As requested...... here are all the learnings and business benefits I got out of attending #WCEU this year (in addition to having fun and catching up with friends, as always). There were far more direct benefits than I expected! General insights: - Reflecting on the downturn - talked to lots of plugin owners about their sales. The vast majority are down. The only ones growing are those who just started marketing properly (i.e. growing from nothing), and the stable ones tend to have popular .org plugins or strong partnerships rather than relying on SEO. However, one major platform told me that across their WP clients, 52% of plugins decreased by an average of 12% over the past 2 years, while the rest grew by an average of 80%. That contrasts so sharply with everyone I've spoken to that I suspect something's off with the data (e.g. maybe they attract lots of new stores that would naturally grow). - Someone told me they've built an AI tool to analyze each support ticket for feature requests, missing documentation etc. which the AI then actions. Going to look at building something similar. - Got useful context from a member of our Services team about why plugin customers need services, and their path from buying a plugin to liking us and then asking for help with unrelated website tasks. - One speaker ran a live poll to get the audience's input, then read out the results - I might do this in future talks. - Met someone looking for a support engineer and put him in touch with an ex-team member who was very grateful. - Got invited onto a webinar panel. Products: - Discussion about the concept of "super plugins" - combining some of our smaller plugins into a bigger one. (On my list to consider!) - Someone set up automated testing faster by having developers connect Cursor/Claude to the Playwright MCP to create tests at the end of a project, when the AI is already familiar with the feature. Will suggest to our dev team, who already use Playwright. - Met someone with a successful Shopify app they want to sell. Looks ideal, but more than I want to spend, so need to think about it. - Discovered that you can now expose plugin features to the Abilities API (e.g. to let users create product options or discounts via AI). Will ask the dev team about this. Marketing: - Saw a demo of the new Google for WooCommerce Video plugin, which lets you display and promote actual products within and underneath videos. I'm sure EDD will never do this, so I plan to get the Woo plugin and ask AI whether we could build the same for our own site on EDD. - Saw a talk about which review sites are most cited by AI, so will consider which to register for. Also discussed the pros and cons of having a Trustpilot profile per product. - A talk mentioned the importance of Quora for AI overviews. Will look at whether there's a realistic strategy there. - Following a talk about market research, a team member suggested to attend some nonprofit events to learn more about the sector and approach people about Document Library Pro which is popular with nonprofits. - Another talk reminded me to re-trawl online forums as market research for our upcoming Shopify B2B app now that people will be talking about the new core B2B features. Content: - Tip: Use AI to trawl support tickets and online reviews to find the language real customers use to describe our plugins, to inform our marketing copy. - Tip: Publish original research as a way to get referenced by AIs and on Reddit etc. - Tip: Add more actual stats with citations instead of saying things like "Many websites...". - Tip: Put more content within blockquotes (where appropriate) because that encourages AI to cite you directly instead of summarizing in its own words. - Tip: Make sure each post is unique in some way - add character, opinion and anecdotes. Ask yourself: "Could this have been written by a competitor if we removed our brand name?" Cross-promotion: - Discovered that @melapressHQ have a user role plugin - opportunity for cross-promotion as we have plugins that restrict access by user role. - Had lunch with a group of plugin founders and came up with a firm plan for ongoing cross-promotion. Website: - Watched a talk about making your site ready for AI. Tips included adding more detailed AI preferences to robots.txt, blocking training bots, allowing search/citation and agent bots, using an interconnected @id graph to correct structured data, and installing an IndexNow plugin to trigger a re-index after major changes. - Discussion about one vs. multiple sites, including the idea of creating a standalone DLP site (possibly translated into multiple languages, as it'll be smaller than our main site) while keeping the main site for high-authority content, so it matters less that we'd be building a new domain from scratch. - Discussed the possibility of switching licensing platform. - Someone told me about a tool they're building to generate whole SaaS products with subscriptions, which might suit a SaaS product I'm working on. - Someone told me Stripe now offers checkout and subscription services good enough that you don't need an ecommerce plugin or third-party platform, which is also worth considering for the SaaS project. Not bad for a 2 day conference!

A 43% jump in ticket sales, CERN's flagship site going live on WordPress, and an eight-hour afterparty. Kraków delivered the WCEU the community wanted. 🔗 therepository.email/wordcamp…

Introducing Claude Opus 4.8: it builds on Opus 4.7 with sharper judgment, more honesty about its own progress, and the ability to work independently for longer than its predecessors. Available today at the same price.

Genuine question here: what in the world is going on with this @WordCampUS website? us.wordcamp.org/2026/ Surely this cannot be the final product for the flagship conference in our industry. We want people to come to this right? Happy to help bring this thing to life.