WordPress in 2025 (& How it Affects Product Builders)

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, a 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 Zack Katz.

And today we're talking about the state of WordPress in 2025.

And that's why we've invited Noel Talk today. Noel, thank you for joining us. Please introduce yourself. It's

a pleasure to be here. Hey, Katie. Hey, Zack. So my name is Noel Talk. I am one of the owners and partners at HumanMade. We're a very long-term, long agency in this game. I have been here since 2011, I believe. And we've really focused on enterprise across those years. We've been part of many large initiatives, be it the REST API, contributions, of course, 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. So still here, 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

yeah yeah everything yeah

look yeah i you know i i think wordpress has been 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 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 work 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 how strong WordPress is as a product because of the growth curve you see there. Meanwhile, on the outside, 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 43% of the open web or so. How much higher can you realistically go? So I think we're just in a great shape in general. But there's really just a lot of opportunities when it comes to AI. There's opportunities when it comes to product marketing. There's this one-size-fits-all, which already didn't work 10 years ago, definitely doesn't work now anymore. So me personally, I feel like it's less about the core product because I think that's really great. And it's a lot more about the further product opportunities or the product marketing.

when you say one size fits 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 an amazing sort of consumer-facing brand at the time. So when you pull up like the stats for 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 market share is still growing, right? So there's this kind of this effect where WordPress is getting pushed further down the stack because other technologies are coming out. People are adopting CRMs. They're adopting social tools, whatever that may be. The statistics around that are sort of insane in terms of how many subscriptions, SaaS subscriptions, an enterprise will have nowadays. I think it's like 500 plus or so. Yeah. 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, a social media tool. And now it's completely changed and we just have a million things. So naturally, it makes sense that we're much further down. But at the same time, we've also seen a lot of specialization. So you'll have niche products that come out or they focus on, they either focus on niches or verticals, or they'll focus on certain geographies. But there's just an insane amount of CMSs and kind of content tools. We had the whole wave of headless, right? And all of this kind of accumulated in, I'd say, like 2021, roughly, like, you know, as COVID was kind of kicking off, 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 Webflow, we have Framer, we have Wix, we have Squarespace. The same whole thing at SME, same thing at Enterprise. It's a very competitive landscape. And that one size fits all just doesn't work to compete in that given geography or niche or whatever that may be. So there's just a lot of room for or opportunity to try and build that out further.

Yeah. And of course, that's the beauty of WordPress, that you can make it 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 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 100,000 sites top million sites WordPress is maybe declining a bit 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. I think there's two things that impact the data over time. One is the sort of fragmentation of websites anyway. So you'll see 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 hundred thousand may run one or sorry two or more cmss um we've we've definitely done consolidations for enterprise where they've just had i don't know like six or so and 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 full customer orchestration and all the touch points and you want to run that kind of DXP kind of model. And then at the same time, want to be able to provide quick marketing sites, aka WordPress, which was a big focus of VIP at some point, right? When that kind of WordPress as a secondary CMS was coming out, they had then productized that and then created a lower class price tier for that to then try and capture some of that market. And then that was further validated by WP Engine's survey, economic survey, I think, or it was even a survey before that, where he talked about WordPress being the most popular secondary CMS inside of enterprise. So it's quite hard to look at that data, I'd say. But yeah, overall, there's certainly not a growth in enterprise at that category you discussed. There's certainly also like a very large boost in terms of just Next.js, React, dare I say headless, but just custom applications, custom websites. 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. 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 builder's approach that we have as a community, 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 end game. And what are the outcomes for your business? As opposed to like, hey, you can do everything with this. That's not an outcome. That's not a starting point. Right. And you guys are smiling because you probably experienced the same thing. I'll stop there.

Well, it's funny that you mentioned that because at WP Product Talk, we talk a lot about selling the features versus the benefits. And you were saying that WordPress has that problem. We're selling a tool, not the outcome. That's fascinating.

Absolutely. And, you know, 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. If that's what you're selling, that's where we belong. And that commands a certain price point. And it's not a very outcome-driven price point. So it's definitely challenging, I'm sure. Same reason why a lot of plugin authors and the whole plugin space has remained at maybe a challenging price point at some times.

Yeah, Katie and I, before we hopped on this call with you, we were talking about maybe having an enterprise topic for WP Product Talk because we really haven't drilled down into what it takes to be an enterprise product company and the differences between commercial and small business, like private website owners selling to them versus selling to enterprise. It's a very different.

A lot of it's not like the feature set, right? It's about the SLAs, the customer support. It's about how are you going to respond to certain escalations and issues. It's a lot more about the service side than maybe the product side. Sure, you could try to move a single sign-on and a couple other things into that kind of enterprise-like tier. But generally speaking, it's really about the sort of human hours 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 instead of charging say five thousand dollars for a website you're 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, it's I mean, I'm sure there's some guardrails with some sort of features to it, in terms of how they like to work, right? Like if it's agile Scrum, if there's a certain system, you're kind of falling into with JIRA and everything. If there's a certain sort of attention to detail and size to teams whereby you're, you know, you're going after governance, you're going after documenting the entire style guide and making sure that's all correct, making sure accessibility is in place, documented, everything's documented in the system. It's just, you're not going to pre-style 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? 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. So 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, I was speaking to the owners of one 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?

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 uh 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 beaver builder 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 a long-term good fit, especially if the budget is there. So if the budget is not a blocker and they're thinking about what's my total cost of ownership to build this so that it's kind of future-proof for the next four years, then they don't need that other sort of faster way to get there. What 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 there'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?

Probably not too realistic, I'd say, simply because take Gravity Forms, for example, 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 there 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 installed Gravity Forms for you. Here's their support. So we're the customers of Gravity Forms or Yoast because the outcome the client wants SEO or forms or lead conversions or whatever that may be. And in that sense, like Gravity Forms in Yoast SEO are just too far removed from the outcome. 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 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 self solutions not short codes 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 this whole tooling plugin approach to things has been something that's kind of stuck with WordPress also because we haven't pursued first-party integrations. It's up to the topic, but yeah, I feel strongly about that too.

So in terms of tooling, you were talking about bigger enterprise companies preferring to be as close to core as possible. What is the state of the block editor these days 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 well

i i really like the block editor i mean i realized that there's legitimate criticisms and you know there's 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 and epi server optimizely uh all of those like wordpress is light years ahead like this is this is a significantly better builder 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 site editing repeatable or reusable blocks, patterns, sync patterns. All of these things speak very well to enterprise because it helps drive scale or content at scale. And that sort of starts making it more of a content repository instead of, and like, sure, like realistically, we're a long shot away from your content lives, 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. I'm not saying to a view, 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 the, the patterns that I want to reuse or the sync patterns, sorry, that I want to reuse throughout my site and pages just happen to be these programmatic long tail kind of things that, you know, that my blocks will happen to fall on. No, we're still, we're still page first as opposed to block first.

And how is that? I know I'm, I'm lost, man. You, you blew my mind. How is that a good thing or a bad thing? Or is that just the way it is?

I think it's okay. The beauty is that I think you can kind of spin it either way. And this is where this one size fits all doesn't work anymore. Because at an enterprise level, I'd love to be able to provide a very hybrid approach where I'm saying, hey, look, you can be page first. You can also be block first. And there's all these things you can do with scaling our content, having the content repository, using that language and really diving into that so that you're mimicking or mirroring the language that other top tier enterprise CMSs or leading CMSs are using so that you can be compared, you can live in that same kind of world. Instead, we're in like blog world or legacy monolithic CMS world, right? And at the same time for consumer, like it's great that it's page first. It should not be anything else, right? For the Wix's 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. So yeah, coming back to product marketing and how is this, who's your audience? Who are we selling to?

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 WooCommerce and people tend to be searching for a specific problem that we provide the solution to. So they're already in the WordPress ecosystem. And then there's the whole controversy around WordPress marketing itself, 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 product businesses have to start promoting wordpress then i think we're doing something wrong we're not going to survive um

yeah but someone has to

yeah yeah no i realized 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 woocommerce 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 uh 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 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 for a large enterprise company and I have to sell my agency and WordPress every single time, right? Whereas if an agency is an Adobe Platinum partner or whatever, they're getting the whole sales pitch from an Adobe team 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. You already got the pitch from Adobe. Are you in? Not like maybe when they come to you already, like they're already sold on Adobe. Like you're done. Whereas for us, I'd say we really do a lot of double or duplicate kind of selling where 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 the scale consortium, right, at the enterprise level. And that's one of the sort of enterprise agency groups to try and consolidate some of our product marketing and approach to the market. And yeah, that's challenging. We're not going to make an impact in that same way.

It used to be that open source was a vulnerability or that people saw it as a vulnerability. And has that changed in 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's quite easy to um uh like discuss and argue around and everything's okay uh because 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 first time 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 it's a consumer side but then on the on the enterprise side or just anywhere smb plus um it's very easy to then i think uh defend wordpress and open source as a whole and i'd say like more broadly when you look at the, I think it's the open hat, oh, sorry, the Red Hat survey that they did. They did an open source survey. They didn't do it this year, but they did it a few years ago. I think it's like 22 or 23. That just talks a lot about how enterprise is really gaining a lot of confidence in open source. So 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. So, Ian, thanks for the question. Thanks for diving right into that. So I spoke about this at my keynote in WordCamp Asia last year. So a good year and a half ago. 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 SaaS industry came to be 2015 plus, you know, probably peaking and really getting like massive momentum, 17, 18, all these SaaS 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 in terms of first-party integrations for WordPress is headless. We could have had a Next integration, a React integration, integrations into other sort of headless tools or SaaS companies, and created really nice sort of headless offering that rounded out the product marketing around 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 first party integrations which all used the same uh extendable ui library and tools and uh and connecting like patterns um it would just be so easy to just be to launch sorry to install wordpress and then say okay i'm a mechanic i'm gonna connect my hubspot i'm gonna connect my mailchimp and connect brevo whatever it may be right like just one click install these things through no code and with full confidence that it is part of core uh not part of course 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 WordPress import plugin, not the export one, it's the import one, right? And that is a plugin managed by the WordPress project, but is not part of core. It is

a feature plugin.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You can call it that. Yeah. I mean, it hasn't, I'm not even sure if it's a feature plugin because it has never made its way into core. And I guess that's the path of a 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 connect HubSpot, let's say, and you go and search HubSpot in the plugin directory, or Salesforce, or whatever, it's a mess because everybody's branding differently. Everybody's got like their SEO optimized titles, 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 reluctance. As any project grows, the hesitance to change things grows, right? Like the resistance to change naturally should grow. 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 five 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 we are in a rapidly changing environment. and we have a very conservative approach to changing core outside of the block editor. That's one of the things that I think is one of the biggest issues for WordPress in 2025. What do you think, Katie?

No, I didn't agree because take BuddyPress, for example. Solution, social platform managed by not core, but like the sort of WordPress project anyway, in some way. And that just lived on the side. 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 first party integrations, whereby it is just a repository of many integrations. And maybe that runs as like 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 a framework, a 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 for Shopify, let's say, uh, I forget what their UI things, snow something. I forget what. It's not Snowflake either. They have a name for their whole UI library and everything. And whatever you create has to adhere to those rules, especially if you want to get their extra rating, which I forget, or standard or not qualified. You can qualify for a higher tier of visibility or whatever. So yeah, all these opportunities to not necessarily gamify, create a healthier ecosystem around first party integrations, I think is critical. And it's a huge miss.

Yeah. Well, Cromwell standing up for poor buddy press now he says you're making J3 cry right now. No port buddy press.

I mean, it's a yeah, it's just, it's just the way things go. I'm sorry.

buddy boss doesn't it yeah

buddy 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 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 we've all had frustrations and dilemmas 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 too 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 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 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. They have their own AI plugins. They have their own AI strategies. They're AI teams. James LePage is doing really great stuff. But that gets back to what is WordPress? And I think that 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 next week, we are going to be doing a panel on AI where we talk about that a bit

more, which will be good. A team that was put together two years after Matt said, learn AI deeply.

I know. I felt that his response at WordCamp Europe was a bit vague. So just the week before, I heard Shopify CEO talk very specifically about their AI strategy. And then when Matt Mullenweg was asked the same question in his keynote at WordCamp Europe, he gave a nice response, but it was a more high level about how self-driving cars have progressed. It wasn't a strategy. Literally, it wasn't a strategy for WordPress.

I'd say that 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 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 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 statements and, you know, basic AI. And that's seamless. That's great. That's amazing. And you will see a ton of that, 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, you know, like around when I guess Matt came out of it too, 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 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 and then thereby giving each plugin the ability to augment their current solution with AI by describing what its plugin does, how to call certain functions, how to do certain activities inside of that plugin and then the pipe dream obviously being able to orchestrate stuff. 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 and just talk to itself and build entire websites which is just nuts so i think that opportunity is the big one now the interesting thing katie which you talked about is you know like some of these companies are coming out with ai solutions right out of 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 uh 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 WordPress plugin 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 same 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 or build that thing 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? what is their focus going to be from, from what I've seen, 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 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 get charged more or whatever. So that's the beauty of open source and this kind of platform agnostic approach to how we may do things, 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.

It feels to me that Noel is pushing the line between

how we've

read it

out just for those listening in audio form. It feels to me that Noel is pushing the line between how we've typically thought of plugin territory. If Noel had his way with core, there might be far fewer need for plugins in general. Yeah, it sounds like it.

I don't want to mess with core. I still think a lot of these first party integrations and everything are separate packages, let's say, you know, from like an NPM perspective or whatever, right? Like they live separately, but there may be some kind of central sort of oversight. The same way 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 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 a 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 plugins to come on there, you know, does that create 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 WordPress itself. And that's also kind of related to the conversation in a way with the FAIR initiative. Bringing in, like right now, Katie and I have paid plugins that we have our own hosting for distributing them. And we have GitHub plugins that are available for free on GitHub. And there are plugins on.org. Everything's very distributed already. And FAIR is one of the opportunities I see in the FAIR initiative is to be able to bring those all together in one standard format for distributing plugins and themes. So what are the opportunities that are presented to WordPress in relation to FAIR, do you think?

So I've limited experience with FAIR, obviously, because I found out at WordCamp Europe. I'm very interested from just like a builder's perspective, and mostly to, you know, to kind of tackle the things I've spoken about, right? I'd love to be able to sort of create an alternative to WordPress.org for enterprise, right? Like really like just purely focused on enterprise. And that's not to take anything away from WP org, right? Like 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 glossary of language when it comes to enterprise buyers. I want to package or group plugins in completely different enterprise groups, be it CDP, personalization, experimentation, whatever it may be. I may want to talk about integrations, not plugins. I may want to use AI to aggregate and summarize 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 does, right? So you see where I'm going with it. Like, I think that's very cool, you know, and 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. And I'm tired and I want like better product marketing and a cooler entry point, right? So if Elementor is like a consumer entry point for many 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 bringing more adoption to the core product WordPress, which is already getting pushed down the stack, right? Like it's been getting pushed further down the stack since 2016, whenever it peaked on that Google Trends chart. The WordPress, the website, is not the product anymore. It is a part of the outcome, along with many, many other things, including the plugins you both build. And we just need to be able to portray those in such a way that they mimic the best practices 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 like

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

word yeah exactly yeah so there's there's there's so much of that uh where where just where we can not only learn and it's pretty obvious when you look at it you're like oh duh that makes sense, the integrations, this language or whatever, but we're not building it. And I think FAIR, in that sense, seems to be able to kind of democratize the ability to market WordPress in that sense, at least for someone like me. I can't speak to some of the other stuff like supply, I forget what they called it, something else. There's a bunch of other terminology and stuff that is more like the tech side of things that I like, I think I get it. But I think the best case scenario here is, is like, there's just a way where it seamlessly just is a great addition to the WordPress ecosystem. And WordPress just flourishes and is able to find a new way to kind of new things for some segments or parts of 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 are lots of things published about changes to the block editor, multi-stage, multi-year project plans around that 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. Zack, do you want to go next?

Sure. apparently stay out of enterprise is my advice you know we've 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 makes

sense if

you are then there's a good article on the freemius site which i've just put the um caption up with the link uh selling themes and plugins to enterprises so if you're going to do it there's some good advice advice in this article but

i'll take noll's comments to heart

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 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 because that's probably 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 I want to do this enterprise platform, I think that's an approach to gaining an audience and being able to retain that audience 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 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 mid journey 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 you actually have JavaScript rendering like various interactive layouts, being very creative, using like V0 or Bolt or whatever, doing some like really creative work. And I'd love to see more things like that that are ambitious, you know, mid-journey 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 sort of similar sort of ambitious idea, but for WordPress. Because I think that's where these are the two sort of extremes where attention will be built. So if you're a product person, please build there. Thank you very much.

Yeah, good advice. So that's a wrap. Noel, thank you so much for joining us.

You're welcome. Thank you.

Well, where can people find you online?

I mean, these days I'm really on Instagram, the most of all places, because I still do a ton of humanitarian work in Ukraine, and that's my focus. So it's just at Noel Talk on Instagram is like my kind of place, even though I'm just not on social as much these days. to begin with. So I'm even very slow at responding anywhere. But that is the one place. Or LinkedIn. LinkedIn is actually good too. Same thing. I have a unique name. Nobody else has it. So there's some product work done.

All right. Well, make sure to check out Noel on Instagram and LinkedIn. And next week for a special 100th episode of WP Product Talk, our co-host 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 check that out yeah

amazing thank you both very much

thank you and special thanks also to PostStatus 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.