WordPress in 2025  ## Metadata - Author: [[WP Product Talk]] - Full Title: WordPress in 2025 - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #wordpress - #future - #productdevelopment - #open-source - #ai - #enterprise - #markettrends Author: Katie Keith, Zach Katz, Null Talk Source: WP Product Talk Podcast – [WordPress in 2025 (& How it Affects Product Builders)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuksWANsHg4) Reference: [YouTube Transcript](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuksWANsHg4) date created: 2025-07-01 14:12 --- # WordPress in 2025 (& How it Affects Product Builders) ## Table of Contents: - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📖 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging) Assessment](#-deib-diversity-equity-inclusion-and-belonging-assessment) - [✅ Logical validity](#-logical-validity) - [🔍 DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🔍 SEO Evaluation](#-seo-evaluation) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) --- ## 📝 Summary The podcast episode explores the current and future state of WordPress as of 2025, especially through the lens of product builders. Guests examine whether WordPress is thriving or stalling, the challenges it faces in the enterprise and consumer markets, and the impact of rapid technological shifts—particularly around AI and integrations. Core insights include WordPress’s global reach and adaptability, the complex needs of enterprise customers, the opportunities and pitfalls of open-source innovation, and the urgent need for improved first-party integrations, especially in an era of AI and multi-platform content creation. The hosts encourage builders to innovate at the extremes—either with ecosystem platforms or ambitious, highly targeted features. --- ## 📖 Main Content ### 🗒️ Notes - **[00:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuksWANsHg4&t=8)** – State of WordPress in 2025 - Is WordPress declining or growing? Context is global, not just Western. - Market share remains strong, with unique growth in areas like Ukraine. - Stagnation at the top is expected; at ~43% of the open web, further exponential growth is unrealistic. - **[04:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuksWANsHg4&t=257)** – Shift From One-Size-Fits-All to Specialization - WordPress’s "build anything" strength is now both a blessing and a curse. - Proliferation of niche CMSs, SaaS tools, and platforms (Webflow, Wix, Framer, etc.). - Market fragmentation: Enterprises use multiple CMSs, consumer options are exploding. - **[07:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuksWANsHg4&t=464)** – WordPress in the Enterprise - Stable/growing for small sites, but possibly shrinking in top-traffic sites. - Enterprises often use WordPress for marketing, other CMSs for core products. - Custom solutions (React, headless, Nex.js) are outpacing WordPress for many core business needs. - **[10:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuksWANsHg4&t=643)** – Selling Outcomes, Not Features - WordPress’s messaging: still tool-first, not outcome-first. - Competitive platforms sell benefits and solutions, not flexibility or feature lists. - Plugin pricing pressure persists; outcome-driven platforms can charge more. - **[13:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuksWANsHg4&t=804)** – Enterprise Projects Are Human-Heavy - Enterprise clients demand support, SLAs, documentation, compliance. - “Enterprise” means integration, governance, and customization—not just big plugins. - Product companies rarely break in unless offering widely trusted solutions (Yoast, Gravity Forms). - **[19:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuksWANsHg4&t=1174)** – The Block Editor’s Evolution - Gutenberg’s full-site editing, reusable blocks, and patterns enable content at scale. - Despite progress, most WordPress use remains page-driven. - Block-first or hybrid approaches are rare outside leading-edge enterprise sites. - **[22:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuksWANsHg4&t=1354)** – Product Businesses and Platform Promotion - Questionable whether product makers should market WordPress itself. - Current structure means agencies must "double sell" WordPress and their own value, unlike Adobe or Shopify partners. - **[26:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuksWANsHg4&t=1561)** – Open Source Perceptions - Open source used to be seen as a risk, now is increasingly sought-after—especially in enterprise. - WordPress’s consumer user base means more “misuse,” but this is understood by serious buyers. - **[27:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuksWANsHg4&t=1643)** – First-Party Integrations: The Missed Boat - WordPress pioneered extensibility with plugins/themes but has lagged in first-party SaaS-style integrations. - Headless integrations, one-click SaaS connections, and unified UI/UX are opportunities. - **[31:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuksWANsHg4&t=1885)** – Resistance to Change in Core - Core changes are slow and conservative, sometimes justified by the scale of WordPress adoption. - Successful “first-party” plugins can live outside core but need WordPress project stewardship. - **[33:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuksWANsHg4&t=2008)** – Frustration and Opportunity for Product Devs - Rapid block editor changes create uncertainty for plugin builders. - Shopify’s advanced AI features set new expectations—WordPress lags behind, but there’s a chance to innovate. - **[37:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuksWANsHg4&t=2256)** – AI as the Next Ecosystem Play - Early AI in Gutenberg was invisible (e.g., paste-from-anywhere detection). - The future: agentic AI frameworks so plugins can “describe” themselves and be orchestrated by AI, platform-wide. - **[43:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuksWANsHg4&t=2607)** – Ownership, Fragmentation, and The Fair Initiative - First-party integrations and AI could centralize or fragment the ecosystem. - FAIR (Federated, Autonomous, Independent Repository) aims to standardize plugin/theme distribution and empower alternative markets. - **[45:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuksWANsHg4&t=2736)** – Product Marketing for Enterprise - Need for industry-specific language and plugin packaging for enterprises. - AI-powered review summaries could help clarify choices for business buyers. - **[49:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuksWANsHg4&t=2991)** – Product Builder Advice - Avoid enterprise unless truly ready; focus on niche, AI-powered, or platform-level solutions. - Innovate “at the extremes”—either as a specialized feature plugin or as a foundational ecosystem player. --- ## 📖 References - [WordPress in 2025 (& How it Affects Product Builders) - WP Product Talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuksWANsHg4) - [Human Made](https://humanmade.com) - [Gutenberg Editor](https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/) - [FAIR Project](https://make.wordpress.org/projects/fair/) - [Shopify AI](https://shopify.com/ai) - [Red Hat Open Source Survey](https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/open-source/what-is-open-source) --- ## 🗣️ Paraphrase **1. On First-Party Integrations (Null Talk):** > “WordPress and its marketplace of plugins and themes was ahead of the curve, wildly ahead, 15 years ago. But as SaaS took off, all these companies had first-party integrations—one-click into this or that tool. WordPress completely missed that boat. For example, with headless, we could have had official integrations with Next, React, etc. That would have made onboarding easier for everyone, from enterprise to consumer.” **Paraphrased:** A decade ago, WordPress led in extensibility with plugins and themes, but as SaaS platforms advanced, WordPress failed to develop official, seamless integrations with major services and headless tools. This oversight left onboarding and workflow fragmented, especially for enterprise and non-technical users. **2. On AI’s Potentia - Summary: How is WordPress evolving in 2025 — and what does it mean for WordPress product companies? In this episode of WP Product Talk, hosts Katie Keith (Barn2 Plugins) and Zack Katz (GravityKit) are joined by Noel Tock (Partner at Human Made) for a deep dive into the state of WordPress today and how the latest trends are reshaping the product ecosystem. We’ll cover: ✅ How the “new WordPress” is driving opportunities in enterprise, AI, and no-code ✅ What today’s enterprise clients expect from WordPress products ✅ Key opportunities (and risks) for WordPress plugin and SaaS businesses If you’re building products in the WordPress ecosystem — or planning to — this episode will help you understand how the platform is changing and where the biggest opportunities lie. WP Product Talk is a weekly podcast for WordPress product founders and marketers. Our rotating panel of experienced co-hosts includes: ⚡ Matt Cromwell, WP Product Talk founder, co-founder of GiveWP, and Senior Director of Customer Experience at StellarWP ⚡ Katie Keith, Founder & CEO of Barn2 Plugins ⚡ Zack Katz, Founder of GravityKit ⚡ Amber Hinds, Founder & CEO at Equalize Digital Learn more at https://wpproducttalk.com. - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuksWANsHg4 Welcome to season 7 of WP product talk. This is our 99th episode and we thought that the perfect way to start the new season would be a discussion about the state of WordPress in 2025 and how the latest trends are shaping the product ecosystem. Is WordPress dying or is it still going strong? How is the platform changing and what opportunities and threats does this create for product businesses? Let's find out. This is WP Product Talk, the place where every week we bring you insights, product marketing, business management and growth, customer experience, product development, and more. It's your go-to podcast for WordPress product owners by WordPress product owners. And now enjoy the show. Hi, I'm Katie Keith and I'm Zach Katz and today we're talking about the state of WordPress in 2025. And that's why we've invited null talk today. Null, thank you for joining us. Please introduce yourself. A pleasure to be here. Uh, hey Katie. Hey, Kazak. Um, so my name is No Talk. I am uh one of the owners and partners at Humanmade. We're very long-term or long agency in this game. Uh have been here since 2011, I believe. And you know, we've really focused on enterprise AC across those years. Uh we've been part of many large initiatives. Uh be it the rest API, um contributions of core, security team, whatever it may be. we've kind of had our hand in everything and just enjoyed all of it in terms of community contributions. Um, so still here, still still going for the ride and yeah, it's just been great. Yeah. Well, thank you for all that Human Made does. Uh, you you've contributed so much to WordPress. Appreciate that. So, yeah, you've been doing a lot of work about how is WordPress going. uh you did a talk at WordPress Europe which was great and you've also published uh documents and white papers and so on. So, could you give us a bit of a summary of what you've discovered because there's a lot of gossip about it, but we need numbers uh around WordPress in 2025 or 2026. Yeah, the outlook, everything. The outlook. Yeah, I you know, I I I think WordPress is in a great place uh if I'm honest, right? Like there's there's a lot of like internal turmoil and that can take away uh the perspective sometimes, right? like we we sometimes live in a bit of a Truman show when it comes to our own community and industry because there's so many people. it's it's its own ecosystem that we completely forget that there's a whole world outside of it that's that's going on and and I had you know the pleasure to to speak about that camp Europe whereby um WordPress had become such a popular tool and was on the rise uh inside of Ukraine and that's that's that's a testament to you know how how strong WordPress is as a product because of the growth curve you see there meanwhile on the outside you know we're we're more on the commercial side, we're more maturing. We talk about stagnation and it kind of makes sense, right? We're at at 43% of the open web or so like how much higher can you realistically go? Um so I I I think we're in a just in a in in a great shape uh in general. Uh but there's really just a lot of there's opportunities, right, when it comes to AI, there's opportunities when it comes to product marketing. Um there's there's this oneizefits-all which already didn't work 10 years ago definitely doesn't work now anymore. Um so it's I'm me personally I feel like it's less about the core product uh because I think that's really great. Uh and it's a lot more about the further product opportunities or the product marketing. When you say oneizefits-all isn't working. Can you tell tell me more about what you mean by that? Yeah absolutely. So I'm on the enterprise side and 2011, 2012, 2013, no problem, right? Like your entire web presence is your website. The website is the product and that means that WordPress is the product and that's why WordPress had such a amazing sort of consumerfacing brand at the time. So when you pull up like the stats for uh Google trends and you look at the popularity of WordPress over time, you see a very early peak in 2015 2016 and then it starts falling off but at the same time the um the the market share is still growing right um so there's this kind of um this this this effect where WordPress is getting pushed further down the stack because other technologies are coming out. People are adopting CRM, they're adopting social tools, whatever that may be. The statistics around that are sort of insane in terms of how many subscriptions, SAS subscriptions an enterprise will have nowadays. I think it's like 500 plus or so. Um, yeah. And and you can think about it in 2011, we had like three, right? Like Buffer had just come out. We're like, "Wow, this is so cool." Like a social media tool. Um, and now it's completely changed and we just have a million tanks. Um so it naturally it makes sense that we're much further down but at the same time we've also seen a lot of um specialization. Um so you you'll have niche products that come out where they focus on uh they either focus on niches or verticals or they'll focus on certain geographies. Um but there's just an insane amount of CMS's and kind of content tools. um we had the whole wave of headless right and all of this kind of accumulated in I'd say like 2021 roughly like um you know as co was kind of kicking off um whereby we saw a massive amount of investment in the CMS space maybe like 1.5 billion or so and that has completely fizzled out but that was really a peak whereby there's just so much fragmentation in the space if you look at consumer software we have web flow we have framer we Wix, we have Squarespace. Same whole thing at like um theme, same thing at Enterprise. Um it it's a very competitive landscape and that one sizefits-all just doesn't work to compete in that given geography or niche or whatever that may be. Um so there's there's just a lot of room uh for or opportunity to to try and build that out further. Yeah. And of course that's the beauty of WordPress that uh you can make it in into anything with themes, plugins, custom development. It is infinitely flexible. But you mentioned that market share is still growing. And when I look at market share, um I sometimes get worried because it's kind of stable or growing a bit amongst smaller sites. So that would be whole internet. And then when I drill down and look at things like the top 100 thousand sites, top million sites, WordPress is maybe declining a bit uh compared to some other platforms. So how are you finding it on the enterprise side if the data that I'm seeing might suggest that it's doing less well for the bigger sites? Yeah, good question. Um I I think there's there's two things u that impact the data over time. Um, one is the sort of fragmentation of websites anyway. So you you'll see uh multiple subdomains kind of pop up. So where does WordPress actually live? Does it live on a subdomain? Does it live on a main domain? Is it some like random installation? And that leads to the second point whereby um a lot of enterprises and let's say sites in the top million, top 100,000 may run one or sorry two or more CMSs. Um, we've we've definitely done consolidations for enterprise where we've just had I don't know like six or so and it it's not unnatural to have one kind of core CMS and then which is really like your customer journey especially if you're in e-commerce and you want to have the the full customer orchestration and all the touch points and you want to run that kind of DXP kind of model uh and then at the same time want to be able to provide quick marketing sites aka WordPress um which was a big focus of VIP at some point right when that when that kind of um WordPress as a secondary CMS was coming out, they had then productized that and then created a lower uh class price tier for that to then try and capture some of that market. Um and then that was further validated by WP Engine's uh survey, economic survey, I think or or it was even a survey before that where they talked about WordPress being the most popular secondary CMS inside of enterprise. Um so there's it's quite hard to look at that data, I'd say. Um but yeah overall there there is pro there there's certainly not a growth in enterprise at that that category you discussed there's certainly also like a very large boost in terms of just Nex.js JS, React, um dare I say headless, um but just custom applications, custom websites, um companies really just trying to create much better product in terms of how their website functions and they have the budgets to do so. So they don't necessarily have to rotate to WordPress. Um and what's also interesting, you had said before that you can just take themes, you can take plugins, WordPress can do anything, right? And that is very much the the builder approach that we have as a community as as a I guess market presence whereby a lot of the other products have already gone into solution selling. So they're really trying to sell the endgame and what are the outcomes for your business as opposed to like hey you can do everything with this. That's not a that's not an outcome. That's not a starting point, right? And you guys are smiling because it's you probably experienced the same thing. Uh I I'll stop there. Well, it's funny that you mentioned that because at WP product talk, we talk a lot about selling uh the features versus the benefits. Uh and you were you were saying that WordPress has that problem where we're we're selling a tool, not the outcome. That's fascinating. Absolutely. Uh and you know, we're we're pushed further down the stack. You know, we talked about that before. There's a lot of tools that are part of your ecosystem. Um if if that's what you're selling, that's that's where we belong. and that commands a certain price point and it's you know it's not a very outcome driven price point. Um so it's uh it's definitely challenging I'm sure uh same reason why a lot of plug-in authors and the whole kind of plug-in space has remained at a maybe a challenging price point at some times. Yeah, we uh Katie and I before that we uh hopped on this call with you, we uh were talking about maybe having an enterprise uh topic for WP product talk because we really haven't drilled down into what it takes to be an enterprise product company uh and the differences between commercial and small business uh like private website owners selling to them versus selling to enterprise. It's a very different uh a lot of it's not like the feature set, right? It's about the SLAs's, the customer support. Um, it's it's it's about how are you going to respond to certain escalations and issues. It's it's a lot more about the service side than necess like maybe the product size. Like sure, you could try to like move a single sign on and a couple other things into that kind of enterprise like tier. Uh but generally speaking, it's it's really about uh the sort of human hours uh you have to spend and be ready to spend on a client in case something happens or goes wrong. So it's like a whole different league of projects and instead of charging say $5,000 for a website, you charging many tens of thousands and putting that time in, you are really delving into their full requirements in detail and creating something bespoke built on top of WordPress, of course. Um, so yeah, it's hard to define, isn't it? Like what makes something an enterprise project? Yeah. Uh, it's I mean I'm sure there's some guard rails with some sort of features to it uh in terms of how they like to work, right? Like if it's agile, scrum, if if there's a certain system you're kind of falling into of Jira and everything. um if there's a certain um sort of attention to detail and and size to teams whereby you're, you know, you're going after governance, you're going after documenting uh the entire style guide and and making sure that's all correct, uh making sure accessibility is in place, documented, uh everything's documented as a system. It's it's just you're you're not going to freestyle your way into draft one without really chatting to the client or you know you've met him once and then be like, "Hey, what do you think of this?" Um that's generally not how it works, right? Because you're working with multiple stakeholders. They all have different needs. They have different workflows. So there's a lot of mapping to do, a lot of integrations into complex systems. Um so it just it's still similar to building a one-off website, but just infinitely more complex, right? like there's a kind of recursive nature to it that just adds a lot of weight. Yeah, that makes sense. So, with the enterprise side of things, um I was speaking to the owners of one um enterprise level WordPress agency and they made a comment that they don't really use plugins, maybe like some really major ones like Yoast or something, but they build everything bespoke because of all the stuff you just said. So as product businesses, should we be even targeting enterprise level potential customers or should we be going more for the small to medium? It's a good question. It's a very good question. I So you're right in that the the large ones are all used, right? like Yoast, Gravity Forms, there's there's there's there's a bucket or a basket of those which is just which are just very known and kind of reused um to to a large degree also because the clients are quite familiar with them and have naturally found them themselves. Um we will use other plugins. I think sometimes there's there's ones which aren't really like something that's maybe less common is maybe using another page builder, right? So something like Elementor or BeaverBuilder may not be what's used for a large enterprise site because the client wants to be as close to native as possible. Um, so there's those kind of things where if a plugin is is a is a is a hack or um an iteration on the way that WordPress does it, uh, but it may still change significantly or core may change significantly in some way and that changes everything in the future. Um, there's just things like that where those are not great fits. So the things which are a short-term great fit may not be uh a long-term good fit, especially if the budget is there, right? So if the budget's not a blocker and they're thinking about what's my total cost of ownership to build this so it's kind of future proof for the next four years um then they don't need that other sort of faster way to get there or a shortcut right we don't really sell to customers who think in total cost of ownership terms no they're not like TCO and TTL and all these things yeah it's kind of a different world. So, we're trying to organize an episode um in a few weeks time in which we'll talk in more detail about agency partnerships. Um but with the at the enterprise level, is it even worth say product companies trying to do deals with that sort of agencies to become a preferred provider? Like how you're so familiar with Gravity Forms, you would just trust them and know they'll be a good option compared to building your own form system. Is it even worth people trying to do that in their marketing or is it just not realistic? Um, probably not too realistic, I'd say. Um, simply because take Gravity Forms for example. Uh, good product, works out of the box, great documentation. We can take ownership of its support and services around it because of how we integrate into the website. So it might be custom functionality. We might be theming it into some way or whatever. But it is a tool which is serving our needs to serve the customer. It's not a tool that we're saying, hey, we've we've installed Gravity Forms for you. Here's their support. Um so we're we're the customers of Gravity Forms uh or Yoast. uh because the outcome the client wants is SEO or forms or um lead conversions or whatever that may be u and in that sense like gravity forms and yoast SEO are just too far removed from the outcome uh and we need to sell the outcome. Yeah, we've actually got a comment on that from our co-host Matt who says no business owner says I need a custom post type. They say instead I need to promote my events in a different way from my blog posts. How do I do that? So, yeah, that's very much the benefit and outcome side of things, isn't it? Yeah, I think it it was I can't remember what it was. There was when WP Candy still existed and they came out with the first magazine, the first edition, the print edition, I had an article in there which said uh self solutions not short codes. Um, so this is already 20 years in the making almost. So yeah, I you can repeat it as much as you want, but you know, this is this this whole tooling plug-in approach to things has been something that's kind of stuck with WordPress also because we haven't pursued uh first party integrations. Uh separate topic, but yeah, I feel strongly about that too. So in terms of uh tooling, you were talking about uh bigger enterprise companies preferring to be as close to core as possible. What is the state of the block editor these days uh when it comes to the people you work with and your impressions outside of that as well just in general like how is it doing? I I I really like the block editor. I mean I realize that there there's legitimate criticisms and you know there these again these battles between elementor the block builder. I don't like Gutenberg. I'm still on classic press or classic editor or whatever. But at the enterprise level, if you compare Gutenberg or the block editor compared to like an Adobe or a site core, an epic server optimizely uh all of those like WordPress is light years ahead. Like this is this is a significantly better builder. uh especially now that we've gone into some of the more enterprise um um enterprisey uh sort of features to the Gutenberg editor which is full-sight editing uh repeatable or reusable blocks uh patterns uh sync patterns um all of these things speak very well to enterprise because it helps drive scale or content at scale uh and that sort of starts making it more of a content repository uh instead of and like sure like realistically we're a long shot away from your content lives your your primary content lives on blocks inside of a repository as opposed to on your page. So the majority of you creating content and how you approach content is still page driven inside of WordPress. is just I'm not I'm I'm not saying two of you, but I'm saying in general that is still where the market is as opposed to viewing WordPress as a content repository where you say I'm going to start with the blocks of content and the repeatable sort of uh the patterns that I want to reuse um or the sync pattern sorry that I want to reuse throughout my site and pages just happen to be these programmatic longtail kind of things that you know that my blocks will happen to fall on. Um, no, we're still we're still page first as opposed to blog first. And how is that I don't I'm I'm lost, man. You you blew my mind. Uh, how uh how is that a good thing or a bad thing? Or is that just the way it is? I I think it's okay. Um the the beauty is that I think you can kind of spin it either way. And this is where this oneizefits-all doesn't work anymore, right? Because at an enterprise level, I'd love to be able to provide a very like hybrid approach where I'm saying like, hey, look, you can be page first, you can also be block first, and there's all these things you can do with like scaling out content, having the content repository using that language and and really diving into that so that you're you're you're mimicking or mirroring the language that other uh top tier enterprise CMSs or leading CMSs are using so that you you can you can be compared, you can live in that kind of world. Um, instead we're in like blog world or legacy monolithic CMS world, right? Um, and at the same time for consumer like it's great that it's page first should not be anything else, right? for the Wixes and Web Flows of this world. Like being page first is great and having the opportunity to take the one thing, you know, like some kind of hero or some kind of ad internal ad for your website or whatever and just being able to repeat that one thing. Great, right? But that's the minority, not the majority. Um, so yeah, coming back to product marketing and how is this who's your audience? Who are we selling to? H yeah on the marketing side of things it's also worth considering about the marketing of WordPress. I've never fully got my head around what is the responsibility of product businesses to be promoting WordPress as a platform. I know, for example, that Elementor brings a huge number of new users to WordPress, whereas my products tend to be more niche add-ons for Woo Commerce and people tend to be searching for a specific problem that we provide the solution to. So, they're already in the WordPress ecosystem. So, and then there's the whole controversy around WordPress marketing itself, um, not currently having an active marketing team and all of that side of things. So, what's your thoughts on what product businesses should be doing to promote the platform in a way that benefits all of us? I mean, if if product businesses have to start promoting WordPress, then I think we're doing something wrong and we're not going to survive. Um Yeah, but someone has to Yeah. Yeah. I know. I realize that, but like at what point do you enter the conversation, right? Um buyer says, "I need a website." Do you enter the conversation at that point with your, you know, your Woo Commerce add-on? Unlikely. Um, Elementor maybe a bit better, right? Because they've kind of created a sort of different, it's almost like a fork, right, in terms of how it presents itself uh of WordPress, right? because they're that high up on the uh where the conversation starts that it's it's a great sort of they've done a great job just packaging it all and and and and trying to promote this thing that's just easy to build and it just doesn't make sense for product businesses to get stuck into that and to try and make up for something that should be occurring somewhere else. It's also my challenge, right? like for years now I have to go into a sales pitch or an enterprise a large enterprise company and I have to sell my agency and WordPress um every single time right whereas if um a company if an agency is a Adobe platinum partner or whatever they're getting the whole sales pitch from an Adobe team um that is just doing all that entire side for them and the sales collateral the whole customer journey, all that is locked in, right? Like they're able to sell that. You as an agency partner to Adobe just rock up and say, "Well, it's going to cost, you know, 2 million to build this thing. Um, you already got the pitch from Adobe. Are you in?" No. Like maybe when you when they come to you already, like they're they're already sold on Adobe like you've you're done. Whereas for us um I'd say we we really do a lot of double or duplicate kind of selling where we have to we have to act both as agency partner and software vendor and that is extremely challenging because we need to compete in the market and that's probably one of the reasons we created uh the scale consortium right at the enterprise level um and that's one of the sort of enterprise agency groups um to try and consolidate some of our product marketing and approach to the market. Um, and yeah, that's challenging. We're not gonna have we're not gonna make an impact in that same way. It used to be that open source was a vulnerability uh or that people saw it as a vulnerability and are is has that changed in uh the people you work with where now people are searching out open source? I' I'd say there's a there's a high like whenever there's like concerns around that, it it's quite easy to uh uh like discuss and argue around and everything's okay. uh because the the numbers also like highlight it and for WordPress it's it is quite specific too whereby you have such a large distribution of customers uh where so many are just consumer firsttime maybe like computer users even and they're installing stuff that doesn't make sense and their directories are open you can do SQL injections whatever it may be um and then it gets a horrible reputation because of consumer side but then on the on the enterprise side or just anywhere SMB plus um it's it's very easy to then I I think uh defend WordPress and open source as a whole and I'd say like more broadly when you look at the uh I think it's the open hat oh sorry the Red Hat um uh survey that they did they did an open source survey they didn't do it this year uh but they did it a few years ago I think it's like 22 or 23 um that just talks a lot about how enterprise is really gaining a lot of confidence in uh open source. So that's like that's less of an issue in my opinion. If anything, open source is gaining traction as an idea. Well, we've got a comment or question from Ian Misner from Kestrel who says, "Love to hear more about what you think about first party integrations and where the opportunities are." It's not even a plant. This is great. Um uh so Ian, thanks for the question. Uh thanks for diving right into that. Uh so I spoke about this at my keynote in Work Camp Asia last year. Um so a good year and a half ago. Uh but basically I believe that long story short, WordPress and its marketplace of plugins and themes was ahead of the curve, wildly ahead of the curve 15 years ago. And as the sort of SAS industry came to be 2015 plus uh you know probably peaking and really getting like massive momentum 17 18 um all these SAS companies had integrations first party integrations like hey one click into this one click into that and a good example of where we've completely missed that boat uh in terms of firstparty integrations for WordPress is headless. We could have had uh a Next integration, a React integration, uh integrations into other sort of uh headless tools or SAS companies and created a really nice sort of headless offering that rounded out the product marketing around um something as as um like just a whole sort of headless offering that became so popular. And that's a really big thing because it really helps people on board insanely fast. And I think if we did have firstparty integrations which all used the same uh ex extendable UI library and tools and uh in uh and connecting um like patterns um it would just be so easy to just be to to launch uh sorry to to install WordPress and then say okay I'm connect I'm going to connect my HubSpot uh I'm going to connect my Mailchimp I'm going to connect uh Brevo So whatever it may be right like just one click install these things through no code um and with full confidence that it is part of core uh not part of core sorry but like on the side of core or managed by the WordPress team and we have an example of such a plugin which I think is the um WordPress import plugin um not the export one it's the import one right uh and that is a plugin managed by the WordPress project but is not part of core it is a plugin M yeah. Yeah, exactly. You can call it that. Yeah. I mean, it's it hasn't it I'm not even sure if it's a feature plugin because it has it's never made its way into core and I guess that's the path of a feature plugin. It's just a first party integration in my book. And we don't talk about any of these first party integrations on the website either or anything like that. So, if you want to uh connect HubSpot, let's say, and you go and search HubSpot in a plug-in directory or Salesforce or whatever, it's a mess because everybody's branding differently. Everybody's got like their SEO optimized titles. Um, you're lost, right, as a customer. And for enterprise all the way down to consumer, that is not good enough. So, for me, taking that approach is something that benefits all tiers of WordPress consumers and buyers. It seems like there's uh reluctance uh as any project grows, the hesitance to change things grows, right? Like uh the resistance to change naturally should grow. Uh if 43% of the web is using your product, you need to think very carefully about what you choose to integrate. So if you choose to integrate HubSpot and it goes away in 5 years, then that was maybe a mistake. I don't think HubSpot's going anywhere, but you know, we still do we still have like MySpace profile settings in user profiles in WordPress? Like if it's in core, it generally stays in core. And I have a feeling like that's part of the struggle that WordPress is in right now is uh we are in a rapidly changing environment and we have a very um conservative approach to changing core outside of the block editor. uh how does is that's one of the things that I think is one of the biggest issues for WordPress in 2025. Do you uh what do you think Katie? No, I I I disagree because take take um take Buddy Press for example, right? solution social platform managed by not I mean not core but like the sort of WordPress project anyway uh in some way and that just lived on the side and at some point it just wasn't that popular anymore and then contributors went away and the software still exists it's still open source it's still there it's still available I view the same thing for firstparty integrations whereby it is just a repository of many integrations uh and maybe that runs as like sep separate packages each one or whatever and it's connected in some kind of way and maybe there's there's there's an first party integration team that manages these things but it does not have to be inside core it just has to be managed by the WordPress project. Yeah. um and and and use it has to well like maybe people can submit those plugins even right like a HubSpot can submit those plugins but it has to adhere to like UI standards and I believe if you do that after Shopify let's say uh I forget what their UI thing snow something I forget what it's not snowflake either they they have a name for their whole like UI library and everything um and whatever you create has to adhere to those rules especially if you want to get their extra rating which I forget or uh standard or like u not qualific uh you can qualify for like a higher tier of like visibility or whatever. Um so yeah like all these opportunities to not necessarily gify but create a healthier ecosystem around first party integrations I think is critical. Uh and it's it's a huge miss. Yeah. Well, um, Cromwell's standing up for poor buddy press now. He says, "You're making J3 cry right now." No, poor Buddy Press. I mean, it's uh Yeah, it's just it's just the way things go. Buddy Boss, doesn't it? Yeah, buddy own the market now for that. But yeah, I think that the rapid changes in WordPress, they're kind of an opportunity and a curse for product people. So, um, all product companies I think have been frustrated with the changes in the block editor over time because whatever you think of it, we've had to do work and redo work. We found missing hooks and filters. we can't you we've all had frustrations and dilemas as to how much of our resources to put into developing for the block editor when it's not finished and when it's not necessarily easy to work with while it's in that transition state. But then there's positives and opportunities as well. For example, um so at Barn 2 we are currently expanding into Shopify so as kind of just a way to spread the risk of the business really. And so I've been learning a lot about Shopify and going to events and one thing that really surprised me at the recent Shopify conference in Toronto was how ahead of WordPress they are in the AI space and that's made me think a bit differently about products. So Shopify has an inbuilt sidekick AI kind of shop assistant for the merchant where you can get it to do things in Shopify. and they said that they're looking at allowing Shopify apps to integrate with it so that for example you can um configure the app within this Sidekick AI. So that's all centralized but I haven't seen anything like that in WordPress yet. So now I'm thinking is this um an opportunity because WordPress is being a bit slower. Can we release our own AI products and get that market or is it a threat that if we do so then it might not be worth it. So it's hard to know and that gets into what is WordPress because I know that automatic is working a lot harder on AI than WordPress core or whatever is. Uh they have their own AI plugins, they have their own AI strategies, their AI teams. James Leage is doing really great stuff. Um but uh that gets back to what is WordPress uh and I think that is is hampering our response to AI. I think automatic is going to have a really good response but is core going to well they have a new team. They have the whole new AI team they recently put together and um and next week we going to be doing a panel on AI where we talk about that a bit more which a team that was put together two years after Matt said learn AI deeply. I know I felt that his response at Word Camp Europe was a bit vague. So I just the week before heard Shopify's CEO talk very specifically about their AI strategy. And then when Matt Mullen was asked the same question in his keynote at Word Camp Europe, he gave a a nice response, but it was a more high level about how self-driving cars have progressed. It wasn't a strategy. It's literally it wasn't a strategy for WordPress. Uh I'd say that there there's there's two sides to this. So there's one which is the AI as a tool and it's going to help your product company or whatever integrate AI in some kind of seamless manner. You're not going to talk about AI in that case or whatever. It's just it becomes this invisible thing and invisible software like that is amazing, right? Like Gutenberg has a great example of that whereby they had their own little AI years ago when uh you could copy from any source, right? like markdown, Google doc, word doc, whatever, and paste inside Gutenberg and it would figure out where is that coming from, right? So that's a bunch of if then else um statements and you know basic AI. Um and that's seamless, that's great, that's amazing. And you will see a ton of that I I'd say throughout products in general. Now I think the thing we're talking about more here is also what I talked about. Yeah, I think it was a year and a half ago even when um you know like around when I guess Matt came out of it too. uh but where I put forward the idea of an agentic AI kind of foundation to WordPress core and its ecosystem whereby we provide the foundation um or the AI foundation to WordPress and then give plugins, features and everything the ability to hook in with agents which follow a certain schema or blueprint um and then thereby by giving each plugin the ability to augment their current solution with AI by describing what it what its plug-in does, how to call certain functions, how to do certain uh activities inside of that plug-in and then you know the pipe dream obviously being being able to orchestrate stuff the same way that when you're in cursor now and you have MCPS and you have various other kind of tooling you can just let the thing go for a long time, right? like it can it can build for a while uh and just talk to itself and build entire websites which is just nuts. Um so I think that opportunity is the big one. Now, the interesting thing, Katie, what you talked about is, you know, like some of these companies are coming out with AI solutions right out of out the gate. And it's great because they can come out with this point solution that's just like really cool looking, right? Like Adobe did that with their uh background tool or whatever it was or like fill tool really early on. Um there was a couple other like small examples and things like that like when AI first came out. Um but the real opportunity I think is these kind of large ecosystem plays right like so Jonathan Wald has spoken about this I forget what his like comparison was it was I think it was you know when you create a a WordPress plug-in today is it a feature type plugin or is it a ecosystem plugin and AI is a huge ecosystem play and opportunity now we have the ability to say or connect so many different plugins and tools together through the agentic kind of network or whatever other AI augmentations we can do and that power is unparalleled like no proprietary solution could ever match that. That being said, if we don't seize that opportunity and we don't come together as a community to be able to bring that uh or build that thing um and actually deliver on it, then we're going to miss out on that. So, it's a bit of a slow burn where we really have to figure out or let time tell in some ways like what's this AI team going to do? Um, what is their focus going to be? From from what I've seen, it it seems like it's driving in that direction. Um, so it may we we we may have FOMO from seeing other applications, but maybe the the payoff comes in like you know two years time. uh where the Gravity Forms where we spoke about Gravity Forms, Yoast, your custom plugins, whatever. They're all AI augmented because they've hooked into some schema and and you're able to use that sidebar chat thing to basically talk to all those features and all the third party plugins too and do so on your own API key without having to go through a third party and and get charged more or whatever. Um, so that's the beauty of open source and this uh this kind of platform agnostic approach to how we may do things. Um, but it has to actually get executed for it to be an advantage. Yeah, that has to be done centrally, doesn't it? It's the only way to do what you've described. And there is that dilemma with API keys and free software particularly. Do you provide yours or in which case you're paying for it? WordPress can't do that, can they? because it's free and so the customer then has that friction point. Yep, I agree. Yeah. And I think that that comes to So we have a question well more of a comment actually from Matt. Feels to me that no one's pushing the line between Yeah, I'll read it out just for those listening in audio form. Uh it feels to me that null is pushing the line between how we've typically thought of plug-in territory. If null had his way with core, there might be far fewer need for plugins in general. Yeah, it sounds like core is like I I don't want to mess with core. Like I I still think a lot of these like first party um uh integrations and everything are uh separate packages, let's say, you know, from like an npm perspective or whatever, right? Like they they live separately. uh but there there may be some kind of central sort of oversight the same way you we may say hey we want to really tackle product marketing in such a way that it is kind of centrally managed but we're all contributing to it same thing as first-party integrations right so first the same thing as agentic AI or whatever so in many ways I think the you know one of the kind of battlegrounds is going to be you know does someone decide to start building some of these things themselves elves um as opposed to you know that happening somewhere else, right? Elementor was able to build a page builder and go to the top of that conversation point and then bring in entirely new customers into WordPress. Do people, you know, will another organization or group try to do a similar thing with first-party integrations with Agentic? Right? Because if you have AI press or whatever and you've built that agentic system and you allow third party uh plugins to come on there, you know, does that create a a sort of space where you own the customer and the attention so you can then start transacting with them? Yeah. And that's a real risk for the fracturing of of WordPress itself. Uh and that's also kind of related to the conversation in a way with the fair initiative. Um bringing in like right now we have Katie and I have paid plugins that we have our own hosting for uh distributing them and uh we have GitHub plugins that are available for free on GitHub. Uh and there are plugins on.org. Everything's very uh distributed already and fair is one of the opportunities I see in the fair initiative is to be able to um bring those all together in one standard format for distributing plugins and themes. Uh so what are the opportunities that are presented to WordPress and uh relation to fair do you think? Um so I mean limited experience with fair obviously because I found out um at work camp Europe. Um I'm very interested from just like a builder's perspective and and mostly to you know to kind of tackle the things I've spoken about, right? Um I'd love to be able to sort of create an alternative to WordPress.org for enterprise, right? Like really like um just purely focus on enterprise. And that that's not to take anything away from WP or right like the the amount of plugins on there, the bandwidth, the traffic, the amount of heavy lifting it does is absolutely insane. But in terms of product marketing, I want to use a completely different glossery of language when it comes to enterprise buyers. I want to package uh or group plugins in completely different enterprisey groups be it you know CDP uh uh personalization experimentation whatever it may be. Um I may want to talk about integrations not plugins. Uh, I may want to um use AI to aggregate and summarize uh reviews that exist on whatever platform to then re or provide an enterprise summary with enterprise language so that enterprise buyers understand what the integration uh does, right? So, you see where I'm going with it? Like I I think that that's that's very cool. Um, you know, and I I can't speak for anybody else, right? like this is just my own personal desire from having sold to enterprise for way too long. Um, and I'm tired and I want like better product marketing and and and a cooler entry point, right? So, if Elementor is like a consumer entry point for many uh new customers which WordPress wouldn't have gotten before, I would love to do the same for enterprise. And to your point before where it's fracturing, it's not fracturing in my opinion. I think it's it's it's it's it's bringing more adoption to the core product WordPress which is already getting pushed down the stack, right? Like it's it's been getting pushed further down the stack since 2016 whenever it peaked on that Google Trends chart. Um the web WordPress the website is not the product anymore. It is a part of the outcome along with many many other things including the the plugins uh you both build and we just need to be able to portray those in such a way that they mimic the best practices and and how the industry approaches that right like Shopify AB test they've they've they've they've tested tried everything with language marketing whatever it may be they're doing something extremely right right I guess you know they have a plus store as well. They have an app store just for the enterprise. So that's an excellent example of what WordPress would benefit from. Yeah. So there's there's there's there's so much of that uh where where this where we can not only learn and it's pretty obvious when you look at it you're like a duh that makes sense duh integrations the this language or whatever. Um but we're not building it. And I think fair um in that sense seems to be able to kind of democratize the ability to um market WordPress uh in that sense like at least for for someone like me, right? Like I I I can't speak to some of the other stuff like um supply I forget what they called it. uh something else like there's a bunch of other terminology and stuff that is more on the like the tech side of things that I like I I think I get it but um I think the best case scenario here is is um like there's just a a way where um it it seamlessly just is a a great um addition to the WordPress ecosystem and WordPress just flourishes and is able to find a a new way to kind of do things um for some segments or parts of the the ecosystem. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. So, let's move on to the final section which is just where we give our best advice for WordPress product owners based on this topic. So, I'll go first to give you a chance to think. So my advice based on everything we've discussed is to stay on top of where you think WordPress is going. There there are lots of things published about changes to the block editor, multi-stage, multi-year project plans around that um and things about AI. There's plenty of information out there. So stay on top of that and use that to inform your decisions on what products to make, what features to add to your products and when. and just operate within that wider context to make the right business decisions for you. Uh, Zach, do you want to go next? Sure. Uh, apparently stay out of enterprise is my advice. You know, we've probably me we've looked into it at different times and uh, you know, for many different reasons, we've decided not to, including we don't want to have an SLA. we don't like even though we have great support that responds quickly, we don't want to have a contract that requires that. Um, and apparently it's not even worth doing. So, uh, yeah, don't go into enterprise unless you're going into enterprise in which case go into enterprise. Business makes sense. If you are, then there's a good article on the Fremia site which I've just put the um caption up with the link u selling themes and plugins to enterprises. So, if you're going to do it, there's some good advice advice in this article, but take comments to heart. All right, what do you what do you got? Yeah. Uh, I will say um my advice to product people, builders is build at the extremes. um in at at in this phase of the market and where we are and with the chaos of AI and everything um I think you should build on AI anyway like um but when I say build at extremes I say either build the platform um uh because you know that's probably like the most interesting thing in terms of trying to be able to tackle a certain market vertical whatever that may be the same way that like I want to do this enterprise uh platform I think that's a uh an approach to gaining an audience and being able to retain that audience uh and really enter at a very high point of the conversation and that is like very much on one extreme and when I think of the complete other extreme I think about a point feature um or a feature plugin where you're really just doing something amazing and like I'd love there to be like really seamless plugins such as what is the midjourney of of WordPress blocks Right? Where do I type in my prompt and it designs four absolutely amazing blocks? And I'm not talking like one's got two columns and the other one's got three columns and something else, right? Like you actually have um you actually have JavaScript uh rendering like ver various interactive layouts being very creative using like v0ero or bolt or whatever. Um doing some like really creative work. Um and I'd love to see more things like that that are ambitious. um you know midjourney for for WordPress or cursor for WordPress or whatever it may be, right? Like taking some of these like leading products and trying to find the kind of analogy or the sort of similar sort of ambitious idea but for WordPress. Uh because I think that's where these are the two sort of extremes where attention will be built. Um so if you're a product person, please build there. Thank you very much. Yeah, good advice. So, that's a wrap. Null, thank you so much for joining us. You're welcome. Thank you. When Well, where can people find you online? Uh, I mean, these days I'm really on Instagram the the most of all places because I I I still do a ton of humanitarian work uh in Ukraine. Uh, and that's my focus. Um, so it's just null talk on Instagram is like my kind of place even though I'm I'm just not on social as much these days to begin with. So, um, so I'm even very slow at responding anywhere. Uh, but that is the one place or LinkedIn. Uh, LinkedIn is actually good, too. Um, same thing. I have a unique name. Nobody else has it. So, you know, there's there's some product um work done. All right. Well, uh, make sure to check out null on Instagram and LinkedIn. And next week for a special 100th episode of WP Product Talk, our co-hosts Matt and Amber will be running a panel about all things WordPress and AI. So be sure to tune in live so you can ask questions and uh check that out. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you both very much. Thank you. And a special thanks also to Post Status for being our green room. If you're enjoying these shows, then do us a favor and hit like, subscribe, share with your friends, add us to your newsletters, and this is a particularly good time to do that because we've just started a new series. And most importantly, don't forget to tune in for episode 100 next week. Bye. [Music], WordPress in 2025, WP Product Talk, 01jyz6e7ey0df5p7hx8agy2chz.