In this episode, Derek Hanson chats with Kimberly Pace Becker about AI’s intersection with language and technology, emphasizing ethics, diverse perspectives, and responsible integration in digital tools.
Home Blog
WPTavern: #215 – Matt Schwartz on Exploring AI’s Impact in WordPress Agencies (Part 1)
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, exploring AI’s impact in WordPress agencies.
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 Matt Schwartz. Matt runs Inspry, an Atlanta WordPress and Woo Commerce agency. He started it back in 2011 and has been working with WordPress even longer than that. In addition to his agency work, he also has a product called CheckView focused on WordPress testing. He’s got years of experience in the WordPress agency world, and recently he’s turned much of his attention towards the growing impact of AI.
If you’ve been hearing a lot about AI but a feeling fatigued by all the fragmented conversations, this episode might well offer a different perspective. Rather than focusing on how AI creates websites or content, Matt shares a different angle, how AI can be used inside a WordPress agency to enhance processes, improve workflows, and deliver more value to clients, with much of it happening behind the scenes.
We start by talking about how Matt stumbled into web design and how that led him to running his own agency. We dig into agency life, and why so many freelancers and agency owners are constantly iterating on their processes. From there, we talk about the big shift that’s happening, not just in building sites, but in how agencies can use AI to streamline their SOPs, client communication, and internal operations.
Matt explains the need for intention when adding AI to an agency. He introduces the idea of an AI vision document, that helps set guardrails and guidelines for where, and how, AI should factor into your business. He also shares real examples of ways AI can save time and stress in things like meetings, proposals, debugging, support, and even helping you expand your service offerings. We also touch on the risks, ethical considerations, and the importance of keeping a human in the loop during critical agency moments.
If you’re running a WordPress agency, or are curious about how agencies are adapting to the rapid pace of change, brought by AI, this episode is for you. This is part one in a two-part series, so listen to this and tune in next week for part two.
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 Matt Schwartz.
I am joined on the podcast by Matt Schwartz. Hello, Matt.
[00:03:45] Matt Schwartz: Hey Nathan. Thank you so much for having me today. I’m excited.
[00:03:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’re very welcome. We’re on the podcast today to have a chat about AI. Now, before you hit the stop button, dear listener, because AI is all the rage everywhere, we’ve talked about it a million different ways. I think there’s something a little bit different about the conversation that we’re going to have today, because it particularly plays into the WordPress agency, kind of the stuff that you are not doing with the website directly, but all of the bits and pieces that allow you to have an agency, and how AI may or may not be best placed to insert itself in those different scenarios.
But before we begin that, Matt, do you mind just giving us your little bio? Maybe tell us a bit about your situation regarding WordPress agencies and whatnot.
[00:04:31] Matt Schwartz: Definitely. Yeah, so I run an agency called In Inspry in Atlanta. We’ve been around since 2011. We’ve been using WordPress since 2013, and also have a product called CheckView, which does WordPress testing.
But yeah, in the agency space specifically, you know, I’ve been talking to a lot of different agencies about AI. I’ve been pretty involved in it. And you’re totally right, Nathan, our goal today is not to make everyone just have to experience the verbal throw up of the word AI, AI, AI over and over again, which is, I feel like I’m sick of the word. But really going into how agencies can use it in, I think, really interesting ways, and also being candid about what AI is, and some of the pitfalls I think of it that, you know, aren’t always talked about, especially if you go on LinkedIn.
[00:05:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so we’ll get into that in a moment, but just before we do, there’s a couple of interesting bits that I want to throw at you. And this is something that I heard in the British press not that long ago. And it doesn’t in any way, shape or form reflect on WordPress, it was just more generally about AI, and the fatigue that the general population are experiencing around that term.
And it feels like we have reached maximum capacity to just hear those words, and hear the overpromising and the potentially under delivery of AI. So I’ll throw that little bit in, but also, just to say that what we’re going to talk about today is not going to be how to get the pixels on the page, and how to use AI to turn the website out. This is much more going to be the background to the agency that you run and all of that kind of thing.
So before we begin, did you intentionally get into web design all those years ago, or were you more like just about everybody that I talked to, did you stumble into it a little bit more?
[00:06:13] Matt Schwartz: So I stumbled into it in the sense that I started when I was basically a kid. You know, I was like obsessed with building websites for like clubs, and middle school, you know, we had tables and HTML. I think Template Monster was around then. And I would just go to the website and look at these beautiful designs that I knew I couldn’t make.
So then, from there I built websites all through middle school, high school. Got paid, I think from my first one it was my Mom’s work. She worked at a dentist. It was awesome that he let me do that. And, you know, he paid me a couple thousand bucks, which was a lot in high school. And then from there I just built sites through college. We were in Drupal land over at University of Georgia. So that was a little harsh reality for the first CMS I ever used actually.
But I really just enjoyed building websites through that process. And I remember graduating in Information Systems in the Business School and being like, I think I’m just going to keep building websites. I think I like doing this. So I didn’t go the consultant route or anything like that, I just stuck with websites. So I stumbled into it when I was a kid, but I definitely chose to stay in it after that.
[00:07:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And what’s curious about that, and it maps very much what I did, almost every word that you said could map into my own life. Is that you, not working for a company, you are never sort of given the SOP. You have to do the SOP. You have to figure it out as you progress on your journey over the years. So every process that you’ve got, every thing that you do, every price point that you make, every email that you create as a template, you’re probably generating that yourself.
And so that kind of leans heavily into what we’re going to do today, because I felt that journey never ended. Part of being an agency owner was always this constant exploration of not the website itself, that kind of handled itself, more the, what’s the process? How do I get new clients? What are the backend systems that I’m going to use to make it all work?
And so I think freelancers in particular in the WordPress space have got that. And so they’re probably constantly looking around, very much beguiled in the more recent past by what AI can do to them.
And so let’s start, you’ve listed out very kindly a whole load of show notes for me. And the first point that you wanted to get into was, well, the big shift. So let’s start there.
[00:08:26] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, definitely. So I think one thing that we’ve seen as agency owners is, oh, websites and content now can start to be built by AI. And everyone’s talked about that, like you said. But I think what is more interesting is what you’re bringing up, which is around more the process of using AI. Which, if you are a freelancer and you have not looked at your process, please do. I didn’t look at my process for like years, and I would just repeat the same thing over and over again. It wasn’t until I actually started hiring people that I realised that was even really a thing. I know that’s sad, but that’s the reality. So if you haven’t, definitely look at that.
But when it comes to AI, I think being able to use it for process and your SOPs and automation, that’s really where I think it’s actually going to make the biggest impact for agencies that do want to use AI.
Because essentially, not every agency’s this way, this is a generalisation, but as a customer, or a client of an agency, they don’t see the difference between one website and another typically outside of the design, right? They don’t really know the technical know-how. But what they do see is, what is your workflow? What is your process? What is your touch points with them? And that’s ultimately what ends up being the product to your clients.
So I think as an agency owner, being able to use AI to make that process easier, and more clear, to your clients is what will really allow you to thrive. Not necessarily, just the content and executing building the website. Sure, AI may be able to help there, but that actually goes into the bigger process in my opinion.
[00:10:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so we’ll definitely get into all of those, but I think basically the case you are making is that there is a there, there. There is something behind the AI that could definitely improve things.
I think it’s fairly unlikely that anybody listening to this podcast hasn’t dabbled in some way with a little bit of AI, but maybe there’s a handful of people out there who genuinely haven’t. And the last 20 years have been marked by fairly gradual improvements in things. You know, SaaS apps came along and they gradually improved and one superseded another. But again, it was incremental.
But over the last three or four years, I think that’s all gone out the window. Incremental’s no longer really a word. It’s seismic this week, seismic next week, seismic the week after that. Keeping up is going to be difficult. But anyway, needless to say, you are going to make the case that there are areas where AI smuggled into your business is going to be useful.
Can I just ask at the beginning, do you in any way show the AI to your clients? In other words, is there a moment where they get to see behind the curtain, oh, Matt, look, he did that with AI, or do you kind of have this curtain which protects you from the client, so that they never see that you are using AI? It’s a bit like how everybody who was a freelancer always uses the word team. They sort of pretend that there’s like nine of you, but there’s actually only one of you. So it’s a bit like that. Do you hide the AI from your clients or do you let them know that this is what you’re doing?
[00:11:30] Matt Schwartz: So when it comes to the product, we definitely let clients know if we are using it in their product. Because I think, at least from my ethical standpoint, I think you should do that. I don’t want to be in a case where we’re not doing that. But I do think when it comes to your process and internal workflows, no, we don’t typically need to do those things.
The only time we would do that is if we’re actually working with a client to improve their internal processes with AI. Then they may be seeing a parallel setup to what we’ve done, even at our own agency.
[00:11:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There are some people who kind of revel in the, no AI, if you like, so they make that a badge of honour within their business, whether it’s an agency in the WordPress space or anything else. And so obviously they would probably want to proclaim from the rooftops that they’re not using any AI. But I think yours is a fairly standard position. You know, if it doesn’t actually affect what they’re doing day to day, why would you need to use that? In the same way that you don’t need to tell your client, well, we’re using Salesforce in order to communicate with you. It’s just, there’s the URL, go to that and type your ticket in there and so on.
So your second point, why now? Why is it important right at this moment? So we’re recording this, I don’t know, towards the end of April, let’s say that, 2026. Is this like some sort of red line in the sand? Are we about to enter a Rubicon moment where we can’t go backwards?
[00:12:47] Matt Schwartz: Well, I don’t know. It’s seismic every week as you said. So I do think the gap is widening between agencies that are not using AI and using AI. But that doesn’t necessarily mean, in my opinion, you should just like hop on the AI train if you’re not currently deep in it. You do have to think about what makes sense to your agency and what you’re comfortable with.
But I think it really comes back to the fact that execution is becoming a commodity more and more, at least in the web agency space. If you’re building a brochure site, right, those tools are essentially becoming more and more replaced. Just like drag and drop builders came in and now this is kind of, in my opinion, the next iteration. It’ll be less about the execution of building a simple website. It’ll be more about, what is the true value of your agency to that client?
Which in a sense is not a bad thing, because this was always an argument before. You know, are you an agency that builds solutions for clients? It makes them money, or saves them money. Or are you an agency that just executes what they say? And there’s definitely a place for that. I think there will always be a place for that, but I think when you look at like a brochure site, it’s harder, I think, to make that argument than if it’s like an e-commerce site or a custom app, because the tools are just getting better.
So as an agency, I think there is an edge here with AI because clients are going to have higher expectations. You’re going to compete against companies that are using AI to do better touchpoint, to do more touchpoints, to having a better process.
Now, of course, that is dependent if they implement AI correctly, right? User error and AI is like any technology, that is definitely a major concern, guardrails, all that good stuff. But I think that is why this is the time, because if you’re not already looking at it, your competitors are definitely looking at using it in some capacity.
[00:14:40] Nathan Wrigley: Just something you said really struck home there. You said execution is a commodity. I’ve never heard that phrase, but that encapsulates so much, so well. I think that’s really interesting.
And I also share your moment in time analogy because I think we are at some moment where the seesaw, I don’t know if you use that word where you come from. The seesaw is definitely tipping to the point where, in the part of the world where I live, virtually everybody is aware of it. We mentioned that maybe there’s fatigue about it, but certainly almost everybody has had some exposure to it. They’re now aligned with what can be done, and at what cost, and for what amount of time.
And so it does feel like if you were to go and say, I don’t know, I’m going to build you a $5,000 brochure website with two pages, maybe a few years ago that was much more credible than it seems like now. And so this horizon of expectations is opening up. And it’s not just because we can do it, it’s because the clients, they know we can do it. And they know that things are going to be cheaper to produce en masse in the future.
So I think you’re probably right. So again, you’ve made the case for, this is the time. So not just that this is a good idea, but this is the time. Anything else to add onto that before we move on to your next one?
[00:15:56] Matt Schwartz: The only thing I would add to that is, you know, AI could be an edge for you. It could also be not using AI at all, because ultimately it’s about the value you’re providing, again, to your client. So you may be able to build a two page, $5,000 website using AI, but essentially if you’re able to provide value to that client in some other way, whether it’s your sales process, your overall process, your personality, whatever it is, that all plays into this. So I would keep that in mind.
But overall, you are correct. I think the floor is rising for everyone. And this is real dark, but AI to me only showed us that a lot of the work we do day to day, it’s just not that special, it’s execution. And that just means we need to be spending more time on the strategy and the value to the client, whether that’s using AI or not. But I think using AI to at least look at that is a good idea, if you haven’t done that up to this point, I think it’s the time to at least look.
[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I expect the calculus that’s going on in most, and I’m using air quotes here, normal people’s heads. So when I’m talking about that, I mean non-technical clients who might be coming, looking for a website for their bricks and mortar shop or whatever it may be. The calculus of AI is just this shrinking of time. The thing which probably would’ve taken a week to do, you know, okay, I’m going to phone you up, we’re going to set up a meeting, we’ll have that meeting, we’ll back and forth what we might want. And then a week or two later, you’ll show me a few wire frames or something like that.
That all seems now to have been crunched into literal minutes. That’s no longer a secret. I think at the beginning of the AI, movement, let’s call it that, a few years ago, I think there was a call that you could basically say, make more money, because the client’s expectations would be the same in terms of time, and the amount of expertise that was needed.
But that seems to be shrinking as well, because now the clients are aware that the AI can do that thing. Look, you just knocked it up with AI in three minutes. No, we’re not going to pay you for six weeks for that kind of thing.
Okay so, right, there we go. So that’s the now. Then you move on to something that I’ve not even thought about before, which is creating an AI vision document. Now you’re going to need to explain what you mean by that I think.
[00:18:08] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, definitely. So the idea really with this is being more purposeful about adding AI. At least in the past, at my agency, you know, I’d wake up one day freaking out and be like, we’ve got to try to see how this works. Does this make sense to add AI to this process? And it wouldn’t be very purposely built. It would just be like, hey, let’s try this.
And to some extent that experimentation is good, but at the same time, I think if you are a lot more methodical about that process, it will be better for the long-term use of AI. Because as I’ve said, I definitely have, maybe I didn’t say, I have hesitations about AI and I use it, right? I think that’s the paradox of what’s happening. A lot of people are using it, but we’re not all trustful of it. But we can see that there are potential gains and you want to be on the cutting edge.
But ultimately, the vision document, the idea is that you will create a document that outlines all of your processes at your company, at your agency. And see what are the things that you want to add AI to, what makes sense, things that are repetitive, that the team is losing time on, compared to things that really require human judgement.
So it’s not just like shove AI into everything. This AI document sounds like that’s what it is. But it’s actually like, there may be many places we don’t want AI at all, or we may want to have a guard for human judgement. And I think that’s actually a really good idea to protect your agency from risk and really just your reputation. Because otherwise, I think a lot of agencies are just kind of, you know, yolo, adding it everywhere and not really thinking about it from a high level.
The other neat thing you can do if you’re building this is, obviously you can use AI to help find patterns in your business from using your time tracking software to see who is working on what tasks, and what’s taking the longest. And being like, are these good places that we could use AI? Like I can connect Claude to Everhour that we use, and it can spit out who’s working on what in the past month. And I actually can get a good pattern, because one thing you can, I will say with AI is it’s pretty good at pattern recognition. That’s what it was built for. So if you just need like a high level idea, again, grain of salt, but at a high level, it’s pretty good at that.
So I think for a vision document, pulling all that data in, using AI and then setting these guardrails, figuring out what in your team’s processes you can build into a vision is a good idea. And that goes into the high level point I made, which was really, I think AI being used for more process and agency is the big thing here, more than anything.
[00:20:42] Nathan Wrigley: I suppose if you’re the agency owner as well, and obviously agency could be like three people, two people, right up to, you know, several hundreds, maybe thousands, who knows. If you are at the, towards the top of that pyramid, let’s put it that way, knowing when and where it’s going to be used is really important. You need to know that, okay, our support, 80% of our support is going to be handled by AI. That’s the thing that we’ve leaned into. We’re going to do it that way.
Or maybe you are exactly the opposite. You know, we’ve learned, our customer base are very dissatisfied with the kind of answers that they get, because of the nature of our company and the expertise that we need to bring to bear. So we’re not going to do any AI for support.
But also development, to know, okay, this is the moment where you must stop using AI. When you run into this snag, we’re going to deal with that as humans. We’re going to huddle together, figure it out as humans, and maybe take it back to the AI at that point.
But having that overarching understanding, and writing it down. Having an SOP, if you like, for AI so that everybody’s on the same page and knows where it’s permissible and not permissible. So you mentioned you’ve got a whole laundry list of possible things. So it might be in the sales process, the delivery process, the proposal stage, project management, QA, launch. There’s a whole bunch on here.
Yeah, that seems like a really neat idea, and not something that I’d figured out. And it’s kind of like, keeps you honest in a way. It means that this is what we’ve agreed to do as a company, these are the boundaries that we’re going to set ourselves. And they can change, but for now, this is what they are.
[00:22:14] Matt Schwartz: Yeah. I think that even if you’re not, again, jumping in the deep end of AI, just having a doc like this will protect you so that I think you do have these guardrails with your employees or your contractors. You know who’s using what, and you can really protect your agency even if it’s not implementing more AI, right? I think it’s just a good idea.
And like you said, writing it down, it’s funny, it’s kind of like when you build your agency, you write your mission statement and your values and that really does do something in, I think, the human psyche when you do that. And I think that can be applied here with the AI vision document too.
[00:22:47] Nathan Wrigley: I love your fourth point, which you’ve entitled, AI as a new core service offering. Because this feels like a really nice sweet spot. Because with the best will in the world, you and I, and probably a lot of the people that are listening to this podcast are very much into technology. We deliberately put ourselves in front of new tech, new features, new widgets, new gadgets, whatever. So we’re beguiled by it. But the truth is, we know there’s a lot of people out there that aren’t, probably don’t really want to get all that close to it. And so I think what you are suggesting here is, why not offer your AI expertise that you gain as an actual service to clients? Have I got that right?
[00:23:24] Matt Schwartz: Correct. So essentially, like you said, if you’re already building up these new technology skills, being able to apply this directly in a, I would say in the proper way, right? Like we’re seeing, again, AI thrown in everywhere. You have to know your clients and your customers. They may not want to hear the word AI. What they may want to hear it instead is, hey, I can fix your business workflow and I can save you thousands of dollars, and we can automate this. They don’t want to hear the word AI, and that’s okay. But it’s essentially AI at the end of the day, right?
So it may not be that the product offerings actually use the word AI. If anything personally, I’m kind of avoiding that, at least at our agency. Of course I’ll tell them it’s using AI, but it’s not what I lead with. I think it’s more about going in on, okay, what solutions can we provide clients and using this as a new offering, especially as a way to handle and mitigate what’s happening with brochure sites, right?
Brochure sites I think are going to continue to drop and you need to provide value to clients. And I think getting closer to their actual processes, there’s a couple different ways you could do this. Like I know some agencies that are using AI to build custom web apps, like lightweight internal ones. Which I think can be helpful, but I have concerns around the risks and security of that because I do know some agencies that are, again, are just yolo building it. I don’t think they’re doing the due diligence. But I do think there’s a way that you can build, let’s say an app that used to cost 50,000 for 10,000 now, right? Or 8,000 and do it mostly like the right way, do human review of the code. So it’s still something that they couldn’t have done at all before. They couldn’t have had this custom internal app.
And I think that is the argument for people that say, hey, I’m going to replace all my SaaS products. It’s not, in my opinion, you replace all your SaaS products. If you can build a SaaS internally that is built specifically for your business, and you feel like you can maintain and build it properly at the right cost, sure. You’re willing to do that. But if there’s a SaaS product out there that does exactly what you need, I’m going to pay the $30, and then go yell at that company. I’m not going to build it internally. So having these conversations with clients, if you’re going to build custom apps, I know I went on a little side tangent, but I think that’s really important say.
And then the other one I’ll mention as far as AI core offerings is using more automation with tools like n8n or any of those Make type tools. n8n, I would say is a little more advanced, but the benefit is clients are hearing about AI, they realise it can do a lot, and starting to ask them, well, how can I help save you money or make you money in your processes? So productising or creating SOPs that are more automated. Even using those tools for your own customers, I think can be huge. Because then you’re really getting to value directly with them.
Like, brochure sites, I think the problem is, it’s almost subjective sometimes the value, which I’ve always struggled with, depending on the client. But things like their processes and them seeing you automate this stuff, they see the value immediately. So it’s an easy sale that you can make. And you can provide that value, and potentially even get recurring income off of that. Because maybe you’re hosting the automation for them or you’re tweaking the automation. So those are some ways you can mitigate, I think what’s going on with AI.
[00:26:50] Nathan Wrigley: The next one, I’m just going to skirt over quite quickly because I think everybody can kind of grasp this. One of the things which AI is obviously superior, let’s go with that word, to the typical human, is its capacity to wrap its arms around a massive amount of data, and kind of make sense of its straight away.
One of the areas where I think you are saying this could be deployed pretty effectively is in things like marketing, where having an understanding of, I don’t know, geography, spending power in different geographical locations, what kind of products are going to service the market that you are launching into, and therefore how to build websites, pages that kind of react to that and will work well.
That’s the kind of thing that was always off limits to me. I wasn’t interested in the marketing side. Looking at that data, trying to digest that data, it was just never of interest to me. And now, I think everybody can understand that you point an AI in the right direction and it can draw conclusions, which are just so much more credible than somebody like me could summon up in six months of hard work, really.
[00:27:53] Matt Schwartz: Well,I mean I think you could sum it up, but I think you bring up a really good point, which is that with AI, it can pull in all this data and it can give you, I would say, summaries and next points that you just wouldn’t have done before. I actually think that’s the sweet spot with AI is, are we using this to replace a really good existing setup, or are we doing something that we literally couldn’t even do before because the client couldn’t afford it?
So I think that’s what’s really neat is I can be like, okay, client, we looked through your Freshdesk, we looked through all the data you gave us. Here’s what we saw your personas. And before, there’s just no way, as an agency, I would be offering that at the budget that they could afford, or maybe the interest as an agency to do that. So I think that is, a really neat thing is, especially for small businesses, we can offer them services that they just wouldn’t even be able to have in the past at the budget that they have.
[00:28:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so really you are kind of broadening the product offering that you can have. I mean nobody here is going to advocate that you just use an AI and regurgitate whatever it says without some background knowledge that what you are saying makes sense. There clearly needs to be a bit of that. But the amassing of the data with some common sense, heuristics around what it is that the data is showing you.
Okay, that’s interesting. So maybe there’s some sort of low hanging fruit that previously you would’ve said no to and, look, we just don’t do that. You can now not only retroactively sort of say, yes, we now do that, but maybe even proactively say, look, we’ve got these other things that we can discuss as well. Okay, that’s interesting.
Right, here’s the next bit, and this is, I think if you are not an AI expert, and I definitely would consider myself in that bucket, I think this next one is some really great low hanging fruit to get you started. So this is, your number six, is AI inside agency operations. So this is using AI to make work easier, I guess would be an easy way to say it. So just run us through these points.
[00:29:51] Matt Schwartz: Definitely. So this is probably, if you’re familiar with AI, the most common uses. But essentially it’s going to be, you know, things like your meeting summaries, right? I think everyone has seen the bots that join in and, you know, there’s like 10 bots and there’s like two people and we’re like, are we in dystopia? Or it’s you and like 10 bots, and the other person doesn’t show up and you’re like, am I supposed to just talk to this bot? I think Mark Zuckerberg actually says he’s starting to have a bot fill in for him at meetings. Anyways, very dystopian.
But when it comes to meeting summaries and that sort of thing, I think where it can be really helpful if you’re not using it, again is, in the past, if I was having these discovery calls where I may not actually land this client, I don’t want to spend 20 hours trying to figure out the perfect proposal for them. It’s just not worth my time, basically, right?
So what this lets you do is it lets you, as an agency, do things you couldn’t do before, or you didn’t have the budget and resources to do. One would be on discovery. I can now take all the meeting notes, I can have it go to the client’s website and I can also have it look at my previous proposals. And I can have it put together a solution for this client, in terms of like what proposal makes sense for them.
To your point, I’m still going to review it. I’m still going to edit it. I’m still going to make sure that this makes sense, but I think that’s a perfect sweet spot again for AI. I know I keep saying it. Something I just wouldn’t have done before. I would’ve like, either I just spent 20 hours on it or sent a very generic proposal just to get something out the door. Now I can make it really a lot more nuanced because it can go through all that data.
So if you’re not using it for summaries or proposals or SOWs, I think a draft version of that, it’s really good at those sort of things with combining all the data.
[00:31:36] Nathan Wrigley: I am so surprised by how quickly that remarkable technology became utterly mundane. That is say that three years ago, the first time somebody dropped in a Zoom meeting with an AI bot, I thought, okay, that’s really unusual, what’s going on here? And then within three minutes you get the email after the call is finished and you see this perfect summarisation of exactly what you talked about, including correctly labelled next tasks for each of the individuals on the call.
That to me was, I was living in Star Trek. And now that just seems so pedestrian. And that’s remarkable. That’s the speed at which we’ve become adapted, and it’s become part of our modus operandi.
And if you haven’t used those, it’s really worth a try because you will experience the amazement that I had three years ago. And then you too can become completely numb to how amazing it is really quickly.
It literally will take an hour of audio and spit out a basically perfect summary in 150 words or whatever it may be, and it will capture it perfectly. I suppose the rebuttal to that is, well, what do you do with that? If nobody does anything with that then, well, you haven’t really lost anything. You’re in exactly the same place as you were before, but at least you’ve got a written record of it.
But like I say, that’s the low hanging fruit. They’re definitely things. SOWs, SOPs, meeting summaries, that kind of thing. Great idea.
Okay, next one. Number seven. AI for support workflows. What’s going on here?
[00:33:04] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, so this one’s a little bit more about the actual operations. But I’ve talked to some agencies that are starting to really build into their support process AI tools. For example, using things like n8n, the automation platform, where it can digest your help tickets. And we’re not necessarily going to have it solve the problems, right? But what it can do, again, is it’s going to have access to a lot of data about that website. It may have access to your project management software, all the other tickets that came in.
And unlike a human where it would take hours to do this, so we just aren’t going to do it, it can do a really good job of essentially making sure that we can have all the information we need for the support person to do what they need to do, the support team, right? So it can even give good initial resolutions for the team to do, so that they can work through tickets faster.
That’s a good example of, we’re not replacing the human, we’re not trying to automate it so it emails back the customer. But what we are doing is we’re taking in all the context of, hey, it’s this client, they’ve had these other tickets, it has access possibly to the WordPress site, so it can even see the error logs. It may have access to the server APIs, so that it can actually see what’s going on with that server. And then it can basically come up with a resolution that is likely the issue.
And you are seeing a lot of, even hosting companies going that route, where they’re starting to have agents inside their hosting so that you can pinpoint issues in WordPress a lot faster than you could in the past. And again, I still want a human to review that, but I do think by doing that, you can get a speedier response to your customers, and you can cover more tickets without alienating your customers or making it seem like it was, you know, written by a robot with em dashes everywhere, right?
[00:34:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you know what? I think this is a real area to tread carefully, certainly from my point of view, because I have definitely got AI bot fatigue. In that, there is some button that gets pushed when I find that I’m in a chat bot, and that is the only route that I’ve got through this whole system. I really dearly love to get in front of a human quite quickly. And I think a lot of people are learning that technique of, you know, the first thing you type is, speak to a human, or something equivalent to that. I think it’s really easy to misstep here, and misjudge people’s capacity to take AI only, or AI mostly or whatever.
This I think will be an interesting area to watch. And maybe this will be at the vanguard of when people express their frustration, you know, how much of this can you take? And monitoring that and keeping sight on when people’s, I don’t know, anger boils over because they’re not getting the service that they paid for or the service that they’ve come to expect or what have you. So, yeah. Anyway, that’s my 2 cents on that.
[00:35:50] Matt Schwartz: Hundred percent agree. It’s the most sensitive portion in my opinion. I mean that’s your touch point with your customer when they’re most frustrated.
[00:35:56] Nathan Wrigley: Right, that’s the pain moment. And introducing additional pain at the moment of pain is fraught with problems. And we’ve seen this play out in all sorts of other ways. I’m sure it’s the case where you are in your part of the world with telephone systems where you end up in this just infinite loop of, press three for, and then press four for. And then eventually you get back to, oh, well, I’m back to pressing three am I? Okay. And the anger boils over.
It feels like such a win. We’re saving time. We’ve got the AI to answer because it’s read all of our documentation. I’m going to guarantee that somebody will not be able to get what you think they ought to be getting with it.
And dare I say it, what about all those dear people out there who really are unable to access the technology in the way that you anticipate, or the way that you can. Maybe they’re elderly, maybe they don’t have the capacity to do it. Maybe they’ve got accessibility needs or something like that.
Okay, number eight. AI assisted debugging and WordPress management. I like this. This is a good one.
[00:36:53] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, so we covered this a little. It goes along actually with the above point which is, one thing that I see other agencies, and we’re also doing this internally is, you know, you can obviously connect AI agents now to WordPress sites directly, obviously with guardrails in place. But it can connect to the REST API you have the Abilities API with Automattic. There’s third party solutions like Novamira out there that can actually work with the PHP code side of things. Your hosting companies often are actually building their own tools as well.
So doing all of that, debugging has been, I will say, has been dramatically improved, at least at our agency. Because it can do all of that and it can really find a nuanced solution where, you know, we could spend 10 hours trying to work on some weird PHP issue because, again, it can look at the whole picture. And I think that is where AI is very good, is when it’s a one-off thing, right? Where it’s just like, this is a one-off troubleshooting task. I don’t want to spend 10 hours learning exactly what this was. It’s likely going to get you there, and then you can obviously finish it up if it’s not able to get you fully there.
But you can use these tools today to really reduce the amount of debugging and management you’re doing. And you can extend it. We’re not going to spend a lot of time on this, but doing edits on websites, a lot of page builders now are starting to build in syntax for agents so that it understands Gutenberg blocks. It understands how to edit and edit nested blocks. I’ve had struggles with Claude, where it would try to write nested blocks and it would just mush the whole page.
But as these page builders are becoming better, and as WordPress becomes better, essentially WordPress becomes the infrastructure, right? And Claude is actually doing the work. You’ve heard that. And what I get out of that with the infrastructure is WordPress is the platform, it provides all the capabilities, but then the AI tool, mixed with the human, is essentially going to be managing the WordPress site. And it’s much easier to tell AI to do that than to go into the backend and make edits.
But I am a little hesitant on just making free flowing edits, not checking the work on the actual website, or letting AI check the work. Some people are doing that. I’m not doing that. We’re saying, give us the link after every page you edit, and I’m going to go click it and I’m going to look at it.
Some agencies, they’re saying, okay, Claude’s going to go to the Chrome link and do that. Whatever you’re comfortable with, but in our opinion, there still needs to be human review. And I still don’t think that’s going to change, even if it gets better because until AI is as good as a human being, in the sense that we can trust it and it won’t lie. I give this analogy, right? You hire a developer, they lie to you twice, you’re probably going to fire them, right? But with AI, we just keep giving them a second chance. And, why?
[00:39:41] Nathan Wrigley: Free pass every time.
[00:39:42] Matt Schwartz: Why are doing that? And I think the way to mitigate that is you still have to have human review based on the risk factor. That’s really what it’s about.
[00:39:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I share your sentiment there. I think it’s very important to have a human in the loop. And usually at the end of whatever is going on, there needs to be a human just to do the sort of final summary and checking and what have you.
But the point that you mentioned there is, WordPress really has done an awful lot of work in the background to make itself AI ready. So a lot of the capabilities inside of WordPress, a lot of the things that you would normally have had to engage with the admin, with a mouse, or with a keyboard or what have you, a lot of that has been taken over.
And we are very much entering an era where WordPress becomes almost like the scaffolding for the website in a way. And you can talk to the website through these AI agents, but in many situations, I think in the next five, six years, there’ll be a lot of people who will be never visiting the WordPress admin and clicking around and trying to find the menus for things because they will simply ask an AI.
Can I change the clock to the 24 hour clock? Sure, done. And that will extend into everything. You know, I want that block to be, I don’t know, I want the text in that block to be bold, and have this particular font and yada yada, on it goes. And WordPress is doing a really incredible job at an incredible speed of laying that foundational work.
If you haven’t looked at what the Core AI team are doing, there’s definitely some interesting stuff.
[00:41:06] Matt Schwartz: It’s really neat.
[00:41:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s, and I think that an interesting and commendable approach as well, because rather than trying to, I don’t know, hold everything into WordPress, it’s very much the opposite. It’s, we’re just allowing everything to communicate inwards to WordPress. And WordPress will just be the foundation upon which the whole thing resides.
Okay, so we’ve got through 8 of what turns out to be 16 points in Matt’s comprehensive show notes. And just looking at the clock, Matt, we’re at it’s kind of 40 odd minutes, which is about the sweet spot. So I’m going to recommend that we split this up into a second episode. So this in effect, will be the first of a two part mini series, if you are okay with that. How do you feel? Is that all right with you?
[00:41:45] Matt Schwartz: Definitely. You know, I didn’t know we were going to dive this far into it, but I’m so glad we are. And I hope, you know, the audience is interested in staying around for part two.
[00:41:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. In which case, if you are happy with that, what we’ll do is we’ll knock it on the head, as we say in the UK, here. We will return next week with the second part. And I will advise people at that point to listen to the first part so they can keep up to date.
So we will see you in a week’s time. I guess all it remains for me to do, Matt, is to say thank you very much for joining me today. Part two next week. See you soon.
[00:42:14] Matt Schwartz: Thank you so much. Look forward to it.
On the podcast today we have Matt Schwartz.
Matt runs Inspry, an Atlanta WordPress and WooCommerce agency. He started it back in 2011, and has been working with WordPress even longer than that. In addition to his agency work, he also has a product called CheckView focused on WordPress testing. He’s got years of experience in the WordPress agency world, and recently he’s turned much of his attention towards the growing impact of AI.
If you’ve been hearing a lot about AI but are feeling fatigued by all the fragmented conversations, this episode might well offer a different perspective. Rather than focusing on how AI creates websites or content, Matt shares a different angle: how AI can be used inside a WordPress agency to enhance processes, improve workflows, and deliver more value to clients, with much of it happening behind the scenes.
We start by talking about how Matt stumbled into web design, and how that led to him running his own agency. We dig into agency life, and why so many freelancers and agency owners are constantly iterating on their processes. From there, we talk about the ‘big shift’ that’s happening, not in just building sites, but in how agencies can use AI to streamline their SOPs, client communication, and internal operations.
Matt explains the need for intention when adding AI to an agency. He introduces the idea of an ‘AI Vision Document’ that helps set guardrails and guidelines for where and how AI should factor into your business. He also shares real examples of ways AI can save time and stress in things like meetings, proposals, debugging, support, and even helping you expand your service offerings. We also touch on the risks, ethical considerations, and the importance of keeping a human in the loop during critical agency moments.
If you’re running a WordPress agency, or are curious about how agencies are adapting to the rapid pace of change brought by AI, this episode is for you. This is part one of a two-part series, so listen to this and tune in next week for part 2.
Matt’s show notes for Part 1
1. Start With the Big Shift
- AI is not just a content tool for agencies.
- The more interesting shift is AI becoming part of the agency’s internal operating layer.
- Agencies are using AI to improve how work moves through the business, not just to write blog posts or social content.
- The real opportunity is combining AI with process, automation, QA, testing, and human judgment.
Good framing line:
The biggest shift is not that agencies can generate more content. It is that smaller teams can now build systems, automate workflows, and create internal tools that used to be out of reach.
2. Why This Matters for Agencies Right Now
- Agencies are often differentiated less by the raw ability to build a website and more by their process.
- Most clients do not fully understand the technical difference between two agencies.
- What they experience is the agency’s communication, organization, speed, clarity, follow-through, documentation, QA, and ability to reduce stress.
- AI can help strengthen those process layers dramatically.
- That means AI is not just a production shortcut. It can become a differentiator in how an agency operates and how clients experience the agency.
Good framing lines:
Most agencies are not differentiated only by the code they write or the designs they create. They are differentiated by their process, and AI can make that process sharper, faster, and more consistent.
Clients often do not see the technical complexity behind the scenes. They see whether the agency is organized, responsive, clear, and proactive. AI can help agencies improve all of those touchpoints.
- The bottom part of the market is getting squeezed.
- Simple brochure sites are becoming harder to sell at the same margins.
- AI website builders, templates, and cheaper offshore options are pushing agencies to provide more operational value.
- More technical agencies may need to move upmarket into:
- Automation
- Custom workflows
- Internal tools
- Integrations
- QA and testing
- Reporting
- Client portals
- Business process improvement
Good framing line:
Agencies may need to become less like website vendors and more like technical operations partners.
3. Before Getting Tactical: Create an AI Vision Document
- Before agencies randomly add AI tools everywhere, it helps to create an internal AI vision document.
- This gives the agency a purposeful way to evaluate where AI actually makes sense.
- A lot of agencies are starting here instead of jumping straight into tools.
- The goal is to map the agency’s existing processes first, then identify where AI can safely and meaningfully improve them.
The document should outline:
- Every major agency process:
- Sales
- Discovery
- Proposals
- SOWs
- Project management
- Design
- Development
- QA
- Launch
- Support
- Reporting
- Client communication
- Internal documentation
- Where the team loses the most time.
- Which tasks are repetitive.
- Which tasks require human judgment.
- Which tasks are low-risk enough to automate.
- Which tasks should only be AI-assisted, not AI-owned.
- Which tools and data AI would need access to.
- What guardrails are required.
- What should never be automated.
- How success will be measured.
Good framing lines:
The best agencies are not just asking, “What AI tool should we use?” They are asking, “Where in our business does AI actually belong?”
Start with a map of your agency, not a list of tools. Then use AI where it actually removes friction.
An AI vision document helps prevent random AI adoption. It turns AI from a collection of experiments into an intentional operating strategy.
4. AI as a New Core Service Offering
- AI automation with n8n
- Agencies can offer business process automation as a core service.
- This is especially relevant for more technical agencies.
- Examples:
- Intake workflows
- CRM updates
- Client notifications
- Reporting
- Ticket routing
- Follow-up emails
- Internal process automation
- AI-assisted custom web apps
- Agencies can use AI to build lightweight apps and internal tools faster.
- This can include dashboards, portals, calculators, admin tools, and reporting systems.
- This may become a better service opportunity than lower-budget brochure sites.
Good framing line:
A lot of agencies are going to have to decide whether they are selling pages or solving operational problems.
5. AI for Marketing Strategy and Client Personas
- AI makes higher-end marketing research more accessible for smaller clients.
- Agencies can use AI to analyze:
- Support tickets
- Surveys
- Reviews
- Online reputation
- Sales conversations
- Customer feedback
- This can help agencies build better customer avatars and personas.
- The agency can then adjust:
- Website messaging
- Landing pages
- Calls to action
- Service pages
- Ad messaging
- Email campaigns
Good framing line:
Smaller clients can now get a level of audience research that used to only be realistic for much larger budgets.
6. AI Inside Agency Operations
- Meeting summaries
- Turn messy discovery calls into clear summaries, next steps, and follow-up emails.
- Proposal and SOW drafts
- Use AI to create a structured first draft from discovery notes.
- Still requires human review for scope, pricing, assumptions, exclusions, and risk.
- Internal SOP drafts
- Convert repeated processes into internal documentation.
- Useful for support, launches, DNS, hosting, QA, plugin updates, and onboarding.
- Project recap emails
- Great for turning technical project updates into plain-English summaries for non-technical clients.
Good framing line:
AI is very good at taking messy agency information and turning it into something structured.
7. AI for Support Workflows
- AI can help analyze support tickets before they reach the team.
- It can summarize the issue, suggest likely causes, and recommend possible solutions.
- It can track what has already been tried, so support does not repeat the same steps.
- It can ask the client for missing information before a ticket is created.
- With n8n or similar tools, agencies can route tickets more intelligently and reduce back-and-forth.
Example:
- Client submits “the form is broken.”
- AI asks for the page URL, browser, screenshot, error message, and whether it happens for all users.
- Ticket is created with a clean summary and likely next steps.
- Support team gets a better starting point.
Good framing line:
The goal is not to replace support. It is to remove the first 20 minutes of confusion from every support ticket.
8. AI-Assisted Debugging and WordPress Management
- AI can help replicate website errors, analyze symptoms, and suggest what to try next.
- For WordPress, this gets more powerful when connected to:
- REST API
- Abilities API
- novamira.ai
- Server logs
- Plugin and theme data
- Hosting environment details
- Hosting companies may increasingly add agents inside their platforms.
- Hosts have a unique advantage because they already have access to the server and WordPress environment.
- Examples to watch:
- Cloudways
- Convesio
- Other managed WordPress hosts
Good framing line:
WordPress troubleshooting is often a context problem. The more context the AI has from the site, server, logs, plugins, and recent changes, the more useful it becomes.
Useful links
Matt’s agency – Inspry
How to Check If Your WordPress SEO Is Actually Working
Many WordPress site owners keep publishing content for months but still aren’t sure if their SEO is actually working.
The tricky part is that the results are usually already there but they’re just not always easy to notice at first glance.
Instead of appearing in one obvious place, SEO performance shows up across different areas of your site. You can spot it through clear signals like organic traffic, keyword rankings, indexed pages, click-through rates, and conversions.
In this guide, I’ll show you how to check if your SEO is working and measure your SEO progress on your site using tools like MonsterInsights, AIOSEO, and Google Search Console.
💡 Quick 2-Minute Check to See If Your WordPress SEO Is Working
If you just want a quick check-up of your SEO performance, you don’t need tools or deep reports yet. Start by answering these simple questions:
- Are you getting any organic traffic from search engines like Google Search?
- Are your pages indexed and appearing in search results?
- Are your keywords showing up in search results at all?
If you can answer ‘yes’ to at least one of these, then your SEO is already working in some way.
If not, it simply means you still need to focus on the basics, and the rest of this guide will help you fix that step by step.
What Does ‘SEO Working’ Actually Mean?
When people ask whether their SEO is working, they’re usually expecting a single clear answer. But in reality, SEO success shows up in a few different areas at the same time.
I’ve found it’s less about one big result and more about steady progress across your content and visibility.
Here are the main signs that your SEO is actually working:
- Your Organic Traffic is Slowly Increasing: You start getting more visitors from search engines over time. It may not jump overnight, but the trend moves upward.
- Your Pages are Appearing in Google Search Results: This means your content is getting indexed properly and showing up when people search for related topics.
- Your Keyword Rankings are Improving: Your posts begin to move higher in search results for the terms you’re targeting. Even moving from page 3 to page 2 is a positive signal.
- More People are Clicking Your Search Listings: This is your click-through rate (CTR). It tells you that your titles and meta descriptions are compelling enough to attract clicks.
- Visitors are Taking Action on Your Site: This could be signing up for your email list, filling out a contact form, or making a purchase.
The main thing to remember is this: you don’t need to see all of these factors improving at the same time or in big numbers. If even a few of them are moving in the right direction, then your SEO is working and building momentum over time.
5 Easy Ways to Check If Your SEO Is Working
Now that you know what ‘SEO working’ actually looks like, let’s get into the practical part: how to check it on your own website.
The good news is that you don’t need to guess or rely on assumptions. You can actually see clear SEO signals using a few simple tools and reports.
I have broken this down into 5 easy checks that give a pretty accurate picture of what’s happening behind the scenes. These are beginner-friendly, and you can do them even if you’re not very technical:
- Track Organic Traffic Growth Over Time
- Verify Your Pages Are Indexed in Google
- Monitor Your Target Keyword Rankings
- Analyze Your Organic Click-Through Rate (CTR)
- Measure SEO-Driven Conversions and Goals (Conversions)
- 💡Simple Monthly SEO Checklist
- How Long Does SEO Take to Work?
- Frequently Asked Questions About Website SEO
1. Track Organic Traffic Growth Over Time
Organic traffic is simply the visitors who land on your website from search engines like Google Search without you paying for ads. So if someone searches for a topic, clicks your post, and visits your site, that’s organic traffic.
This is usually the first and most important SEO signal because it tells you one simple thing:
Are people actually finding your site through search?
To make this easier, here’s an idea of what healthy organic traffic can look like for different types of websites:
If this number is going up over time, then it usually means your content is getting more visibility, and your SEO strategy is moving in the right direction.
💡 Expert Tip: Organic search is still the main source of traffic, but search is evolving. Some websites are also starting to get traffic from AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
This is part of a newer strategy called GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), which focuses on making content easier for AI systems to understand and surface in answers.
To prepare your site for visibility AI-generated answers, see our guide on Generative Engine Optimization.
See Your Organic Traffic With MonsterInsights
You can track your organic traffic using Google Analytics, which is one of the most popular and free tools for website analytics.
Inside Google Analytics, you’ll need to explore reports and filter traffic sources to find your organic search data. While it’s very powerful, it can feel overwhelming for beginners because there are multiple menus, reports, and settings to navigate.
That’s why I recommend MonsterInsights instead.
We use MonsterInsights across WPBeginner because it is the best analytics solution for WordPress.
It connects directly with Google Analytics but simplifies everything by showing your most important SEO and traffic data inside your WordPress dashboard.
Once MonsterInsights is installed and connected to Google Analytics, go to Insights » Reports in your WordPress dashboard, where you will see an ‘Overview Report.’
This gives you a simple breakdown of your website traffic, including how much is coming from organic search.
If you want deeper SEO insights, switch to the ‘Search Console‘ tab from the top (available in Pro).
This report shows:
- Top search queries bringing visitors
- Clicks and impressions from Google
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Average keyword position
It is one of the easiest ways to understand what people are searching for before landing on your site.
MonsterInsights also includes an AI Traffic report, which helps you track visitors coming from AI platforms like ChatGPT and other AI tools.
This is especially useful if your content is being discovered through AI-powered recommendations or answers.
To access it, go to Insights » Reports in your WordPress dashboard, then switch to the Traffic » AI Traffic tab from the top.
How to Check Organic Traffic in Google Analytics
If you prefer to use Google Analytics directly, then you can find your organic traffic there with just a few clicks. Once you know where to look, it’s pretty straightforward.
First, log in to your Google Analytics account and select your website. Then, go to Reports » Acquisition » Traffic acquisition.
Here, you’ll see a table showing different traffic sources. Look for the row labeled ‘Organic Search.’
This shows exactly how many visitors are coming to your site from search engines like Google.
You can also click on ‘Organic Search’ to get more detailed insights, like which pages are getting traffic and how users are interacting with your content.
While this method is powerful, it does require a bit more navigation compared to MonsterInsights. This is why many beginners prefer seeing this data directly inside their WordPress dashboards.
What Your Traffic Data Means
Once you open your reports in MonsterInsights or Google Analytics, you’ll usually see a trend line showing whether your traffic is going up, staying flat, or going down.
To make this easier to understand, here’s a simple breakdown of what those trends actually mean:
| Traffic trend | What it means |
|---|---|
| Traffic is growing | Your SEO is working well, and your content is gaining visibility in search engines. |
| Traffic is flat | This is normal for new sites or during periods where you’re not publishing much new content. |
| Traffic is dropping | Something may need attention, such as content quality, indexing issues, or lost rankings. |
The important thing here is not to panic over small changes. What really matters is the overall direction over time.
What Should You Do Next
If your organic traffic isn’t growing the way you expect, don’t worry. This is very common, especially for newer WordPress sites. The key is to focus on small, consistent improvements.
Here’s a simple action plan you can follow:
- Update Older Blog Posts: Refresh outdated content, improve clarity, and add new information where needed. Prioritize articles that are already ranking on page 2 or 3 of Google or that get a decent number of impressions but a low click-through rate.
- Publish New Content Regularly: Focus on topics people are actively searching for. This helps you build more entry points from search engines over time. I also recommend building content clusters around specific topics on your site.
- Improve Internal Linking: Link related posts together so search engines can better understand your site structure and users can navigate more easily.
- Target Easier Keywords First: If your site is still growing, focus on low-competition keywords to build momentum before going after harder search terms.
The goal is not to fix everything at once, but to make steady improvements that compound over time.
2. Verify Your Pages Are Indexed in Google
One of the most common SEO mistakes I see is people assuming that once you publish a post, it automatically shows up in search results. That’s not always the case.
Before your content can appear in search engines like Google Search, they need to index it. This means that search engines have discovered, analyzed, and stored your content.
If search engines haven’t indexed your pages, they simply cannot bring in any organic traffic, no matter how well you’ve written them.
To make it easier, I have added a visual that shows how indexing works.
How to Check Indexing in WordPress (The Easy Way)
You can easily check the index status of your pages and posts directly inside All in One SEO, which is the best WordPress SEO plugin.
It’s a powerful yet beginner-friendly tool that not only helps you optimize your content for search engines, but also gives you clear insights into how your site is performing, right inside your WordPress dashboard.
One of its most useful features is built-in indexing insights, so you can quickly see which pages are indexed, which aren’t, and why.
We use AIOSEO across WPBeginner to improve our SEO and keep track of how our content is performing in search engines You can read our full experience in our AIOSEO review.
To check your index status, you first need to set up All in One SEO properly. Once it’s active, connect it to your Google Search Console account so it can pull indexing data directly from Google.
For more information on that, see our guide on getting your WordPress site listed on Google.
After that, go to Search Statistics » Index Status from your WordPress dashboard. This section gives you a clear overview of how search engines are indexing your website content.
AIOSEO makes this even easier by showing the index status for each post directly on the main ‘Post Index Status’ screen.
Each post has a simple indicator that tells you whether it’s indexed or not, so you can scan your entire site at a glance without opening detailed reports for every page.
You can also expand the tab for each post or page to see detailed information about the index status pulled from Google Search Console.
AIOSEO all tells you whether the content was found through the sitemaps on your site, or through referring links from other content on your site. It also shows whether there’s any rich results for this content found by Google.
How to Check Indexing in Google Search Console
If you want to double-check indexing directly from Google, then you can use Google Search Console. I sometimes use this method when I want to confirm whether a specific page is indexed or not.
First, go to your Google Search Console account and select your website. Then, switch to the Indexing » Pages section from the left panel.
You can now use the URL Inspection tool at the top of the page. Just paste any page URL from your website into the search bar.
It will show you whether that page is indexed in Google or not.
If it’s not indexed yet, you can click ‘Request Indexing’ to ask Google to crawl it again.
What To Do If Pages Aren’t Being Indexed
If you notice that important pages are not being indexed, there are a few reliable ways to fix this and speed up the process.
One of the fastest methods is using IndexNow. It is an automatic ping that lets search engines know when a post or page (URL) on your website has been added, updated, or deleted.
With AIOSEO, IndexNow support is already built in, so you don’t need to install any extra plugin. Once you activate AIOSEO, simply go to AIOSEO » Feature Manager and enable the IndexNow feature.
After that, everything is handled automatically in the background. AIOSEO generates and manages your IndexNow API key, so your site can instantly notify search engines when you publish or update content.
If you want a full walkthrough, I recommend seeing our tutorial on adding IndexNow in WordPress to speed up SEO results.
Another important step is submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console.
A sitemap helps search engines understand your website structure and discover all your important pages more efficiently.
To do this, log in to Search Console and select your website. Then go to the ‘Sitemaps’ section in the left menu. In the ‘Add a new sitemap’ field, enter sitemap.xml and click submit.
💡Tip: You can find your exact sitemap URL in your AIOSEO settings by going to AIOSEO » Sitemaps. The plugin will show you the correct URL to use.
In many cases, Google will recognize this as a sitemap index file, often named sitemap_index.xml by SEO plugins. This is completely normal – it simply means Google has found your main sitemap file and is processing it correctly.
Once you submit your sitemap, Google will start crawling your site more effectively, and you can monitor indexing progress inside AIOSEO over time.
3. Monitor Your Target Keyword Rankings
Keyword rankings tell you how well your content is performing for specific search terms in Google Search results. Basically, it shows whether your pages are moving up, staying the same, or losing visibility for the keywords you care about.
This is one of the most important SEO checks because traffic growth usually starts with better keyword rankings. If your pages start ranking higher, then more people will see them, and more clicks will follow.
How to Track Keyword Rankings in AIOSEO
One of the easiest ways to track keyword performance in WordPress is by using All in One SEO, which is a powerful keyword ranking tracker. We use it to monitor our article rankings and track SEO progress across different websites.
AIOSEO’s Search Statistics feature works like a built-in keyword rank tracker inside your WordPress dashboard. This means you don’t need separate SEO tools just to understand how your keywords are performing.
📍Note: To see these insights, you’ll first need to connect AIOSEO to your Google Search Console account. This allows the plugin to pull your ranking data directly from Google.
Inside the Search Statistics dashboard, you’ll find widgets like Keyword Positions and Keyword Rankings.
They give you a clear overview of how your content is ranking in search results over time.
You can manually add keywords you want to track, import them from your focus keywords, pull them from Google Search Console, or even upload them via CSV.
This makes this method flexible whether you’re tracking a few posts or managing a full content strategy.
Once you add your keywords, AIOSEO shows you exactly where you rank for each term, along with helpful metrics like clicks, impressions, average click-through rate, and position history.
You can even expand individual keywords to see which specific pages are ranking for them.
Over time, this makes it much easier to spot trends, track progress, and see which content is actually improving in search.
For step by step instructions, I suggest reading our tutorial on how to check if your WordPress blog posts are ranking for the right keywords.
What to Do if Keywords Aren’t Ranking
If your keyword rankings aren’t improving, don’t panic. This is very common, especially for newer content or competitive topics.
I recommend making small, focused improvements that give your pages a better chance to rank.
| Action | What it means | Why it helps |
|---|---|---|
| Improve Content Depth | Add more helpful information, examples, and answers to related questions. | Makes your content more complete and useful for search engines and readers. Also improves visibility in AI search systems by fully covering a topic in one place. |
| Target Easier Keywords | Focus on low-competition or long-tail keywords instead of highly competitive terms. | Gives your content a better chance to rank faster and start gaining visibility. |
| Add Internal Links | Link related blog posts and pages together within your site. | Helps search engines understand your site structure and boosts authority of important pages. |
| Build Content Clusters | Organize your content into topic groups where multiple related posts link back to a main “pillar” page. | Helps establish topical authority and makes it easier for both Google and AI systems to understand your expertise and surface your content in relevant answers. |
These tips can often lead to better rankings over time, especially when combined with regular publishing and ongoing SEO optimization.
4. Analyze Your Organic Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rate (CTR) shows how often people click your link after seeing it in Google Search results. It reflects how well your title and meta description are able to grab attention and encourage clicks.
Here’s a simple breakdown of what a “good” CTR can look like depending on the type of website:
Even if your pages rank well, a low CTR can still hold back your traffic. That’s why CTR is an important SEO signal. It helps you see how your search listings are performing before users even land on your site.
How to Find CTR Data in AIOSEO
You can easily track CTR using the Search Statistics dashboard inside All in One SEO.
In the SEO Statistics report, you’ll see a clear overview of your site’s search performance for the selected date range.
This includes:
- Search Impressions – how many times your site appeared in Google search results
- Total Clicks – how many times users clicked through to your site
- Average CTR (Click-Through Rate) – the percentage of impressions that turned into clicks
- Average Position – your average ranking position in search results
All of this data comes directly from the Performance report in Google Search Console, but AIOSEO presents it in a much simpler, visual way inside WordPress.
You can also hover over the graph to see how these numbers change over time for specific dates. This helps you quickly understand whether your CTR is improving or dropping without digging into multiple reports.
How to Check CTR in Google Search Console
If you want to see CTR directly from Google, then you can use Google Search Console.
First, log in to your account and select your website property. Then, go to Performance » Search results from the left menu.
At the top of the report, you’ll see key metrics including:
- Total clicks
- Total impressions
- Average CTR
- Average position
You can also scroll down to see the exact search queries and pages that are generating clicks.
This gives you a more direct view of how your site is performing in Google search results, without using any plugin.
What Does CTR Tell You?
CTR helps you understand how effective your content looks in search results, not just how well it ranks.
| Situation | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| High impressions, low CTR | Your page is showing in Google, but the title or description isn’t compelling enough |
| High CTR | Your titles and meta descriptions are attracting clicks effectively |
| Low impressions | Your pages may need better rankings before CTR becomes meaningful |
Quick Fixes to Improve CTR
If your CTR is lower than expected, you can often improve it with a few small changes. You don’t always need to change your rankings—just make your search listing more appealing.
One of the easiest improvements is updating your title. Adding numbers, the current year, or a clear benefit can instantly make your result more clickable. For example, “10 Easy Ways…” or “Best Guide for 2026…” tends to perform better in search results.
Thankfully, AIOSEO comes with a headline analyzer, which gives a score and some practical tips for improving your post or page title.
Next, rewrite your meta description so it clearly explains what the page offers and why someone should click it. Think of it as a short “preview” that convinces users your page has the answer they’re looking for.
Make sure you’re also adding schema markup with AIOSEO where possible. This helps your listings stand out in search results with rich snippets like ratings, or FAQs.
For more tips and tricks, I recommend going through our guide on improving organic click-through rate in WordPress.
5. Measure SEO-Driven Conversions and Goals (Conversions)
It’s wise to measure traffic, but it’s only half the story.
The real SEO success comes when visitors actually take action on your site, like signing up, buying a product, or submitting a form. These actions are called conversions.
Before you start tracking details, it helps to know what “healthy” conversion performance can look like depending on your website type:
How to Track Conversions With MonsterInsights
The easiest way to track conversions in WordPress is using MonsterInsights, which connects your site to Google Analytics.
One of the biggest advantages of MonsterInsights is its eCommerce addon. It makes it extremely simple to track product performance, revenue, and purchase behavior inside your WordPress dashboard.
This is super powerful because you can quickly see which products are generating sales, which traffic sources are converting best, and how users move through your buying process.
MonsterInsights also lets you track submissions using its Forms addon. It allows you to see which forms are getting the most views, how many submissions each form receives, and which forms are converting better than others.
I love how the plugin gives you a clean, easy-to-understand overview of how visitors interact with your site and which actions are actually driving results.
For detailed instructions, please take a look at our WordPress conversion tracking guide.
How to Track Conversions in Google Analytics
If you prefer to track conversions directly in Google Analytics, then log in to your account and select your website. Then, go to Reports » Engagement » Conversions (or Events, depending on your setup).
Here, you’ll see different user actions that Google tracks as events, such as:
- Form submissions
- Button clicks
- Purchases (for eCommerce sites)
- Sign-ups or other key actions
You can also mark specific events as conversions inside Google Analytics, so they appear in your main reporting dashboard.
While this method is more flexible, it can feel a bit technical for beginners, which is why many WordPress users prefer using MonsterInsights instead.
What to Improve if Conversions are Low
If your traffic looks good but conversions are low, here are some practical improvements I’ve seen work well across WordPress sites:
- Add Clear CTAs: Guides visitors to the next step instead of leaving them unsure what to do.
- Improve Content Intent: Makes sure your page matches what users are actually looking for when they land on it.
- Simplify Navigation: Helps users find what they need faster, without friction or confusion.
For more tips and how to implement them, check out our ultimate guide on conversion rate optimization.
💡Simple Monthly SEO Checklist
Now that you know what to look for, I suggest creating a simple monthly SEO check-in for your WordPress site.
This doesn’t need to be complicated or time-consuming, just a quick routine to make sure your SEO is moving in the right direction.
Every month, take a few minutes to review the key signals covered in this guide:
- Is my organic traffic growing?
- Are my pages properly indexed?
- Are my keyword rankings improving over time?
- Are people actually clicking my search results (CTR)?
- Are visitors taking action on my site (conversions)?
If most of these are trending upward, then your SEO is working well. If one or two are not improving, that’s your signal to focus on that specific area next. This routine takes less than 20 minutes a month but provides the clarity you need to keep your SEO strategy on track.
For a complete step-by-step system, I suggest taking a look at our ultimate WordPress SEO guide.
How Long Does SEO Take to Work?
One of the most common questions I hear from WordPress site owners is: how long does SEO actually take to start working?
The honest answer is that SEO is not instant. It builds up gradually over time as search engines like Google crawl, understand, and trust your content.
To set realistic expectations, here’s a simple timeline of what most sites typically experience:
Keep in mind that these timelines can vary depending on your niche, competition, and how consistently you publish and optimize content.
The most important thing to remember is this: slow progress is completely normal in SEO—consistency matters far more than speed.
Small improvements over time add up to strong long-term results. For a deeper breakdown, see our guide on how long website SEO takes to show results.
Frequently Asked Questions About Website SEO
Even after checking all the key SEO signals, you might still have a few questions about how to know if your WordPress SEO is really working.
That’s completely normal because SEO can feel a bit confusing at first, especially when results don’t show up right away.
Below are some of the most common questions beginners ask, along with simple answers to help you stay on track.
How do I know if my WordPress SEO is improving?
You’ll know your WordPress SEO is improving when you see steady growth in organic traffic, better keyword rankings, and increasing impressions in search results on Google Search.
Even small upward trends over time are a strong sign that your SEO is moving in the right direction.
Why am I not getting traffic from SEO yet?
If you’re not getting traffic yet, it’s usually because your site is either still new or your pages are not fully indexed in search engines. In many cases, it just takes time for search engines to discover and rank your content properly.
Can I check WordPress SEO for free?
Yes, you can check your WordPress SEO for free using Google Search Console. It gives you insights into indexing, keyword performance, and search visibility. This makes it a powerful starting point for beginners.
What is more important in SEO: traffic or conversions?
Conversions are more important because they show real results from your SEO efforts. While traffic helps bring visitors to your site, conversions tell you whether those visitors are actually taking meaningful actions like signing up or making a purchase.
I hope this article helped you learn if your WordPress SEO is actually working. You may also want to see our guide on tracking SEO changes on your WordPress site and our list of WordPress site settings that are critical for SEO success.
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 Check If Your WordPress SEO Is Actually Working first appeared on WPBeginner.
Open Channels FM: How AI is Transforming Ecommerce Automations
As eCommerce advances, AI integration into WooCommerce automation enhances flexibility and adaptability, allowing for smarter workflows that respond effectively to customer inputs and streamline operations.
Introducing Universally: Translate Your Entire WordPress Site with AI in Minutes
Ever wished you could double your traffic by reaching international audiences who don’t speak English?
Imagine if you could click a few buttons to translate your entire WordPress site into 70+ languages without hiring a developer or professional translators.
Sadly, most website translation tools are either crazy expensive, painfully slow, or so poorly built that they damage your SEO the moment you activate them.
It simply shouldn’t be this hard to speak to your global audience in their own language.
That’s why today, I’m excited to announce Universally, an AI-powered translation platform that turns your WordPress site into a fully-translated, SEO-ready, multilingual experience in minutes.
Simply put, Universally is truly the “set-it-and-forget-it” translation engine you’ve always been waiting for.
Background Story – Why Universally?
For years, I’ve wanted to translate WPBeginner and my other eCommerce websites into multiple languages because we have users from around the world and many have even asked for it.
So, last year I decided to give it a try.
The journey of making a multilingual eCommerce website in WordPress is a lot bumpier than I would’ve hoped. And the problem extends to every mid to large content site as well.
That’s because every well-known WordPress translation plugin inefficiently stores translations inside the WordPress database. I tried them all on WPBeginner, and every single one of them made our WordPress admin area so slow that the post editor was practically unusable.
When we tested them on our eCommerce sites (both Woo and EDD), we noticed that the performance impact was on our entire checkout process, and that’s not good for conversions & revenue.
Out of every WordPress translation plugin that I tried, only ONE worked, but it required converting the website into a WordPress multisite which comes with its own set of complexities and technical challenges.
As I went through this process, I literally thought to myself why is this so hard? Clearly there has to be a better solution.
So I looked into some well-known SaaS solutions that offered AI translations, and they worked very well. Unfortunately, the cost for us would be hundreds of thousands of dollars to use their platform for just WPBeginner alone. If I included my other brands like WPForms, AIOSEO, and others, our translation cost would likely go into 7 figures.
In the age of AI, translation platforms shouldn’t be this expensive. The new AI models have gotten so much better that a small business owner who is not leveraging translations is just missing out.
After going through this painful process personally over the last year, I asked our team to build an AI website translation platform that we can use for our own brands, and make it available to our community (YOU).
Because in 2026, small businesses and eCommerce website owners need an easy & affordable way to translate their websites without having to compromise on website speed.
That’s exactly what Universally offers.
The best part is that it will work on all website platforms including WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Loveable, Replit, etc.
You simply connect your website with Universally, select the languages, and let our intelligent multilingual AI platform expand your global reach.
We have already translated over 250 million words on the platform during our internal launch and private beta.
Here’s a quick overview:
What is Universally?
Universally is an AI-powered website translation platform built for WordPress site owners, WooCommerce stores, SaaS companies, and agencies that need to go multilingual without the usual translation headaches.
Once installed, it automatically detects every translatable element on your site, including blog content, button text, menu items, form labels, image alt tags, schema.org data, even your product descriptions in WooCommerce, and more.
Universally translates them into 70+ languages within minutes.
Unlike traditional plugins, Universally doesn’t store anything extra in your WordPress database. No duplicate posts, bloated tables, or slowdowns. Translations live on Universally’s cloud and content is delivered from edge (cloud servers closest to the user). This means your international visitors will likely see a faster version of your website, never slower.
Here’s what makes it special:
Full Website Translation in Minutes, Not Months
If you’ve ever worked with a translator, you know how tedious the process is…
You export strings to a spreadsheet and send it to a translator. You get the translated content 2 weeks later, only to realize that the context is wrong. So, you’ll have to repeat the same process… and for every language you want to translate.
Universally skips that entire back and forth.
You pick your target languages once, and within minutes your entire site is live in every language you selected, including content you forgot you had (old blog posts, archived product pages, buried checkout strings).
And it doesn’t stop there. Every time you publish or edit a post in your source language, Universally automatically catches the change and pushes the updated translation across every language version. You never have to remember to “also translate this” again.
For quality, Universally targets 90-95% AI accuracy out of the box, with optional professional human translation available for critical pages like your pricing page, checkout flow, or legal terms.
Multilingual SEO That Actually Works (Without a Developer)
Multilingual SEO is where most translation tools quietly fall apart.
Google has very specific rules for multilingual sites. You need hreflang tags on every page. You also need translated meta titles and descriptions, properly structured URLs, and multilingual XML sitemaps.
For Arabic and Hebrew translation, you need RTL (right to left) support to ensure those languages are properly displayed.
Miss any of those rules and Google either ignores your translated pages entirely or flags them as duplicate content.
Universally handles all of it automatically.
It provides:
- Automatic hreflang tags on every language version
- Translated title tags, meta descriptions, Open Graph, and Twitter Card tags
- Schema.org / JSON-LD structured data translation
- Automatic lang attribute and dir=”rtl” for right-to-left languages
- Multilingual XML sitemaps generated automatically
- Internal link rewriting (your /about link becomes /fr/about on French pages… without you lifting a finger)
- Subdirectory, subdomain, or separate-domain URL structures supported
AI Glossary – Protect Your Brand in Every Language
If you’ve ever seen a major brand’s product name get awkwardly translated into a random foreign word, then you know how painful this can be.
Universally’s AI Glossary lets you lock down specific terms, like your brand name, product names, technical vocabulary, legal wording and so on. That way they either stay untouched across every language or get forced into a specific translation.
You can build the glossary manually, let Universally’s AI suggest entries based on your existing content, or import your terminology into Universally.
A Language Switcher That Looks Great
You can place the Universally language switcher in multiple locations on your website, depending on your layout and user experience needs.
Universally gives you four built-in switcher styles, such as bottom right, bottom left, top right, and top left. It also comes with a Language Switcher block as well.
The Most Affordable AI Translation Tool
Universally is the most affordable AI translation tool on the market. Compared to other platforms, like Weglot, for example, Universally is up to 50% cheaper.
Here’s how to try Universally on your site:
✅ Step 1: Sign up for a free Universally account. The free plan gives you 1 site, 1 language, and 2,000 translated words per month… no credit card required.
✅ Step 2: Install the Universally plugin from the Universally site.
✅ Step 3: Paste your API key into the plugin settings.
✅ Step 4: Pick your source language and target languages, then save.
Universally starts translating immediately, and your language switcher appears on your site automatically.
If you need more words or more languages, you can consider using the paid plans, which start at $7.5/month when paid annually.
What’s Coming Next?
My goal with WPBeginner has always been to help small businesses grow & compete with the big guys.
Every big company is already translating their websites and expanding their global reach. We’re building Universally to level the playing field, so small businesses can also expand their global presence.
We’re truly building something special, and it would mean a lot to me if you join us on the journey while also expanding your global audience. My goal is to make Universally, the best translation solution on the market, and the best way to do that is by listening to you.
I would love to hear your honest feedback.
While we have an exciting roadmap ahead, I want to make sure we’re building exactly what you need. If you have ideas for languages, features, or platform integrations that would make your life easier, please send us your suggestions.
If you’re an agency that builds multilingual websites, we would love to work with you.
If you’ve been putting off translating your site because it felt too expensive, too technical, or too fragile, give Universally a real look. The free plan is genuinely free, and you can see your website running in a second language in less than 10 minutes.
Thank you for your continued support of WPBeginner and the products I’ve been part of over the years. I look forward to helping you reach a global audience without the complexity, cost, or maintenance headaches that have held WordPress site owners back for years in making their websites truly multilingual.
Let’s make websites universally accessible.
Yours Truly,
Syed Balkhi
Founder of WPBeginner
The post Introducing Universally: Translate Your Entire WordPress Site with AI in Minutes first appeared on WPBeginner.
WordPress.org blog: Get Involved With WordCamp US 2026 in Phoenix
WordCamp US 2026 will take place August 16–19 in Phoenix, Arizona, and applications are now open for sponsors, speakers, and volunteers. WordCamp US is the flagship gathering for the WordPress community in North America, where contributors, builders, and users come together to share ideas and help shape what comes next for the open web. Full details are available on the WordCamp US 2026 site.
Sponsor
Sponsorships keep WordCamp US accessible. They fund the production and programming that make a flagship WordCamp possible while keeping ticket prices low for attendees, and, in return, sponsors gain direct visibility within one of the most engaged technology ecosystems. Packages support both in-person and digital participation, with opportunities to connect with agencies, developers, and enterprise teams that build on WordPress every day.
Speak
The organizing team is looking for strong ideas with practical takeaways from across the community, whether that means a personal story, a lesson learned in production, or a perspective on where publishing, AI, and the open web are heading. Sessions can take the form of traditional talks, workshops, or more interactive formats, and new or underrepresented voices are especially encouraged to apply. Prior speaking experience is not required.
Speaker applications due by May 29, 2026.
Volunteer
Volunteers are essential to the experience of the event. They welcome attendees and support sessions throughout the week, helping create the inclusive environment that defines a flagship WordCamp. Volunteering is also one of the best ways to meet people from across the global community and see firsthand how an event of this scale comes together. No prior experience is needed, and volunteers receive a free ticket.
Volunteer applications due by June 15, 2026.
Attend
It’s the people. It’s the friendships and the stories.
Matt Mullenweg, WordPress Cofounder
WordCamp US continues a long tradition of in-person gatherings where contributors meet face-to-face to openly discuss the project’s direction. Whether you participate as a sponsor, take the stage, join the volunteer team, or help organize the event, your involvement shapes what the event becomes.
To stay informed as ticket sales open and the schedule takes shape, subscribe to WordCamp US 2026 updates.
Contact Form 7 Freezes New Features – What WordPress Users Should Do Next
Since the early days of WordPress, Contact Form 7 has been helping website owners add simple forms to their sites. If you’ve trusted it on your own site, then you made a perfectly reasonable choice that millions of other site owners have made, too.
But things have officially changed.
At WordCamp Asia 2026, Contact Form 7 creator Takayuki Miyoshi confirmed on stage that the plugin will no longer receive new feature updates after version 6.2. Miyoshi’s focus is shifting to a separate project called Contactable.io, which is currently targeted for 2028.
Your existing forms aren’t going to break overnight, but a plugin in ‘feature freeze’ is a plugin that will slowly fall behind. That makes today the perfect time to migrate to a new form builder plugin before your forms get more complex and migration gets harder.
The good news is that you don’t need to start from scratch.
By the end of this tutorial, you’ll know exactly what the WordCamp announcement means for your site and how to migrate all your Contact Form 7 forms to a modern form builder using a simple import tool.
What the Contact Form 7 Feature Freeze Actually Means
The ‘Contact Form 7 abandoned’ headlines sound dramatic, so let’s explore what exactly this means in more detail.
Firstly, the plugin isn’t going to disappear overnight. Instead, it’s entering what developers call a “feature freeze,” which still has very real implications for the future of your website.
Here’s everything Contact Form 7 user needs to understand before deciding what to do next:
- Version 6.2 is the Final Major Release: Takayuki Miyoshi announced at WordCamp Asia 2026 that version 6.2 will be the last version to add new functionality. After this, Contact Form 7 moves into maintenance mode.
- Security Patches Will Continue: This is the reassuring part. Critical security holes and bugs will still be patched, so your forms won’t suddenly become a security risk. However, don’t expect any attention beyond these basic fixes.
- No Modern Tools or Integrations: Increasingly, site owners need features like AI form generation, conditional logic, and seamless payment fields. None of these are planned for Contact Form 7. If you want to keep up with your competitors, then you’ll need to switch to an alternative form builder.
- The Replacement Project is Years Away: The successor project, Contactable.io, isn’t expected to release until at least 2028. That is a long time to wait for a tool that hasn’t even launched yet, especially when proven alternatives already exist.
The truth is that as your website grows, your forms will often need to become more complex. You’ll start adding more fields, setting up custom email routing, or trying to integrate your forms with a customer relationship management (CRM) system.
What takes just a few minutes to migrate today could easily turn into a frustrating, weekend-long project in the future. The smart move is to migrate to a Contact Form 7 alternative now, while your Contact Form 7 forms are still stable and up-to-date.
The Best Way to Replace Contact Form 7 in WordPress
We’ve tried out dozens of contact form plugins, but we always find ourselves coming back to WPForms.
The reason is simple: WPForms strikes the perfect balance between being incredibly easy for beginners to use, while still offering the advanced features you’ll need as your website grows.
In our opinion, this is exactly what Contact Form 7 users need.
📝 If you’d like a deeper side-by-side comparison, our Contact Form 7 vs WPForms breakdown covers every key difference in detail. Alternatively, you can see our detailed WPForms review.
If you’re looking for more power, then the premium version of WPForms comes with over 2,100 ready-made form templates, smart conditional logic, and seamless payment integrations. You can even create multi-page forms to improve your form conversion rates.
However, the free WPForms Lite plugin actually has everything a former Contact Form 7 user needs. This includes a drag-and-drop builder that lets you create professional forms in minutes without touching a single line of code.
Even better, WPForms comes with a built-in Contact Form 7 import tool. This means you can migrate all your existing forms to WPForms with just a few clicks.
Behind the scenes, WPForms reads your old forms and recreates them inside its modern, user-friendly interface. It even imports your field labels and notification settings so you don’t lose any data.
This is a must-have feature for Contact Form 7 users who want to switch to a modern, secure form builder that’s constantly evolving – without having to start from scratch.
Now, let’s look at how you can easily migrate from Contact Form 7 to WPForms today.
Step 1: Install and Activate WPForms
The first thing you need to do is install and activate the WPForms plugin on your website.
As we mentioned earlier, you can download the Lite version of WPForms for free directly from WordPress.org. For this guide, I’ll be using the Lite version so you can migrate away from Contact Form 7 today, regardless of your budget.
However, at some point you might need more advanced features, such as the ability to accept online payments, create conversational forms, or connect to email marketing services like Mailchimp. In that case, you can easily upgrade to the premium plugin at any time.
If you’ve never installed a plugin before, don’t worry! You can follow our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Once the plugin is activated, you’re ready to start the migration process.
Step 2: Run the WPForms Setup Wizard
Upon activation, WPForms will automatically launch a quick setup wizard. This tool is designed to walk you through the entire setup experience in just a few minutes.
The wizard helps you get up and running quickly, so we highly recommend completing the entire process rather than skipping it.
If you’ve upgraded to the premium version of WPForms, you’ll also need to enter your license key. You can find this key by logging into your account on the WPForms website or by checking your purchase confirmation email.
After completing the setup process, WPForms will offer to help you create your very first form. Since we’re going to import your existing forms from Contact Form 7 instead, skip this step when prompted.
Step 3: Open the WPForms Import Tool
This is where the migration actually begins. WPForms comes with a dedicated Tools page that includes a built-in Contact Form 7 importer, so you don’t have to worry about installing any extra addons.
To access the importer, go to WPForms » Tools.
If it isn’t already selected, click the ‘Import’ tab.
Next, open the ‘Import from Other Form Plugins’ dropdown and select ‘Contact Form 7.’
After that, click the ‘Import’ button.
WPForms will now scan your site and display a list of every Contact Form 7 form it finds. This makes it easy to see exactly what you need to migrate.
Step 4: Choosing Which Forms to Import to WPForms
After the scan finishes, you’ll see two columns labeled ‘Available Forms’ and ‘Forms to Import.’ This is where you decide exactly which forms you want to move over.
If you want to migrate all your Contact Form 7 forms, simply click the ‘Select All’ link.
Alternatively, you can manually check the box next to each individual form you want to import.
This is a great opportunity to clean up your site by leaving behind any old test forms or duplicates you no longer need.
When you’re happy with your selection, go ahead and click the ‘Import’ button. WPForms will then begin recreating each form inside its own drag-and-drop builder.
Step 5: Review the Imported Forms
Once it’s finished, WPForms will show a results screen with a “Congrats, the import process has finished!” message. This is an important step, so we recommend looking at the report carefully rather than skimming past it.
Every form that imported successfully will show up with a green checkmark, along with quick ‘Edit’ and ‘Preview’ links.
WPForms can migrate most standard fields like text, email, dropdowns, checkboxes, and file uploads without any issues.
However, Contact Form 7 might occasionally use custom fields or unique shortcodes that don’t have direct WPForms equivalents. In these cases, WPForms will flag the form for review.
We recommend making a quick note of any flagged forms. In the next step, we’ll show you how to easily adjust these forms manually before publishing them to your site.
Step 6: Reviewing and Polishing Your New Forms
Now it’s time to open your migrated forms and check that everything looks right. It’s always worth spending a few extra minutes to catch small issues before your visitors do.
To get started, head over to WPForms » All Forms.
Here, you’ll see a list of every form that WPForms just imported.
To take a closer look at a specific form, simply hover your mouse over it and click the ‘Edit’ link.
This opens the form in the WPForms drag-and-drop editor. You can now check each field to make sure it matches your old Contact Form 7 setup.
We recommend paying special attention to required fields, dropdown options, and custom field labels.
After that, click the ‘Settings’ tab on the left side of the builder to confirm your configurations.
In particular, you should check the ‘Notifications’ tab to ensure your email address is correct. While WPForms imports your existing settings, it’s always a good idea to confirm that submissions will go to the right inbox.
When you’re happy with the setup, click the ‘Save’ button in the top-right corner to store your changes.
If you’d like more advanced control here, our guide on how to create a contact form with multiple recipients walks you through routing different submissions to different team inboxes.
Step 7: Replacing Your Old Forms
Your forms are now ready inside WPForms, but your site is still showing the old Contact Form 7 content to visitors. You’ll need to update your site so that visitors can start using your new forms.
First, open the page or post that contains your Contact Form 7 form. Then, click on the existing Contact Form 7 block to select it.
Finally, press the ‘Delete’ key on your keyboard to remove it.
With the old form gone, click the ‘+’ button to add a new block to the page. In the popup that appears, start typing ‘WPForms.’ When the correct block appears, click to add it to your page.
Next, open the dropdown menu inside the WPForms block and select the specific form you want to display.
One of the best parts about WPForms is that the form will load directly inside the editor. This lets you see exactly how the form will look when visitors arrive on your site.
💡 If the styling looks slightly different than your old form, don’t worry! WPForms is designed to automatically inherit your WordPress theme’s styles so it looks great right out of the box.
Once you’re happy with how everything looks, go ahead and publish or update the page as normal to make your new form live.
Step 8: Testing Your New Forms
Before going any further, you need to confirm that your new form actually works. We always run at least one test submission on every form we migrate. It’s the only way to guarantee your data is being collected properly and your notifications are firing as intended.
To do this, open your live page in a regular browser tab (not the WordPress editor). Then, fill out the form exactly like a real visitor would, and click ‘Submit.’
Next, check your inbox to confirm the email notification has arrived safely.
💡 If you upgrade to the premium version of WPForms, you can also see every submission right in your WordPress dashboard by going to WPForms » Entries.
If the email doesn’t arrive, your site might have email deliverability issues that existed before you migrated to WPForms. In that case, we recommend installing a WordPress SMTP plugin to fix the problem.
SMTP is the standard way to send emails through a reliable provider instead of relying on your web host, which often gets flagged as spam. For a complete walkthrough, see our guide on how to set up WP Mail SMTP with any host.
Once you’ve confirmed the form is working from start to finish, you’re officially ready to retire Contact Form 7.
Step 9: Deactivate and Delete Contact Form 7
This is the final step, and we encourage you to take it slowly. You should only deactivate Contact Form 7 once you’re 100% sure that your entire site is using WPForms.
⚠️ For extra security, you may want to create a backup using a plugin such as Duplicator before deleting Contact Form 7 completely.
After that, go to Plugins » Installed Plugins, find Contact Form 7 in the list and click its ‘Deactivate’ link.
After that, we recommend visiting your site one more time. Load every page that used to display a Contact Form 7 form, just to check that everything still looks right.
If any page shows a leftover [contact-form-7] shortcode instead of a form, it means you overlooked this form earlier. If that happens, simply follow the steps to replace this shortcode with the WPForms block.
Once you’ve confirmed that every page is using WPForms cleanly, head back to the Plugins screen and click ‘Delete’ to remove Contact Form 7 from your site entirely.
It’s as easy as that! Your forms are now running on a modern plugin that’s built to grow with your site, and you’re ready to take advantage of all the powerful features that Contact Form 7 was missing.
Getting More Out of WPForms Now That You’ve Migrated
Now that your migration is complete, it’s the perfect time to explore the features WPForms offers that simply don’t exist in Contact Form 7.
Here’s the features we always recommend trying out, especially if you upgrade to the premium plugin:
- AI Form Generation: This feature lets you describe the form you want in plain language, like “a feedback form with a rating system.” WPForms will then build it for you in seconds. This is a life-saver when you need to create a new form, fast.
- Built-in Spam Protection: WPForms uses invisible token validation to stop spam without any frustrating CAPTCHA challenges. This feature makes a huge impact on your form completion rates.
- Smart Conditional Logic: This allows you to show or hide fields based on a visitor’s previous answers. We love using this for quote requests, as it makes long forms feel much shorter and more personal.
- Smart Payment Forms: Turn your forms into a revenue tool by connecting Stripe, PayPal, Square, or Authorize.net. This is great for recurring donations, registrations, or custom orders.
- Conversational Forms: Instead of showing 20 questions at once, this feature displays one question at a time, just like a real conversation. This is a total game-changer for survey completion rates because it feels much less overwhelming for your visitors.
- Multi-Page Forms with Progress Bars: If you have a long application or registration form, WPForms lets you break it into multiple pages.
- Form Abandonment: Imagine if you could see every lead that almost contacted you. This feature lets you capture those partial entries so you can follow up with potential leads who got distracted. It’s like a ‘recovered cart’ feature, but for your contact forms.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Contact Form 7 Feature Freeze
Since the Contact Form 7 announcement, we’ve been getting lots of questions from our readers. It’s clear that you’re concerned about what this feature freeze means for your website.
Whether you’re worried about your existing forms breaking, wondering if the free version of WPForms is enough, or trying to decide if you should switch now or wait, these answers will help you move forward with confidence.
Is Contact Form 7 actually abandoned, or is it just in feature freeze?
Technically, it’s a feature freeze rather than a full abandonment.
Takayuki Miyoshi confirmed at WordCamp Asia 2026 that version 6.2 will be the final major release for Contact Form 7. Moving forward, the development team will only provide critical bug fixes and security patches.
While Contact Form 7 isn’t being removed from the WordPress.org repository, it effectively means that no new features, modern integrations, or user experience improvements will be added.
In the fast-moving WordPress ecosystem, a plugin that stops evolving can quickly become a compatibility risk or a security liability. It’s much safer to migrate now while your forms are working correctly, rather than waiting until a conflict or security vulnerability forces you to move later.
Will my existing Contact Form 7 forms suddenly break if I don’t migrate?
No, your forms won’t suddenly break.
As Miyoshi confirmed, Contact Form 7 will continue to receive critical bug fixes and security patches. This means your forms should continue to work with WordPress core updates for the foreseeable future.
However, the real risk is gradual rather than sudden. As the rest of the web moves forward, a plugin in ‘feature freeze’ starts to fall behind.
You’ll eventually find yourself needing modern features that simply aren’t coming to Contact Form 7. Plus, while your forms might work, they’ll start to look and feel dated compared to competitors who are using modern form builders.
Should I just wait for Contactable.io instead of switching now?
We wouldn’t recommend waiting. While Takayuki Miyoshi discussed his vision for Contactable.io during his session in Mumbai, the reality is that a full, stable release is still a long way off.
Current estimates place a target launch closer to 2028, which is years away. Even when it does launch, it will be a brand-new plugin without the years of testing, massive community support, or the deep ecosystem of integrations that WPForms already offers.
Migrating to a stable, actively maintained plugin today gives you immediate access to modern tools like:
- AI-powered builders to save you time.
- Invisible spam protection to keep your inbox clean.
- Built-in entry management so you never lose a lead.
If Contactable.io eventually launches and turns out to be a game-changer, you can always reconsider then. But for now, you won’t lose anything by switching to WPForms. In fact, you’ll likely find that your site runs much more smoothly.
If you want to compare other options before deciding, you can also explore our roundup of the best WPForms alternatives to see what else is actively being developed.
Do I need the paid version of WPForms to migrate from Contact Form 7?
No, you don’t need the paid version to migrate. The free WPForms Lite plugin includes the Contact Form 7 importer, plus the full drag-and-drop builder.
Most former Contact Form 7 users find that the Lite version is more than enough to get started. You can always upgrade later if your business needs grow.
What happens to my existing Contact Form 7 entries during migration?
The short answer is that your past form submissions won’t migrate over. This is because Contact Form 7 doesn’t actually store entries inside your WordPress database. Instead, it simply emails them to you.
Since there’s no entry list for the importer to find, there’s nothing to migrate.
If you need to keep a record of your past Contact Form 7 submissions, we recommend checking your email inbox for this information. Alternatively, if you’ve been using the companion Flamingo plugin to save your entries, then you can export your messages as a CSV file.
Final Thoughts on the Contact Form 7 Feature Freeze
If you’ve been following along with this guide, then every one of your old Contact Form 7 forms is now running on a modern plugin that’s supported by an entire development team.
The Contact Form 7 era was a historic one for WordPress, and it served millions of sites well for nearly two decades. But as we move toward the future of the web, having a form builder that evolves alongside your site is no longer a luxury – it’s a necessity.
Additional Resources for WordPress Form Building
Now that you’ve made the move to WPForms, you might be wondering what else you can do with a modern form builder.
Whether you’re trying to grow your email list, accept your first online payment, or build something more advanced like a survey or booking form, the resources below will walk you through it step-by-step:
- How to Use a Contact Form to Build Your Email List
- How to Create GDPR Compliant Forms in WordPress
- How to Create a Survey in WordPress (with Beautiful Reports)
- Best Order Form Plugins for WordPress
- How to Create a Booking Form in WordPress
- Best File Upload Plugins for WordPress (Free & Paid)
- How to Create a Custom User Registration Form
- How to Easily Create a Quiz in WordPress
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 Contact Form 7 Freezes New Features – What WordPress Users Should Do Next first appeared on WPBeginner.
Gutenberg Times: Block Format Bridge: A Practical Solution for AI-Generated Content in WordPress
Chris Huber, developer at Automattic, released Block Format Bridge, an open-source plugin that addresses one of the more persistent friction points in AI-assisted WordPress workflows: getting AI-generated content into the block editor reliably.
The plugin takes a pragmatic approach. Block markup is notoriously difficult for AI to produce correctly — not because AI models lack capability, but because of how the format works. As Dennis Snell explained back in 2017 in his still-essential post Gutenberg posts aren’t HTML, a Gutenberg post is a serialized tree structure that happens to be stored as HTML with JSON-carrying comment delimiters. It was never designed to be written by hand — or by an AI inferring its way through a save() function it can’t actually execute. The result, for anyone building publishing automations, REST API integrations, or agent workflows that call wp_insert_post(), is a familiar failure mode: content that saves fine, then opens in the editor with invalid blocks or silently falls back to the classic editor.
Even a block as common as a styled quote illustrates the problem:
The generated HTML should be treated as throwaway code.
Dennis Snell
JSON
<!-- wp:quote {"className":"is-style-large"} -->
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large">
<p>The generated HTML should be treated as throwaway code.</p>
<cite>Dennis Snell</cite>
</blockquote>
<!-- /wp:quote -->The className attribute in the comment has to match the class on the HTML element. The cite tag must follow the exact structure the block’s save() function produces. Get either wrong and the block is invalid — and with more complex blocks like wp:cover or wp:columns, the surface area for errors grows considerably.
HTML to Blocks converter and vice versa
Block Format Bridge sidesteps the problem by letting AI output what it does well — Markdown or plain HTML — and handling the conversion to block markup server-side, using established PHP libraries. It builds on chubes4/html-to-blocks-converter for the write side, WordPress core’s do_blocks() for rendering, and league/commonmark and league/html-to-markdown for Markdown support.
The core API is compact and readable:
JSON
/ Markdown → blocks
$blocks = bfb_convert( "# HellonnSome content here.", 'markdown', 'blocks' );
/ HTML → blocks
$blocks = bfb_convert( '<h1>Hello</h1><p>Some content here.</p>', 'html', 'blocks' );
/ Blocks → Markdown (for reading back to AI)
$md = bfb_render_post( $post_id, 'markdown' );It also adds a ?content_format= query parameter to the REST API, so AI agents can fetch existing post content as Markdown — not raw block markup — which makes edit workflows considerably more reliable.
The architecture is extensible. New formats can be added by registering a new adapter without touching the core bridge, and the bfb_default_format filter lets you declare that a custom post type writes in Markdown by default, so any code path calling wp_insert_post() gets the same conversion behavior automatically.
Does This Need a Skill?
After sharing an early draft of this post with Chris Huber, he offered a perspective worth sitting with: this plugin is designed to eliminate a skill rather than add one.
When Block Format Bridge is bundled as a dependency and the system prompt simply instructs the agent to insert post content as Markdown, the AI doesn’t need to know the plugin exists at all. A single line — “post content should be inserted as Markdown” — is enough. The conversion happens automatically, invisibly, in PHP. The complexity disappears into infrastructure rather than into instructions.
That’s a different philosophy from agent-skills, which is about making AI aware of patterns and tools. The more elegant approach here is the opposite: good tooling that makes the AI less aware, not more. An end user of a plugin built on top of Block Format Bridge would never know it exists — they’d just see valid blocks in the editor.
A skill may still have a role for developers who don’t control the system prompt and need to guide agent behavior through other means. But for anyone building AI-powered WordPress plugins or automations, the cleaner pattern is to bundle the plugin, set the default format, and let the infrastructure do its job.
A draft skill is available below for those who do want to experiment with the agent-skills approach.
A draft skill can be downloaded to use the Block Format Bridge .
All is still a work in progress so there might be dragons
As a small footnote, this post was drafted with AI assistance and had to be converted to blocks before I could edit it. —which felt fitting given the subject
Gutenberg Times: Studio Code, Hosting call for testing, Design with AI, and more — Weekend Edition 365
Hi there,
May is an action-packed month for the WordPress community, packed with tons of local WordCamps and Campus Connect events. After so long without seeing each other, it’s awesome to get together in person — sharing ideas, storytelling, and just making real connections. In this digital age, those genuine face-to-face moments remind us how much it really matters to show up in person.
Enjoy the people around you, friends and family. Speaking of which my next two weeks are all about that. We are on the road to a family reunion and the following weeks we get a visit from our long -time Canadian friends. I also will take another break on the weekend edition, though. Number 366 is scheduled to come out on May 23, 2026, the 77th Anniversary of the German Constitution.
Have a wonderful weekend.
Yours, 
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Amy Kamala, co-release coordinator for WordPress 7.0, published an Urgent: Testing request to Web hosts for collaborative editing by May 4th. The results will inform core architectural decisions before release. The test suite needs only bash, cURL, WP-CLI, and patch — and the Core team wants data from your actual customer environments, not clean installs. Results are aggregated and kept anonymous.
The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #130 – WordPress 7.0, Gutenberg 22.9 and 23.0, WordCamp Europe, Block Themes and More with Tammie Lister, Chief Product Officer at Convesio
Hamza Kwehangana, co-organizer of WordCamp Vienna, walks you through everything new in WordPress 7.0, the release that kicks off Phase 3: Collaboration. You’ll see real-time multi-user editing in action, native AI Connectors for plugging in providers like OpenAI or Anthropic, a refreshed admin with Data Views, and a new Notes and Comments system for editorial teams. Block-level additions include heading variations, fit text, responsive editing mode, a native Icons block, and Visual Revisions.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
The WooCommerce team is actively exploring a DataViews-powered Product Catalog Management experience that could improve how merchants handle large product sets. Led by Luigi Teschio, you can already test a working prototype via WordPress Playground. The shared blueprint installs WooCommerce nightly, Gutenberg, and sample products in one click. Smoother filtering, price filtering, inline variation handling, and improved bulk edit workflows are all on the table.
WPMet, plugin developers of GutenKit, introduced TableKit, a native Gutenberg table builder aimed at replacing the block editor’s limited default table with a more sophisticated approach. You get four table types — standard tables, WooCommerce product tables with live stock and direct add-to-cart, data tables that import from CSV, Google Sheets, or JSON with auto-sync, and WordPress post tables. Standout features include conditional formatting, freeze columns, column sorting, search and filtering, and export to PDF, CSV, or Excel, all without shortcodes or leaving your editor.
Mike McAlister has been busy shipping for Ollie Pro. He posted a demo on X showing new responsive controls in the block editor — device-specific settings for typography, padding, margin, spacing, and text alignment at specific breakpoints, no custom CSS or extra plugins required. Alongside that, he introduced a completely redesigned Ollie Pattern Library with a unified design language across hundreds of patterns, a faster Browse tab with live search and one-click actions, and a brand-new Discover tab powered by Ollie AI, letting you describe a layout in plain language, use pre-made prompts, or hit “Inspire Me” to instantly assemble a full page.
Maxime Bernard-Jacquet announces that Modern Fields 1.0 is now out of beta — a custom fields plugin built for the block editor era and positioned as an ACF alternative. The 1.0 release adds JSON import/export, automatic field sync with the theme, a no-code UI for creating custom post types and taxonomies, and WP-CLI commands. A live in-browser demo requires no installation. A Pro version is in the works, with repeater and relational fields, conditional logic, options pages, query loop filters, and custom block creation planned.
Core contributors Nik Tsekouras and Marin Atanasov started an Experiment: Content types tracking issue, developer might want to keep an eye out. The idea is to bring management of majority of the cases to core and leave complex use cases in plugin territory.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Jamie Marsland shares a neat design-system-to-WordPress workflow that lets you spin up a styled site in minutes — no local install, no hosting, no deploy. Head to claude.ai/design, grab a DESIGN.md from the awesome-design-md repo (Vercel, Linear, or Stripe are solid picks), upload it to Claude, and ask it to build a homepage, about page, and blog with sample posts inside WordPress Playground. One tip you shouldn’t skip: make sure Playground uses storage=browser so your work persists between reloads.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
Taylor Drayson‘s WP Wireframe is a PHP library that you can include in your plugin to create complete WordPress admin settings pages using one configuration array—no JS build step required. It offers over 20 field types (like text, color, file picker, and more), an API for accessing settings, options for conditional visibility, validation, support for multiple pages, and a helper to adjust settings. Install it with Composer, point it to a settings.php file, and your settings page is ready to go. Or so Drayson promises.
AI and WordPress
Automattic’s Alexa Peduzzi introduces Studio Code, now in public beta — a WordPress-native agentic CLI tool built on top of Claude Code. Install Studio CLI and run studio code to get started. Unlike general-purpose coding agents, it’s purpose-built for WordPress: you can describe a site in natural language and it builds a complete block theme — layout, typography, fonts, and content — then validates block markup against the real editor, runs WP-CLI commands, audits performance, and pushes to WordPress.com or Pressable hosting. Free during beta. Details on how to get started are on the developer portal.
Varun Dubey, founder of Wbcom Designs and BuddyPress contributor, offers a developer’s honest take on WordPress 7.0 AI Connectors — what they get right and what still worries him. You’ll find the case for standardization (one dashboard for all AI providers, lower barrier for solo plugin developers, user choice of cloud or local models) balanced against real concerns: data privacy enforcement is still honor-system, budget limits are soft rather than hard, and local/self-hosted AI remains a second-class setup experience despite Varun’s own work running a private Ollama-powered WordPress instance. His prescription for the ecosystem — mandatory data transparency declarations, hard cost caps, end-user consent hooks, and provider certification — is worth reading before you start wiring AI connectors into your own plugins.
Among other things, Varun Dubey flagged unencrypted AI Connector key storage as one of the sharper edges of WordPress 7.0 — and Encrypt AI Connector Keys by Thomas Zwirner is exactly the kind of ecosystem response he was calling for. Install it, re-enter your keys under Settings > Connectors, and they’re saved encrypted using the battle-tested Crypt for WordPress library, with the decryption key stored outside the database in wp-config.php, an MU plugin or a custom file. No settings page, just one filter hook if you need to customize the encryption method.
If you’ve ever asked an AI to write a post for your WordPress site, you’ve probably seen what happens: the content looks fine at first glance, but once it’s in the editor, the blocks are a mess. That’s because AI tools are great at plain HTML and Markdown, but Gutenberg’s block format — with its mix of HTML and JSON-formatted comment tags — is just quirky enough to trip them up regularly.
Block Format Bridge, a new open-source plugin by developer Chris Huber, offers a sensible fix. Instead of wrestling AI into producing perfect block markup, it lets AI do what it’s good at and handles the conversion to blocks itself, server-side. It works the other way too, so you can pull post content back out as Markdown or HTML whenever you need it. If you’re experimenting with AI-assisted publishing on WordPress, this one’s worth a look. Install it and it automatically makes the conversion.
In this post, i dived a bit deeper into the matter: Block Format Bridge: A Practical Solution for AI-Generated Content in WordPress
Greg Ziółkowski maps out what he’d like to see land in WordPress 7.1 for Core AI, building on the Abilities API and server-side WP AI Client shipping in 7.0. You’ll find proposals across four areas:
- a refactored Guidelines system (with a
wp_guideline_typetaxonomy and awp_register_guideline()plugin API), - execution lifecycle filters and filtering support for the Abilities API,
- new site-orientation abilities like
core/get-active-themeandcore/list-plugins, and - a JavaScript
@wordpress/aiclient still awaiting a merge strategy for 7.1.
Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
Send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.
For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com
Open Channels FM: Building WooCommerce, Community Lessons from Checkout Summit
The episode recaps Checkout Summit in Palermo, highlighting insights from WooCommerce creators. Hosts discuss the event’s intimate nature, engaging talks, networking opportunities, and plans for more future gatherings, enhancing community growth and connection.