top and click ‘Start’. Screaming Frog will then crawl every URL it can discover on your site.
Once the crawl is complete, you’ll need to go to File » Export in Screaming Frog and save the full URL list as a CSV. To get a clean list of just your images, click the ‘Images’ tab in Screaming Frog before hitting export.
Tip: If you run a photography or recipe blog, make sure to crawl your image assets too, so you don’t lose that valuable image SEO.
Store this file in your migration folder alongside the keyword export.
While reviewing the crawl results, you will want to look for any URLs that already return a 301 or 302 status. These existing redirects need careful handling during migration to avoid creating redirect chains.
Also, record your homepage canonical URL.
Right-click your homepage, select ‘View Page Source’, and press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on Mac) to search for <link rel="canonical".
Step 2: Migrate Your Site With Duplicator
The method you use to migrate your site is actually your first major SEO decision.
For the transfer itself, I strongly recommend using Duplicator because of how safely it handles your database during the move.
Haven’t migrated yet? Please pause here and follow our complete guide on
how to move WordPress to a new domain without losing SEO. Once your transfer is finished, come right back here to run through the verification steps below.
When you run the Duplicator installer on your new domain, it automatically
updates every URL stored in your WordPress database to reflect the new
domain. This includes automatically fixing your internal links and image paths.
This automatic URL replacement is what prevents the stale canonical and
mixed-content problems covered later in this guide. Tools that skip this
step leave old-domain URLs scattered throughout your database, which you
then have to find and fix manually.
Once your migration is complete, confirm it worked cleanly by going to Settings » General in your new WordPress dashboard. Both the ‘WordPress Address’ and ‘Site Address’ fields should show your new domain URL. If they do, then you are ready to move on to the next step.
Important: While you’re in your new WordPress dashboard, go to Settings » Reading and confirm the ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’ checkbox is not checked.
This setting is sometimes left on from staging or development and will block Google from indexing your new domain entirely.
Confirm Your robots.txt Isn’t Blocking the New Site
The ‘Discourage search engines’ checkbox isn’t the only thing that can block crawling. Your robots.txt file can do it too, and a stale rule carried over from staging is easy to miss.
To check this, open https://yournewdomain.com/robots.txt in your browser.
Confirm two things. First, that no stray Disallow: / rule (or a leftover staging rule) is blocking important content. Second, that any Sitemap: line points to your new domain’s sitemap, not the old one.
If you use All in One SEO, you can fix this without editing files by hand. Just go to All in One SEO » Tools, turn on the ‘Enable Custom Robots.txt’ toggle, and correct any outdated rule. The robots.txt editor is included in the free version.
For more information on getting these rules right, see our guide on how to optimize your robots.txt for SEO in WordPress.
Step 3: Set Up 301 Redirects From Your Old Domain
A 301 redirect tells Google that your old URLs have permanently moved to new ones.
Think of a 301 redirect like filing a permanent ‘Change of Address’ form with the post office so your SEO reputation forwards correctly.
Without 301 redirects, Google treats your old and new domains as entirely separate sites, and your ranking signals stay on the old domain.
For a complete overview of your options, see our guide on how to do a full site redirect in WordPress.
Set Up a Full Site Redirect in AIOSEO
All in One SEO is the best SEO toolkit for WordPress that lets you handle sitemaps, canonical tags, keyword tracking, and redirects all in one place.
Its Full Site Redirect tool (Pro plan and above) is the simplest way to redirect your entire old domain to the new one. You configure it once and AIOSEO automatically sends all your old URLs to their matching pages on the new domain using 301 redirects.
On your old WordPress site, go to All in One SEO » Redirects. If you are enabling this for the first time, click the ‘Activate Redirects’ button. Then click the ‘Full Site Redirect’ tab.
You’ll see a ‘Relocate Site’ toggle. Go ahead and turn it on.
In the ‘Relocate to domain’ field, enter your new domain URL. Make sure to
double-check the spelling. A typo here means every visitor on your old
domain gets sent to the wrong place.
Finally, click ‘Save Changes’. AIOSEO will now redirect all traffic from your old domain to the matching pages on your new domain automatically.
Important Warning: Because this method runs from a plugin, All in One SEO must stay installed and active on your old site, and that old WordPress installation must remain live. You must keep your old domain name registered, your old web hosting active, and your old WordPress site installed. If you delete the old site, cancel the hosting, or let the domain expire, your redirects will instantly stop working.
Test Your Redirects Before Proceeding
Testing your redirects before notifying Google is important. Submitting a change-of-address notification with broken redirects slows the entire migration recovery.
Instead, spend 10 minutes checking your key URLs now to avoid weeks of ranking problems later.
I recommend visiting an external tool like httpstatus.io rather than testing in your browser, as web browsers often ‘remember’ old redirects and can show you false results.
Enter your old homepage URL and confirm it returns a 301 status and resolves to the correct new-domain URL.
You should repeat this test for your top 5 posts and your main category
pages to ensure the URLs are mapping properly to the new site.
If httpstatus.io shows a 302 instead of 301, or a chain of multiple hops, then go back to All in One SEO » Redirects.
First, open the ‘Full Site Redirect’ tab and confirm there are no typos in the ‘Relocate to domain’ field. If that looks correct, check your standard ‘Redirects’ tab to ensure you don’t have older, individual redirect rules conflicting with your new full site redirect.
Pro Tip: A redirect chain happens when oldsite.com/page goes to a staging URL, which then goes to newsite.com/page. Each extra hop in the chain passes slightly less SEO equity and adds latency for visitors. Fix chains so every old URL redirects directly to the new URL in a single 301 hop.
Step 4: Register Your New Domain in Google Search Console
Google treats your old and new domains as entirely separate properties. To
transfer your ranking signals, you need to verify the new domain in Google
Search Console, submit a change-of-address notification, and resubmit your
sitemap.
For the complete steps, see Step 5 of our guide on how to properly move WordPress to a new domain without losing SEO.
Here is a summary of the three things you need to do.
Add and Verify Your New Domain Property
You need both your old and new domains as verified properties in
Google Search Console. Your old domain should already be there.
For the new one, click the property dropdown at the top left, select ‘Add
Property’, choose your property type, and follow the verification steps.
Submit the Change-of-Address Notification
This is the step that tells Google your site has permanently moved.
You need to switch to your old domain property in Google Search Console and
go to Settings » Change of address.
Next, you should select your new domain from the ‘Update Google’ section, and click ‘Validate & Update’.
Google will verify your 301 redirects are in place and walk you through a
brief wizard to complete the request. If Google Search Console cannot verify
the redirects, then go back to Step 3 and confirm your Full Site Redirect is
active before retrying.
Resubmit Your XML Sitemap
All in One SEO automatically updates your sitemap’s internal links when your
site URL changes, but you still need to resubmit this new map to Google
Search Console manually. This queues your new domain’s URLs for crawling
rather than waiting for the next automated crawl cycle.
First, you will want to double-check that your active sitemap is reflecting the new domain. In your new WordPress dashboard, navigate to AIOSEO » Sitemaps to view your configuration.
Simply click on the ‘Open Sitemap’ button to see a link to your XML sitemap.
Once you copy your updated sitemap URL from this screen, you can head back
over to your new Google Search Console property and click ‘Sitemaps’ in the
left sidebar to paste and submit it.
For a visual walkthrough on accessing this menu in your plugin and submitting the link to Google, see our step-by-step tutorial on how to add an XML sitemap to Google Search Console.
Step 5: Verify Canonical URLs Are Correct
A canonical URL is the ‘official’ version of a page that search engines
should index and rank. After a domain migration, canonical tags that still
point to your old domain are one of the most common causes of slow ranking
recovery.
The new-domain page effectively tells Google to rank the old URL instead.
Note: If you used Duplicator to migrate your site in Step
2, it automatically updates canonical URLs stored in the database during
deployment. You may find that everything already looks correct. Still run
the spot-check below to catch any canonical overrides set at the individual
post level, which Duplicator may not update.
Check Your Global Canonical Settings in AIOSEO
All in One SEO
automatically generates sitewide canonical tags based on your WordPress site
URL. After migrating with Duplicator, these should already reflect your new
domain.
What you do need to verify manually are two redirect settings that prevent
duplicate-content issues on thin pages.
Go to All in One SEO » Search Appearance and click the ‘Advanced’ tab. You will see a ‘Paged Format’ setting, which adds a page number variable to the SEO title and description of paginated archive pages (for example, ‘Page 2’, ‘Page 3’).
The default format shows three components: a separator, the word ‘Page’, and
a page number variable. You just need to confirm the field isn’t blank.
If it is blank, you can restore the default by selecting a separator from the first dropdown, typing ‘Page’ in the text field, and selecting the page number variable from the final dropdown.
This makes each paginated page appear unique to Google without using redirects, preventing duplicate content flags.
Then click the ‘Image SEO’ tab in the same Search Appearance menu.
Confirm that ‘Redirect Attachment URLs’ is not set to ‘Disabled’. This redirects thin media attachment pages to the parent post or page where the image is hosted to keep those low-value pages out of Google’s index.
The ‘Attachment’ option (the default) redirects attachment pages directly to
the image file. ‘Attachment Parent’ redirects to the post or page where the
image is used, though images not attached to any post will still show their
attachment page.
Either option keeps these thin pages out of Google’s index.
Spot-Check Your Most Important Pages
Global settings cover the default, but individual posts and pages can have canonical overrides set at the post level.
You should check your highest-traffic pages to catch any lingering old-domain references.
You can open each page in your browser, right-click anywhere on the page,
and select ‘View Page Source’. Then, simply use Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on Mac) to
search the source code for <link rel="canonical".
Confirm the URL in the canonical tag references your new domain.
If you find any page still showing the old domain, then open that post in your new site’s WordPress editor, scroll down to the All in One SEO settings panel, click the ‘Advanced’ tab, and update the canonical URL field.
Finally, save the post to apply the change.
For a deeper explanation of how canonical tags work, see our guide on
what a canonical URL is and how to use it in WordPress.
Step 6: Fix Database URLs, Mixed Content, and Broken Links
After migration, some images, scripts, and stylesheets on your new site may still be pointing to your old domain or loading over an insecure HTTP connection. Those stale assets will cause broken images and security warnings the moment your old domain goes offline.
While migration tools like Duplicator replace most of these automatically during deployment, it’s important to run a manual cleanup sequence to catch hardcoded errors, mixed content, or broken internal links.
Replace Hardcoded URLs in the Database
Warning: Replacing database URLs is a permanent, irreversible action. Before you start, always create a complete backup of your website.
While Duplicator handles standard URL updates during migration, hardcoded links inside page builder layouts, text widgets, or custom theme options sometimes get left behind. Running a quick scan with Search & Replace Everything by WPCode makes sure no old links are missed.
I recommend this plugin because it replaces URLs across your entire WordPress database without corrupting serialized data, which is a common problem with less careful tools.
We have a detailed article on how to easily update URLs when moving your WordPress site, but here are the main steps.
First, you need to install and activate Search & Replace Everything from the WordPress plugin repository. If you need help, see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Once activated, simply navigate to
Tools » WP Search & Replace in your WordPress admin.
Here, you’ll need to enter your old domain URL in the ‘Search for’ field and
your new domain URL in the ‘Replace with’ field.
Then make sure you check all available database tables in the list below the input fields.
You can do this easily by clicking the ‘Select All’ link.
Next, click the ‘Preview Search & Replace’ button to see a preview of the URLs that can be replaced, without making any changes.
Review the row count to confirm the number looks reasonable for your site
size.
Once you are satisfied with the dry run preview, you are ready for the live replacement. Simply click the ‘Replace All’ button.
Note for Page Builder Users: If you use a page builder like Elementor or Divi, then you might still see broken background images after running a Search & Replace. This is because builders store URLs in static CSS files.
To fix this, you must clear your WordPress cache and regenerate your page builder files. For example, in Elementor, go to Elementor » Tools and click ‘Regenerate Files & Data’.
Check for and Fix SSL Mixed Content Errors
Before chasing any mixed-content warnings, confirm a valid SSL certificate is installed and covers your new domain. Most hosts issue one automatically, but a brand-new domain sometimes needs it applied first.
If your old domain used standard HTTP and your new one forces secure HTTPS, then you might notice a broken padlock icon or a security warning in your browser address bar when visiting your new site. This is a mixed content error.
It happens when your website configuration is secure, but an embedded background script, stylesheet, or image asset is still trying to load over an insecure connection.
If you see active security warnings or broken images on your new domain, you can resolve them quickly by following our step-by-step guide on how to fix the mixed content error in WordPress.
Scan for Remaining Broken Links
After replacing your database URLs, it’s a good idea to use the Broken Link Checker by AIOSEO plugin to catch any internal links still resolving to unexpected 404 errors.
For a complete visual walkthrough on managing these inline errors, see our tutorial on how to find and fix broken links in WordPress.
Once activated and connected, the plugin automatically scans your content in the background. You can check its progress at any time by navigating to Broken Links » Broken Links in your WordPress admin area.
If the background scan uncovers any issues, you will see them compiled in a clean list. For each broken link found, you can use the inline ‘Edit URL’ option to correct the mistake instantly, or click ‘Unlink’ to safely remove the dead link from your post.
Once you finish cleaning up the list, the cloud scanner will verify the fixes during its next automated pass.
Clean internal links also prevent redirect chains that waste Google’s crawl budget. If the scanner flags more broken links, fix them the same way and check back after the next background pass.
Find and Fix Any Hard 404 Errors
The broken-link scan above catches dead links inside your content. A hard 404 is a different problem: a page on your new site that loads as ‘Not found’ because it never migrated, its URL was renamed, or its redirect didn’t fire.
To find these, run the same Screaming Frog crawl you used in Step 1, but this time point it at your new domain. Once the crawl finishes, click the ‘Response Codes’ tab and look for ‘4xx Client Error’ to see every URL returning a 404.
It also helps to cross-check this list against Google Search Console.
In your new domain property, go to Indexing » Pages and look for any ‘Not found (404)’ rows, which flag pages Google expected to find but couldn’t.
For each hard 404, you have two fixes:
- If the page should still exist, restore or republish it at its correct address.
- If the page moved to a new URL, you can add a 301 redirect in All in One SEO that sends the old address straight to the new one. This recovers the ranking signals that a dead page would otherwise lose.
Update Your Most Valuable External Backlinks
The steps above fix the links inside your own site. But other websites may still be linking to your old domain, and those external backlinks are some of your strongest ranking signals.
Your 301 redirects do pass that ranking value to your new domain. But that hand-off isn’t permanent: it can weaken over time as it passes through the redirect, and it stops completely if you ever let the old domain expire.
A direct link to your new domain is always stronger than one that has to pass through a redirect. So it’s worth updating your most valuable backlinks at the source.
To find them, open Google Search Console and go to Links » Top linking sites on either your old or new property. This shows you which sites send you the most links, so you know where to focus.
I recommend prioritizing the high-authority mentions you can actually influence. These are usually your guest-post author bios, press mentions, resource-page listings, and partner sites.
For each one, send the site owner a short, polite email asking them to update the link to your new domain. You can’t edit links on sites you don’t control, so a friendly request is the only route for those.
You won’t get every link changed, and that’s fine. Updating even the top handful of your highest-authority backlinks protects the ranking power that matters most.
Step 7: Monitor Ranking Recovery With AIOSEO and MonsterInsights
Ranking recovery after a domain migration takes time.
Your main concern in the weeks following a site relocation is to tell the difference between normal, short-term changes due to search engine algorithms and genuine technical problems that require you to do something.
Track Keyword Positions in AIOSEO Search Statistics
All in One SEO’s Search Statistics dashboard pulls your Google Search Console data directly into your WordPress admin area. This allows you to monitor your key word positions without needing to log into GSC separately.
To see your recovery, navigate to AIOSEO » Search Statistics and open your keyword performance reports. From here, you can cross-reference your live numbers against the pre-migration baseline CSV you saved during Step 1.
If you want to learn how to deeply customize these reports, see our guide on how to see search analytics in WordPress.
Be sure to click into the ‘Winning / Losing’ tab to quickly identify specific pages that have lost the most visibility since the move.
You can also add your top 20 migration-critical keywords to the built-in Rank Tracker to make sure you get immediate updates on your most valuable revenue terms.
Compare Traffic Trends in MonsterInsights
While keyword monitoring shows you your search engine positions, tracking actual traffic volume confirms how users are responding to the new domain.
MonsterInsights brings your Google Analytics data directly into WordPress, making it simple to run week-over-week traffic checks. To set it up, see our guide on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress.
Important: Keep your existing Google Analytics property. Do not create a new one for the new domain. Your whole recovery check depends on comparing the new numbers against your pre-migration baseline, and a fresh property starts that history at zero. Stay on the same property and just update its data stream to the new site URL, so your week-over-week comparison stays intact.
You can analyze traffic by navigating to Insights » Reports in your WordPress dashboard to open the default Overview Report.
Then, you can use the date range picker to compare your post-migration stats against your old baseline window. Then, look at the traffic breakdown to make sure your organic search is recovering proportionally.
For a complete look at measuring traffic spikes or troubleshooting flatlines, check out our guide on how to check if your WordPress SEO is actually working.
To make your data easy to scan over the next 180 days, you can also use the Site Notes feature (available on the Pro plan and above) to pin your migration date directly to the analytics timeline graph.
You’ll need to go to Insights » Site Notes, click ‘Add Note’, and log the exact move date. This creates a permanent visual anchor on your overview line charts so you can see precisely when your traffic started recovering.
Your Week-by-Week Recovery Timeline
It is totally normal to feel a little stressed when you see your rankings change a lot after a domain migration. Knowing what a normal recovery looks like can help you avoid making panic changes to your content, which can actually slow things down.
Here is a week-by-week look at what to expect.
Week 1: Discovery and Fluctuation
The first week is the most unsettling. Google’s ‘crawlers’ (the automated
bots that read and index websites) are discovering your redirects and
beginning to process the domain change.
Rankings will fluctuate (shift up and down) significantly during this
period.
Some keywords may temporarily disappear from results entirely, even for pages with perfect redirects in place. Organic traffic typically drops 30–70% from your baseline during week 1, though well-prepared migrations often see smaller dips.
This is expected and is not a sign that your migration failed.
If you moved to a new hosting provider as part of this migration, DNS propagation can take 24–48 hours. During this time, some visitors and crawlers may still reach your old site. GSC data from the first 48 hours after migration may look unusual as a result. This is normal.
It’s tempting to start fixing things when your traffic dips, but try to resist. For this first week, just focus on making sure your technical setup is working properly. Try to avoid rewriting content, changing URLs, or tweaking your AIOSEO settings.
If you change too many things at once, it will only confuse Google and make it harder to spot real problems.
Week 2: Signals Begin Transferring
By week two, Google has typically processed most of your 301 redirects and is beginning to pass ranking signals to the new domain.
With solid redirects in place, many sites see some traffic recovery begin by week 2. But the pace varies significantly by domain authority, niche, and crawl budget.
Make sure you log in to Google Search Console and check your new domain property for any ‘Redirect Error’ or ‘Soft 404’ notifications. A soft 404 occurs when a page loads successfully but returns little or no useful content. Google treats these as potential content quality issues.
These appear in the Pages report under Indexing » Pages. Fix any errors flagged here before they turn into larger ranking losses.
Week 4 and Beyond: Recovery Assessment
By week four, you should have a clear picture of your overall recovery. Sites with clean 301 redirects often see 80–100% recovery within 4–8 weeks.
But timelines vary, and some sites take longer even when your migration was done perfectly.
Now is a great time to open up your AIOSEO Search Statistics dashboard and pull out that baseline CSV you saved back in Step 1. Let’s see how your keywords are doing.
If you spot any pages that are still ranking much lower (like 50% or more below where they started), don’t worry. They just need a little one-on-one attention.
For those specific pages, simply double-check these three quick things:
- The redirect: Is the 301 redirect working perfectly and pointing to the right place?
- The canonical tag: Does the canonical URL on that specific page definitely point to your new domain?
- Google’s index: Does Google Search Console’s Pages report show that the new URL is successfully indexed?
Once you fix any issues you find, simply give Google another two weeks to process the updates before you check your stats again. Remember, SEO takes a little patience, but by catching these errors now, you are setting your new domain up for long-term success.
Frequently Asked Questions About Domain Migrations & SEO
Here are the most common questions about verifying SEO after a WordPress domain migration.
How long does it take to recover SEO after a domain migration?
WordPress sites with clean 301 redirects in place often see 80–100% ranking recovery within 4–8 weeks, though timelines vary depending on domain authority, niche, and redirect completeness.
Sites with missing redirects, redirect chains, or stale canonical URLs pointing to the old domain can take 3–6 months.
The single biggest factor in recovery speed is redirect quality. Every old
URL needs a direct 301 to its new-domain equivalent with no intermediate
hops.
Will I lose all my rankings when I change domains?
No, but you will experience a temporary drop while Google processes the
change. A 301 redirect transfers your ranking signals from the old URL to
the new URL. Google follows the redirect and eventually ranks the new-domain
page instead of the old one.
Sites that migrate without 301 redirects do permanently lose their SEO
equity. Google treats the new domain as a brand-new site with no history.
Do I need to keep paying for my old hosting and domain?
You need to keep the old domain registered, but not necessarily the old hosting. The plugin-based redirect in this guide runs from your old WordPress site, so it needs that site and its hosting to stay active.
If you’d rather stop paying for hosting, you can set the redirect up at the domain level instead (for example, with a free Cloudflare redirect rule) and then cancel the old hosting. Either way, keep the old domain registered for at least a year so your redirects keep passing your ranking signals.
Do I need to update all my internal links after a domain migration?
Yes. Even though your 301 redirects will automatically forward visitors to the right place, you should still update your links.
Leaving old links in your content forces users to wait for the redirect to load, which slows down your website. It also makes search engines work much harder to read your pages.
Instead of changing them one by one, you can use the
Search & Replace Everything by WPCode
plugin to safely
update every old link
in just a few minutes. This keeps your site fast and SEO-friendly.
What else should I update after moving to a new domain?
Update everywhere your old domain is referenced off your site, not just your redirects and internal links.
That includes any local directories and business listings, your social media profiles (YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and X), and your Google Business Profile.
You’ll also want to swap the old domain out of your email signatures and any UTM or campaign links you use in ads and newsletters.
Think of it as housekeeping. It keeps visitors from landing on your old domain and keeps your branding consistent across every place people find you.
What should I do if rankings have not recovered after 8 weeks?
You’ll want to start with a redirect audit. Simply crawl your old domain
with Screaming Frog and confirm every URL returns a 301 to the correct
new-domain URL.
Then, you can
check if WordPress is still redirecting
to the old domain, a common post-migration issue caused by stale URLs in the
database.
Also verify your new domain is not accidentally set to ‘noindex’ anywhere.
Check both AIOSEO’s global settings and your WordPress ‘Reading’ settings.
Run a full
WordPress SEO audit
to catch any remaining technical issues. Also check your schema markup: if
your old domain URL is hardcoded in any JSON-LD schema blocks, that
conflicting signal can create inconsistency that may affect how Google
interprets your site’s authority.
Can I do a domain migration without losing any traffic at all?
A zero-traffic-loss migration is theoretically possible but extremely rare
in practice. Even with perfect 301 redirects, Google takes time to process
the change, and some short-term fluctuation is nearly universal.
What you can realistically achieve is a minimal-impact migration where
traffic dips for 1–2 weeks and then fully recovers within a month.
Additional Resources for Domain Migration SEO
Migrating to a new domain is a big project, and you’ve done the work to protect your SEO.
You have successfully set up your redirects, cleaned up your old links, and put a solid tracking system in place using AIOSEO and MonsterInsights.
Now that the hard part is done, you can take a deep breath. Just give Google a little time to process the changes, and you should see your search traffic stabilize over the next 4 to 8 weeks.
You may also want to check out these related guides:
-
How to Easily Move WordPress to a New Domain Without Losing SEO. A complete step-by-step guide to migrating your WordPress site using
Duplicator, including pre-migration backups and post-migration checks. -
Beginner’s Guide to Creating 301 Redirects in WordPress. Learn how to set up individual 301 redirects using All in One SEO’s
Redirection Manager without editing any server files. -
How to Perform an SEO Audit and Generate Free SEO Report. A checklist-style walkthrough of the most important technical,
on-page, and off-page SEO factors to review on any WordPress site. -
How to Find and Fix Broken Links in WordPress (Step by Step). How to use AIOSEO’s Link Assistant and other tools to automatically
detect and repair broken links across your site. -
How to Easily Update URLs When Moving Your WordPress Site. A quick guide to using Search & Replace Everything by WPCode to
update hardcoded URLs in your WordPress database after any migration.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
The post How to Verify Your SEO Is Intact After a WordPress Domain Migration first appeared on WPBeginner.
Open Channels FM: The Changelog: Still Here, Still Doing It
commentary A bit over four years ago, in 2022, I recorded an episode from San Diego. I was getting ready for an event, about to attend my first-ever Contributor Day (which, yes, felt a little absurd given how many WordCamps I’d been to by that point). To fill the time before things kicked off, I […]
Dennis Snell: Gutenberg Package Activity
Last week at WordCamp Europe there was a get-together among WordPress Core committers and a question arose concerning the separate Gutenberg npm packages that are built and distributed. I was curious about how frequently they are updated and which ones are most active, so I asked Codex to review git commit activity, gather commits per package which touch files in that package, and then render it into a plot. It produced this.
Also available as a PNG image.
Script available in a gist.
Open Channels FM: WordCamp Europe Takeaways: Community Vibes, Tech Advancements and Smarter Tools
This Open Channels FM episode from WordCamp Europe discusses the event’s vibrant atmosphere, the integration of AI in WordPress workflows, and the positive community outlook on evolving technology and opportunities.
#220 – Cathy Mitchell on Why WordPress Events Matter: Community, Connection, and Giving Back
Transcript
[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, why WordPress events and community matter.
If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
So on the podcast today, we have Cathy Mitchell. Cathy has been working with WordPress since 2007. What began as a fun personal project during her maternity leave soon evolved into a fully fledged business with the launch of WPBarista in 2008. Over the years, Cathy has garnered extensive experience in the WordPress space, and is now working towards the 2026 WordCamp Canada.
The conversation focuses on the powerful role of community within the WordPress ecosystem, something that Cathy is deeply passionate about. We discuss how open, welcoming, and international the WordPress community feels, compared to more traditional corporate or volunteer environments. A theme that emerged was how involvement in WordPress has provided Cathy, and many others, with a sense of belonging and fulfilment, especially after life changes like becoming an empty nester.
The discussion explores the motivations for volunteering and organising within the WordPress community, both from the perspective of newcomers looking for purpose and connection, and business owners assessing the return on investment from contributing or sponsoring events. This includes how easy it is to get involved, the unique lack of barriers and red tape, and the value of altruism and camaraderie.
Other topics we explored with a broader impact of technology and loneliness, the importance of service and community for wellbeing, challenges in sponsorship amid changes economic times, and the vital need to engage the next generation in open source.
If you’re interested in the human side of WordPress, how volunteering shapes both individual and the broader community, and what the future might hold for WordPress events and contributors, this episode is for you.
If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
And so without further delay, I bring you Cathy Mitchell.
I am joined on the podcast by Cathy Mitchell. Hello, Cathy.
[00:03:25] Cathy Mitchell: Hello. Thanks for having me.
[00:03:27] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. Cathy and I have been having, well, 15 minutes or so of chit chat just before we started the podcast. I’ve been learning a little bit about Cathy and we’re going to share all sorts of information.
I think probably broadly we could talk about it as being the WordPress community, which is a subject which is dear to my heart.
However, before we get into that, Cathy, I’ve had an introduction from you over the last few minutes, but would you mind sort of giving us your potted version of that, your shorter version, your bio if you like. Tell us who you are and how come you’re featuring on a WordPress podcast.
[00:03:58] Cathy Mitchell: Well that’s a whole lot of imposter syndrome. Why I am featuring, because you’re kind enough to have me. I’ve been working with WordPress since 2007 and it was just something fun that I did to begin, much like you with podcasting.
And then a couple years in, I told my friends that they’d have to start paying me, or I was going to go back to work, find a real job. This was during my mat leave, and so it kind of just took off from there in 2008, started WPBarista.
And now I’m very interested in the community because I was looking for something to do in the WordPress community last year. Dan in the Canada Slack got a hold of me and said, hey, do you want to help with the WordCamp? And I said, sure. You know, I had time.
And he got me in and brought me right up to like being on the organising team. And it was so fun but so shocking. Like, there is a lot of red tape in the corporate world before they let you do anything meaningful. Like you have to sweep the floors for a whole long time before they let you actually do something you’re good at. So this was remarkable. And this year I find to my surprise, I’m leading the 2026 WordCamp Canada.
So that’s what I’m doing now. And we’re going to focus on community too. So I’m very excited about this topic, both from a corporate, like what do we get out of this? Or are we supposed to get something out of this? And from a personal standpoint, it’s been amazing to meet these people, and to be given a chance. And I found out I’m not the only one. This is like normal, which is bizarre and wonderful.
[00:05:37] Nathan Wrigley: My experience of the WordPress community, so I started in WordPress actually quite a long time after you did. Maybe sort of six or seven years after you began using WordPress. I really didn’t know that there was a community at all. I just downloaded the software and used the software. And then I can’t even remember really how it happened. It might have been through things like Facebook Groups or something like that, where I was trying to learn a particular thing? Or perhaps there was something in the dashboard which indicated that there was an event nearby.
But I found myself, to my own surprise actually, I found myself at a WordPress event in London, WordCamp London, which at the time was going really strong. You know, hundreds and hundreds of people would show up every year.
And I remember purchasing a ticket and getting the train ticket and thinking, what am I doing? What am I possibly hoping to get out of this? And showing up and kind of being a bit like a timid rabbit sitting in the corner a little bit, and then it kind of worked out fairly quickly. Okay, this is all fairly benign. Nobody seems to be all that boastful. Nobody seems to be sort of shoving corporate speech down my throat, or trying to sell me anything unnecessarily.
And during the course of a day or maybe a couple of days, opened up a little bit and got chatting to people. And lo and behold, within a couple of years, a significant proportion of my free time, let’s call it that, outside of the commitments of daily life and family and all of that kind of thing, was taken up with doing WordPressy things in my spare time.
And so I, I don’t know if the story maps the same as you, I’ve shared mine, maybe you’ll share something similar in a moment. The community to me is much more than just, oh, there’s a community there. It genuinely is a seriously important part of my life. To the point where if that was to be sort of whipped away, or somebody like a Thanos type character suddenly clicked their fingers and that disappeared, I don’t know what I would do with myself. I would really have to go out there and find an awful lot of other things to do. Was it a bit like that for you?
[00:07:41] Cathy Mitchell: Not at all. I went to the forums first. And in 2008, 2009, there were some big names nowadays that were just answering us in the support forums. And so I learned from the best of the best, I think. And they would answer my ridiculous questions. I had no idea about PHP. I didn’t even know HTML. I didn’t even know what the internet was, like as broad concept. I asked my husband at the time like, okay, I don’t understand how my computer is talking to someone else’s computer, like you need to draw me a picture.
So anyway, I’ve only recently, I went to a couple of events, but I’ve always had the business mind. If I can’t see an ROI financially, I’ll say, from what I’m doing, then I don’t have time for it. But that was also during a time when I had a young family and then I became a single mum and then I had to work this business. And so it’s only really recently that I’m looking around and seeing people like you and going, this is unique.
I’ve been in volunteer communities, and now that my kids are all grown up, I’m kind of looking for those opportunities. What meaningful thing can I do with my time? And this just seems so unique. Like I volunteered at other places and there’s so much red tape and there’s so much, I don’t know, different feelings than this one. This one’s very open.
[00:09:09] Nathan Wrigley: I think the bit that is so curious to me is you can sort of dip in and dip out of it. Because, I don’t know, let’s say for example, you do something much more local, involved with your hometown or something like that. And you get involved in it and there’s a certain kind of, pressure is the wrong word, I suppose you can dip in and dip out of that as well, but do you know what I mean? You get involved in those philanthropic things locally and you get to know things and it becomes more of a habit, and you do the same thing over and over again. At least that’s my experience.
What I quite like about this is the international flavour of it. The fact that I’m being introduced people from really different parts of the world and cultures. And it’s very, very open, and it’s a real contrast to the bit that you just mentioned, where the corporate bit, and obviously there’s a side of our community which is very much devoted to turning a profit and what have you. But there’s a significant proportion of the people who don’t have that metric in their head when they’re introducing themselves to people.
They are just trying to be helpful and trying to deliver on the promise that the internet gave us back in the 1990s of, here’s the infrastructure to pass information around freely. Wouldn’t it be nice if everybody had the capacity to publish things, or to share things online without some sort of corporate overlord or paywall or algorithm? Which we’ve now probably regret deeply allowing that to happen to the internet.
All of those kind of things come into play. I have constantly, for the last decade, tried to sum up and capture what this is. And I always fail. It simply feels nice, is all that I’ve got, really. This community, the people in it that I hang out with, it just feels like a nice thing to do. That’s all I’ve got. No wisdom beyond that. It’s bizarre, isn’t it?
[00:10:53] Cathy Mitchell: I’ve been trying to quantify it too, and especially planning this next conference. I feel much like a student because there’s a large group, probably most people are not like me. Like they’re like you, at least the ones, in Slack that I’m talking to on a daily basis. And they’re the original nerds who are so happy, like were inspired and spent their free time, like this wasn’t their job. Promoting this and like answering my questions in forum as an absolute noob. So in that way I feel like I would really like to give back now.
But the community, yeah, I can’t quite put my finger on. I just talked to a sponsor yesterday and she is of course wanting to get in front of her audience, which is agency owners. But there’s a real sense of promoting the community because the healthier the community, the healthier all of us are. Not just financially, but it creates the forward momentum, I think as far as open source as a whole too. Like there’s a bunch of us, me included, even though I kind of am taking a corporate angle that really believe that open source could change the world. I still do, maybe even more so because AI is, can actually talk to things that are open source. Less so if everything’s behind a paywall.
[00:12:09] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the things that you mentioned there, which suddenly sort of struck me is whilst there are a handful of people out there, and I say a handful, there’s obviously many millions of people. I think it’s fair to say that many people prefer to be in proximity to other people, to do things, to be in conversation with people, to have a shared experience. You know, we go to the cinema or the movie theatre to watch a movie. I mean I know the screen’s bigger and everything, but part of it is to be with other people and to go ooh and ah, at the same time and go to firework displays and concerts and things like that.
Now all of that stuff can be done in an isolated environment in your house. You know, you can watch Netflix and you can watch the TV and get a similar kind of experience. But I think there’s some sort of core part of me at least, and the people that I hang out with at these kind of events and online who just enjoy that shared experience, that willingness to be involved in a similar task. Just to be pointing in the same direction as a bunch of other people, pulling together on the same team. And it’s unquantifiable. I literally can’t encapsulate it, but I think you and I are talking about the same thing.
What’s interesting is I accidentally found it fairly early on in my WordPress journey. Serendipity played a really blinding hand for me there. But I think had I not had, bit like that film Sliding Doors, I could easily have missed the cues which sent me to that WordCamp or whatever it was that got me started. And I probably could have gone for a decade or more and not even noticed it was a community and maybe discovered it much more recently.
And it sounds like that’s kind of happening to you. You mentioned that you are, I think in the show notes you described it as, it’s a lovely phrase, empty nesting. Does that mean when your children grow up and go away? Is that what that means?
[00:13:53] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah. That’s a pretty common phrase over here.
[00:13:55] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay.
[00:13:56] Cathy Mitchell: This side of the pond. You know, you kick the little birdies out, and they’re spreading their wings. All of a sudden we’re left with, it’s a different life stage. I think we were talking a little bit about it. You’re getting there.
[00:14:08] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to there very, yeah, awh, it’s kind of filled with melancholy. On the hand, obviously I would love for my children to grow up, but on the other hand it’s, pulls all the heartstrings, doesn’t it?
So you are finding space in your life to do this kind of stuff. I’m going to ask a question, which is maybe a little bit personal, I don’t know. Hope you don’t read it in the wrong way. Do you find this stuff like meaningful and significant? Do you get a sense of fulfilment and satisfaction from the work that you are doing? For example, with WordCamp Canada.
Because there must be moments when it’s a real chore and, you know, you’ve got far too many tasks which are spilling over, and you think, gosh, I’m just a volunteer. There’s no quid pro quo here. I’m just doing it out of the goodness of my heart. But on balance, do you get that warm and fuzzy feeling from doing all of this?
[00:14:54] Cathy Mitchell: That’s a good question. I had time, so I started volunteering at a bunch of things. I started volunteering teaching kids, and then to go the complete other end of the spectrum, I did a seniors class at my local college last month. I just started volunteering because in my opinion, as a little amateur psychologist, I think service, serving our community is kind of the best way to, like you said, pull alongside someone. And then when you have like a focused goal, there’s a togetherness and I really need to grow my community.
Me, and I think quite a few other people, there’s this whole epidemic of loneliness to be frank. Having raised the kids and then having done the job, now all of a sudden it’s like, I have time to invest in a real community. And I really want it to be worthwhile. I don’t want to sweep the floors for, maybe it’s an age thing, I don’t know. I’m so, so grateful that they let me do something that I’m good at, as far as organising, because they didn’t have to. That’s a big responsibility to put on somebody. And I am praying it all works out in the fall.
But it comes because of the huge number of volunteers that all work together. So my job’s just basically pulling all these people together, and making sure that we’re talking to each other. Because one person can’t possibly do all of the work that comes with putting on a conference. At least not part-time. But yeah, I’m finding it immensely rewarding because I also feel like I’m good at it. Everybody loves to do something they’re good at.
[00:16:28] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned something earlier where you sort of implied that you were very surprised that in the WordPress world, you were given a bunch of responsibility for an event. I mean, basically, I think a lot of that, isn’t there? There’s a lot of, whoever can show up does get the job really, because there’s a paucity of volunteers. And for an event of the magnitude of WordCamp Canada, if you’ve ever been to events like that, you sort of walk in and on every level it feels like a corporate event. You know, it’s very polished, highly polished. There’s catering, the venue’s all been booked, you’ve got name badges and there’s probably some translation going on, and there slides and every, there’s timetables and everything. And it’s all done by volunteers.
And I remember the same sort of thing, being asked to do a variety of different things and thinking, wait, really? You don’t know the inside of my head. I will mess this up so badly. But that is such a nice characteristic of our community. And you’ll fail together, if you know what I mean? You know, it is not like anybody’s going to let you deeply fail. People will step in and help you, should you need to.
[00:17:31] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah, we have to say yes, like it’s part of the culture is, if people volunteer, we have to find a way to say yes. Like our default is yes, not, well, have you done this first?
[00:17:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It’s interesting because you obviously have done a lot of this kind of corporate stuff, and so have the impression that you ought to be qualified, I don’t know, a decade or two decades of this particular thing in order to be trusted to do it. And this is just, yeah, this is so different. Anybody? Bueller. Okay, you’ll do it. Great. Fine. That’s great, yeah.
[00:18:03] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah. You’re hired.
[00:18:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s it. That’s I’ve never done it before. It doesn’t matter. You’ll be brilliant.
[00:18:07] Cathy Mitchell: We’ll help you.
[00:18:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And that camaraderie of binding together on a particular thing, in your case WordCamp, but the broader project, you know, the WordPress project as a whole, I feel it’s full of these kind of people. And we will get into in a minute I’m sure, how that maybe has changed for some people in the more recent past, and about the fact that the community does feel like it’s in a bit of a challenging place at the moment.
But I just want to go back a little bit because you mentioned, and neither of us I suspect will have the answer to this, but I’m interested in your intuitions anyway. You mentioned that people nowadays, maybe this has always been the case, but it feels like there’s been a change. Loneliness seems to be a very common thing now. And my sort of back of the napkin calculus points me in the direction of wondering if it is actually oddly technology. The very thing that we’re celebrating. If technology might be responsible for it.
For example, I look around and I see a lot of people who give an awful lot of what would’ve otherwise been free time, time that they could have gone out and socialised and what have you. And, you know, you sort of end up sitting on the couch and scrolling through social media and things like that.
Television has become so absolutely fascinating. You know, there’s like a billion different channels, and essentially there’s a thousand ways to keep yourself entertained all by yourself, and never speak to another human being, or be in proximity to another human being. There’s no question there, I just wondered if you had an observation or a similar thought process.
[00:19:39] Cathy Mitchell: I looked up, because I knew we were going to talk about this, the stat on it. Because I know I’ve had the same feeling. And I’ve heard people talk about it, but I didn’t really know if that was like true or not, because whenever I am thinking or researching something, of course that’s what the algorithm shows me. So I’m always kind of hesitant, like is this actually real or am I just seeing this?
But it did say in a 2021 report, the US Surgeon General, and this is in the States, no 2023, that the health impact of a loneliness epidemic. Okay, General Vivek Murthy declared a loneliness epidemic in 2023. And he said that the health impact is the same as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It’s not good for us. And that the biggest effect, 79% reported feeling lonely of the 18 to 24-year-old group, which is more like 40 some percent. What was it? 41% of 66 plus.
[00:20:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so the younger you skew, the more lonely you are likely to be.
[00:20:40] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah. And we also see, now I don’t know if this is correlative or causative, but technology has also skyrocketed in that period of time.
[00:20:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Yeah, and also probably, again, I’m drawing conclusions which are not based in fact or research or anything like that. You and I were both born in an era where that technology wasn’t available. So I imagine patterns were set down in our infant brains, which are perhaps different to the patterns that are set down now.
It’d be curious to see if there is a there, there. If the broad adoption, certainly in the UK, I can’t speak to Canada, but the broad adoption of technology to ever and ever younger children, to a really alarmingly early age. You know, you see children who are not even at school age who seem to have access to every technology under the sun, and who don’t seem to get that interaction from another human being. I wonder. And I’m going to sound all curmudgeonly and there’s probably going to be people shouting at me.
[00:21:34] Cathy Mitchell: I have seen it change with the Gen Z that they’re talking about. And my kids fall in that category. Whereas I wanted to be, okay, it’s personal responsibility, so we’re going to raise them. It was new to me, so I raised my kids thinking, okay, tablets, I’m going to teach you how to use it, not restrict it. I was all open-minded about all.
Now they’ve told me that if they have kids, they will restrict it far greater than I ever did. They were like, they won’t have nearly the freedom that I gave them in my open-mindedness.
[00:22:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well, but you are forgiven for your open-mindedness because I guess humanity perhaps needed more evidence to draw conclusions around that. And perhaps those conclusions are now landing.
[00:22:16] Cathy Mitchell: I think so.
[00:22:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well, certainly as an example, I know that in Australia more recently, there’s now a widespread ban, I think under the age of 16, and I’m going to use the word illegal, maybe that’s the wrong word. Maybe there’s a technical definition, but social media is not permitted for children under the age of 16. And I think that there’s legislation being talked about in the UK of a similar nature, and some other European countries.
I don’t know how much traction that will have because I feel that there’s a persuasive argument, much like you described of, it’ll all work itself out. You know, we don’t need the government to tell us what to do, and all of that, and that all makes sense.
But my, I can well understand, I think in the UK also, there is a growing, a groundswell of this alternative way of looking at it. Like a rejection of the phones and the technology.
Anyway, there we go. That was an aside. Do you want to contribute into that a little bit more before I push us back in the WordPress space?
[00:23:11] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah, I don’t want to be all, it’s bad, it’s bad, but I think that we’re seeing an effect. I really do believe that volunteerism, whether it’s with WordPress or anything else, in my faith background, being a person, a Christian person, I grew up seeing the service as an answer, as just part of our lifestyle. You just serve others. But now I’m seeing it come in a secular sort of way as well, where service is an antidote to loneliness.
And I think no matter where you’re serving, not the church or any, like just pick a service. Being that cameraderie with people, having a similar goal, going in the same direction, like I really do think there’s hope. There’s hope out there for all of us. And it’s a great way to do something meaningful. Like you get to do all those things. You get to practise a skill, you get to do something meaningful, you get direction, you get cameraderie all by serving.
[00:24:03] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to, say something now, and I’m going to caveat it heavily before I say it because A, it relies on my prodigiously bad memory, and B, it could just be fabricated anyway because the source could be utterly wrong. But it feels like there’s a kernel of truth in it.
I was doing some research recently about happiness, that broad subject. You know, we would all like to be happy I’m sure. There’s a lot of people who spend a lot of time thinking about what this actually means, and trying to drill it down to some fairly basic maxims, if you like, for what leads to happiness.
Two of the biggest indicators of happiness are really interesting. One of the two is how often you spend with other people basically. How much time you interact with other human beings. Now I know that that’s not for everybody, but broadly speaking, that seems to be a huge indicator. If you actually get yourself out and you do things with other human beings, there is a definite benefit.
And the other one, which is very curious because I think it’s fair to say, you know, Canada and the UK, we’ve been brought up to worry about our own finances and amassing as much stuff as we can, and lining your nest for the future and everything. Well, this other one, controversially, the second one that I’m going to mention is the amount of stuff that you basically give away. And that could be time, or it could be finance, it could be any of those things. The more that you give away with no expectation of a return, that also apparently is a real indicator of happiness.
And I think we can all identify that. That moment where you give somebody a gift and you’ve really thought about it, and you hand it over and you watch the face change as they unwrap it. And you think, they’ve loved that, haven’t they? And you’re not thinking to yourself, well, I did that. I made them happy there. You’re just thinking, oh look, they’re really happy. Isn’t that wonderful? So anyway, there’s my 2 cents of utterly unproven thoughts.
[00:25:59] Cathy Mitchell: Okay. Learned something. Those are two, so the two things were being around people and altruism basically, with nothing expected in return.
[00:26:08] Nathan Wrigley: And funnily enough, they map very closely to what we’re talking about, right? We’re talking about events and socialising with other people, but also that, in this case, it’s not a financial thing that you are giving away, but you are definitely giving away an awful lot of your time for doing these kind of things. And maybe, given that little bit of information, it kind of becomes a little bit easier to justify because if you can say to yourself, this makes me happy, it might not seem it in those stressful moments.
[00:26:36] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah, today.
[00:26:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s right. But ultimately that might be causing your happiness.
Okay, so there we go. That was our little segue. Let’s sort of bring it back to WordCamps. You were very kind to write me a bunch of show notes, and they really drew me in as I was reading them. And I want to sort of dwell on a few of them because you.
[00:26:53] Cathy Mitchell: Had to convince you to get me on the podcast.
[00:26:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no, there not a lot of convincing needed. I loved it. You’ve got some sort of bullet points if you like, not really bullet points. You’ve touched on different areas where you feel that you’ve got something to say about, I dont know, why people might contribute and why they might volunteer and what have you.
So it’s things like, why might new people, newbies, as you’ve described them, volunteer and why might business folk volunteer?
So the first one was, let me go back. So I’ll read into the record what you wrote because it makes a lot of sense. You said, in 2025 I helped the organisers for WordCamp Canada and this year found myself the lead organiser. And this has been consistently one of the nicest, most open groups, that I’ve ever been part of. And then you strayed into why other people, for example, new people and business people might like to contribute.
So on the business side, you said, volunteers, boundaries when not getting paid, giving back, sponsoring folks, not necessarily a financial return on investment. And then for the newbies, you said, there’s other ways to contribute, for example, contributing in code or non-coding ways, and also just being a recipient of the open, friendly community that you encounter. So that was really it. Maybe I’ve said everything that you wanted to say.
[00:28:07] Cathy Mitchell: Well, those are kind of questions that I had coming from a corporate, and I keep talking to different people trying to figure out, I guess I’m looking for something other than altruism when comes to the corporate people at least. Like why are they sponsoring? And I can see, the pessimistic, or maybe the pragmatic, side of me to be positive wants to know why. Why are they putting the dollars in?
But then on the other side, I think, well, if WordPress doesn’t do well, then they don’t do well. Like, if their businesses are based on WordPress. But then I also saw something that, if you sponsor open source projects, it makes hiring people that much easier, and also vetting people that much easier. Because it gets you into the community and so it goes both ways. People will be more likely to apply for your jobs and you will be more likely to have a way to vet them. That’s one thing I saw.
[00:29:04] Nathan Wrigley: I think there’s a lot of truth in that, or at least I’d like to believe there’s a lot of truth in that. That makes me feel happy about the whole situation. But what’s curious about what you’ve just said, and I don’t know how much of an intuition you’ve got on this, but if you were to go back to, let’s say the year, oh, I don’t know, 2018 or something like that, WordPress was experiencing this really stratospheric growth. You know, in terms of market share of the internet broadly, you know, the number of websites as a percentage, WordPress was going from sort of the low twenties to the mid twenties, high twenties, and then through the thirties, and then finally landing at this sort of 40%.
And during that time, saying this phrase sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous, WordPress could kind of do no wrong, I think. There was just growth upon growth upon growth and a lot of companies, I don’t think needed to explain themselves to their directors quite so much. The return on the investment didn’t need to be made. It was just, look, we’re part of this thing, and there’s this rising tide, and we are one of the boats. And look, we’re going up as it all goes up. So it just happened.
However, during COVID, and then especially over the last few years, and then now especially the last couple of years, inject AI into the mix, I feel that that calculus has changed a little bit. And there’s this inkling when you speak to the same corporate people who a few years ago were willing to open their wallets to sponsor events, the wallets are much, much harder to open.
Again, in much the same way that I don’t really know why the community is so fabulous. I don’t really know why the wallets are harder to open. But I think the landscape for sponsorship, and the requirement of a return on investment, as opposed to, well let’s just join in because WordPress is growing. I think that calculation is going to be harder and harder to make. And maybe you’ve got experience of this over at WordCamp Canada trying to gather sponsors. Perhaps you found it straightforward. Perhaps it’s been difficult. I don’t really know.
[00:31:08] Cathy Mitchell: There’s almost like a perfect storm right now because wallets are tighter because over the last few years, at least in the States where my clients are, it’s become, economically there’s uncertainty. And so that trickles down and trickles up, right? And so more wallets are going to be a little bit more restrictive on what they’re going to buy, and they’re going to want to see more bang for their buck.
Corporately, also there’s been this huge rise in competition in the corporate world. There’s just way more competition over the last five or six years for just about anything when it comes to agencies or plugins or themes or whatever, there’s a lot more great competition, like good products out there. But then there’s also a lot more competition to get the clients, like clients have a lot more options.
And so I think it’s a perfect storm. Like, do you want to put your money into WordPress because is that the future? Is there money for sponsorship? Plus WordPress has become stricter on what they require to sponsor, as far as trademark use and different things that have been put higher on the priority list.
And I kind of see it like a levelling off. Like not as a bad thing because every industry can’t just, go, go, go, go. Like there’s going to be a levelling, right? Can’t be that easy. When I started, I didn’t even advertise. And I’ve had this business for 19 years. I’ve never advertised. That is going to go away. Like it was just, you know, I lucked out starting somewhere, but that’s not realistic.
[00:32:44] Nathan Wrigley: So what’s interesting in that is I think I am the same. The only period in which I’ve been in the WordPress community was during this stratospheric growth period really. Everything has been, you know, people have argued on the inside about this, that, and the other thing, and whether a feature should ship in Core, or whether or not we should do this thing at an event or what have you. So there’s been some minor disagreements.
But broadly speaking, the whole project has just swelled and swelled and swelled. There’s this overarching sense of optimism and growth, and now the brakes are on. And so for me, it feels like unfamiliar territory. And because it’s unfamiliar, it feels a little bit scary because I don’t know what that means. I don’t know whether that means that things are going to just level out as you just described, or whether it means things are going to decline, or whether it means some of my friends are going to go away because the community, it’s no longer going to be something that they wish to frequent because their profitability is under question and they need to seek revenue from other different options. Maybe AI, maybe, whatever it might be. And so I think my concern just, it’s probably self-interest really. I’m just concerned because I don’t know what’s coming and that fear is, well, it’s fear.
[00:33:57] Cathy Mitchell: I think this brings me perfectly into the WordCamp Canada thing that I wanted to mention. Just because I see this event, and even the community team, as a whole in WordPress. There are teams in WordPress, by the way, for people that don’t know, that help you get involved. It’s not just coders, like there’s all kinds of teams. And one of them is the community team, and all we have to know how to do is plan an event or host an event or serve coffee. It’s amazing. But anyway.
I am excited about WordCamp Canada, and the reason I’m putting so much time and effort into this conference is because I really see it as a light at the end of this tunnel. Not at the end. Maybe midway. I have no idea what’s going to happen to my own business, to WordPress, I don’t know. But I think there’s one thing that I’m fairly certain of, even now, even in the midst of AI, and that’s open source. I really still believe that open source is the way of the future. I still think it is, open source and AI are probably the way of the future. Yeah, I don’t know how else to say it.
And I think the exciting thing, and the thing that we need to do as people who got to take advantage of that uprise and that uptick, is you and I need to get young people involved. Like we need to get those young people involved in open source. I don’t even care if it’s WordPress or not, but they need to become part of a community that is exciting, that is beyond themselves. They need to see that we’re nice. We don’t bite. We’ll hire them. There’s just so much good that can come out of being together. And these are the nicest people. They’ll talk to people that are just standing around in the hallways with nobody to talk to, which is me. I’m an introvert, ironically.
[00:35:38] Nathan Wrigley: You definitely don’t come across like that, just so that you know.
[00:35:40] Cathy Mitchell: Well, we’re I’m pretending nobody else is listening.
[00:35:43] Nathan Wrigley: The other thing that I would add, as you were saying all of those things, it occurred to me that, I would imagine that people in more senior positions, I don’t really know how to describe it in the WordPress world, have got a similar intuition to the one that you just described. In that they can definitely see that the future needs to be thought about in terms of the youth coming in. Because there’s an awful lot of work being done at the moment and an awful lot of hours being put into educational initiatives.
And also, not just where you and I are living, but all over the world. And it was kind of interesting at WordCamp Asia recently, that was a big focus. A lot of people talking about exactly this thing and these kind of overlapping initiatives that are beginning to bear fruit. So people coming out of universities who’ve had experience of open source and WordPress in particular. And children at schools having experience of open source and WordPress.
And I think, as much as we would like open source and WordPress to win, just from a moral point of view, wouldn’t that be a great thing if everybody just noticed it and got on and used it? I think we need to do a bit of work to make sure that it’s being put under their noses so that they can make those judgements for themselves. And that is definitely a part of the future.
[00:36:57] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah, the Campus Connect and the Credits where they can university credits, like it is getting popular in other places we haven’t heard so much. But I really want to introduce it and bring it to the conference in Vancouver this fall. Because we can have universities in Canada and the US, on this side of the pond get involved in this and actually give kids credits that they can use to graduate.
[00:37:21] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so interesting as well because it’s very hard to, how to describe this, that’s a difficult one to sell, let’s put it that way. The people that are really into those initiatives really love it, but it’s hard to get people to notice that that’s going on, and hard for people perhaps to notice how important that is. But without those little foundational bricks being put in place for the future, this rising tide carries all boats metaphor, that’s not going to happen. You know, I think maybe another good metaphor there is they’re kind of building the harbour wall to make sure that the boats have got something to rise against. And I think that’s really important.
And your part of the world is definitely open to that, I’m sure. Seems to be that some European institutions, colleges, universities and South American institutions and parts in India and Southeast Asia and places like that are also beginning to bite on those ideas as well. So it’d be really interesting to see how that all goes.
You’re painting a picture, Cathy, which makes me feel optimistic. Feels like there’s a lot of positivity coming out of where you are, yeah.
[00:38:24] Cathy Mitchell: I’m probably going to get in trouble for saying this, but for all of the faults that Matt might be accused of, somehow he put something in place that became very, very popular. And the culture that I have been a part of, I haven’t worked for Automattic, but the culture at the WordCamp level and volunteering and the community team has been unbelievably positive, and foreign to me. Like I’ve had to learn this culture. What do you mean there’s no application process? How do I say yes? What are you talking about? So somehow this has grown. And he has had a lot to do with it. People don’t like that he’s had a lot to do with it, but there’s some truth there.
[00:39:07] Nathan Wrigley: It’s really interesting and it doesn’t matter how many times I have conversations like this, I’m always confused by it. I can never get my hands around it and work out what the secret sauce is so that I could copy and paste it into a different locale or a different jurisdiction or different era. But there’s a there, there. There’s something very satisfying about this community. And from everything that you’ve said, it sounds like you are very positive about it. And I share your positivity, even though sometimes it seems quite hard to grasp in the more recent times.
Oh, Cathy, that’s been absolutely wonderful. I’ve enjoyed chatting to you today. We’ve hit the sort of sweet spot of the amount of time that we’ve got, so if it’s okay with you, we’ll wrap it up there. Just before we go, if anybody wants to get in touch with you, or just sort of wants to pat you on the back for your wisdom there, where would we find you?
[00:39:55] Cathy Mitchell: Well they can find me at WPBarista. And right now they can also find me at canada.wordcamp.org.
[00:40:02] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Well I will make sure that that goes into the show notes. So if you’re listening to this, head to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Cathy Mitchell, that’s Cathy with a C, and you’ll be able to find the details in the show notes there. So Cathy Mitchell, thank you very much for chatting to me today. That was lovely. Thank you.
[00:40:19] Cathy Mitchell: Thank you. I enjoyed it.
So on the podcast today we have Cathy Mitchell.
Cathy has been working with WordPress since 2007. What began as a fun personal project during her maternity leave soon evolved into a fully fledged business with the launch of WPBarista in 2008. Over the years, Cathy has garnered extensive experience in the WordPress space, and is now working towards the 2026 WordCamp Canada.
The conversation focuses on the powerful role of community within the WordPress ecosystem, something that Cathy is deeply passionate about. We discuss how open, welcoming, and international the WordPress community feels compared to more traditional corporate or volunteer environments. A theme that emerged was how involvement in WordPress has provided Cathy, and many others, with a sense of belonging and fulfillment, especially after life changes like becoming an “empty nester”.
The discussion explores the motivations for volunteering and organising within the WordPress community, both from the perspective of newcomers looking for purpose and connection, and business owners assessing the return on investment from contributing or sponsoring events. This included how easy it is to get involved, the unique lack of barriers and red tape, and the value of altruism and camaraderie.
Other topics we explored were the broader impact of technology and loneliness, the importance of service and community for well-being, challenges in sponsorship amid changing economic times, and the vital need to engage the next generation in open source.
If you’re interested in the human side of WordPress, how volunteering shapes both individuals and the broader community, and what the future might hold for WordPress events and contributors, this episode is for you.