I have been using AI tools since ChatGPT first launched. And like many content marketers, I wanted to improve my skills for the AI era. This means I frequently test a wide range of AI tools as part of my actual content marketing workflow.

This regular testing has helped me move past the noise and identify which tools genuinely save time and improve content quality for other bloggers and marketers.

My goal was to find what helps drive traffic and engagement, not just add another subscription to the list.

In this guide, I’ll share that clarity with you. Here are my recommendations for the best AI tools for content marketers, based on my daily use and the results I got from them.

Quick Comparison – My AI Toolkit for Content Marketing

If you are in a hurry, here is a quick list of all the AI tools I use in my daily workflow as a content marketer:

Tool	Best For	Key Feature	Starting Price
ChatGPT	Content Writing	Versatile conversational AI	Free – Paid plans start at $20 / mo
Gemini	Research & Technical Writing	Real-time web access & sourcing	Free – Paid plans start at $19.99
All in One SEO	Social & Email Copy	Integration inside WordPress	Free – Paid plans start at $49.60 / yr
SeedProd	Landing Page Copy	AI writer inside page builder	Free- Paid plans start at $39.50 / yr
Canva	Image Editing	Magic eraser & background remover	Free – Paid plans start at $4.58 / mo
Runway	Text-to-Video	High-definition, cinematic output	Free – $15 / mo
ElevenLabs	Text-to-Audio	Natural, human-like voice	Free – $5 / mo

Next, I’ll show how I tested each tool and why you can trust my picks.

How I Tested & Reviewed These AI Content Tools

The AI industry is exploding with innovation, making it harder to separate hype from reality, and choosing the wrong tool can waste time and money.

I aim to cut through the noise with real-world usage to save time and money.

Here’s a breakdown of my testing process:

• I used them for real-world tasks. I used these tools for actual content marketing at WPBeginner: brainstorming articles with ChatGPT, creating social media posts with AIOSEO, and designing graphics with Canva’s AI. This process shows how they perform in a real business, not just a demo.
• I analyzed what truly matters. Each tool was judged on the quality of its output, ease of use for non-experts, practical time-saving features, and overall value for money.
• I tested with a variety of prompts. I didn’t just accept the first result. Instead, I experimented with different tones, styles, and complex commands to check the flexibility and control of the AI’s output.
• I categorized them for specific needs. A blogger’s needs are different from a landing page designer’s. That’s why I’ve categorized each tool by its best use case, helping you find the right solution for your specific task.

1. ChatGPT

ChatGPT is one of the most versatile AI tools I’ve used. It works well for quick idea generation, long-form articles, and even creative media like images.

As one of the most advanced AI companies, OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) is spending huge resources on research and innovation. This means more capable and faster models are released quite frequently.

ChatGPT allows you to switch between search, chat, deep research, and agent modes so you can perform different types of tasks from the same window.

How I use ChatGPT:

ChatGPT is my primary AI for a variety of tasks. I use it daily for updating existing articles, brainstorming blog post ideas, writing new articles, and more.

I learned that using Projects and ChatGPT’s memory feature allows the AI to learn my preferred tone, structure, and formatting rules. This saves me a lot of time in the long run.

I also use it to create illustrations for articles and general blog images. It sometimes misspells words in images, but I can easily correct those using Photoshop or Canva.

Key Features & Where It Excels:

• Handles multiple content formats: blog posts, scripts, captions, and social copy.
• Excellent image generation model included.
• Powerful memory system to personalize results to your brand voice.
• Integrates with ChatGPT plugins for WordPress and automation tools like Uncanny Automator and Zapier to create powerful workflows. However, you’ll need an API key for integrations, which has a separate pay-as-you-go pricing not included in the monthly ChatGPT subscription.

Pros of ChatGPT 👍	Cons of ChatGPT 👎
Extremely versatile across writing and creative tasks	Requires human fact-checking
Remembers preferences with the memory feature	Output quality depends heavily on prompts
Integrates with top automation and marketing tools	The free plan has limited access to the latest models

Practical Tips for Marketers:

• Use the project feature to group related tasks and save time switching between contexts.
• For recurring formats (like newsletters), train the memory feature with examples so that ChatGPT automatically matches your style.
• Learn to improve your prompts for better outputs. You can see my collection of AI prompts for marketers for practical examples.

Pricing

A free plan is available with limited model access. Paid plan starts at $20/month, GPT-5, memory features, faster responses, and priority access during peak times.

2. Gemini

While ChatGPT is my go-to for creative tasks, Gemini is my trusted research assistant.

Its biggest advantage is its direct, real-time integration with the Google search index, which means the information it provides is current and often comes with source links.

This makes it incredibly reliable for tasks where accuracy is critical. I’ve found its ability to understand and explain complex, technical subjects is second to none.

It’s also excellent at generating structured data like tables and comparing information from multiple sources.

Plus, Google is continually updating Gemini with its latest AI models and connecting it with its ecosystem of Google Workspace apps like Google Docs, Sheets, and Gmail. These integrations make it a powerful productivity hub.

How I use Gemini:

I turn to Gemini whenever I need to write content that requires up-to-date information or fact-checking.

For instance, when writing a review of a new software release, I’ll ask Gemini to summarize the latest features, find recent user reviews, and compare its pricing to competitors.

I also use it to simplify technical topics.

When working on an article about website security, I can ask Gemini to explain “what is a DDoS attack” in a simple analogy that a non-technical reader can understand. Its ability to provide sourced information saves me a significant amount of research time.

Key Features & Where It Excels:

• Connects directly to Google Search for real-time, sourced answers.
• Excellent at summarizing articles, research papers, and web pages via a link.
• Generates multiple “drafts” of a response so you can choose the best one.
• Integrates directly with Google Workspace apps (Docs, Sheets, Gmail) for a seamless workflow (with Gemini for Workspace).

Pros of Gemini 👍	Cons of Gemini 👎
Provides current, sourced information	Can be less “creative” in tone than ChatGPT
Excellent for research and fact-checking	Image generation capabilities are less advanced
Great at simplifying complex topics	Fewer third-party integrations compared to OpenAI

Practical Tips for Marketers:

• Use the “Double-check response” feature (the Google icon) to have Gemini highlight statements it’s confident about and find sources for ones it’s less sure of.
• When researching, ask it to “act as a research assistant” and request information in a specific format, like a table comparing three products on features and price.
• For complex topics, ask it to “explain this to me like I’m a beginner” to get clear, easy-to-understand copy.

Pricing

The standard Gemini model is free to use. To access the most powerful models (like Gemini 2.5 Pro) and larger context windows, you can subscribe to Google AI Pro, which starts at $19.99/month as part of the Google One AI Pro plan.

3. All in One SEO – AI Content Generator

All in One SEO’s AI Content Generator is built right into your WordPress dashboard, making it incredibly easy to create ranking-ready content without switching between tools.

You can instantly generate:

• SEO titles & meta descriptions
• FAQs with schema
• TL;DR summaries to improve GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
• Social media posts for LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and Facebook
• Marketing copy for your email newsletter

Because it’s part of the AIOSEO plugin, all the AI-generated content can be inserted into your post or page with a single click. This helps you save time and ensure everything is properly optimized for search engines and engagement.

How I use AIOSEO AI Content Generator:

I use AIOSEO’s AI content generator when I need to speed up the optimization process for new and updated articles.

For example, after writing a post, I’ll use the AI Content Generator to create a compelling meta description, add FAQ blocks for featured snippets, and generate a TL;DR section to improve readability.

It’s also my go-to for creating platform-specific social media captions. I can generate tailored copy for Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and X (Twitter) in seconds, which saves me from rewriting the same message multiple times.

Plus, I love its Marketing Email feature, which allows you to instantly generate an email based on the content of your article.

Key Features & Where It Excels:

• Works inside WordPress and uses your article content for context, which significantly improves the quality of output.
• Generate SEO titles and meta descriptions that improve click-through rate (CTR).
• Create FAQ blocks with built-in schema markup for better rankings and AI Overviews.
• Produce “Key Points” summaries to boost readability and capture featured snippets.
• Instantly write platform-specific social media posts for multiple networks.
• Generate and publish an llms.txt file to get discovered and cited by AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini.

Pros of AIOSEO 👍	Cons of AIOSEO 👎
All-in-one content optimization directly in WordPress	Credits are limited based on the plan
Includes advanced features like FAQ schema and llms.txt	Requires the AIOSEO plugin
Saves time by creating multi-platform content instantly

Practical Tips for Marketers:

• Use FAQ and Key Points in every post to target featured snippets and AI Overviews.
• Leverage the social media post generator to maintain consistent branding across platforms.
• Enable the llms.txt file feature to help AI chatbots find and cite your best content.

Pricing

Available for both Lite and Pro users. Lite users get 100 free credits, with additional credits available for purchase. Pro users get generous credits included with their license. All users can buy extra credits at any time.

4. SeedProd AI Writing & Image Generator

SeedProd is one of the most popular WordPress website and landing page builders. Alongside its drag-and-drop builder, it comes with built-in AI tools for text and image creation.

It integrates with ChatGPT for copywriting and DALL·E for generating images, so you can create a complete, custom landing page without ever leaving the editor.

The AI assistant is available inside many SeedProd blocks, letting you generate text or rework existing copy with just a click.

You can also instantly translate your page content into 50+ languages and fine-tune tone and style with over 30 options, from professional to playful.

Plus, you can even use SeedProd to create an entire website from scratch. For details, see our guide on how to create a WordPress website with AI.

How I use SeedProd’s AI features:

I use SeedProd’s AI writing assistant when I’m building landing pages or product pages and need polished copy fast.

Instead of starting from scratch, I can select a block, click “Generate AI Text,” and have a strong starting draft instantly.

For visual content, I use the AI image generator to create custom illustrations or hero images that match the page’s theme. If I don’t like the first result, then I can create multiple variations until I find the perfect fit.

Key Features & Where It Excels:

• AI-powered text generation and editing directly inside the SeedProd builder.
• 30+ tone of voice options to match your brand style.
• One-click text transformations: simplify, shorten, lengthen, or translate into 50+ languages.
• DALL·E-powered AI image creation with variation support for consistent design themes.
• 300+ templates, full WordPress theme builder, and easy WooCommerce integration.

Pros of SeedProd 👍	Cons of SeedProd 👎
Integrated AI copywriting and image generation in one builder	AI Assistant is only available on premium plans
30+ tone options and translation into 50+ languages	Image results may require multiple attempts for best output
Seamless drag-and-drop website building with 300+ templates	AI credits are tied to your SeedProd plan

Practical Tips for Marketers:

• Use tone options to match the style of each landing page — formal for B2B, casual for lifestyle brands.
• Leverage AI translations to localize pages for international audiences without hiring translators.
• Create multiple image variations to maintain a consistent visual style across your campaign.

Pricing

SeedProd offers a free plan for its page builder. AI writing and image generation are available on premium plans as a paid add-on. Pricing starts at $39.50/year for the base builder, with AI features included in higher tiers.

5. Canva Magic Studio

Canva is already one of the easiest tools for creating designs, but its Magic Studio AI features take it to another level with AI-powered image editing and media generation.

It’s perfect for marketers who need professional visuals without advanced design skills.

From background removal to text-to-image, text-to-video generation, Canva’s AI tools save time while expanding creative possibilities.

Canva’s Magic Studio is powered by a mix of its own AI technology and models from leading partners like Google. This allows it to offer powerful image and video generation tools right inside the Canva editor as an all-in-one design solution.

How I use Canva Magic Studio:

I use Canva for creating and editing blog images, social media graphics, and quick promotional materials.

The Magic Eraser is a huge time-saver when I need to remove unwanted elements from a photo, and the Expand tool is perfect for adjusting aspect ratios.

I often tweak AI-generated visuals with Canva’s design tools for a polished final product. In particular, I use it to edit images generated with ChatGPT or Gemini because those platforms don’t have the same image editing capabilities as Canva.

Key Features & Where It Excels:

• Magic Eraser for removing unwanted objects in seconds.
• Easily expand to resize and reframe images without cropping important content.
• Text-to-image AI generation for new AI artwork.
• AI resize tool for instantly adapting designs to multiple social media formats.
• Background remover and object eraser for clean, professional images.
• Hundreds of templates and drag-and-drop editing for non-designers.

Pros of Canva 👍	Cons of Canva 👎
Fast, beginner-friendly interface with professional results	AI image generation can struggle with accurate text rendering
Magic tools make editing and resizing effortless	Most AI features are limited in free plans
Huge library of templates and design assets
Low-cost monthly subscription

Practical Tips for Marketers:

• Use Magic Resize to instantly create platform-specific versions of your designs for Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.
• Pair text-to-image generation with your brand colors and fonts for on-brand custom visuals.
• Combine Magic Eraser and background remover to repurpose stock images for unique content.

Pricing

Free plan available with limited AI features. The Pro plan starts at $4.58 /month and includes Magic Studio AI tools, brand kits, premium templates, and unlimited background removal.

6. Runway

Runway is one of the most innovative AI tools for marketers who need professional-quality video without a production crew.

It offers text-to-video generation, background replacement, and advanced editing features, all inside a simple browser interface.

I am not a video editor, but as part of a marketing team, I sometimes need quick videos.

Runway is a great option for creating product promos, social media clips, and creative visuals that stand out in your campaigns. You can even start from an image or video clip and transform it entirely with AI.

How I use Runway:

I’ve used Runway to try out quick video clips and fun personal projects.

I thoroughly tested Runway Aleph against Google’s Veo-3 (limited preview available in Gemini). Runway performed quite well and, in some areas, exceeded Veo.

I also liked Runway’s ease-of-use, storyboard, and remix features. As someone with limited video editing experience, I found Runway to be much easier to use than Veo.

Key Features & Where It Excels:

• Text-to-video generation from prompts or images.
• Green screen and background removal without a studio setup.
• Wide range of visual styles and camera movement controls.
• Fast rendering compared to traditional video software.

Pros 👍	Cons 👎
Generates high-quality videos in minutes	Negative prompts are not supported
Easy to use, even for beginners	Best results often require multiple tries
No expensive video equipment needed

Practical Tips for Marketers:

• Use reference images to guide the AI’s style and accuracy.
• Pair Runway videos with Canva or AIOSEO for complete campaign materials.
• Batch create multiple clips in one session to save time.

Pricing

Free plan available with limited exports and watermarks. Paid plans start at $12/month, offering higher-quality output, faster rendering, and commercial usage rights.

7. ElevenLabs

I discovered ElevenLabs when our WPBeginner YouTube team was trying it out for their videos and shorts. It is one of the most advanced AI voice generation platforms I’ve tested.

Its voices sound remarkably realistic, with natural pacing, emotional nuance, and subtle inflections that make them almost indistinguishable from real human narrators.

With support for over 70 languages (in the upcoming Eleven V3 model) and a library of 120+ pre-built voices, it’s a flexible tool for any marketer looking to add professional-quality audio to their content.

You can also fine-tune voices with precision controls to match your brand tone or creative style.

How I use ElevenLabs:

I first used ElevenLabs for a quick AI video experiment. It was a fun non-work project, but I was hooked.

I am not a podcaster or video editor, and don’t have any professional audio equipment. ElevenLabs came as a blessing to easily add quick narrations to short videos.

For example, I can paste a pre-written script for a video, choose a voice that fits the tone, then adjust stability and style sliders for a polished delivery. I then use Audacity to edit audio for my videos to add pauses and music.

I’ve also used its multi-language support to quickly generate audio for a personal project. The new Eleven V3 model surprised me. It was able to distinguish Urdu from Hindi (two almost identical South Asian languages), and the pronunciation was surprisingly good.

Key Features & Where It Excels:

• Ultra-realistic voice generation with natural pacing and emotion.
• Large voice library (120+ voices) plus the ability to fine-tune delivery.
• The Eleven V3 model supports 70+ languages, making it great for multi-lingual audiences.
• Fast rendering, even for longer scripts.
• Ability to clone voices (paid feature) for brand consistency.

Pros 👍	Cons 👎
Highly realistic and expressive voices	The free plan has strict character limits
Fast generation time	Does not edit or mix audio, so a separate tool is required
Supports multiple languages for localization

Practical Tips for Marketers:

• Match your voice choice to your target audience — formal tones for B2B, friendly tones for casual content.
• Use precision controls to tweak pacing and emotion for maximum authenticity.
• For social media videos, keep scripts short to stay within free-tier character limits.
• Combine with editing tools like Descript or Audacity to add music, sound effects, or clean up audio.

Pricing

Free plan includes 10,000 characters/month. Paid plans start at $5/month with higher character limits, faster generation, and access to voice cloning. For daily content creation, the $22/month plan is the most practical choice.

How to Choose the Best AI Tool for Your Marketing Needs

AI moves fast. New features arrive every month, and “best” depends on your workflow, budget, and goals.

Use these quick checks to pick tools that fit how you work today while staying flexible for tomorrow.

Smart Selection Tips

• Start with a free plan or trial. Test on one real task before you commit.
• Audit what you already have. Many tools you use (SEO, design, CMS) now include AI features. For instance, I use WPCode in WordPress, which has a built-in AI code snippet generator.
• Match the tool to the task. That means you should pick writing tools for long-form, image models for visuals, and voice tools for narration.
• Check ease of use. A clear UI saves more time than a complex feature set. For instance, I prefer to use Runway, which is easier than the more powerful Veo available in Gemini.
• Look for solid integrations. Useful integrations include WordPress, email marketing platforms, and automated workflows with tools like Uncanny Automator or Zapier.
• Evaluate pricing at scale. Credits can add up if you publish often. If you are using APIs for integrations, make sure to calculate the costs and set a cut-off budget.
• Review data and privacy settings. Know how prompts and outputs are stored and used. You don’t want your trade secrets to be used by AI models for training.
• Confirm export options. Make sure you can move drafts, images, and audio into your stack.

Honorable Mentions: Other AI Tools I Use

I have shared the tools that I use daily and are part of my workflows as a content marketer. Here are some more tools that I use quite frequently.

Tool	Suitable for
SEOBoost	Keyword clustering, content briefs, and search intent planning for data-backed outlines.
Manus	A multi-purpose AI agent suitable for deep research.
MidJourney	High-quality AI imagery for social posts, blog headers, and campaign visuals.
Copy.ai	Fast social captions, ad angles, and email subject lines with ready-made templates.
Jasper	Team workflows, brand voice training, and multi-channel content production.

Frequently Asked Questions About AI Tools for Content Marketing

The following are some of the most common questions that I hear from WPBeginner users on Reddit and LinkedIn.

Which AI tool is best for beginners?

If you’re starting out, I recommend ChatGPT. It’s versatile, easy to learn, and has a free plan so you can practice without spending money.

Do I need to pay for AI tools to get good results?

Not always. Many AI tools, like ChatGPT and Canva, have free tiers that work well for smaller projects. Paid plans usually offer faster responses, higher quality outputs, and more advanced features.

Can AI tools replace human writers and designers?

AI tools are great for speeding up tasks and sparking ideas, but they can’t fully replace human creativity and judgment. I still review and edit everything to make sure it fits my style and is factually correct.

How do I know if an AI tool is right for me?

Check if the tool solves a problem you face often, offers a free trial, and integrates with your existing workflow. If it saves you time or improves quality without adding complexity, then it’s worth keeping.

Will AI tools keep getting better?

Yes. The AI industry is evolving fast. Expect new features, better accuracy, and more integrations over the next few years. That’s why I suggest testing tools regularly to see if better options appear.

Conclusion

These AI tools help me plan, write, design, and publish faster while keeping quality high. You can start with the free plans, test on one real task, and keep the tools that save you time without adding extra steps.

Just make sure to keep human editing and fact-checking in the loop so your content stays accurate and on brand.

You may also like to see these articles related to AI:

• How AI is Reshaping SEO: 30+ Trends to Watch
• How to Use AI for Customer Service (Tips for Small Businesses)
• Is AI Content Bad for WordPress SEO? (Expert Insights & Tips)
• A Small Business Owners’ Guide to Artificial Intelligence
• WordPress Plugins Using Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post I Tested 7 AI Tools for Content Marketing: Here’s What I Found first appeared on WPBeginner.

I’ve been running WordPress blogs for years, and one thing that used to frustrate me was seeing my visitors get stuck on archive pages. They’d land on a category or date archive, scroll for a bit, and then leave without finding what they needed.

I realized the real issue wasn’t the archives themselves, but how visitors were using them. People wanted a faster way to narrow down my blog posts instead of scrolling through everything.

That’s when I started testing different solutions and discovered that using a plugin like SearchWP made a huge difference. It powers a smarter search experience and lets you place a search bar right where your readers will use it.

In this guide, I’ll show you how to set it up step by step so your readers can find the right content faster and stay engaged with your blog longer. ⚡

Why Do You Need a Search Function on Your Blog Archives Page?

A search bar on your blog archives page makes it much easier for visitors to find exactly what they’re looking for. Instead of endlessly scrolling through older content, they can simply type a keyword and instantly see relevant results.

In WordPress, archive pages are automatically generated pages that group your content by type, such as:

• Your main blog page
• Category pages
• Tag pages
• Date-based archives

Adding a search bar on any of these archive pages can keep visitors engaged and make older content easier to discover.

A search bar can also nudge visitors to explore more pages on your blog, whether it’s a recent post or something from years ago.

On the flip side, without a search option, archive pages can feel cluttered or overwhelming. And your best content may get buried and overlooked.

Plus, if your blog has more than a few dozen posts or covers a variety of topics, adding a search bar isn’t just helpful. It’s essential for delivering a great user experience.

This is especially helpful for WordPress blogs with growing content libraries. For example:

• 📚 Educational blogs filled with tutorials and guides
• 🥘 Food blogs with hundreds of recipes organized by category or date
• 🌍 Lifestyle and travel sites sharing personal stories or destination reviews
• 🌐 Tech blogs publishing updates, reviews, and evergreen advice
• 🗞 Magazine-style or news sites with a steady publishing schedule

With that said, I’ll walk you through how to add WordPress search to the blog archives page.

Here’s a quick overview of all the steps I’ll cover in this guide:

Step 1: Install and Activate SearchWP

If you’d rather not install a plugin, then you can skip ahead to step 4, where I show you how to add a Search block to your archive pages. This will work with WordPress’s built-in search.

Just keep in mind that the default WordPress search is pretty limited. It only looks at basic post content and often shows results that aren’t very helpful.

That’s why I recommend using SearchWP instead, which is the best WordPress search plugin on the market.

This plugin lets you improve your WordPress search algorithm in multiple ways. For example, you can add all types of content to the results, including custom post types, WooCommerce products, and even PDF content.

We use SearchWP on some of our business websites, and we’ve found that it works great. You can find out everything about it in our detailed SearchWP review.

To get started, you’ll need a SearchWP plan. You can head over to the SearchWP website and click ‘Get SearchWP Now’ to purchase the plan that best fits your needs.

After you sign up, you’ll get a user account. Simply log in to your new SearchWP account, download the plugin’s .zip file, and locate your license key.

You can find it in your SearchWP account under the ‘Downloads’ section. At this point, you need to copy your license key or leave the browser tab open so you can access it easily later.

Next, let’s navigate to Plugins » Add New Plugin from your WordPress dashboard. From there, click the ‘Upload Plugin’ button at the top of the page.

On the next screen, click ‘Choose File’ and select the SearchWP .zip file you downloaded earlier.

Click ‘Install Now’ then ‘Activate’ once the button appears.

If you need help, you can check out our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Once the plugin is activated, you’ll need to go to SearchWP » Settings » General.

Then, go ahead and paste your license into the ‘License Key’ box.

Step 2: Customize your Search Algorithm

Once SearchWP is activated, the next step is to fine-tune your website’s unique search engine settings for your blog archive pages.

To do that, go to SearchWP » Algorithm in your WordPress admin dashboard and click ‘Add New.’

At the top, you’ll see the ‘Sources & Settings’ button. Go ahead and click on it.

This is where you choose which content types SearchWP should include in your search results.

You’ll see options for posts, pages, media, and more.

By default, WordPress displays blog posts on archive pages. To make sure all your articles are searchable, you’ll definitely want to check the ‘Posts’ box.

You may also be considering what additional elements are important to include.

If your site has a lot of valuable information on ‘Pages’ or ‘Comments,’ consider adding those too.

On the other hand, I recommend skipping sources like ‘Tags’ that could clutter results.

You might notice some options grayed out — this is normal for the ‘Default engine.’ They’ll be available if you create a new engine.

You can then close the popup by clicking ‘Done.’

Step 3: Tell SearchWP What Content Is Most Important

After selecting your content sources, you can customize how SearchWP ranks the content in your search results. This helps show the most relevant results based on what your visitors are likely to look for.

On the SearchWP » Algorithm screen, you can click ‘Add/Remove Attributes.’

In the popup, you’ll choose which parts of your content you want SearchWP to consider.

They include sources such as:

• Title – Prioritize results that match the post or page title.
• Content – Index the main body text of your posts or pages.
• Slug – Include the post’s URL-friendly name (useful for SEO keywords).
• Excerpt – Search within manually written or auto-generated summaries.
• Author – Allow visitors to find content written by a specific author.

I recommend picking the ones that make searches more relevant and skipping unrelated sections.

For example, if your visitors rarely search by “Author,” leaving it out can help keep results clean and focused.

You can include extra content stored in custom fields. Additionally, you can let users find posts grouped under specific topics or labels in the ‘Taxonomies’ field.

Once you’ve added the attributes, you’ll see a set of sliders for each content source.

Think of these sliders as a scoring system that tells SearchWP which content is most important. By giving an attribute a higher ‘relevance weight,’ you’re telling the search plugin to give it more points.

For example, if you slide ‘Title’ far to the right, a post where the search term appears in the title will get a huge point boost.

This makes it much more likely to show up at the top of the results. So, this is a great way to ensure the most relevant content surfaces first.

For most users, the default weights are a great starting point. You can always come back and fine-tune it later based on your site’s needs.

When you’re happy with the settings, click the ‘Save’ button in the top-right corner.

SearchWP will now start rebuilding the index automatically.

This might take a few minutes, depending on the amount of content on your site and the performance of your WordPress hosting server.

Once you see ‘Index Status: 100%’, it means all your content has been successfully indexed and your settings are ready to go.

Step 4: Add the Improved Search to the Archives Page

SearchWP is now powering your site’s search behind the scenes. The final step is to add a search bar directly to your archive pages so visitors can use it.

There are two easy ways to do this: using the Full Site Editor (FSE) or the WordPress search widget.

Which method you choose will depend on whether you’re using a block theme (option 1) or a classic theme (option 2). Keep scrolling to find the right choice for you.

Option 1: Add the Search Bar to the Archives Page Using FSE

If your theme supports Full Site Editing (FSE), like Twenty Twenty-Four, you can go to Appearance » Editor in your WordPress dashboard to get started.

In the Site Editor, click ‘Templates’ from the left-hand menu.

Next, you’ll need to find the template that controls your blog archives.

The name of this template can vary depending on your theme. It can be ‘Archive,’ ‘Blog,’ ‘Home,’ or ‘Index,’ among others.

The key is to select the one that your theme uses for the main blog listing. A good way to be sure is to click on one and see if you have the look for the Query Loop block (that’s what WordPress uses to display your list of posts).

Now that you’ve found the right blog archives page and opened the template, you’ll need to add the search bar to it.

Simply click the ‘+’ button wherever you want, and look for the ‘Search’ block. Click on it to insert it in your template.

After you add the search block, you can go to the ‘Block’ tab in the right-hand panel to customize its style.

Here, you can adjust the block’s color, typography, position, to border to match your site’s design.

This is a great chance to add a touch of personality.

For instance, instead of the default ‘Search’, you could use something more engaging like ‘Find a recipe…’, ‘Search our tutorials…’, or ‘Looking for something specific?’ to guide your visitors.

When you’re happy with how everything looks, go ahead and click ‘Save’ in the top-right corner to apply your changes.

Now, if you visit your blog archive page, you can see your custom search bar in action.

Option 2: Add the Search Bar to the Archives Page with a Classic Theme

Adding the search bar to a widget area like a sidebar is the quickest and easiest method for most classic themes.

To get started, navigate to Appearance » Widgets.

On the next screen, you can choose where you’ll add a widget. The best part is that SearchWP automatically improves any default search bar. Whether it’s in the sidebar or somewhere else, the plugin enhances it behind the scenes.

For this tutorial, I’m going to add it to my site’s sidebar.

You can go ahead and click the ‘+’ button and look for the ‘Search’ widget.

From here, you can update the label or placeholder to something more specific. For example, you can edit it to “Search blog posts…” or “Looking for a tutorial?”

Feel free to get creative and choose wording that best fits your content.

Once everything looks good, simply click ‘Update’ to save and apply the search bar to your site.

Now, if you visit your blog archive page, you can see your custom search bar in action.

Step 5: Test and Optimize Your Archive Search Functionality

Now that your custom search bar is live on the blog archive page, it’s important to make sure everything is working smoothly across devices and browsers.

You can start by opening your website in incognito or private mode. This lets you view it as a new visitor would, without cached data affecting the results.

From here, you can test different search terms to make sure the right results appear. If anything seems missing or irrelevant, you can go back to SearchWP » Algorithm to adjust your content sources or attribute relevance settings.

If this doesn’t resolve the issues, you can try these quick fixes:

• Clear your cache – Cached JavaScript files can prevent SearchWP from loading correctly. Use a plugin like WP Rocket to clear the cache and optimize performance.
• Deactivate conflicting plugins – Temporarily disable other plugins one by one to see if one of them is causing issues.
• Rebuild the index – To force a fresh search data rebuild, you can go to SearchWP » Settings » General and click the ‘Rebuild Index’ button.

For more troubleshooting tips, you can refer to our guide on how to fix WordPress search not working.

Once visitors start using your new search bar, you’ll want to know what they’re looking for.

This is where the SearchWP Metrics extension is incredibly powerful. It shows you exactly what terms people are searching for, which searches get no results, and more.

For details, you can check out our guide on how to see search analytics in WordPress.

Bonus Tip: Add Search by Category in WordPress Blogs

Want to make your blog’s search even more useful? One easy way is to let visitors filter results by category.

Categories help organize your content and make it easier for readers to browse related posts. But when combined with search, they become even more powerful. This allows users to narrow down results and find exactly what they need.

Here are a few ways this can come in handy:

• Lifestyle or personal WordPress blogs: Let visitors search posts only within categories like Travel, Recipes, or Wellness.
• Tutorial or knowledge base sites: Allow users to search by topic, such as WordPress, SEO, or eCommerce.
• News sites: Help visitors focus on sections like Business, Sports, or Tech.
• WooCommerce stores: Let shoppers search by product category to find what they need faster and boost conversions.

With SearchWP, you can create a custom search form that limits results to a selected category. You can do this either through a dropdown filter or pre-defined settings.

For step-by-step instructions, check out our full guide on how to search by category in WordPress.

FAQs About Adding WordPress Search to Blog Archives Page

Still have questions? Let’s quickly go over some of the most common things WordPress users ask when setting up search on their blog archive pages.

How do I add a search bar to my WordPress blog archive page?

You can do this by editing your archive template. Just go to Appearance » Editor, find your blog archive template, and insert the Search block. You can also customize how the search form looks by adjusting the placeholder text, button style, margins, and more.

If you’re using a classic theme, you can add the search form to a widget-ready area like the sidebar.

What is the best search plugin for WordPress blog archives?

I recommend SearchWP because it’s the best WordPress search plugin on the market. It works seamlessly with archive pages and is much more accurate than the default WordPress search. Plus, it gives you full control over what content gets searched, how results are ranked, and even what custom fields or post types to include.

Can I make my old blog posts searchable in WordPress?

Absolutely. As long as your old posts are published and included in your search engine settings (like in SearchWP’s ‘Sources & Settings’ panel), they’ll show up in the results.

Can I limit archive search results to just blog posts or certain categories?

Yes, you can. For example, with SearchWP, you can customize your search engine to include only certain post types, like blog posts. You can even fine-tune it further by limiting searches to specific categories or tags using search filters or custom search forms.

How do I improve the search functionality on my WordPress site?

You can start by replacing the default WordPress search with a powerful plugin like SearchWP. It lets you include more content types, adjust relevance settings, and deliver better results overall. You can also improve the experience by customizing the search results page, using smart suggestions, or adding filters to narrow down results.

Additional Resources: More Guides to Improve WordPress Search 

I hope this guide has helped you learn how to add WordPress search to your WordPress blog archives.

If you want to take your WordPress search to the next level, you may find these guides helpful:

• How to Add Live AJAX Search to Your WordPress Site
• How to Add Fuzzy Search in WordPress
• How to Make Blog Comments Searchable in WordPress
• How to Add PDF Indexing and Searching in WordPress
• How to Create a Searchable Member Directory in WordPress
• How to Create an Advanced Search Form in WordPress for Custom Post Types

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Add WordPress Search to Blog Archives Page (The Easy Way) first appeared on WPBeginner.

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Transcript

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case the long complex story of how WordPress came to have a.com and.org variety.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy and paste that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers. Michelle is well known in the WordPress community for her myriad roles, including Executive Director of Post Status, and program director for WP Includes. She’s a prolific freelancer, podcaster, and a driving force behind many WordPress initiatives.

Jonathan is a WordPress Core committer, contributing to the project since 2013, and has been sponsored by Bluehost to work on WordPress Core since 2018. His work largely takes place behind the scenes supporting contributors, maintaining build tools, and keeping WordPress running smoothly for millions of users.

If you’ve ever searched for WordPress online, you’ve probably found both wordpress.com and wordpress.org at the top of your results, and like many, you might be unsure what really separates the two.

Today, Michelle and Jonathan helped clear up the history, philosophy, and practical differences between wordpress.com and wordpress.org.

They talk about how these two flavors of WordPress came to be, why they’ve both been key to WordPress’s growth and the ways they overlap and differ in features, user experience, and monetization.

Michelle shares her perspectives as a longtime user and advocate, with experience across both.com and.org sites. While Jonathan dives into the technical and historical details from his Core contributor vantage point.

They also explore whether the naming conventions of .com and.org have helped or hindered the project, and how the WordPress communities open source ethos shapes the ongoing conversation.

Along the way, they touch on how .com made WordPress accessible in the early days, the importance of data portability, and evolving efforts to unify the user experience between the two platforms.

If you’ve ever wondered which version of WordPress is right for you, why the projects seems split into two variants, or how community and commerce intertwine in the WordPress ecosystem, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers.

I am joined on the podcast by two guests today. I’m joined by Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers. Hello.

[00:03:48] Michelle Frechette: Hello.

[00:03:48] Jonathan Desrosiers: Hi, how’s it going?

[00:03:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good thank you. We’re going to talk today a little bit about a subject, which I confess confuses me greatly. It’s the differences, the similarities between WordPresses variance, .com and.org.

Before we get into that, I know it’s a terribly generic thing to do, but nevertheless, we’re going to do it anyway because we have a new audience member each time this podcast airs. So I’m going to ask you both to give us your little potted bio. Tell us who you are. So let’s start with Michelle.

[00:04:14] Michelle Frechette: Hi, I am Michelle Frechette. I do a lot of freelancing type work in WordPress, and I also am the Executive Director of Post Status, and the Program Director for WP Includes. I have a couple podcasts, a couple different things that I do, lots of different projects I’ve started, none of which are relevant today.

[00:04:31] Jonathan Desrosiers: Hi, I am Jonathan Desrosiers. I am a WordPress Core committer since 2018. I’ve been contributing to the project in some way since 2013, and I am partially sponsored by Bluehost to be a contributor to the project.

And so for me, a lot of that results in, some people call it invisible work, but I’m behind the scenes just making sure people are supported properly, they have the resources they need, they’re not blocked.

I also do a lot with our build tools. So making sure our tests keep running and our different build processes to build the software that’s eventually shipped to the world is working in order. Yeah, you’ll find me a little bit everywhere. I’m a generalist. I have my hands in a lot of different things.

[00:05:13] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you both for joining me and also for giving us your credentials there. That’s great. So we’re going to get into this strange topic.

Now, I just carried out a typical search. I went onto a search engine. It wasn’t Google, by the way, but nevertheless, I went to a search engine, and I typed in one word, and that word was WordPress.

And I’m now confronted by a result at the top, which says wordpress.com. That came in at number one. The second result for me was wordpress.org. And I’ll just give you the headlines. It says wordpress.com, this is the first result, wordpress.com, everything you need to build your website. And then the second result, download wordpress.org.

And both of you know the difference. I know the difference, on a very high level, I understand the difference, but when we get into the weeds, I quickly start to misunderstand what the difference is. But they are different. These two things are radically different in their intention, in the relationship they have with their users, the way that they’re monetised, and so on and so forth.

So let’s, first of all, just clear that up. Let’s rewind the clock, if you like. How did this all start? What’s the history of wordpress.com and wordpress.org. And then we can get into what the heck they are and how they’re different a bit later. So, I don’t know who wants to answer that.

[00:06:28] Michelle Frechette: I’ll give a quick start. Then I’m going to let Jonathan get into the more technical aspects of things.

Back in the nineties, blogging became a thing, and lots of people were establishing blogs online through things like Blogger, Blogspot and all those things. And then WordPress was one of the blogging platforms that you could create your blog on. All of them were free. I think I still have a Blogspot out there somewhere with really angsty poetry on it. So if you ever really want to find that out, sure, I could send you a link. But the idea was that, you know, you could get online and you could do the blogging things with it.

And then it was like, well, is it just for blogging or could it be used for other things? And so there are still people today that when you say, oh, I could build you a WordPress website, say, isn’t that just a blog? And to which I say, look at all of these websites that are built on, like the White House and NASA and all of these other things that are not just blogging, and are building their websites on WordPress.

But that’s different necessarily from wordpress.com where I do have a blog, right? I actually, it’s actually a website, wptrailbuddies.wordpress.com. I’m using the free .com to create a very quick, very simple, very easy way for people to sign up for one program.

But I also have several websites built on the .org idea, right, which is self-hosted. Find a host, download the software, or have the one button install, which is much more common now.

And then also I have a paid plan on wordpress.com as well, which takes away any ad space, and also allows me to have plugins and themes within that website.

So that’s what I know at the surface level, what are the differences. I know that Jonathan knows much more about the software itself.

[00:08:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think you’ve highlighted some of the top level items, so we’ll circle back to those in a moment. But first, let’s get Jonathan’s take on that. So it’s the history question, really. What’s the history of these two different things?

[00:08:24] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, so WordPress started as a project in 2003, and it’s what we call a fork. And so you probably know if you listen to this, that WordPress is open source software. And basically that means, it’s licensed under the GPL, and you have the right to download it, make modifications, see how it works. We distribute, all those things are your right to do with the software that is published.

And so it was forked from a project called b2 where a couple people were not really happy with the development that was happening on that, bugs weren’t being fixed to their liking, and so they decided to fork it. And so that was Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. And that was in 2003, and they called it WordPress. And so that was the beginning of the WordPress project that we know today that is now over 22 years old.

A few years later, Automattic just turned 20 years old, so in 2005, Matt Mullenweg, one of the co-creators of WordPress, co-founders of WordPress, decided to create a company. And so he created a company called Automattic. And the company’s bread and butter was obviously WordPress, because he knew it very well. And so that’s how wordpress.com came about.

And in many ways it was the first true managed WordPress hosting platform, because you could sign up, you could get a blog for free, and you still can, and your URL will be, you know, nathanssite.wordpress.com, or johnssite.wordpress.com. And you can pay for additional things such as, the subscription plans allow you to have a custom domain name, and that’s evolved. The features that you can pay for has evolved significantly over the years.

But along with this is the WordPress software that I mentioned earlier. And so the WordPress software is available for anyone to download and run, as I mentioned. And Automattic has a hosting setup that runs the open source software. And so many of the hosts that you have today, you all run that same software at the core of it, and it’s just a matter of what services are surrounded with it. What do they allow you to do within their environment? And how they support you in your journey to have an online presence.

[00:10:36] Nathan Wrigley: So the .com side of things was a very early move. So really, more or less as, I mean we’re into sort of the 20 plus years of history of WordPress, but right back near the beginning it was made easier to install. And nowadays, if you go to more or less any host that’s got any association with WordPress, they will offer some kind of one click solution, which makes it trivially easy, within a couple of moments, really, and a few buttons, you’ll have a version of WordPress. And I’m talking there about the .org side of things. So you’ll have a .org install of WordPress. Really straightforward.

However, if you rewind the clock right back to the beginning when .com started, I’m guessing it was a much more painful process. There weren’t these managed hosts where you could do that, and so it made sense, I guess, into the market to put something where you didn’t need to install anything. You simply sign up, create an account, be it free or paid, we’ll get into that in a moment as well, and you’ve got yourself the software.

And so I guess that’s an important part to remember. It was much more difficult back then to do the .org thing than it is now. So many tools now making it relatively straightforward. I guess that’s a part of the success of .com, that it was just the first mover made it more straightforward.

[00:11:51] Jonathan Desrosiers: The WordPress project has several philosophies that we use to guide our decisions and how we choose what makes it into the software and what shape that takes. And some of those, for example, are design for the majority, decisions not options, clean, lean, and mean, striving for simplicity, out of the box software.

And so you see this in the setup process in the five minute install. We really aim to make the installation as simple as possible for the software itself. But that doesn’t mean the surrounding database set up and server set up and uploading, getting the files on the server, doesn’t mean that that’s easy as a part of that.

And so WordPress could be two clicks to install. Could be really simple, email and password and installs it for you, but it doesn’t really, can only contribute so much to that cohesive experience, that all encompassing experience of what a website is, of what hosting is.

[00:12:42] Michelle Frechette: I think back to, again, the early days of blogging where that was the goal. You could change the colors behind it, you were limited to the theming that was provided with whatever platform you were choosing from. And the way that we’ve grown from just like, here are your five options, kind of like a MySpace idea, right? You’re kind of limited with what you could do back in those days as well, to where you can do a lot more now.

And so even with .com, with the free plan, you have a lot more options than you did 20 years ago, 23 years ago. And if you upgrade to a business plan, then you have all the options basically that you have with the install, the .org install for yourself, self-hosted.

One of the things I love about it is that I don’t have to worry about security, I don’t have to worry about traffic, and I don’t have to worry about upgrades. I don’t get a message that my PHP version is outdated. On some other sites where I’m self-hosting, I have to make sure that everything’s up to date all the time. With the .com. It’s one of those things that I don’t have to do.

And so for me, that is one of the benefits. Of course, I have only one site there, but I’m loving the fact I can walk away from it and not be having to check it on a regular basis. And I think that’s one of the beautiful things for people who are not tech savvy, because they can get in and do the things like they would in one of the competitors.

[00:13:57] Nathan Wrigley: So a lot of this conversation is going to be done through the prism of history, you know, and decisions that were made which now perhaps people have got opinions about, maybe they think poor decisions were made, or brilliant decisions were made, they were made at a different time.

And I’m going to allude to what I said right at the top of this episode, which was that if you do a Google search, for just simply for the word WordPress, and that probably is the word that you’ve heard. You probably have no familiarity with whatever WordPress is. You just, somebody told you, you know, you were in a bar somewhere and somebody said, oh, you want a website? WordPress can do that.

So you end up at a search engine and in it goes, WordPress, and up come these slightly conflicting things. And I guess that’s maybe where some problems for end users begin. We’re in the inside of it all, so we’ve totally got a grip on this. We might not understand the intricacies of all of the bits and pieces, but we understand what .com is and we understand the difference.

This is a question you don’t have to answer in a binary way. It doesn’t have to be a yes or a no. But, do you think with the benefit of hindsight, it would’ve been a good idea to call these different versions different things? So for example, WordPress could have been the .com or the .org, and it would’ve had a different name for something else. And that’s purely from a, keeping it obvious what the two different things are. So again, you can obfuscate or you know, dodge that question if you like.

[00:15:18] Michelle Frechette: I’m reminded of George Foreman, whose children are all named George.

[00:15:23] Jonathan Desrosiers: Most confusing household ever. Without getting into the nuances of the agreements and all, how the permissions work, Automattic just has special permission to use the WordPress trademark. And so that’s why it’s called wordpress.com and wordpress.org. And while there are some, there is some confusion that comes from that. In many ways, it also has contributed to the success of the project, because in the early days, it was very easy to get a site spun up on WordPress, on wordpress.com, and people started using WordPress.

And so there are definitely people out there that solely started using WordPress because they got to wordpress.com and they were able to get a site. And now more and more hosting companies are much more capable, and we all have our own, like I said, I work at Bluehost, so for example, we have our own special sauce of onboarding, where we ask you a couple questions and we help you. We find that the thing people struggle with a lot is where to start.

You get dumped into WordPress, right? And you don’t know where to start. What do I need on my site? What do I make it look like? What do I need to do? And so using these onboarding questions to produce a starting point for you, that’s contextual to what you’re trying to do. And so that’s one of the things that we take pride in is our onboarding process that we’re working on and is available if you want to try it out.

But all that to say is that, you know, in the early days it was definitely a benefit. And now as the project has grown to over 40% of the internet, that confusion gets magnified in some ways. And a lot of times that takes the form of, as you said, Googling and finding conflicting resources as people not accurately describing the differences.

We get a lot of tickets on Trac, which is the bug tracking software for WordPress, for the software itself, that incorrectly is saying there’s a bug, but it’s actually intended behavior, but it’s on .com and not in the .org software. The support forums are full of people that are not sure of the difference.

And so it’s just important as community members that we keep this in mind, that it’s not always easy to understand, but a lot of times people just need a push in the right direction. And in some ways it returns to our philosophies of making it simple because the majority of WordPress users are not technically minded and so they probably don’t care about the difference, right? They just want their WordPress site. I have a site, I need it up, I need it to not go down. I need customers. And so keeping that lens in mind as well is helpful to get through this.

[00:17:40] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of interesting, I’ve been using the internet more or less from the beginning and although these boundaries have got really blurred, back in the day, anything which ended .org had a real kind of community, charity, non-profit kind of focus to it. I don’t know if you both remember that as well, but anything ended .org, it felt like there was a philanthropic purpose to it. And anything which was .com, that wasn’t the case.

[00:18:11] Michelle Frechette: It was commerce.

[00:18:12] Jonathan Desrosiers: Commercial. Yeah, it for commercial.

[00:18:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there go. So commercial, company, along those lines. And I don’t know when that was, but that just ceased to be a thing at some point. But back when .com began, naming it .org maybe was a bigger signpost than it now appears to be, if you know what I mean. Oh, look, it’s WordPress, it’s .org. It speaks for itself. It’s a philanthropic version or what have you. And that is maybe a part of the jigsaw puzzle.

And again, rewinding history, when the split happened between.com and .org, I’m presuming that nobody had any intuition that any of this was going to be successful in any way, shape, or form. .com, you know, the commercial wing could have been an absolute failure. The whole project could have collapsed within a couple of years. . org, again, nobody took any interest in it. It just didn’t work out. And it became, well, another b2, the annals of history. And it didn’t work out that way.

But I guess once you’ve started down the path, you are going to stick with it. There would be no point 3 years in in saying, you know what? Everybody’s confused about .com, .org, we should upend the whole thing. I guess that’s off the table a bit at that point as well.

[00:19:20] Michelle Frechette: Well, I think that the generic web user who’s not a techie still doesn’t necessarily have an idea that the .org and .com were originally intended for different audiences, right? So I think that, I mean there are, definitely are some savvy people who understand that, but I think that the majority of people still, it doesn’t matter if it’s a .io, we have so many extensions now that I think it’s kind of blurred what those actually mean. And if you actually go to register a .org, it’ll say, do you want the .com and the dot net, and the dot whatever else too? So that you’re kind of getting all of your traffic driven to the same place.

I think that that is something that, yes, we understand that now. And I think that we would’ve always understood that, the three of us, but I don’t know that that was such a huge distinction back in the day.

I also think that it was one of those things where, you know, you have light versions of something or, you know, you have free versions of other things in life that aren’t software related that you can upgrade to or that, you know, free gifts with purchase.

And so I think the idea of, you could have this free one, or you can upgrade to these other things, or you could take it and run with it and do it your own thing, I think is something that made sense at the beginning, but again, can be slightly confusing now.

Because I do see people come to my meetup and they’re asking questions, and we all try to troubleshoot. We get them to log in, and we’re like, oh, okay, now I see, you’re using the free version, so you don’t have the ability to add this plugin or change your theme this way, or use CSS, you know, and those kinds of things, as you can with the paid version or with the self-hosted. And so I think that there is an opportunity for us to make that distinction in different places.

I will say one of the benefits, however, even if you start on the free .com, you can upgrade to paid and get that, or you can port that over to your own self-hosted as well. Other competitors don’t necessarily let you, like take your whole version of your website that you’ve built on their platform and bring it into a self-hosted situation like WordPress can.

And so even if you made the decision to go with wordpress.com, and halfway through a build, or a year later, realise that you really wish you had done something different, we make it easy for you to be able to take that and move it someplace else, like Bluehost or you know, SiteGround or other places like that. So we make it easy for you. We’re not trying to shove you into one box and make you stay there and say look at all those people over there doing things you wish you could do.

[00:21:43] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, I think that the underlying motivations was just fueled by the open source ideals, and the software belongs to the people and not so much specific companies or corporations. And so by putting it in .org, it was just more about being open and available and for the community, right?

Matt and Mike, when they forked b2, the intention was to get more people to work on it with them, right? And ensure that the software that they were running their website with survived and continued to grow and didn’t have bugs. And so I think that that was just part of the motivation where, I just looked it up, and the .org domains were intended to only be used by organisations. And it seems like the intention was to require documentation at some point, but it was never enforced.

I mean, when I got, in the late two thousands when I got involved, there was always the perception in my mind that you had to be an organisation to get one of those right? But that’s not actually the case. At least my early perception was that I needed it in order to do that. And so I wonder if that persists with other people as well.

And so I think that what Michelle also said resonates well is that, you know, no matter where you WordPress, you’re going to be able to take your site with you and go somewhere else. And that’s what makes WordPress great. And maybe you’re not even taking your site somewhere else, maybe you’re just taking out your content and, I don’t know, maybe feeding it into AI, or creating a book of all your posts, like a historical reference or something.

[00:23:07] Michelle Frechette: I did that.

[00:23:07] Jonathan Desrosiers: That sounds kind of cool actually, yeah. And so being able to take your content with you and you are the true owner of your content, and you have the rights to it, is not something that’s true for other platforms. You know, not to name names, but there’s a lot of other website platforms where it’s difficult to impossible to extract out your content if you need to move somewhere else.

[00:23:27] Michelle Frechette: It’s a lot of copy, paste at that point.

[00:23:29] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, or like finding someone that knows how to create a browser extension, or a scraper or something like that. And so that’s always something that I tell someone looking to get started with a website where, you know, it might be easier to get started with this other service now, and it might be okay with your needs now, but if you outgrow that website or that service, it’s more difficult to bring it elsewhere later.

We’re working on different ways with the data liberation initiative where we’re looking at ways to make our data more portable from other platforms to other platforms. And so I really feel strongly about that.

Like, that’s the strongest point, one of the strongest points of WordPress is that you own your content, you control it, there’s no algorithm changes, you know, on Facebook where all of a sudden people aren’t seeing your content. They change a feature, right? People can’t react a certain way to your content anymore, and it affects your traffic to your site.

And so I always strongly emphasise that to people, because people don’t think about that. They think I just need a website, right? But they don’t think about, what happens if I need to make changes and this software doesn’t work, or this service doesn’t help me anymore?

[00:24:36] Nathan Wrigley: We’ve definitely moved as a community, and by community I don’t mean the WordPress community, I mean the community of online users. We’ve definitely moved towards more gatekeeping and siloed consent repositories. You know, you think of things like social media, and essentially anything where there’s a, you know, a username and a password and a paywall. We seem to be more at peace with that.

And that brings me to the next thing actually. And I’m sorry if this comment lands badly, dear listener, but I think there is something quite curious about our community. I think we are full of people who are very well intentioned, who have extremely benevolent motives, and often, I think, regard commercial things sometimes as something to be viewed with a little bit of suspicion. I don’t know if you’ve detected this kind of thing as well.

All of those things are things which drew me in. They didn’t alienate me. They were exactly the kind of people that I wanted to be around. But I do wonder if WordPress’ history, so the .com, .org history over the last, let’s say 15 years or so, I do wonder if the flavor, the colour of the community, if you like, that we’ve got meant that we were going to have problems about this .com, .org split.

Because on the one side, fierce, fierce open source advocacy people. You must own your own content. You’ve got to be able to download the software. This is terribly important, you want to be able to fork it at a moment’s notice.

And then on the other hand, a bunch of people are, well, that’s great you do that, but I’m happy over here. I’ll pay my fee for the premium version of wordpress.com. That’s fine with me. I’m okay with that. I don’t need all the bells and whistles that you seem to have. I don’t need it to be this version and that version. I don’t need this plugin or that thing.

But I do wonder if the community that we’ve got is a part of that. In the mix somewhere is just what we’ve got. The people that are drawn to open source are going to view the .com side of things with a little bit of suspicion, and maybe see that, you know, that’s something which, gosh, we should not have that.

[00:26:46] Jonathan Desrosiers: The only thing I’d challenge you on there is that I don’t think it’s fair to say that people on the .com side don’t also care about the open source ideals. I think that many of them, if not all of them, do care about the underlying principles there. I think that, you always hear, you have to look after your own, right? You have to make sure you can pay your bills and you have a business and you. I’m US based, the American dream, right? Of creating a business and growing that into something sizable that can help people and benefit many.

And so that’s my only pushback there is that they do. It’s not a binary thing. It’s definitely an overlap. And I like to think that there’s more overlap than we think. And that might be a little naive, but I do tend to think that it overlaps pretty heavily in that section there.

[00:27:29] Nathan Wrigley: I think you are right, and I think what you’ve done there is uncovered the poor way that I phrased what I was saying. I think when I was trying to describe that I was, although I didn’t say it, I was trying to describe things from the .org point of view only. And so the nature of that community is fiercely protective of the open source values there and what have you. So yeah, you’re quite right. It felt, with a bit of hindsight, it felt like that question was coming from both sides and it really wasn’t. So thank you for picking me up on that.

[00:28:01] Jonathan Desrosiers: It’s normal to be skeptical of other people, right? Especially when you see all these horror stories of this big business, you know, draining these businesses out there that are draining money out of everybody and raising prices and profits are through the roof, right? So it’s normal to have this skepticism towards commercial entities, and that they’re trying to do the right things and things of that nature.

But to that, I just say to look at how the company and the space is contributing back and how they are ensuring that they do get their fair share of the WordPress pie, that is billions of dollars, on the last publishing that I saw, last report that I saw. But also making sure that that ecosystem is still strong, and supportive of everybody in the pool. To make sure that we can all compete to, you know, there’s definitely competition. We’re all going to compete together to make sure we’re trying to get more of the pie, right? And try to prove that our service or our products are the best.

But, yeah, so I think a little level of skepticism is healthy. You always hear, assume good intent. I think that’s very important, and to obviously judge people by their actions and what they do to help grow that open source community while they’re living in that .com commercial space.

Yeah, I don’t know, Michelle, if you have anything to add there. You probably have a different lens as the non-developer background.

[00:29:19] Michelle Frechette: Definitely the non-developer background here. So you used the word community when you talked about that when you first started the question, and I think we have to think about the fact that the community, although it does encompass both .com users and anybody who’s self-hosted through .org. It really is the lion’s share of that community comes from that self-hosted .org side. Comes from the people who go to Meetups. Comes from the people who attend WordCamps. And most importantly, it comes from the people who contribute to the ecosystem.

Whether that’s by volunteering through the .org and Make WordPress, whether that’s selling a product, or having a podcast or any of the things, a newsletter, any of the things that contribute to the success of WordPress overall, it applies across the board. But when you look at all of the volunteerism, and all of the unsponsored people, and even sponsored people who are creating, right? So Jonathan is a developer, he’s in the weeds with it. He’s got a sense of pride with what the community creates for each other.

And when you have a sense of pride in what you do, you have a loyalty to that as well. And so we are part of a group of people, a huge group of people, a multimillion group of people worldwide who are this .org community with some .com community peppered in. So of course there’s going to be skew, one direction versus the other.

I don’t think it’s necessarily derision. That I don’t think people like necessarily look at .com and go, ugh, what do they say? The redheaded stepchild of, you know, .org or whatever. I think it’s more along the lines of, we know this, we use this. We want other people to use this too. This is our community and this is what we’ve built this community around.

But I think that democratising publishing is used by both, right? So if you look at .org and .com, we talk about democratising publishing. And the free .com allows people in incredibly socioeconomically depressed areas, and who have very little side income to be able to start a website. The ability to do that, whether it’s a website to talk about a service that they offer. Whether it’s a website just to blog. Whether they’re trying to monetize or not, there’s opportunities for people around the world to create a free, absolutely free website on .com.

And have it say, you know, michellefrechette.wordpress.com, because that’s what I could afford at the time. And then when I can, I either upgrade to paid, or I port that over to a self-hosted situation. So I think that both of them really have an amazing place in our ecosystem, but we tend not to see that when we sit squarely in one side or the other.

[00:32:02] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know? That’s a really interesting point, and one I cannot believe I’ve never thought about that. Over all these many years of thinking about WordPress and all of its different flavors and things, wordpress.org carries the word free around with it in my head. I’m thinking wordpress.org, free. I’m struggling to imagine a scenario where it is entirely free to deploy.

[00:32:25] Michelle Frechette: I used to say WordPress is free like a free puppy. A free puppy, you still have to take to the vet, and buy food, and get their nails trimmed, and buy the leash, and all of the things that go along with a free puppy. WordPress.org is like that. It’s a free puppy. You still have to pay for hosting and pay for themes, and I mean, you couldn’t do it fairly inexpensively, but not a hundred percent free.

[00:32:44] Jonathan Desrosiers: I was just going to add in, likewise, it’s not free to get to the point where it’s published. And another thing that you brought up, Michelle, that made me think is, I mentioned about judging companies based on how they contribute and the ideals they follow. But that also is true for the individuals that spend their personal time, or self sponsor, to contribute to the software.

And so they are not looking, most likely, not looking for your business. They may be if they’re a freelancer type thing. But in most cases they’re looking for just recognition, or maybe a job, or maybe sponsorship, so that they could continue to help the software grow.

And so there’s multiple lenses to that commercial side of things, right? Where we talked about .org versus .com, and commercial versus, open source. But within that, there’s also other layers of that as well where you’re contributing to make sure the software grows, so that your company continues to do good. But also maybe you just really enjoy the software and believe in it and want to contribute on your own to ensure that that same thing happens.

[00:33:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, interesting. I’m just going to finish off my thought from previously there. So the free to download bit, I think where I was going with that was that there’s a minimum of hosting. In order to get that free version of the software, the zip file that you download. In order to make it meaningful, you’ve got to at least do the hosting. The other bit, well, I suppose you could host it on your own computer, but good luck with that if you’re a newbie.

[00:34:09] Jonathan Desrosiers: I challenge that too, not necessarily, right? Like a website is only as good as who can access it, if they find what they’re looking for. But you could very easily just run WordPress on a Raspberry Pie somewhere in your basement that, you know, you use it to send requests to, to turn on your lights or something like that, or sync up your garage door. You know, you could theoretically use WordPress to do all these types of things.

So I would also challenge you to think outside the box a little bit on that. I’m not saying it’s a good idea and I’m not saying I might grunt at you when you come with your really weird obscure edge case in Trac, but that’s part of the great thing about WordPress.

[00:34:45] Michelle Frechette: But it’s possible.

[00:34:46] Jonathan Desrosiers: You can use WordPress in many different ways, with many different combinations of plugins and themes. And that makes WordPress great, but it also makes it incredibly difficult to maintain and ensure that backwards compatibility, which is one of our main pillars, is sustained release to release.

[00:35:02] Nathan Wrigley: It’s fascinating. Yeah, what insight that was. That’s remarkable.

The commercial side, so the .com side where you’re paying a subscription if you want the different tiers and the abilities that you get for doing that, I don’t know if any of this data is available, whether it’s been published, whether it’s easy to access, I’m not sure. But I’m guessing that there is some through line between the profitability of the .com business side of things, and the open source project.

We all know that many, many, many volunteers contribute to .org in every conceivable way. Whether that’s to the code, to events, to whatever it may be. But I’m imagining there is some connection. Maybe it’s attenuating a little bit more now. Maybe it was more in the past than it is now. But I’m imagining that there is a connection between sales, unit sales of the .com out into the open world, and people being paid, seconded, and what have you, to work on the .org side.

I actually don’t know if there’s any truth in that, if there’s anything there, but I’m imagining there is. If the .com business pays for the .org side to be as successful as it is essentially is what I’m trying to say.

[00:36:18] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, I mean, historically Automattic has been the most sizable contributor to the project. There’s something called the Five for the Future Project, which is basically a challenge to companies, or individuals, making a living on WordPress to contribute 5% of their time back to the project. It’s a great initiative. That’s something that I was hired to participate in, so I’m very thankful for that because I’m able to have employment to work on open source software because of it.

But there are some flaws with it in that 5% isn’t right for everyone. It’s a goal, right? It’s, I’ve talked about this at WordCamps in the past, but time is not necessarily a good measure because it doesn’t measure the impact you have, or the productivity, or the efficiency that you have, right? So you could spend one hour working on this one bug fix that could fix screen reader software for millions of people accessing sites across the world. That’s very meaningful and that has a very strong impact. But that’s very hard to measure. And hours is certainly not the way that you can measure that.

So it’s a good idea. I like that a lot of people rallied behind that, and that it’s a very strong program. There’s a lot of participants. I’m looking forward to the next iteration of that, which a lot of community members are discussing and, you know, I’m sure leadership is always thinking about that as well. Like, how can we improve this and encourage more people to contribute and give back?

And so I guess all that to say that, you know, I guess .com and Automattic have contributed a sizable amount to the project over its history, and many other companies as well have historically contributed a lot back too.

[00:37:53] Nathan Wrigley: So another thing that I wanted to discuss, which we haven’t discussed so far is the sort of different feature set that you get, and the evolution of that over time. So if I was to get a .com site back, I don’t know, 12 years ago, the things that I could do with that would be different to what I can do now.

Obviously with the .org side, all bets are off. You can do what you wish with that. It’s yours. You can do anything you like. But on the .com side, it was limited in certain ways. The software was designed presumably to facilitate whatever it was that their agenda items were, whether that was profitability, growth, simplicity to use, whatever those metrics were.

Where are we at at the moment? Because it kind of feels like the two are coalescing, especially from a UI point of view. It feels like there’s moves at the moment to make the .com side be brought in line with the .org side. So the .org UI it feels like is going to be made available or pushed into the .com side.

And that kind of feels curious to me. It always felt that the UI was a big differentiator, like, you know, it looks different, you can immediately see that’s a .com website. Maybe in the future it won’t be. So let’s just talk around that. What are the differences in what you can do with the platforms? And then maybe we can get onto the UI and the UX.

[00:39:08] Michelle Frechette: So the free .com versus the upgraded paid plans have very different things that you can do within them. And then the paid plans are almost identical to what you can do with self-hosted. And so the difference really is you’re looking at the free plan versus any upgraded paid plan.

And with the free plan, you’re very limited into plugins and themes. There are very few that you can choose from. There’s more now than there were 10 or 15 years ago for sure. And I think my experience with logging into a free .com site looks different now than it did 10 or 12 years ago as well. But it still looks different than it does on a self-hosted WordPress installation.

That does change with an upgrade plan, because now you have a lot more features that you can add, you can bring in plugins, you can change a lot of the way that things look through CSS or through customisation. And so, yes, I think that the paid plan and the self-hosted are very much in sync with one another.

But the free plan still looks, to me at least, a lot different. And when I tried to add CSS to what it said, oh, you need to upgrade to do that, which I understand, right? So if they gave away everything, then there would be no money coming into the company to be able to operate and to pay the employees that actually work at Automattic. So yeah, I think there is still a difference. And I know that Jonathan probably knows a lot more about the technical differences than I do, but that’s my experiential difference.

[00:40:38] Jonathan Desrosiers: Well, one interesting fact is that wordpress.com is just one multi-site. So when you create a site, it’s just all in the same instance of WordPress. You just have your own space on that install.

[00:40:48] Nathan Wrigley: That is truly remarkable by the way. That is a quite numbing thought when you actually ponder that for a moment.

[00:40:54] Jonathan Desrosiers: For anyone that’s worked with multi-site, you know how challenging it is to have 10 sites, nevermind millions of sites. So it’s definitely impressive and interesting.

I’d also add that, you know, Michelle has talked a lot about more the personal style plans, right? Where we mentioned you get a free site if you have your site at nathan.wordpress.com. You can pay, you know, to get a domain, like I mentioned is the next plan. And then you can pay for more things like different plugins and different backups, whatever the features are that they offer.

But after you get past that, there’s additional tiers for people like agencies. There’s very, very high level, reliable hosting for companies that run Fortune 500 companies, Fortune 10 companies, whatever it is that they need more handholding. They need you to help them with engineering maybe with their team. There’s tiers all the way up to that level at Automattic. And I think it’s fair to say that any, you know, they have plans that compete with any different tier that may be out there.

There’s e-commerce plans and all of that. And, you know, at Bluehost we have e-commerce plans. We have managed plans just like they do. And like I said, before, we’re all trying to have our special sauce to make our home the best place to WordPress and for you to come and want to set up your site and make a living on us.

[00:42:09] Nathan Wrigley: So then back to the question of the, what feels like an endeavor to make the .com look a lot like the .org. Now that was something that I caught sight of not that long ago. It was probably, maybe, I want to say about eight weeks ago, something like that. I don’t know if either of you caught that piece of news, and whether or not that’s in fact moving forward. But the idea is to make a default version of .org basically identical in terms of look and feel.

I found that curious. I wondered what the intention was there. Was it purely just to have, I don’t know, one base of software that could be relied upon for both, or whether it was to make it easier to do a migration in either direction? I don’t know. So, I don’t know if either of you do.

[00:42:48] Jonathan Desrosiers: So a little, I guess a little history is that wordpress.com used to use the same dashboard as .org. And a while ago there was a project called Calypso, and that is basically the dashboard that you know probably from the last five years or so. And I can’t confirm this, but I believe that it was an exploration on what the dashboard, what a new WordPress dashboard could be. And I think that they’ve realised that having your own dashboard that’s different than .org is not really the best path.

And there’s a few reasons for that. One is that we mentioned you have millions of sites on .com, right? That’s all very valuable feedback from using the software. And if they’re using a different dashboard than everybody that’s not on wordpress.com, that’s basically lost opportunities to receive feedback on the software that we’re building. And so that’s one aspect.

And the other aspect is that, if you have a different dashboard, you have to have people maintaining that different dashboard, and making sure it works with all the new features that are added to wordpress.org. Make sure it’s sustainable and performant and all of this requires resources. But if you could adapt your products to use the same dashboard that everybody else has, then maybe you could take some of those resources and put them back to the .org software, instead of the internal Calypso project.

I should correct that, it wasn’t an internal project, it was used internally. It is open source and, especially initially there was a lot of encouragement for community members to participate in that. And so it’s not like it was a closed thing where they shut everybody out and they wanted, you know, it to be their own thing. It wasn’t trade secret type stuff. It was open source.

So, yeah, those are just two things that stand out to me as reasons why you would want to use the same experience that everybody else has, as it just contributes to the greater good of the software and the health of the ecosystem.

[00:44:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting, and again, something I hadn’t really thought about. The heuristics that would come out of .com. Well, for a start, it’s incredibly cohesive. That data set is going to be enormous, whereas trying to gather that from all the other versions of WordPress, you would obviously have to opt people into that to begin with. But also, it would be very difficult to gather all of that, whereas presumably the .com side of things has got that completely sealed up. So yeah, again, really interesting.

It is curious. I don’t really know if we’ll ever overcome in people’s heads the, well, for some people I think it’s a chasm. You know, it’s a really big divide, the difference between .org and .com. But I think we’ve done a fairly good job of explaining what the history is, why the things have been done in the way that they’ve been done, maybe a little bit into the future and how things are going to look.

I don’t know if there’s any salient point that you think we missed there, but if not, I think we’ll round it up. So I’ll just ask Michelle first. Anything you wanted to get across about that before we knock it on the head?

[00:45:43] Michelle Frechette: I think that we often talk about .org versus .com as though they were adversarial, but it’s really just a comparison as opposed to one being better than the other. I think you choose the option that’s best for you and your goals, and there’s nothing wrong with choosing any of those options.

[00:46:02] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, I’d just add that with any technology or anything, knowledge is not always binary, right? It’s a spectrum. And so how can we better expose people to the concepts, better explain them to people so that it’s easier to understand and get up to speed on what different concepts are. Technical concepts, brand concepts, whatever that may be, software, and strive for simplicity, right? That’s our, one of our philosophies. And so how can we make things more simple so that more people are able to better understand and be empowered to have a better online presence by having a greater understanding.

[00:46:37] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you both for picking that puzzle apart with me. That’s been really interesting. So Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers, thank you both for joining me today. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

[00:46:46] Michelle Frechette: Thanks for having us.

[00:46:46] Jonathan Desrosiers: Always a pleasure. Thank you Nathan.

On the podcast today we have Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers.

Michelle is well known in the WordPress community for her myriad roles, including Executive Director of Post Status and program director for WP Includes. She’s a prolific freelancer, podcaster, and a driving force behind many WordPress initiatives.

Jonathan is a WordPress core committer, contributing to the project since 2013, and has been sponsored by Bluehost to work on WordPress core since 2018. His work largely takes place behind the scenes, supporting contributors, maintaining build tools, and keeping WordPress running smoothly for millions of users.

If you’ve ever searched for “WordPress” online, you’ve probably found both WordPress.com and WordPress.org at the top of your results, and, like many, you might be unsure what really separates the two.

Today, Michelle and Jonathan help clear up the history, philosophy, and practical differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. They talk about how these two flavours of WordPress came to be, why they’ve both been key to WordPress’ growth, and the ways they overlap and differ in features, user experience, and monetisation.

Michelle shares her perspective as a long-time user and advocate, with experience across both .com and .org sites, while Jonathan dives into the technical and historical details from his core contributor vantage point.

They also explore whether the naming conventions .com and .org have helped or hindered the project, and how the WordPress community’s open source ethos shapes the ongoing conversation.

Along the way, they touch on how .com made WordPress accessible in the early days, the importance of data portability, and evolving efforts to unify the user experience between the two platforms.

If you’ve ever wondered which version of WordPress is right for you, why the project seems split into two variants, or how community and commerce intertwine in the WordPress ecosystem, this episode is for you.

Useful links

 Blogger

 Michelle’s WP Trail Buddies on WordPress.com

 The story of forking b2

Bluehost

 Data Liberation

 Five for the Future

 Calypso

Artificial Intelligence isn’t new, but in November 2022, something changed. The launch of ChatGPT brought AI out of the background and into everyday life. Suddenly, interacting with a machine didn’t feel technical — it felt conversational.

Just this March, ChatGPT overtook Instagram and TikTok as the most downloaded app in the world. That level of adoption shows that millions of everyday users, not just developers or early adopters, are comfortable using AI in casual, conversational ways. People are using AI not just to get answers, but to think, create, plan, and even to help with mental health and loneliness.

In the past two and a half years, people have moved through the Kübler-Ross Change Curve — only instead of grief, it’s AI-induced uncertainty. UX designers, like Kate (who you’ll meet shortly), have experienced something like this:

• Denial: “AI can’t design like a human; it won’t affect my workflow.”
• Anger: “AI will ruin creativity. It’s a threat to our craft.”
• Bargaining: “Okay, maybe just for the boring tasks.”
• Depression: “I can’t keep up. What’s the future of my skills?”
• Acceptance: “Alright, AI can free me up for more strategic, human work.”

As designers move into experimentation, they’re not asking, Can I use AI? but How might I use it well?.

Using AI isn’t about chasing the latest shiny object but about learning how to stay human in a world of machines, and use AI not as a shortcut, but as a creative collaborator.

It isn’t about finding, bookmarking, downloading, or hoarding prompts, but experimenting and writing your own prompts.

To bring this to life, we’ll follow Kate, a mid-level designer at a FinTech company, navigating her first AI-augmented design sprint. You’ll see her ups and downs as she experiments with AI, tries to balance human-centered skills with AI tools, when she relies on intuition over automation, and how she reflects critically on the role of AI at each stage of the sprint.

The next two planned articles in this series will explore how to design prompts (Part 2) and guide you through building your own AI assistant (aka CustomGPT; Part 3). Along the way, we’ll spotlight the designerly skills AI can’t replicate like curiosity, empathy, critical thinking, and experimentation that will set you apart in a world where automation is easy, but people and human-centered design matter even more.

Note: This article was written by a human (with feelings, snacks, and deadlines). The prompts are real, the AI replies are straight from the source, and no language models were overworked — just politely bossed around. All em dashes are the handiwork of MS Word’s autocorrect — not AI. Kate is fictional, but her week is stitched together from real tools, real prompts, real design activities, and real challenges designers everywhere are navigating right now. She will primarily be using ChatGPT, reflecting the popularity of this jack-of-all-trades AI as the place many start their AI journeys before branching out. If you stick around to the end, you’ll find other AI tools that may be better suited for different design sprint activities. Due to the pace of AI advances, your outputs may vary (YOMV), possibly by the time you finish reading this sentence.

Cautionary Note: AI is helpful, but not always private or secure. Never share sensitive, confidential, or personal information with AI tools — even the helpful-sounding ones. When in doubt, treat it like a coworker who remembers everything and may not be particularly good at keeping secrets.

Prologue: Meet Kate (As She Preps For The Upcoming Week)

Kate stared at the digital mountain of feedback on her screen: transcripts, app reviews, survey snippets, all waiting to be synthesized. Deadlines loomed. Her calendar was a nightmare. Meanwhile, LinkedIn was ablaze with AI hot takes and success stories. Everyone seemed to have found their “AI groove” — except her. She wasn’t anti-AI. She just hadn’t figured out how it actually fit into her work. She had tried some of the prompts she saw online, played with some AI plugins and extensions, but it felt like an add-on, not a core part of her design workflow.

Her team was focusing on improving financial confidence for Gen Z users of their FinTech app, and Kate planned to use one of her favorite frameworks: the Design Sprint, a five-day, high-focus process that condenses months of product thinking into a single week. Each day tackles a distinct phase: Understand, Sketch, Decide, Prototype, and Test. All designed to move fast, make ideas tangible, and learn from real users before making big bets.

This time, she planned to experiment with a very lightweight version of the design sprint, almost “solo-ish” since her PM and engineer were available for check-ins and decisions, but not present every day. That gave her both space and a constraint, and made it the perfect opportunity to explore how AI could augment each phase of the sprint.

She decided to lean on her designerly behavior of experimentation and learning and integrate AI intentionally into her sprint prep, using it as both a creative partner and a thinking aid. Not with a rigid plan, but with a working hypothesis that AI would at the very least speed her up, if nothing else.

She wouldn’t just be designing and testing a prototype, but prototyping and testing what it means to design with AI, while still staying in the driver’s seat.

Follow Kate along her journey through her first AI-powered design sprint: from curiosity to friction and from skepticism to insight.

Monday: Understanding the Problem (aka: Kate Vs. Digital Pile Of Notes)

The first day of a design sprint is spent understanding the user, their problems, business priorities, and technical constraints, and narrowing down the problem to solve that week.

This morning, Kate had transcripts from recent user interviews and customer feedback from the past year from app stores, surveys, and their customer support center. Typically, she would set aside a few days to process everything, coming out with glazed eyes and a few new insights. This time, she decided to use ChatGPT to summarize that data: “Read this customer feedback and tell me how we can improve financial literacy for Gen Z in our app.”

ChatGPT’s outputs were underwhelming to say the least. Disappointed, she was about to give up when she remembered an infographic about good prompting that she had emailed herself. She updated her prompt based on those recommendations:

• Defined a role for the AI (“product strategist”),
• Provided context (user group and design sprint objectives), and
• Clearly outlined what she was looking for (financial literacy related patterns in pain points, blockers, confusion, lack of confidence; synthesis to identify top opportunity areas).

By the time she Aero-pressed her next cup of coffee, ChatGPT had completed its analysis, highlighting blockers like jargon, lack of control, fear of making the wrong choice, and need for blockchain wallets. Wait, what? That last one felt off.

Kate searched her sources and confirmed her hunch: AI hallucination! Despite the best of prompts, AI sometimes makes things up based on trendy concepts from its training data rather than actual data. Kate updated her prompt with constraints to make ChatGPT only use data she had uploaded, and to cite examples from that data in its results. 18 seconds later, the updated results did not mention blockchain or other unexpected results.

By lunch, Kate had the makings of a research summary that would have taken much, much longer, and a whole lot of caffeine.

That afternoon, Kate and her product partner plotted the pain points on the Gen Z app journey. The emotional mapping highlighted the most critical moment: the first step of a financial decision, like setting a savings goal or choosing an investment option. That was when fear, confusion, and lack of confidence held people back.

AI synthesis combined with human insight helped them define the problem statement as: “How might we help Gen Z users confidently take their first financial action in our app, in a way that feels simple, safe, and puts them in control?”

Kate’s Reflection

As she wrapped up for the day, Kate jotted down her reflections on her first day as an AI-augmented designer:

There’s nothing like learning by doing. I’ve been reading about AI and tinkering around, but took the plunge today. Turns out AI is much more than a tool, but I wouldn’t call it a co-pilot. Yet. I think it’s like a sharp intern: it has a lot of information, is fast, eager to help, but it lacks context, needs supervision, and can surprise you. You have to give it clear instructions, double-check its work, and guide and supervise it. Oh, and maintain boundaries by not sharing anything I wouldn’t want others to know.

Today was about listening — to users, to patterns, to my own instincts. AI helped me sift through interviews fast, but I had to stay curious to catch what it missed. Some quotes felt too clean, like the edges had been smoothed over. That’s where observation and empathy kicked in. I had to ask myself: what’s underneath this summary?

Critical thinking was the designerly skill I had to exercise most today. It was tempting to take the AI’s synthesis at face value, but I had to push back by re-reading transcripts, questioning assumptions, and making sure I wasn’t outsourcing my judgment. Turns out, the thinking part still belongs to me.

Tuesday: Sketching (aka: Kate And The Sea of OKish Ideas)

Day 2 of a design sprint focuses on solutions, starting by remixing and improving existing ideas, followed by people sketching potential solutions.

Optimistic, yet cautious after her experience yesterday, Kate started thinking about ways she could use AI today, while brewing her first cup of coffee. By cup two, she was wondering if AI could be a creative teammate. Or a creative intern at least. She decided to ask AI for a list of relevant UX patterns across industries. Unlike yesterday’s complex analysis, Kate was asking for inspiration, not insight, which meant she could use a simpler prompt: “Give me 10 unique examples of how top-rated apps reduce decision anxiety for first-time users — from FinTech, health, learning, or ecommerce.”

She received her results in a few seconds, but there were only 6, not the 10 she asked for. She expanded her prompt for examples from a wider range of industries. While reviewing the AI examples, Kate realized that one had accessibility issues. To be fair, the results met Kate’s ask since she had not specified accessibility considerations. She then went pre-AI and brainstormed examples with her product partner, coming up with a few unique local examples.

Later that afternoon, Kate went full human during Crazy 8s by putting a marker to paper and sketching 8 ideas in 8 minutes to rapidly explore different directions. Wondering if AI could live up to its generative nature, she uploaded pictures of her top 3 sketches and prompted AI to act as “a product design strategist experienced in Gen Z behavior, digital UX, and behavioral science”, gave it context about the problem statement, stage in the design sprint, and explicitly asked AI the following:

1. Analyze the 3 sketch concepts and identify core elements or features that resonated with the goal.
2. Generate 5 new concept directions, each of which should:
   • Address the original design sprint challenge.
   • Reflect Gen Z design language, tone, and digital behaviors.
   • Introduce a unique twist, remix, or conceptual inversion of the ideas in the sketches.
3. For each concept, provide:
   • Name (e.g., “Monopoly Mode,” “Smart Start”);
   • 1–2 sentence concept summary;
   • Key differentiator from the original sketches;
   • Design tone and/or behavioral psychology technique used.

The results included ideas that Kate and her product partner hadn’t considered, including a progress bar that started at 20% (to build confidence), and a sports-like “stock bracket” for first-time investors.

Not bad, thought Kate, as she cherry-picked elements, combined and built on these ideas in her next round of sketches. By the end of the day, they had a diverse set of sketched solutions — some original, some AI-augmented, but all exploring how to reduce fear, simplify choices, and build confidence for Gen Z users taking their first financial step. With five concept variations and a few rough storyboards, Kate was ready to start converging on day 3.

Kate’s Reflection

Today was creatively energizing yet a little overwhelming! I leaned hard on AI to act as a creative teammate. It delivered a few unexpected ideas and remixed my Crazy 8s into variations I never would’ve thought of!

It also reinforced the need to stay grounded in the human side of design. AI was fast — too fast, sometimes. It spit out polished-sounding ideas that sounded right, but I had to slow down, observe carefully, and ask: Does this feel right for our users? Would a first-time user feel safe or intimidated here?

Critical thinking helped me separate what mattered from what didn’t. Empathy pulled me back to what Gen Z users actually said, and kept their voices in mind as I sketched. Curiosity and experimentation were my fuel. I kept tweaking prompts, remixing inputs, and seeing how far I could stretch a concept before it broke. Visual communication helped translate fuzzy AI ideas into something I could react to — and more importantly, test.

Wednesday: Deciding (aka Kate Tries to Get AI to Pick a Side)

Design sprint teams spend Day 3 critiquing each of their potential solutions to shortlist those that have the best chance of achieving their long-term goal. The winning scenes from the sketches are then woven into a prototype storyboard.

Design sprint Wednesdays were Kate’s least favorite day. After all the generative energy during Sketching Tuesday, today, she would have to decide on one clear solution to prototype and test. She was unsure if AI would be much help with judging tradeoffs or narrowing down options, and it wouldn’t be able to critique like a team. Or could it?

Kate reviewed each of the five concepts, noting strengths, open questions, and potential risks. Curious about how AI would respond, she uploaded images of three different design concepts and prompted ChatGPT for strengths and weaknesses. AI’s critique was helpful in summarizing the pros and cons of different concepts, including a few points she had not considered — like potential privacy concerns.

She asked a few follow-up questions to confirm the actual reasoning. Wondering if she could simulate a team critique by prompting ChatGPT differently, Kate asked it to use the 6 thinking hats technique. The results came back dense, overwhelming, and unfocused. The AI couldn’t prioritize, and it couldn’t see the gaps Kate instinctively noticed: friction in onboarding, misaligned tone, unclear next steps.

In that moment, the promise of AI felt overhyped. Kate stood up, stretched, and seriously considered ending her experiments with the AI-driven process. But she paused. Maybe the problem wasn’t the tool. Maybe it was how she was using it. She made a note to experiment when she wasn’t on a design sprint clock.

She returned to her sketches, this time laying them out on the wall. No screens, no prompts. Just markers, sticky notes, and Sharpie scribbles. Human judgment took over. Kate worked with her product partner to finalize the solution to test on Friday and spent the next hour storyboarding the experience in Figma.

Kate re-engaged with AI as a reviewer, not a decider. She prompted it for feedback on the storyboard and was surprised to see it spit out detailed design, content, and micro-interaction suggestions for each of the steps of the storyboarded experience. A lot of food for thought, but she’d have to judge what mattered when she created her prototype. But that wasn’t until tomorrow!

Kate’s Reflection

AI exposed a few of my blind spots in the critique, which was good, but it basically pointed out that multiple options “could work”. I had to rely on my critical thinking and instincts to weigh options logically, emotionally, and contextually in order to choose a direction that was the most testable and aligned with the user feedback from Day 1.

I was also surprised by the suggestions it came up with while reviewing my final storyboard, but I will need a fresh pair of eyes and all the human judgement I can muster tomorrow.

Empathy helped me walk through the flow like I was a new user. Visual communication helped pull it all together by turning abstract steps into a real storyboard for the team to see instead of imagining.

TO DO: Experiment prompting around the 6 Thinking Hats for different perspectives.

Thursday: Prototype (aka Kate And Faking It)

On Day 4, the team usually turns the storyboard from the previous day into a prototype that can be tested with users on Day 5. The prototype doesn’t need to be fully functional; a simulated experience is sufficient to gather user feedback.

Kate’s prototype day often consisted of marathon Figma Design sessions and late-night pizza dinners. She was hoping AI would change that today. She fed yesterday’s storyboard to ChatGPT and asked it for screens. It took a while to generate, but she was excited to see a screen flow gradually appear on her screen, except that it had 3 ¾ screens, instead of the 6 frames from her storyboard, as you can see in the image below.

She tried different prompts but couldn’t get a complete flow. She was excited when it offered to create a Figma file. She waited. And waited. And reminded it that she was right there waiting. It finally gave her a link — a link that didn’t work. That made her question why she needed prototype screens in Figma at all. Could one of those no-code tools do the job? Kate remembered that she had just received beta access to Figma Make (Figma’s AI prompt-to-prototype tool) and decided to put it to the test.

She shared her storyboard, added context about the prototype for a design sprint, the problem, and a brief description of the audience. In a few seconds, she saw code being generated and a running description on the left. It seemed like it would take some time, so she headed to the cafeteria for lunch.

When Kate returned, she was surprised to see Figma Make had created an app along with a detailed explanation:

“I’ve created a complete finance app prototype with five key screens that guide users through setting financial goals in a friendly, low-pressure way. The app features smooth animations with Framer Motion, a progress indicator to show users where they are in the journey, and emotionally supportive visuals and copy throughout the experience. Each screen serves a specific purpose: welcoming users, helping them define relatable goals, building their plan with visual feedback, presenting a simple summary, and offering next steps without pressure.

You might want to:

• Add personalization options like user profiles or avatars.
• Implement a dark mode toggle for accessibility.
• Create additional goal templates and saving strategies.”

Since Figma Make had built the prototype, not her, Kate felt like she was User 0, and clicked her way through the interactive prototype, making a mental note of what worked, what didn’t. She was impressed to see that she could not only select a common goal (buy a home, save for education, and so on) but she could also create her own goal (hello De’Longhi Coffee Maker) and it carried over for the rest of the experience. This was something she had never been able to do in Figma Design!

Despite some obvious misses like a missing header and navigation, and some buttons not working, she was impressed! Kate tried the option to ‘Publish’ and it gave her a link that she immediately shared with her product and engineering partners. A few minutes later, they joined her in the conference room, exploring it together. The engineer scanned the code, didn’t seem impressed, but said it would work as a disposable prototype.

Kate prompted Figma Make to add an orange header and app navigation, and this time the trio kept their eyes peeled as they saw the progress in code and in English. The results were pretty good. They spent the next hour making changes to get it ready for testing. Even though he didn’t admit it, the engineer seemed impressed with the result, if not the code.

By late afternoon, they had a functioning interactive prototype. Kate fed ChatGPT the prototype link and asked it to create a usability testing script. It came up with a basic, but complete test script, including a checklist for observers to take notes.

Kate went through the script carefully and updated it to add probing questions about AI transparency, emotional check-ins, more specific task scenarios, and a post-test debrief that looped back to the sprint goal.

Kate did a dry run with her product partner, who teased her: “Did you really need me? Couldn’t your AI do it?” It hadn’t occurred to her, but she was now curious!

“Act as a Gen Z user seeing this interactive prototype for the first time. How would you react to the language, steps, and tone? What would make you feel more confident or in control?”

It worked! ChatGPT simulated user feedback for the first screen and asked if she wanted it to continue. “Yes, please,” she typed. A few seconds later, she was reading what could have very well been a screen-by-screen transcript from a test.

Kate was still processing what she had seen as she drove home, happy she didn’t have to stay late. The simulated test using AI appeared impressive at first glance. But the more she thought about it, the more disturbing it became. The output didn’t mention what the simulated user clicked, and if she had asked, she probably would have received an answer. But how useful would that be? After almost missing her exit, she forced herself to think about eating a relaxed meal at home instead of her usual Prototype-Thursday-Multitasking-Pizza-Dinner.

Kate’s Reflection

Today was the most meta I’ve felt all week: building a prototype about AI, with AI, while being coached by AI. And it didn’t all go the way I expected.

While ChatGPT didn’t deliver prototype screens, Figma Make coded a working, interactive prototype with interactions I couldn’t have built in Figma Design. I used curiosity and experimentation today, by asking: What if I reworded this? What if I flipped that flow?

AI moved fast, but I had to keep steering. But I have to admit that tweaking the prototype by changing the words, not code, felt like magic!

Critical thinking isn’t optional anymore — it is table stakes.

My impromptu ask of ChatGPT to simulate a Gen Z user testing my flow? That part both impressed and unsettled me. I’m going to need time to process this. But that can wait until next week. Tomorrow, I test with 5 Gen Zs — real people.

Friday: Test (aka Prototype Meets User)

Day 5 in a design sprint is a culmination of the week’s work from understanding the problem, exploring solutions, choosing the best, and building a prototype. It’s when teams interview users and learn by watching them react to the prototype and seeing if it really matters to them.

As Kate prepped for the tests, she grounded herself in the sprint problem statement and the users: “How might we help Gen Z users confidently take their first financial action in our app — in a way that feels simple, safe, and puts them in control?”

She clicked through the prototype one last time — the link still worked! And just in case, she also had screenshots saved.

Kate moderated the five tests while her product and engineering partners observed. The prototype may have been AI-generated, but the reactions were human. She observed where people hesitated, what made them feel safe and in control. Based on the participant, she would pivot, go off-script, and ask clarifying questions, getting deeper insights.

After each session, she dropped the transcripts and their notes into ChatGPT, asking it to summarize that user’s feedback into pain points, positive signals, and any relevant quotes. At the end of the five rounds, Kate prompted them for recurring themes to use as input for their reflection and synthesis.

The trio combed through the results, with an eye out for any suspicious AI-generated results. They ran into one: “Users Trust AI”. Not one user mentioned or clicked the ‘Why this?’ link, but AI possibly assumed transparency features worked because they were available in the prototype.

They agreed that the prototype resonated with users, allowing all to easily set their financial goals, and identified a couple of opportunities for improvement: better explaining AI-generated plans and celebrating “win” moments after creating a plan. Both were fairly easy to address during their product build process.

That was a nice end to the week: another design sprint wrapped, and Kate’s first AI-augmented design sprint! She started Monday anxious about falling behind, overwhelmed by options. She closed Friday confident in a validated concept, grounded in real user needs, and empowered by tools she now knew how to steer.

Kate’s Reflection

Test driving my prototype with AI yesterday left me impressed and unsettled. But today’s tests with people reminded me why we test with real users, not proxies or people who interact with users, but actual end users. And GenAI is not the user. Five tests put my designerly skill of observation to the test.

GenAI helped summarize the test transcripts quickly but snuck in one last hallucination this week — about AI! With AI, don’t trust — always verify! Critical thinking is not going anywhere.

AI can move fast with words, but only people can use empathy to move beyond words to truly understand human emotions.

My next goal is to learn to talk to AI better, so I can get better results.

Conclusion

Over the course of five days, Kate explored how AI could fit into her UX work, not by reading articles or LinkedIn posts, but by doing. Through daily experiments, iterations, and missteps, she got comfortable with AI as a collaborator to support a design sprint. It accelerated every stage: synthesizing user feedback, generating divergent ideas, giving feedback, and even spinning up a working prototype, as shown below.

What was clear by Friday was that speed isn’t insight. While AI produced outputs fast, it was Kate’s designerly skills — curiosity, empathy, observation, visual communication, experimentation, and most importantly, critical thinking and a growth mindset — that turned data and patterns into meaningful insights. She stayed in the driver’s seat, verifying claims, adjusting prompts, and applying judgment where automation fell short.

She started the week on Monday, overwhelmed, her confidence dimmed by uncertainty and the noise of AI hype. She questioned her relevance in a rapidly shifting landscape. By Friday, she not only had a validated concept but had also reshaped her entire approach to design. She had evolved: from AI-curious to AI-confident, from reactive to proactive, from unsure to empowered. Her mindset had shifted: AI was no longer a threat or trend; it was like a smart intern she could direct, critique, and collaborate with. She didn’t just adapt to AI. She redefined what it meant to be a designer in the age of AI.

The experience raised deeper questions: How do we make sure AI-augmented outputs are not made up? How should we treat AI-generated user feedback? Where do ethics and human responsibility intersect?

Besides a validated solution to their design sprint problem, Kate had prototyped a new way of working as an AI-augmented designer.

The question now isn’t just “Should designers use AI?”. It’s “How do we work with AI responsibly, creatively, and consciously?”. That’s what the next article will explore: designing your interactions with AI using a repeatable framework.

Poll: If you could design your own AI assistant, what would it do?

• Assist with ideation?
• Research synthesis?
• Identify customer pain points?
• Or something else entirely?

Share your idea, and in the spirit of learning by doing, we’ll build one together from scratch in the third article of this series: Building your own CustomGPT.

Resources

• Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days, by Jake Knapp
• The Design Sprint
• Figma Make
• “OpenAI Appeals ‘Sweeping, Unprecedented Order’ Requiring It Maintain All ChatGPT Logs”, Vanessa Taylor

Tools

As mentioned earlier, ChatGPT was the general-purpose LLM Kate leaned on, but you could swap it out for Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or other competitors and likely get similar results (or at least similarly weird surprises). Here are some alternate AI tools that might suit each sprint stage even better. Note that with dozens of new AI tools popping up every week, this list is far from exhaustive.

Stage	Tools	Capability
Understand	Dovetail, UserTesting’s Insights Hub, Marvin	Summarize & Synthesize data
Sketch	Any LLM, Musely	Brainstorm concepts and ideas
Decide	Any LLM	Critique/provide feedback
Prototype	UIzard, UXPilot, Visily, Krisspy, Figma Make, Lovable, Bolt	Create wireframes and prototypes
Test	UserTesting, UserInterviews, PlaybookUX, Maze, plus tools from the Understand stage	Moderated and unmoderated user tests/synthesis

Artificial intelligence is increasingly automating large parts of design and development workflows — tasks once reserved for skilled designers and developers. This streamlining can dramatically speed up project delivery. Even back in 2023, AI-assisted developers were found to complete tasks twice as fast as those without. And AI tools have advanced massively since then.

Yet this surge in capability raises a pressing dilemma:

Does the environmental toll of powering AI infrastructure eclipse the efficiency gains?

We can create websites faster that are optimized and more efficient to run, but the global consumption of energy by AI continues to climb.

As awareness grows around the digital sector’s hidden ecological footprint, web designers and businesses must grapple with this double-edged sword, weighing the grid-level impacts of AI against the cleaner, leaner code it can produce.

The Good: How AI Can Enhance Sustainability In Web Design

There’s no disputing that AI-driven automation has introduced higher speeds and efficiencies to many of the mundane aspects of web design. Tools that automatically generate responsive layouts, optimize image sizes, and refactor bloated scripts should free designers to focus on completing the creative side of design and development.

By some interpretations, these accelerated project timelines could represent a reduction in the required energy for development, and speedier production should mean less energy used.

Beyond automation, AI excels at identifying inefficiencies in code and design, as it can take a much more holistic view and assess things as a whole. Advanced algorithms can parse through stylesheets and JavaScript files to detect unused selectors or redundant logic, producing leaner, faster-loading pages. For example, AI-driven caching can increase cache hit rates by 15% by improving data availability and reducing latency. This means more user requests are served directly from the cache, reducing the need for data retrieval from the main server, which reduces energy expenditure.

AI tools can utilize next-generation image formats like AVIF or WebP, as they’re basically designed to be understood by AI and automation, and selectively compress assets based on content sensitivity. This slashes media payloads without perceptible quality loss, as the AI can use Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) that can learn compact representations of data.

AI’s impact also brings sustainability benefits via user experience (UX). AI-driven personalization engines can dynamically serve only the content a visitor needs, which eliminates superfluous scripts or images that they don’t care about. This not only enhances perceived performance but reduces the number of server requests and data transferred, cutting downstream energy use in network infrastructure.

With the right prompts, generative AI can be an accessibility tool and ensure sites meet inclusive design standards by checking against accessibility standards, reducing the need for redesigns that can be costly in terms of time, money, and energy.

So, if you can take things in isolation, AI can and already acts as an important tool to make web design more efficient and sustainable. But do these gains outweigh the cost of the resources required in building and maintaining these tools?

The Bad: The Environmental Footprint Of AI Infrastructure

Yet the carbon savings engineered at the page level must be balanced against the prodigious resource demands of AI infrastructure. Large-scale AI hinges on data centers that already account for roughly 2% of global electricity consumption, a figure projected to swell as AI workloads grow.

The International Energy Agency warns that electricity consumption from data centers could more than double by 2030 due to the increasing demand for AI tools, reaching nearly the current consumption of Japan. Training state-of-the-art language models generates carbon emissions on par with hundreds of transatlantic flights, and inference workloads, serving billions of requests daily, can rival or exceed training emissions over a model’s lifetime.

Image generation tasks represent an even steeper energy hill to climb. Producing a single AI-generated image can consume energy equivalent to charging a smartphone.

As generative design and AI-based prototyping become more common in web development, the cumulative energy footprint of these operations can quickly undermine the carbon savings achieved through optimized code.

Water consumption forms another hidden cost. Data centers rely heavily on evaporative cooling systems that can draw between one and five million gallons of water per day, depending on size and location, placing stress on local supplies, especially in drought-prone regions. Studies estimate a single ChatGPT query may consume up to half a liter of water when accounting for direct cooling requirements, with broader AI use potentially demanding billions of liters annually by 2027.

Resource depletion and electronic waste are further concerns. High-performance components underpinning AI services, like GPUs, can have very small lifespans due to both wear and tear and being superseded by more powerful hardware. AI alone could add between 1.2 and 5 million metric tons of e-waste by 2030, due to the continuous demand for new hardware, amplifying one of the world’s fastest-growing waste streams.

Mining for the critical minerals in these devices often proceeds under unsustainable conditions due to a lack of regulations in many of the environments where rare metals can be sourced, and the resulting e-waste, rich in toxic metals like lead and mercury, poses another form of environmental damage if not properly recycled.

Compounding these physical impacts is a lack of transparency in corporate reporting. Energy and water consumption figures for AI workloads are often aggregated under general data center operations, which obscures the specific toll of AI training and inference among other operations.

And the energy consumption reporting of the data centres themselves has been found to have been obfuscated.

Reports estimate that the emissions of data centers are up to 662% higher than initially reported due to misaligned metrics, and ‘creative’ interpretations of what constitutes an emission. This makes it hard to grasp the true scale of AI’s environmental footprint, leaving designers and decision-makers unable to make informed, environmentally conscious decisions.

Do The Gains From AI Outweigh The Costs?

Some industry advocates argue that AI’s energy consumption isn’t as catastrophic as headlines suggest. Some groups have challenged ‘alarmist’ projections, claiming that AI’s current contribution of ‘just’ 0.02% of global energy consumption isn’t a cause for concern.

Proponents also highlight AI’s supposed environmental benefits. There are claims that AI could reduce economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions by 0.1% to 1.1% through efficiency improvements. Google reported that five AI-powered solutions removed 26 million metric tons of emissions in 2024. The optimistic view holds that AI’s capacity to optimize everything from energy grids to transportation systems will more than compensate for its data center demands.

However, recent scientific analysis reveals these arguments underestimate AI’s true impact. MIT found that data centers already consume 4.4% of all US electricity, with projections showing AI alone could use as much power as 22% of US households by 2028. Research indicates AI-specific electricity use could triple from current levels annually by 2028. Moreover, Harvard research revealed that data centers use electricity with 48% higher carbon intensity than the US average.

Advice For Sustainable AI Use In Web Design

Despite the environmental costs, AI’s use in business, particularly web design, isn’t going away anytime soon, with 70% of large businesses looking to increase their AI investments to increase efficiencies. AI’s immense impact on productivity means those not using it are likely to be left behind. This means that environmentally conscious businesses and designers must find the right balance between AI’s environmental cost and the efficiency gains it brings.

Make Sure You Have A Strong Foundation Of Sustainable Web Design Principles

Before you plug in any AI magic, start by making sure the bones of your site are sustainable. Lean web fundamentals, like system fonts instead of hefty custom files, minimal JavaScript, and judicious image use, can slash a page’s carbon footprint by stripping out redundancies that increase energy consumption. For instance, the global average web page emits about 0.8g of CO₂ per view, whereas sustainably crafted sites can see a roughly 70% reduction.

Once that lean baseline is in place, AI-driven optimizations (image format selection, code pruning, responsive layout generation) aren’t adding to bloat but building on efficiency, ensuring every joule spent on AI actually yields downstream energy savings in delivery and user experience.

Choosing The Right Tools And Vendors

In order to make sustainable tool choices, transparency and awareness are the first steps. Many AI vendors have pledged to work towards sustainability, but independent audits are necessary, along with clear, cohesive metrics. Standardized reporting on energy and water footprints will help us understand the true cost of AI tools, allowing for informed choices.

You can look for providers that publish detailed environmental reports and hold third-party renewable energy certifications. Many major providers now offer PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) metrics alongside renewable energy matching to demonstrate real-world commitments to clean power.

When integrating AI into your build pipeline, choosing lightweight, specialized models for tasks like image compression or code linting can be more sustainable than full-scale generative engines. Task-specific tools often use considerably less energy than general AI models, as general models must process what task you want them to complete.

There are a variety of guides and collectives out there that can guide you on choosing the ‘green’ web hosts that are best for your business. When choosing AI-model vendors, you should look at options that prioritize ‘efficiency by design’: smaller, pruned models and edge-compute deployments can cut energy use by up to 50% compared to monolithic cloud-only models. They’re trained for specific tasks, so they don’t have to expend energy computing what the task is and how to go about it.

Using AI Tools Sustainably

Once you’ve chosen conscientious vendors, optimize how you actually use AI. You can take steps like batching non-urgent inference tasks to reduce idle GPU time, an approach shown to lower energy consumption overall compared to requesting ad-hoc, as you don’t have to keep running the GPU constantly, only when you need to use it.

Smarter prompts can also help make AI usage slightly more sustainable. Sam Altman of ChatGPT revealed early in 2025 that people’s propensity for saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to LLMs is costing millions of dollars and wasting energy as the Generative AI has to deal with extra phrases to compute that aren’t relevant to its task. You need to ensure that your prompts are direct and to the point, and deliver the context required to complete the task to reduce the need to reprompt.

Additional Strategies To Balance AI’s Environmental Cost

On top of being responsible with your AI tool choice and usage, there are other steps you can take to offset the carbon cost of AI usage and enjoy the efficiency benefits it brings. Organizations can reduce their own emissions and use carbon offsetting to reduce their own carbon footprint as much as possible. Combined with the apparent sustainability benefits of AI use, this approach can help mitigate the harmful impacts of energy-hungry AI.

You can ensure that you’re using green server hosting (servers run on sustainable energy) for your own site and cloud needs beyond AI, and refine your content delivery network (CDN) to ensure your sites and apps are serving compressed, optimized assets from edge locations, cutting the distance data must travel, which should reduce the associated energy use.

Organizations and individuals, particularly those with thought leadership status, can be advocates pushing for transparent sustainability specifications. This involves both lobbying politicians and regulatory bodies to introduce and enforce sustainability standards and ensuring that other members of the public are kept aware of the environmental costs of AI use.

It’s only through collective action that we’re likely to see strict enforcement of both sustainable AI data centers and the standardization of emissions reporting.

Regardless, it remains a tricky path to walk, along the double-edged sword of AI’s use in web design.

Use AI too much, and you’re contributing to its massive carbon footprint. Use it too little, and you’re likely to be left behind by rivals that are able to work more efficiently and deliver projects much faster.

The best environmentally conscious designers and organizations can currently do is attempt to navigate it as best they can and stay informed on best practices.

Conclusion

We can’t dispute that AI use in web design delivers on its promise of agility, personalization, and resource savings at the page-level. Yet without a holistic view that accounts for the environmental demands of AI infrastructure, these gains risk being overshadowed by an expanding energy and water footprint.

Achieving the balance between enjoying AI’s efficiency gains and managing its carbon footprint requires transparency, targeted deployment, human oversight, and a steadfast commitment to core sustainable web practices.

The phrase “Would you like fries with that?” is more than just a famous question. It’s a clever sales move that has added billions to a single company’s revenue.

And that same idea can help grow your own WooCommerce store, too. It’s all about making simple, helpful suggestions your customers will actually appreciate.

The key is to make these added offers feel like a natural part of the shopping experience. You want to enhance a customer’s purchase, not interrupt it.

I’ve spent time testing different options to see which plugins actually do this well. Some were clunky or too aggressive, but others blended seamlessly into the checkout process and genuinely helped increase sales.

In this guide, I’ll share the best upsell and cross-sell plugins I found for WooCommerce. Each one is designed to boost your profits without extra effort, and without annoying your customers.

Overview of the Best Upsell and Cross-Sell Plugins for WooCommerce

Here are my top picks for the best upsell and cross-sell plugins for WooCommerce at a glance:

#	Plugins	Best For	Pricing
🥇	Merchant by aThemes	All-in-one conversion toolkit	$69/yr + Free
🥈	FunnelKit	Sales funnels + 1-click upsells	$99.50/yr + Free
🥉	SeedProd	Product & checkout page upsells	$39.50/yr + Free
4	OptinMonster	Popups for upsell and cross-sell timing	$7/month + Free
5	Advanced Coupons	Smart coupon-driven upsells	$59.50/yr + Free
6	YITH WooCommerce Frequently Bought Together	Amazon-style ‘Frequently Bought Together’ section	$79.99/yr + Free
7	PushEngage	Push notifications for upsells & cross-sells	Free
8	Booster for WooCommerce	Powerful toolkit with upsell and cross-sell modules	$12.99/month

Here’s a quick look at the topics I will cover in this article:

What Are Upsell and Cross-Sell Plugins?

Upsell and cross-sell plugins are tools that help you sell more in WooCommerce by showing smart product suggestions to your customers. In summary, upsells help customers upgrade, while cross-sells help them complete the experience.

Type	What It Does	Example	Best Use Case
Upsell	Promotes a higher-end or premium version of the same product	Suggesting a laptop with more storage instead of the basic model	When you want customers to upgrade to a better version
Cross-sell	Recommends related or complementary products	Suggesting a laptop bag, mouse, or external hard drive when buying a laptop	When you want customers to add extras that improve the main purchase

It’s also worth noting that upsells and cross-sells can happen at different points in the shopping journey. Some plugins show offers directly on the product page, others use a popup before checkout, and a few even let you add a special deal after the order is complete.

When you use the right plugin, WooCommerce can handle this automatically. That means happier customers, bigger orders, and more revenue for your store without extra work on your end.

🧪 How I Tested And Reviewed Upsell and Cross-Sell Plugins for WooCommerce

Before I recommend any plugin, I make sure to test it myself. I don’t just go by the feature list or what the developers claim. Instead, I install each plugin on a real WooCommerce demo store to see how it actually performs.

Here’s a quick look at how I tested upsell and cross-sell plugins:

• ✅ Real Store Setup: I used a fully functioning WooCommerce test site with sample products, categories, and customer journeys to mimic how an actual store would work.
• 🛠️ Plugin Compatibility: I checked whether the plugin works well with popular themes and other essential plugins like payment gateways and caching tools.
• ⚡ Speed & Performance: I checked to see if the plugin slows down the store or causes any issues with essential features. Since performance is important, I don’t recommend plugins that negatively impact your site.
• 📈 Effectiveness: I simulated common buying scenarios to see if the upsell and cross-sell offers show up in the right places and whether they help increase conversions.
• 🎯 Ease of Use: I only recommended tools that are beginner-friendly, with clean interfaces and simple setup steps. No complex configurations or coding required.
• 💬 Support & Updates: I looked into how frequently the plugin is updated, and I even tested the support by submitting a few questions to see how responsive the team is.

By the time a plugin makes it onto my list, you can trust that it’s been tested for real-world use. That being said, let’s look at the best upsell and cross-sell plugins for WooCommerce.

Keep reading to see my in-depth reviews of the best upsell and cross-sell plugins for WooCommerce!

1. Merchant by aThemes – Best All-in-One Toolkit with Upsell & Cross-Sell Features

Merchant by aThemes is the ideal all-in-one toolkit for store owners who want to add a wide range of conversion features, including upsells and cross-sells, without installing multiple plugins.

It combines over 40 different modules into a single, performance-optimized package.

My Experience

I tested Merchant on several websites, and it consistently delivered strong results across different types of WooCommerce stores.

I really liked that I didn’t have to install three or four separate WooCommerce plugins to get upsells, cross-sells, and cart boosts working together because everything just connected smoothly.

What I love most is how seamlessly it blends these sales tactics into the shopping experience without overwhelming you with complicated settings.

It’s flexible, modular, and designed with real store owners in mind.

One feature that I found to be very practical was the Frequently Bought Together module.

It lets you recommend smart product bundles right on the product page, either manually or based on what customers typically buy together.

Alongside that, Buy X, Get Y promotions are incredibly easy to set up with Merchant. I’ve used this approach to offer “Buy 2, Get 1 Free” and similar deals right on the cart and checkout pages.

The Complementary Products feature is another one of my favorites. It displays addons or related products in the perfect spots, nudging customers to consider extras.

There’s also a Recently Viewed Products option that reminds visitors of items they checked earlier, which helps recover interest and boost conversions.

To top it off, Merchant’s Stock Scarcity module adds real urgency by showing when a product is almost out of stock. That little nudge can be all it takes to convert a hesitant shopper.

All in all, Merchant is a toolkit built for WooCommerce users who want to grow smarter and faster.

✅ Pros of Merchant

• It comes with a pre-order feature, allowing you to include upcoming products in your upsell and cross-sell offers while collecting orders in advance.
• The plugin lets users join a waitlist if an upsell or cross-sell item is out of stock.
• Merchant includes a free shipping bar that motivates customers to add more items to their cart to reach the threshold.
• The plugin supports product videos and audio, which helps you make upsell products more engaging.
• The built-in trust badges and reasons-to-buy lists can give your product pages more credibility, especially for upsell offers.
• It also adds a cookie banner and terms checkbox without needing extra plugins.

❌ Cons of Merchant

• Some of the features aren’t available in Merchant’s free plan.

Why I recommend Merchant: If you want an all-in-one conversion toolkit for your WooCommerce store, then Merchant is a great pick. It replaces the need for multiple plugins by offering features like scarcity timers, free shipping bars, and upsells — all in one lightweight, modular plugin.

2. FunnelKit – Best for Sales Funnels & Post-Purchase Upsells

FunnelKit is the best choice for businesses that want to create high-converting sales funnels with single-click, post-purchase upsells.

Its specialty is optimizing the entire checkout and the post-checkout process, helping you maximize revenue from every single customer.

My Experience

While trying out FunnelKit, I really liked its post-purchase upsell funnels, which allow you to show targeted one-click upsell offers immediately after checkout. These don’t interrupt the buyer’s experience and help boost average order value effortlessly.

When creating this funnel, I could see exactly how the upsells would look in the flow, which made it easier to tweak designs.

We go into more detail in our full FunnelKit review if you’d like a deeper look.

Other than that, it includes product-specific workflows that trigger targeted upsell or cross-sell recommendations based on purchase behavior.

Customer win-back campaigns can be used to re-engage past buyers by promoting complementary items or special bundle deals.

You can also use FunnelKit Cart to add powerful upselling, cross-selling, and reward features to a sliding shopping cart.

This way, you can recommend related products every time a customer adds an item to their cart.

For more information, see our tutorial on how to upsell products in WooCommerce.

✅ Pros of FunnelKit

• FunnelKit offers dynamic coupons, allowing personalized discounts in upsell campaigns.
• With smart delay timers and conditional logic, users can control the timing and flow of each automation to ensure the right offer is shown at the right moment.
• You can also add upsell offers in emails.
• It lets you recover lost sales by setting up automated email and SMS campaigns with personalized product recommendations.
• You can track how your upsell and cross-sell automations are performing with detailed metrics on opens, clicks, and sales.

❌ Cons of FunnelKit

• While powerful, FunnelKit’s automation builder can be overwhelming for beginners.
• Running many complex automations on a high-traffic store might impact performance, so it works best on well-optimized hosting.

Why I recommend FunnelKit: It’s the best option for adding one-click upsells after purchase to boost order value. If you want to build multi-step funnels with order bumps, post-purchase offers, and custom checkouts, then FunnelKit makes the process easy and automated.

3. SeedProd – Best Page Builder for Upsells and Cross-Sells

SeedProd is the best plugin for creating custom, high-converting product and checkout pages with upsell offers built right in.

As a drag-and-drop page builder, its main strength is giving you complete design control over every part of the customer journey without touching any code.

My Experience

During my evaluation, the Upsells block stood out the most.

I was able to customize the messaging, design, and even the timing of the upsell so it felt natural and non-intrusive.

Several of WPBeginner’s partner brands also use SeedProd on their eCommerce stores, and their customers have really responded to the clean, modern look.

We’ve also tested the plugin ourselves while preparing our complete SeedProd review.

Whether I wanted to promote a higher-tier product, a bundle, or a limited-time upgrade, SeedProd gave me full control without needing custom code.

Its drag-and-drop page builder comes with 24+ powerful WooCommerce blocks that you can use to display products that your customers may be interested in.

For example, some blocks can show recent, on-sale, best-selling, featured, and top-rated products.

Plus, I love its Products Related block that allows you to cross-sell related items that the customer may be interested in adding to their current purchase.

Once you add the block to a product, landing, or checkout page, you can customize how it looks. You may want to show multiple products and sort them with the highest-rated products offered first.

💥 Related Post: Looking for more information? Check out our beginner’s guide on how to customize a WooCommerce product page using SeedProd.

You can also use SeedProd to easily create a custom Thank You page where you can upsell products in your WooCommerce store.

Here, you can recommend valuable items, offer a discount coupon, and increase your sales.

For step-by-step instructions, please see our guide on how to create a custom WooCommerce Thank You page.

✅ Pros of SeedProd

• I really love SeedProd’s AI Builder. You just need to add a prompt, and it will create the entire store for you.
• The plugin has a countdown timer block that can create a sense of urgency and increase your sales.
• You can use dynamic content to personalize upsell messages with the shopper’s name or cart contents.
• I love that it creates SEO-friendly product pages.
• After a customer accepts an upsell, you can easily redirect them to the checkout page.
• It has built-in support for email marketing tools like ActiveCampaign. This means you can also promote products in your emails.

❌ Cons of SeedProd

• It has a free plan, but some of the features will be locked in it.
• Not built specifically for eCommerce — it’s a general-purpose page builder.

Why I recommend SeedProd: It’s the best choice if you want full design control over your sales pages. With drag-and-drop WooCommerce blocks, you can easily add upsells and related products anywhere. This helps you guide customers toward a higher average order value.

4. OptinMonster – Best for Popups with Upsells & Cross-Sells

OptinMonster is the best WooCommerce plugin for creating targeted popups and floating bars with upsell and cross-sell offers.

What really makes the tool stand out is its ability to display in-cart upsell popups. Instead of showing generic deals, you can trigger highly targeted offers on the cart page, with page-level targeting and Smart Tags.

This ensures that shoppers see personalized recommendations based on what’s in their cart.

My Experience

I really liked how flexible OptinMonster was when setting up campaigns. I could create a popup in minutes, customize it to match my site, and target it to promote specific products.

At WPBeginner, OptinMonster is our preferred tool for popups, slide-ins, banners, and more. We’ve used it many times when promoting our online resources and professional services.

To learn more about our experiences with the tool, see our detailed OptinMonster review.

One feature I really appreciate is the lightbox popup, which works perfectly for upselling.

For example, you can use it on the cart page to offer a discount on a related item or a limited-time upgrade.

Combined with page-level targeting, the lightbox ensures shoppers see offers that make sense based on what they’re already planning to buy.

I love that you can also create the Yes/No Campaigns. These are perfect for creating simple upsell flows.

For instance, you can ask users something like “Want to add a matching accessory?” with one-click responses.

OptinMonster also has an InactivitySensor. So, if a shopper pauses for too long on the cart or checkout page, you can show them a targeted cross-sell offer to re-engage them.

The plugin also has premade templates that make it super easy to launch a campaign.

For more details, see our guide on how to create a WooCommerce popup to increase sales.

✅ Pros of OptinMonster

• You can also create slide-ins and floating bars.
• OptinMonster lets you show different cross-sell offers based on what a user viewed earlier.
• OptinMonster has a geolocation targeting feature. This means you can show different upsell offers based on a customer’s location.
• The scroll trigger feature allows you to show an upsell offer popup once a visitor has scrolled 50% or more through a product page.
• You can also schedule your campaigns to run limited-time upsell deals or flash cross-sell offers.

❌ Cons of OptinMonster

• No built-in way to offer true 1-click upsells
• Requires integration with WooCommerce

Why I recommend OptinMonster: It’s an excellent choice for using targeted popups to increase average order value. If you’re looking to reduce cart abandonment and show upsell offers right before a visitor leaves, OptinMonster is built for that.

5. Advanced Coupons – Best for Smart Coupon Upsells & Cross-Sells

Advanced Coupons is the best upsell and cross-sell plugin for store owners who want to increase sales using smart coupon rules and promotions.

In my opinion, it stands out because you can use it to create highly specific deals, like Buy One Get One (BOGO) offers, or automatically adding a free product to the cart when a coupon is used.

This method of cross-selling can encourage your customers to purchase more. For example, you can give away a free bag once they buy over $200 worth of items.

My Experience

When testing the tool for its upsell and cross-sell features, I found it to be super beginner-friendly.

Plus, the WPBeginner team as a whole has tested it extensively over the years, as it’s one of our favorite coupon plugins. For more information, see our complete Advanced Coupons review.

When testing this tool again, I was impressed by how it allows you to set up powerful cart conditions, including minimum cart amount, specific products, and product categories.

Customers whose carts meet these conditions will automatically receive your coupon discount for their entire cart or the products that you decide.

For more details, please see our guide on how to auto-apply coupons in WooCommerce.

✅ Pros of Advanced Coupons

• The interface is beginner-friendly and easy to navigate.
• You can set up Buy One, Get One deals to encourage customers to add items to their cart.
• The cart conditions feature lets you trigger specific offers based on cart contents, user roles, or total value.
• URL coupons let you share clickable links that automatically apply discounts and add items to the cart.
• The built-in loyalty program helps increase repeat purchases and overall order value.
• Coupons can be scheduled to start and end automatically, making it easy to run time-sensitive upsell campaigns.

❌ Cons of Advanced Coupons

• The free plan has limited features.

Why I recommend Advanced Coupons: It’s perfect for stores that rely on promotions and discounts to drive sales. If you want to use coupons as a key upselling tool, this plugin gives you the flexibility to create smarter, more targeted offers.

6. YITH WooCommerce Frequently Bought Together – Best for Amazon-Style Suggestions

YITH WooCommerce Frequently Bought Together is the best upsell and cross-sell plugin for adding an Amazon-style ‘Frequently Bought Together’ section to your product pages.

It’s designed to do one thing very well: bundle related items together to encourage your customers to add more to their cart in a single click.

My Experience

During my testing, I loved how you can use this tool to bundle less popular products with best-sellers, helping you increase their visibility and sales.

For example, you can encourage buyers to add relevant accessories to their cart so that you can earn more from the purchase.

You can easily show a ‘Frequently Bought Together’ section on individual product pages, showcasing related or complementary products that customers often purchase together.

Plus, the plugin allows you to customize the title, text, and colors of the ‘Add to Cart’ button within the ‘Frequently Bought Together’ section to match your store’s branding.

Other than that, you can manually select products to display or enable automatic suggestions based on product tags, categories, or existing upsell and cross-sell configurations.

For details, see our tutorial on how to show frequently bought together products in WooCommerce.

✅ Pros of YITH WooCommerce Frequently Bought Together

• You can offer fixed or percentage-based discounts when customers purchase multiple suggested products together.
• It allows customers to select variations (such as size or color) of variable products directly within the ‘Frequently Bought Together’ section.
• The plugin enables you to select the position of the ‘Frequently Bought Together’ section within the product page.
• YITH offers multilingual and multi-currency settings.
• You can redirect users to the checkout page immediately after adding suggested products to their cart.
• It is compatible with the best WordPress theme builders.

❌ Cons of YITH WooCommerce Frequently Bought Together

• There is limited functionality in the free plan.
• Some user reviews mention occasional issues with shortcodes not working as expected, which could require troubleshooting.

Why I recommend YITH WooCommerce Frequently Bought Together: It’s my top recommendation for store owners who want to replicate Amazon-style product bundling. If your goal is to boost order size by showing related products, this plugin offers a simple and effective way to do it.

7. PushEngage – Best for WooCommerce Push Notifications

PushEngage is the best web push notification tool for upselling and cross-selling to customers after they leave your website.

It allows you to send targeted, clickable messages directly to a user’s browser, making it a powerful way to re-engage past visitors with new offers.

Cross-selling with push notifications works especially well since you’re marketing to existing customers. Plus, research shows you’re much more likely to sell to someone who has already purchased.

My Experience

Many of our brands are already using PushEngage on their websites, which you can read more about in our complete PushEngage review.

When I tested it out for this review, I found that you don’t need coding skills to get started.

You can easily create audience segments based on customer behavior — like product categories or past purchases — and then trigger automated notifications that promote complementary products.

For example, if someone buys a hoodie, you can automatically send them a push notification the next day, suggesting matching joggers or accessories.

These notifications can even include discounts, urgency timers, or rich media to boost conversions.

You can learn more in our guide on how to set up automated drip notifications in WordPress.

✅ Pros of PushEngage

• You can automatically send reminders to customers who have left items in their WooCommerce cart without completing the purchase.
• It lets you divide your audience based on behavior or purchase history to send highly targeted notifications.
• You can target visitors who viewed products but didn’t add them to their cart.
• PushEngage lets you schedule your notifications so you can send them out to your customers at optimal times.
• The tool includes built-in A/B Testing to experiment with different messages to see what works best.

❌ Cons of PushEngage

• The free version has limited features, and more advanced tools require a paid plan.
• Not ideal for upsells during purchase or post-checkout offers — it works better for follow-ups after the user has left your site.
• Limited customization compared to on-site popups or embedded offers.

Why I recommend PushEngage: It’s a smart way to bring customers back to your store. You can use it to send instant messages for cart abandonment, flash sales, and personalized cross-sell offers — helping you stay connected even after visitors leave.

8. Booster For WooCommerce – Best eCommerce Toolkit with Upsells

Booster for WooCommerce is a massive toolkit designed for store owners who need a wide range of features beyond just upsells and cross-sells.

It also includes features like PDF invoicing, custom payment gateways, and bulk price editing.

My Experience

One of my favorite modules is the ‘Frequently Bought Together’ tool. It automatically suggests related products on the product page, just like Amazon does.

This encourages customers to add more items to their cart without feeling pressured. It’s a simple tweak that can seriously boost your average order value.

Booster also makes it easy to create custom product recommendations at various stages of the shopping journey.

Whether you want to show related items in the cart or create targeted offers after checkout, there’s a module for that.

What I like most is that you don’t need a separate plugin just for upselling. It packs it into one dashboard along with tons of other features like PDF invoicing and custom pricing.

Overall, it’s a great option if you want more eCommerce features without juggling multiple tools.

✅ Pros of Booster for WooCommerce

• The plugin can create and send custom email notifications for various order statuses and events.
• It also has customizable email templates for your WooCommerce store.
• It allows customers to save products to a wishlist for future purchases, encouraging return visits.
• You can also send automated reminders to customers who leave items in their cart without completing the purchase.
• The plugin also allows you to customize the checkout form fields.

❌ Cons of Booster for WooCommerce

• When reading reviews, I found that it may conflict with some plugins or themes.
• Booster for WooCommerce includes 110 modules. This may feel excessive if you’re just looking for a few specific features like upsells or custom pricing.

Why I recommend Booster for WooCommerce: It’s a powerful all-in-one plugin for handling everything from marketing to store management. If you want tools for pricing, shipping, invoicing, and upselling in one place, and don’t mind a feature-rich interface, Booster is a great pick.

What Is the Best WooCommerce Upsell and Cross-sell Plugin?

In my opinion, Merchant by aThemes is the best upsell and cross-sell plugin for WooCommerce if you’re looking for a complete toolkit. It gives you everything from frequently bought together recommendations to complementary product displays, scarcity timers, and post-purchase offers.

My second choice is FunnelKit. It lets you add sliding side carts with built-in upsell offers, making it easier for customers to discover add-ons as they shop. Plus, it lets you make relevant offers after a customer completes their purchase.

On the other hand, SeedProd has an upsell block that’s great if you want to create custom product or checkout pages with targeted product suggestions.

Finally, OptinMonster lets you create upsell and cross-sell popups based on user behavior, cart value, and exit intent. This can give you a slightly more sophisticated edge when upselling and cross-selling.

Frequently Asked Questions About Upselling and Cross-Selling in WooCommerce

Here are some questions we are often asked about the best ways to upsell and cross-sell in WooCommerce.

What’s the difference between upselling and cross-selling?

Upselling is when you encourage customers to buy a higher-priced version of the product they’re considering — something with more features or better value. On the other hand, cross-selling is when you recommend related products that complement what the customer is already buying, like accessories or add-ons.

What are the best products for upselling or cross-selling?

When upselling or cross-selling, it’s best to show your customers relevant products that will solve a problem. These items should ideally provide more value to your customers because they are of higher quality or include more features.

For example, if a customer adds hiking shoes to their cart, then you might upsell higher-quality hiking shoes that are more comfortable, durable, and versatile. Or you can cross-sell Merino wool socks or other hiking gear.

Can I use more than one upsell or cross-sell plugin at the same time?

In most cases, it’s best to stick with one upsell or cross-sell plugin to avoid overlapping offers and a cluttered shopping experience. Using multiple plugins that serve the same purpose can confuse customers and make your store harder to manage.

However, some plugins focus on different parts of the funnel, so combining them carefully can work.

For example, you could use Merchant for on-page ‘Frequently Bought Together’ recommendations alongside OptinMonster to show an exit-intent popup with a special bundle offer. Since they target different moments in the customer journey, this would still provide an excellent user experience while maximizing your sales.

Related Guides for Improving Your WooCommerce Store

Looking to improve your WooCommerce store even more?

Here are some guides packed with practical tips and tools to help you boost sales, improve user experience, and grow your business:

• How to Create a Buy One Get One Free Offer in WooCommerce
• How to Send Automated Birthday & Anniversary Emails in WooCommerce
• Best WooCommerce Plugins for Your Store (Most are FREE)
• How to Setup WordPress Email Logs (and WooCommerce Email Logs)
• How to Optimize the Customer Journey for WooCommerce Stores
• Ways to Increase WooCommerce Sales (Actionable Tips)
• Best WooCommerce Automations to Increase Sales

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The post I Tested 8 Best Upsell and Cross-Sell Plugins for WooCommerce first appeared on WPBeginner.

These days, it’s easy to find curated lists of AI tools for designers, galleries of generated illustrations, and countless prompt libraries. What’s much harder to find is a clear view of how AI is actually integrated into the everyday workflow of a product designer — not for experimentation, but for real, meaningful outcomes.

I’ve gone through that journey myself: testing AI across every major stage of the design process, from ideation and prototyping to visual design and user research. Along the way, I’ve built a simple, repeatable workflow that significantly boosts my productivity.

In this article, I’ll share what’s already working and break down some of the most common objections I’ve encountered — many of which I’ve faced personally.

Stage 1: Idea Generation Without The Clichés

Pushback: “Whenever I ask AI to suggest ideas, I just get a list of clichés. It can’t produce the kind of creative thinking expected from a product designer.”

That’s a fair point. AI doesn’t know the specifics of your product, the full context of your task, or many other critical nuances. The most obvious fix is to “feed it” all the documentation you have. But that’s a common mistake as it often leads to even worse results: the context gets flooded with irrelevant information, and the AI’s answers become vague and unfocused.

Current-gen models can technically process thousands of words, but the longer the input, the higher the risk of missing something important, especially content buried in the middle. This is known as the “lost in the middle” problem.

To get meaningful results, AI doesn’t just need more information — it needs the right information, delivered in the right way. That’s where the RAG approach comes in.

How RAG Works

Think of RAG as a smart assistant working with your personal library of documents. You upload your files, and the assistant reads each one, creating a short summary — a set of bookmarks (semantic tags) that capture the key topics, terms, scenarios, and concepts. These summaries are stored in a kind of “card catalog,” called a vector database.

When you ask a question, the assistant doesn’t reread every document from cover to cover. Instead, it compares your query to the bookmarks, retrieves only the most relevant excerpts (chunks), and sends those to the language model to generate a final answer.

How Is This Different from Just Dumping a Doc into the Chat?

Let’s break it down:

Typical chat interaction

It’s like asking your assistant to read a 100-page book from start to finish every time you have a question. Technically, all the information is “in front of them,” but it’s easy to miss something, especially if it’s in the middle. This is exactly what the “lost in the middle” issue refers to.

RAG approach

You ask your smart assistant a question, and it retrieves only the relevant pages (chunks) from different documents. It’s faster and more accurate, but it introduces a few new risks:

• Ambiguous question
  You ask, “How can we make the project safer?” and the assistant brings you documents about cybersecurity, not finance.
• Mixed chunks
  A single chunk might contain a mix of marketing, design, and engineering notes. That blurs the meaning so the assistant can’t tell what the core topic is.
• Semantic gap
  You ask, “How can we speed up the app?” but the document says, “Optimize API response time.” For a human, that’s obviously related. For a machine, not always.

These aren’t reasons to avoid RAG or AI altogether. Most of them can be avoided with better preparation of your knowledge base and more precise prompts. So, where do you start?

Start With Three Short, Focused Documents

These three short documents will give your AI assistant just enough context to be genuinely helpful:

• Product Overview & Scenarios
  A brief summary of what your product does and the core user scenarios.
• Target Audience
  Your main user segments and their key needs or goals.
• Research & Experiments
  Key insights from interviews, surveys, user testing, or product analytics.

Each document should focus on a single topic and ideally stay within 300–500 words. This makes it easier to search and helps ensure that each retrieved chunk is semantically clean and highly relevant.

Language Matters

In practice, RAG works best when both the query and the knowledge base are in English. I ran a small experiment to test this assumption, trying a few different combinations:

• English prompt + English documents: Consistently accurate and relevant results.
• Non-English prompt + English documents: Quality dropped sharply. The AI struggled to match the query with the right content.
• Non-English prompt + non-English documents: The weakest performance. Even though large language models technically support multiple languages, their internal semantic maps are mostly trained in English. Vector search in other languages tends to be far less reliable.

Takeaway: If you want your AI assistant to deliver precise, meaningful responses, do your RAG work entirely in English, both the data and the queries. This advice applies specifically to RAG setups. For regular chat interactions, you’re free to use other languages. A challenge also highlighted in this 2024 study on multilingual retrieval.

From Outsider to Teammate: Giving AI the Context It Needs

Once your AI assistant has proper context, it stops acting like an outsider and starts behaving more like someone who truly understands your product. With well-structured input, it can help you spot blind spots in your thinking, challenge assumptions, and strengthen your ideas — the way a mid-level or senior designer would.

Here’s an example of a prompt that works well for me:

Your task is to perform a comparative analysis of two features: "Group gift contributions" (described in group_goals.txt) and "Personal savings goals" (described in personal_goals.txt).

The goal is to identify potential conflicts in logic, architecture, and user scenarios and suggest visual and conceptual ways to clearly separate these two features in the UI so users can easily understand the difference during actual use.

Please include:

• Possible overlaps in user goals, actions, or scenarios;
• Potential confusion if both features are launched at the same time;
• Any architectural or business-level conflicts (e.g. roles, notifications, access rights, financial logic);
• Suggestions for visual and conceptual separation: naming, color coding, separate sections, or other UI/UX techniques;
• Onboarding screens or explanatory elements that might help users understand both features.

If helpful, include a comparison table with key parameters like purpose, initiator, audience, contribution method, timing, access rights, and so on.

AI Needs Context, Not Just Prompts

If you want AI to go beyond surface-level suggestions and become a real design partner, it needs the right context. Not just more information, but better, more structured information.

Building a usable knowledge base isn’t difficult. And you don’t need a full-blown RAG system to get started. Many of these principles work even in a regular chat: well-organized content and a clear question can dramatically improve how helpful and relevant the AI’s responses are. That’s your first step in turning AI from a novelty into a practical tool in your product design workflow.

Stage 2: Prototyping and Visual Experiments

Pushback: “AI only generates obvious solutions and can’t even build a proper user flow. It’s faster to do it manually.”

That’s a fair concern. AI still performs poorly when it comes to building complete, usable screen flows. But for individual elements, especially when exploring new interaction patterns or visual ideas, it can be surprisingly effective.

For example, I needed to prototype a gamified element for a limited-time promotion. The idea is to give users a lottery ticket they can “flip” to reveal a prize. I couldn’t recreate the 3D animation I had in mind in Figma, either manually or using any available plugins. So I described the idea to Claude 4 in Figma Make and within a few minutes, without writing a single line of code, I had exactly what I needed.

At the prototyping stage, AI can be a strong creative partner in two areas:

• UI element ideation
  It can generate dozens of interactive patterns, including ones you might not think of yourself.
• Micro-animation generation
  It can quickly produce polished animations that make a concept feel real, which is great for stakeholder presentations or as a handoff reference for engineers.

AI can also be applied to multi-screen prototypes, but it’s not as simple as dropping in a set of mockups and getting a fully usable flow. The bigger and more complex the project, the more fine-tuning and manual fixes are required. Where AI already works brilliantly is in focused tasks — individual screens, elements, or animations — where it can kick off the thinking process and save hours of trial and error.

A quick UI prototype of a gamified promo banner created with Claude 4 in Figma Make. No code or plugins needed.

Here’s another valuable way to use AI in design — as a stress-testing tool. Back in 2023, Google Research introduced PromptInfuser, an internal Figma plugin that allowed designers to attach prompts directly to UI elements and simulate semi-functional interactions within real mockups. Their goal wasn’t to generate new UI, but to check how well AI could operate inside existing layouts — placing content into specific containers, handling edge-case inputs, and exposing logic gaps early.

The results were striking: designers using PromptInfuser were up to 40% more effective at catching UI issues and aligning the interface with real-world input — a clear gain in design accuracy, not just speed.

That closely reflects my experience with Claude 4 and Figma Make: when AI operates within a real interface structure, rather than starting from a blank canvas, it becomes a much more reliable partner. It helps test your ideas, not just generate them.

Stage 3: Finalizing The Interface And Visual Style

Pushback: “AI can’t match our visual style. It’s easier to just do it by hand.”

This is one of the most common frustrations when using AI in design. Even if you upload your color palette, fonts, and components, the results often don’t feel like they belong in your product. They tend to be either overly decorative or overly simplified.

And this is a real limitation. In my experience, today’s models still struggle to reliably apply a design system, even if you provide a component structure or JSON files with your styles. I tried several approaches:

• Direct integration with a component library.
  I used Figma Make (powered by Claude) and connected our library. This was the least effective method: although the AI attempted to use components, the layouts were often broken, and the visuals were overly conservative. Other designers have run into similar issues, noting that library support in Figma Make is still limited and often unstable.
• Uploading styles as JSON.
  Instead of a full component library, I tried uploading only the exported styles — colors, fonts — in a JSON format. The results improved: layouts looked more modern, but the AI still made mistakes in how styles were applied.
• Two-step approach: structure first, style second.
  What worked best was separating the process. First, I asked the AI to generate a layout and composition without any styling. Once I had a solid structure, I followed up with a request to apply the correct styles from the same JSON file. This produced the most usable result — though still far from pixel-perfect.

So yes, AI still can’t help you finalize your UI. It doesn’t replace hand-crafted design work. But it’s very useful in other ways:

• Quickly creating a visual concept for discussion.
• Generating “what if” alternatives to existing mockups.
• Exploring how your interface might look in a different style or direction.
• Acting as a second pair of eyes by giving feedback, pointing out inconsistencies or overlooked issues you might miss when tired or too deep in the work.

AI won’t save you five hours of high-fidelity design time, since you’ll probably spend that long fixing its output. But as a visual sparring partner, it’s already strong. If you treat it like a source of alternatives and fresh perspectives, it becomes a valuable creative collaborator.

Stage 4: Product Feedback And Analytics: AI As A Thinking Exosuit

Product designers have come a long way. We used to create interfaces in Photoshop based on predefined specs. Then we delved deeper into UX with mapping user flows, conducting interviews, and understanding user behavior. Now, with AI, we gain access to yet another level: data analysis, which used to be the exclusive domain of product managers and analysts.

As Vitaly Friedman rightly pointed out in one of his columns, trying to replace real UX interviews with AI can lead to false conclusions as models tend to generate an average experience, not a real one. The strength of AI isn’t in inventing data but in processing it at scale.

Let me give a real example. We launched an exit survey for users who were leaving our service. Within a week, we collected over 30,000 responses across seven languages.

Simply counting the percentages for each of the five predefined reasons wasn’t enough. I wanted to know:

• Are there specific times of day when users churn more?
• Do the reasons differ by region?
• Is there a correlation between user exits and system load?

The real challenge was... figuring out what cuts and angles were even worth exploring. The entire technical process, from analysis to visualizations, was done “for me” by Gemini, working inside Google Sheets. This task took me about two hours in total. Without AI, not only would it have taken much longer, but I probably wouldn’t have been able to reach that level of insight on my own at all.

AI enables near real-time work with large data sets. But most importantly, it frees up your time and energy for what’s truly valuable: asking the right questions.

A few practical notes: Working with large data sets is still challenging for models without strong reasoning capabilities. In my experiments, I used Gemini embedded in Google Sheets and cross-checked the results using ChatGPT o3. Other models, including the standalone Gemini 2.5 Pro, often produced incorrect outputs or simply refused to complete the task.

AI Is Not An Autopilot But A Co-Pilot

AI in design is only as good as the questions you ask it. It doesn’t do the work for you. It doesn’t replace your thinking. But it helps you move faster, explore more options, validate ideas, and focus on the hard parts instead of burning time on repetitive ones. Sometimes it’s still faster to design things by hand. Sometimes it makes more sense to delegate to a junior designer.

But increasingly, AI is becoming the one who suggests, sharpens, and accelerates. Don’t wait to build the perfect AI workflow. Start small. And that might be the first real step in turning AI from a curiosity into a trusted tool in your product design process.

Let’s Summarize

• If you just paste a full doc into chat, the model often misses important points, especially things buried in the middle. That’s the “lost in the middle” problem.
• The RAG approach helps by pulling only the most relevant pieces from your documents. So responses are faster, more accurate, and grounded in real context.
• Clear, focused prompts work better. Narrow the scope, define the output, and use familiar terms to help the model stay on track.
• A well-structured knowledge bas makes a big difference. Organizing your content into short, topic-specific docs helps reduce noise and keep answers sharp.
• Use English for both your prompts and your documents. Even multilingual models are most reliable when working in English, especially for retrieval.
• Most importantly: treat AI as a creative partner. It won’t replace your skills, but it can spark ideas, catch issues, and speed up the tedious parts.

Further Reading

• “AI-assisted Design Workflows: How UX Teams Move Faster Without Sacrificing Quality”, Cindy Brummer
  This piece is a perfect prequel to my article. It explains how to start integrating AI into your design process, how to structure your workflow, and which tasks AI can reasonably take on — before you dive into RAG or idea generation.
• “8 essential tips for using Figma Make”, Alexia Danton
  While this article focuses on Figma Make, the recommendations are broadly applicable. It offers practical advice that will make your work with AI smoother, especially if you’re experimenting with visual tools and structured prompting.
• “What Is Retrieval-Augmented Generation aka RAG”, Rick Merritt
  If you want to go deeper into how RAG actually works, this is a great starting point. It breaks down key concepts like vector search and retrieval in plain terms and explains why these methods often outperform long prompts alone.

Color plays a pivotal role in crafting compelling user experiences and successful digital products. It’s far more than just aesthetics; color strategically guides users, establishes brand identity, and evokes specific emotions.

Beyond functionality, color is also a powerful tool for brand recognition and emotional connection. Consistent use of brand colors across a digital product reinforces identity and builds trust. Different hues carry cultural and psychological associations, allowing designers to subtly influence user perception and create the desired mood. A thoughtful and deliberate approach to color in UX design elevates the user experience, strengthens brand presence, and contributes significantly to the overall success and impact of digital products. In this article, we will talk about the importance of color and why they are important for creating emotional connection and delivering consistent and accessible digital products.

Well-chosen color palettes enhance usability by creating visual hierarchies, highlighting interactive elements, and providing crucial feedback on screens. For instance, a bright color might draw attention to a call-to-action button, while consistent color coding can help users navigate complex interfaces intuitively. Color also contributes significantly to accessibility, ensuring that users with visual impairments can still effectively interact with digital products. By carefully considering contrast ratios and providing alternative visual cues, designers can create inclusive experiences that cater to a wider audience.

The colors we choose are the silent language of our digital products, and speaking it fluently is essential for success.

Communicating Brand Identity Through Color In The Digital Space

A thoughtfully curated and vibrant color palette becomes a critical differentiator, allowing a brand to stand out amidst the digital noise and cultivate stronger connections with the audience.

Far beyond mere decoration, color acts as a visual shorthand, instantly conveying a brand’s personality, its underlying values, and its unique essence. According to the American Marketing Association, vibrant colors, in particular, possess an inherent magnetism, drawing the eye and etching themselves into memory within the online environment. They infuse the brand with energy and dynamism, projecting approachability and memorability in a way that more muted tones often cannot.

Consistency: The Core Of Great Design

Consistency is important because it fosters trust and familiarity, allowing users to quickly identify and connect with the brand in the online landscape. The strategic deployment of vibrant colors is especially crucial for brands seeking to establish themselves and flourish within the digital ecosystem. In the absence of physical storefronts or tangible in-person interactions, visual cues become paramount in shaping user perception and building brand recognition. A carefully selected primary color, supported by a complementary and equally energetic secondary palette, can become synonymous with a brand’s digital presence. A consistent application of the right colors across different digital touchpoints — from the logo and website design to the user interface of an app and engaging social media campaigns — creates a cohesive and instantly recognizable visual language.

Several sources and professionals agree that the psychology behind the colors plays a significant role in shaping brand perception. The publication Insights Psychology, for instance, explains how colors can create emotional and behavioural responses. Vibrant colors often evoke strong emotions and associations. A bold, energetic red, for example, might communicate passion and excitement, while a bright, optimistic yellow could convey innovation and cheerfulness. By consciously aligning their color choices with their brand values and target audience preferences, digitally-native brands can create a powerful emotional resonance.

Beyond Aesthetics: How Color Psychologically Impacts User Behavior In Digital

As designers working with digital products, we’ve learned that color is far more than a superficial layer of visual appeal. It’s a potent, often subconscious, force that shapes how users interact with and feel about the digital products we build.

We’re not just painting pixels, we’re conducting a psychological symphony, carefully selecting each hue to evoke specific emotions, guide behavior, and ultimately forge a deeper connection with the user.

The initial allure of a color palette might be purely aesthetic, but its true power lies in its ability to bypass conscious thought and tap directly into our emotional core. Think about the subtle unease that might creep in when encountering a predominantly desaturated interface for a platform promising dynamic content, or the sense of calm that washes over you when a learning application utilizes soft, analogous colors. These are not arbitrary responses; they’re deeply rooted in our evolutionary history and cultural conditioning.

To understand how colors psychologically impact user behavior in digital, we first need to understand how colors are defined. In digital design, colors are precisely defined using the HSB model, which stands for Hue, Saturation, and Brightness. This model provides a more intuitive way for designers to think about and manipulate color compared to other systems like RGB (Red, Green, Blue). Here is a quick breakdown of each component:

Hue

This is the pure color itself, the essence that we typically name, such as red, blue, green, or yellow. On a color wheel, hue is represented as an angle ranging from 0 to 360 degrees. For example, 0 is red, 120 is green, and 240 is blue. Think of it as the specific wavelength of light that our eyes perceive as a particular color. In UX, selecting the base hues is often tied to brand identity and the overall feeling you want to convey.

Saturation

Saturation refers to the intensity or purity of the hue. It describes how vivid or dull the color appears. A fully saturated color is rich and vibrant, while a color with low saturation appears muted, grayish, or desaturated. Saturation is typically expressed as a percentage, from 0% (completely desaturated, appearing as a shade of gray) to 100% (fully saturated, the purest form of the hue).

In UX, saturation levels are crucial for creating visual hierarchy and drawing attention to key elements. Highly saturated colors often indicate interactive elements or important information, while lower saturation can be used for backgrounds or less critical content.

Brightness

Brightness, sometimes also referred to as a value or lightness, indicates how light or dark a color appears. It’s the amount of white or black mixed into the hue. Brightness is also usually represented as a percentage, ranging from 0% (completely black, regardless of the hue or saturation) to 100% (fully bright). At 100% brightness and 0% saturation, you get white. In UX, adjusting brightness is essential for creating contrast and ensuring readability. Sufficient brightness contrast between text and background is a fundamental accessibility requirement. Furthermore, variations in brightness within a color palette can create visual depth and subtle distinctions between UI elements.

By understanding and manipulating these 3 color dimensions, digital designers have precise control over their color choices. This allows for the creation of harmonious and effective color palettes that not only align with brand guidelines but also strategically influence user behavior.

Just as in the physical world, colors in digital also carry symbolic meanings and trigger subconscious associations. Understanding these color associations is essential for UX designers aiming to craft experiences that not only look appealing but also resonate emotionally and guide user behavior effectively.

As the EMB Global states, the way we perceive and interpret color is not universal, yet broad patterns of association exist. For instance, the color blue often evokes feelings of trust, stability, and calmness. This association stems from the natural world — the vastness of the sky and the tranquility of deep waters. In the digital space, this makes blue a popular choice for financial institutions, corporate platforms, and interfaces aiming to project reliability and security. However, the specific shade and context matter immensely. A bright, electric blue can feel energetic and modern, while a muted and darker blue might convey a more serious and authoritative tone.

Kendra Cherry, a psychosocial and rehabilitation specialist and author of the book Everything Psychology, explains very well how colors evoke certain responses in us. For example, the color green is intrinsically linked to nature, often bringing about feelings of growth, health, freshness, and tranquility. It can also symbolize prosperity in some cultures. In digital design, green is frequently used for health and wellness applications, environmental initiatives, and platforms emphasizing sustainability. A vibrant lime green can feel energetic and youthful, while a deep forest green can evoke a sense of groundedness and organic quality.

Yellow, the color of sunshine, is generally associated with optimism, happiness, energy, and warmth. It’s attention-grabbing and can create a sense of playfulness. In digital interfaces, yellow is often used for highlighting important information, calls to action (though sparingly, as too much can be overwhelming), or for brands wanting to project a cheerful and approachable image.

Red, a color with strong physiological effects, typically evokes excitement, passion, urgency, and sometimes anger or danger. It commands attention and can stimulate action. Digitally, red is often used for alerts, error messages, sales promotions, or for brands wanting to project a bold and energetic identity. Its intensity requires careful consideration, as overuse can lead to user fatigue or anxiety.

Orange blends the energy of red with the optimism of yellow, often conveying enthusiasm, creativity, and friendliness. It can feel less aggressive than red but still commands attention. In digital design, orange is frequently used for calls to action, highlighting sales or special offers, and for brands aiming to appear approachable and innovative.

Purple has historically been associated with royalty and luxury. It can evoke feelings of creativity, wisdom, and mystery. In digital contexts, purple is often used for brands aiming for a sophisticated or unique feel, particularly in areas like luxury goods, beauty, or spiritual and creative platforms.

Black often signifies sophistication, power, elegance, and sometimes mystery. In digital design, black is frequently used for minimalist interfaces, luxury brands, and for creating strong contrast with lighter elements. The feeling it evokes heavily depends on the surrounding colors and overall design aesthetic.

White is generally associated with purity, cleanliness, simplicity, and neutrality. It provides a sense of spaciousness and allows other colors to stand out. In digital design, white space is a crucial element, and white is often used as a primary background color to create a clean and uncluttered feel.

Gray is often seen as neutral, practical, and sometimes somber or conservative. In digital interfaces, various shades of gray are essential for typography, borders, dividers, and creating visual hierarchy without being overly distracting.

Evoking Emotions In Digital Interfaces

Imagine an elegant furniture application. The designers might choose a primary palette of soft, desaturated blues and greens, accented with gentle earth tones. The muted blues could subtly induce a feeling of calmness and tranquility, aligning with the app’s core purpose of relaxation. The soft greens might evoke a sense of nature and well-being, further reinforcing the theme of peace and mental clarity. The earthy browns could ground the visual experience, creating a feeling of stability and connection to the natural world.

Now, consider a platform for extreme investment enthusiasts. The color palette might be dominated by high-energy oranges and reds, contrasted with stark blacks and sharp whites. The vibrant oranges could evoke feelings of excitement and adventure, while the bold red might amplify the sense of adrenaline and intensity. The black and white could provide a sense of dynamism and modernity, reflecting the fast-paced nature of the activities.

By consciously understanding and applying these color associations, digital designers can move beyond purely aesthetic choices and craft experiences that resonate deeply with users on an emotional level, leading to more engaging, intuitive, and successful digital products.

Color As A Usability Tool

Choosing the right colors isn’t about adhering to fleeting trends; it’s about ensuring that our mobile applications and websites are usable by the widest possible audience, including individuals with visual impairments. Improper color choices can create significant barriers, rendering content illegible, interactive elements indistinguishable, and ultimately excluding a substantial portion of potential users.

Prioritizing color with accessibility in mind is not just a matter of ethical design; it’s a fundamental aspect of creating inclusive and user-friendly digital experiences that benefit everyone.

For individuals with low vision, sufficient color contrast between text and background is paramount for readability. Imagine trying to decipher light gray text on a white background — a common design trend that severely hinders those with even mild visual impairments. Adhering to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) contrast ratios ensures that text remains legible and understandable.

Furthermore, color blindness, affecting a significant percentage of the population, necessitates the use of redundant visual cues. Relying solely on color to convey information, such as indicating errors in red without an accompanying text label, excludes colorblind users. By pairing color with text, icons, or patterns, we ensure that critical information is conveyed through multiple sensory channels, making it accessible to all. Thoughtful color selection, therefore, is not an optional add-on but an integral component of designing digital products that are truly usable and equitable.

Choosing Your Palette

As designers, we need a strategic approach to choosing color palettes, considering various factors to build a scalable and impactful color system. Here’s a breakdown of the steps and considerations involved:

1. Deep Dive Into Brand Identity And Main Goals

The journey begins with a thorough understanding of the brand itself. What are its core values? What personality does it project? Is it playful, sophisticated, innovative? Analyze existing brand guidelines (if any), target audience demographics and psychographics, and the overall goals of the digital product. The color palette should be a visual extension of this identity, reinforcing brand recognition and resonating with the intended users. For instance, a financial app aiming for trustworthiness might lean towards blues and greens, while a creative platform could explore more vibrant and unconventional hues.

2. Understand Color Psychology And Cultural Associations

As discussed previously, colors carry inherent psychological and cultural baggage. While these associations are not absolute, they provide a valuable framework for initial exploration. Consider the emotions you want to evoke and research how your target audience might perceive different colors, keeping in mind cultural nuances that can significantly alter interpretations. This step is important to help in making informed decisions that align with the desired user experience and brand perception.

3. Defining The Core Colors

Start by identifying the primary color — the dominant hue that represents your brand’s essence. This will likely be derived from the brand logo or existing visual identity. Next, establish a secondary color or two that complement the primary color and provide visual interest and hierarchy. These secondary colors should work harmoniously with the primary, offering flexibility for different UI elements and interactions.

4. Build A Functional Color System

A consistent and scalable color palette goes beyond just a few base colors. It involves creating a system of variations for practical application within the digital interface. This typically includes tints and shades, accent colors, and neutral colors.

5. Do Not Forget About Usability And Accessibility

Ensure sufficient color contrast between text and background, as well as between interactive elements and their surroundings, to meet WCAG guidelines. Tools are readily available to check color contrast ratios.

Test your palette using color blindness simulators to see how it will be perceived by individuals with different types of color vision deficiencies. This helps identify potential issues where information might be lost due to color alone.

Visual hierarchy is also important to guide the user’s eye and establish a clear visual story. Important elements should be visually distinct.

6. Testing And Iteration

Once you have a preliminary color palette, it’s crucial to test it within the context of your digital product. Create mockups and prototypes to see how the colors work together in the actual interface. Gather feedback from stakeholders and, ideally, conduct user testing to identify any usability or aesthetic issues. Be prepared to iterate and refine your palette based on these insights.

A well-defined color palette for the digital medium should be:

• Consistent,
• Scalable,
• Accessible,
• Brand-aligned,
• Emotionally resonant, and
• Functionally effective.

By following these steps and keeping these considerations in mind, designers can craft color palettes that are not just visually appealing but also strategically powerful tools for creating effective and accessible digital experiences.

Color Consistency: Building Trust And Recognition Through A Harmonized Digital Presence

Consistency plays an important role in the whole color ecosystem. By maintaining a unified color scheme for interactive elements, navigation cues, and informational displays, designers create a seamless and predictable user journey, building trust through visual stability.

Color consistency directly contributes to brand recognition in the increasingly crowded digital landscape. Just as a logo or typeface becomes instantly identifiable, a consistent color palette acts as a powerful visual signature. When users repeatedly encounter the same set of colors associated with a particular brand, it strengthens their recall and fosters a stronger brand association. This visual consistency extends beyond the core interface to marketing materials, social media presence, and all digital touchpoints, creating a cohesive and memorable brand experience. By strategically and consistently applying a solid and consistent color palette, digital products can cultivate stronger brand recognition, build user trust, and enhance user loyalty.

If you’ve been part of the WordPress community for a while, then you’ve almost certainly heard of OceanWP. Launched as a free theme with premium-level features, it quickly became a staple for freelancers, agencies, and DIY site owners.

The creator, Nicolas Lecocq, stepped away from WordPress after selling the theme, only to return years later with a whole new approach to building products. This time, he’s creating faster and thinking differently about performance, user experience, and the role AI can play in development.

Under his new company, DigiHold, Nicolas has launched six WordPress products in less than one year — work he says would have taken him years before.

In this interview, Nicolas shares what’s possible when experience meets new AI tools and when you prioritize creating products that truly help customers.

“A product works when it solves a real problem… that’s what I focus on now.”

Nicolas Lecocq – Creator of OceanWP & Founder of DigiHold

Keep reading to get insider advice and tips from the creator of one of the most successful themes in WordPress history.

📹 Video Interview with Nicolas Lecocq

If you’d like to check out our complete video interview with Nicolas Lecocq, then you can watch it below:

Or you can use the links below to see what we covered in the interview (and more):

🚀 Meet Nicolas Lecocq: From Sports Blogger to Self-Taught Developer

Nicolas’s journey with WordPress started in 2012, not with a business plan, but with a personal hobby.

His first blog focused on MMA sports, and although it didn’t last long, it introduced Nicolas to the flexibility of WordPress.

“I wanted to create a blog and I searched on Google ‘the best way to create a blog,’ and it was obviously WordPress.”

Nicolas Lecocq

Soon, he was tinkering with themes and experimenting with code. At the time, learning resources were far more limited than they are today.

Nicolas relied on a mix of YouTube tutorials, online forums, and something many seasoned developers still swear by: studying the code of other themes to see how they were built.

“I was watching YouTube videos, but there was not a lot of information like now… I learned really myself and little by little by editing themes.”

Nicolas Lecocq

His early freelance work involved making client websites responsive, back before mobile-friendly designs were the standard.

That process revealed an insight that would later define his career: every project seemed to require learning an entirely new theme.

Nicolas began imagining a single, versatile solution.

One theme that could handle any type of website — from eCommerce to real estate — while keeping a consistent workflow for developers and site owners alike.

That idea became OceanWP.

📈 The OceanWP Phenomenon: When Free Beats Premium

OceanWP started as a way to streamline Nicolas’s client work.

Instead of adapting to a new theme for every project, he built one that could handle anything, and he knew it inside and out.

“When you have one theme to create anything, it’s easier for you when you know how to use it.”

Nicolas Lecocq

Originally, Nicolas planned to sell OceanWP as a premium theme.

But when his first attempt at a paid theme on ThemeForest didn’t gain traction, he decided to take a different approach.

He released OceanWP for free, but paired it with a companion plugin, Ocean Extra.

This allowed users to unlock the full potential of the theme without breaking WordPress.org guidelines.

They could access an unusually generous set of features for free at a time when most powerful themes were locked behind paywalls.

“I put so many free features… it was like a premium theme made for free. So everyone loved it.”

Nicolas Lecocq

Alongside these tools, Nicolas also launched premium OceanWP add-ons for paid features.

Growth was slow in the first six months, fueled mainly through word of mouth. But once it caught on, it grew very quickly.

Within a year, OceanWP went from a side project to one of the most popular themes on the market. With thousands of installs, Nicolas saw his OceanWP income jump from around $2–3K per month to $15K per month.

The combination of flexibility, rich features, and a free entry point made OceanWP a favorite for freelancers, WordPress agencies, and DIY site builders alike.

We can also vouch for the OceanWP theme. We’ve recommended it tons of times over the years for its versatility and complete feature set.

In fact, we often include it among our top choices for free themes in multiple categories. It even comes in at #4 on our list of the best free WordPress business themes.

🎯 Learning From Success and Setbacks

Building OceanWP gave Nicolas a crash course in what it takes to grow and sustain a popular WordPress product. Alongside the wins came valuable lessons.

One of the biggest? Performance matters.

“I added so much features I didn’t really think about performance… now performance is the first thing to think about.”

Nicolas Lecocq

Early versions of OceanWP packed in a huge list of capabilities, but Nicolas admits that some of those features slowed down websites.

💥 Related Post: Interested in learning more about WordPress website performance? Check out our ultimate guide to boost WordPress speed and performance.

Over time, user feedback helped shape improvements. This was feedback that came in through contact forms, WordPress.org forums, support emails, and even GitHub.

For Nicolas, those conversations weren’t just bug reports or feature requests. Instead, they were a roadmap for making the product better.

“It is your creation, but it’s their product. So you always need to listen to them.”

Nicolas Lecocq

After three to four years, he decided to sell OceanWP.

The experience had been formative, but he wanted to explore new ideas and address personal priorities.

His next project, Olympus, aimed to be faster and more focused than OceanWP. But just after launch, personal circumstances and partnership issues forced him to step away.

The setback reshaped how he approaches collaboration.

“I will not make my mistake with Olympus to do bad partnerships now. I’m very selective about who works with me.”

Nicolas Lecocq

From those experiences, Nicolas carried forward several important lessons: prioritize performance, build for user needs, and choose collaborators with care.

🤖 The AI-Powered Comeback: Building 6 Products in Under a Year

In 2024, Nicolas returned to WordPress development with a familiar starting point: freelancing and building websites for clients.

But he noticed something that would define his next chapter. Nearly every client wanted to sell something, whether it was services, eBooks, or eLearning content.

That observation became the foundation for his new company, DigiHold.

DigiHold is designed to cover eCommerce needs with the following products:

• DigiCommerce – A platform for selling digital goods, services, and online courses
• DigiBlocks – A collection of Gutenberg blocks for building high-performance sites
• DigiFusion – A minimalist WordPress theme with Pro features for full customization

Each product also has a Pro version, making a total of six releases, all built in under a year.

The difference this time? A performance-first approach paired with the power of AI.

“You cannot do coding without AI. It’s so much faster… it’s a game changer.”

Nicolas Lecocq

Nicolas leaned heavily on Claude AI, which he prefers over ChatGPT for development tasks.

His workflow involves training the AI on his codebase, asking it to help implement features, and then carefully reviewing every suggestion for performance, security, and user experience.

He was quick to emphasize that AI doesn’t replace the need to know how to code, but it amplifies it.

“Sometimes it tells me very bad things. And I know it’s not good, so I don’t do it,” Nicolas said.

🔮 Why AI Integration Matters: Building for Tomorrow’s Web

For Nicolas, AI isn’t just a behind-the-scenes development tool. It’s also something he’s actively building into his products.

DigiFusion Pro now includes integrations with ChatGPT and Claude, allowing users to generate content for blog posts and pages without leaving WordPress.

It’s part of his larger belief that website owners should be equipped to use AI in their own workflows, not just developers.

This focus on AI integration comes from a forward-looking view that the way people search the web is changing.

“You need to know how to implement SEO for AI because it’s the future… it’s happening.”

Nicolas Lecocq

Nicolas predicts that AI-driven search tools like ChatGPT will replace many traditional Google searches.

For developers and site owners, that means thinking about how to optimize content for AI. This is a shift he believes will become critical in the coming years.

“I think it will be easier to search on the web with ChatGPT, so people will use it more and more,” he said.

If you want to learn more about it, check out our beginner’s guide to generative AI optimization for WordPress.

By designing products with AI capabilities from the start, Nicolas is positioning DigiHold to be ready for that transition and helping his customers do the same.

💡 Product Philosophy & Developer Advice

If there’s one common feature with all of Nicolas’s products, it’s that they’re born from real-world needs, not trends.

DigiCommerce, DigiBlocks, and DigiFusion each came from solving specific problems his clients faced.

“A product works when it solves a real problem… if you just create it to earn money, I believe it will not really work.”

Nicolas Lecocq

That mindset shapes everything from his feature decisions to how he manages performance.

Although he believes strongly in the importance of user feedback, he’s not afraid to turn down requests that would slow down a site.

Instead, he prefers to offer workarounds via child themes or custom code.

“Performance and user experience have to be in mind when you build WordPress products now.”

Nicolas Lecocq

His development workflow is also lean and intentional.

He uses:

• Visual Studio Code for coding
• Local for staging environments
• Photoshop for design work
• ClickUp for organizing features, feedback, and ideas
• Claude AI as a coding assistant, but never as a replacement for core skills

For new developers, his advice is clear: master the fundamentals before relying on AI.

“You really need to learn code first, and then AI helps with your code.”

Nicolas Lecocq

That means starting with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, understanding how things work, and then using AI to speed up and refine what you already know how to do.

💥 Related Post: Looking for more advice from founders? Check out our interview with Ionut Neagu, co-founder of Themeisle.

💭 Final Thoughts

Nicolas Lecocq’s story comes full circle, from teaching himself WordPress by editing themes to building one of the most popular free themes in the world.

Now, he’s returning years later with a new mindset and a powerful new toolset.

His journey is a mix of resilience, adaptability, and continuous learning. The setbacks he faced didn’t end his career. Instead, they reshaped how he works, how he chooses collaborators, and how he builds products.

Now, with AI as part of his daily workflow, he’s able to move faster than ever while keeping performance and user experience front and center.

But his advice to other developers is to see AI as an accelerator, not a replacement.

“For my six products, I believe I could have done them in some years manually. I did it in less than a year with AI.”

Nicolas Lecocq

For developers and entrepreneurs, Nicolas proves that strong skills, user feedback, and fresh tools can unlock new paths.

To learn more about what Nicolas is working on today, check out the DigiHold website.

📚 Bonus: Expert Resources for WordPress Developers

Looking to follow in Nicolas’s footsteps and build your own WordPress products?

These WPBeginner guides can help you get started:

• How to Learn WordPress for Free (Step by Step)
• Best WordPress Developer Job Sites (+ Example Job Template)
• Ultimate WordPress SEO Guide for Beginners
• WordPress Career Options – How to Make a Living With WordPress
• How Zac McDonald Grew Into the Top-Rated WordPress Freelancer on Upwork
• Blogger Turned WordPress VIP Partner: How WordPress Continues to Inspire Rahul Bansal
• How Ben Rojas Rose From a Developer to the President of AIOSEO
• The LearnDash Story: How Justin Ferriman Grew a Multi-Million Dollar LMS

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post The OceanWP Creator Is Back: How Nicolas Lecocq Built 6 New WordPress Products With AI first appeared on WPBeginner.

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As artificial intelligence evolves from reactive chatbots to autonomous agents, design teams are facing a new frontier: creating user experiences for systems that not only respond but act on their own.

Autonomous agents—capable of goal-seeking, multi-step reasoning, and contextual adaptation—represent a dramatic leap from co-pilots and traditional assistants. They can pursue tasks with minimal supervision, call tools independently, and even collaborate with other agents in a shared runtime.

For UX practitioners, this evolution introduces a complex design challenge: How do we craft interfaces that support trust, transparency, and control in systems we don’t fully script?

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From Interfacing With AI to Interfacing With Intelligence

In the Invisible Machines podcast, Robb Wilson—founder of OneReach.ai and author of The Age of Invisible Machines—summarizes this shift bluntly:

“We’re no longer designing for the machine—we’re designing for what the machine does when we’re not looking.”

This reality reshapes UX at a foundational level. Previously, designers created flows assuming the system would only act when prompted. But in agentic systems, autonomy is not a feature—it’s the default behavior.

These agents don’t live inside neat input/output boxes. They initiate tasks, communicate asynchronously, and may alter the state of applications or data without user awareness unless careful affordances are designed into the experience.

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Key UX Challenges for Autonomous Agents

Designing for agentic AI surfaces four high-stakes areas for UX and product teams:

1. Trust and Transparency

Users must understand what agents are doing, why they’re doing it, and when they’ll act. Without these cues, autonomy feels like unpredictability.

• Provide real-time status indicators (“Your travel assistant is rescheduling your flight”).
  
• Include rationales or intent summaries (“Rebooking due to weather disruption forecasted”).
  
• Offer view history and audit logs for actions taken autonomously.
  

“The more autonomous a system becomes, the more visible its reasoning must be,” writes Wilson in The Age of Invisible Machines.

2. State and Context Management

Agents act across time, apps, and modalities. That means users need visibility into what state the agent is in—even if the interaction is paused or asynchronous.

• Use persistent agent dashboards that summarize current objectives, pending actions, and next steps.
  
• Leverage natural language recaps when users re-enter a thread (“While you were away, I confirmed your hotel and drafted your expense report”).
  

3. Interruptibility and Control

Autonomy doesn’t mean loss of control. Users should be able to:

• Intervene and override agent decisions.
  
• Pause or halt behaviors.
  
• Adjust parameters and preferences mid-task.
  

UX affordances for these controls must be accessible but unobtrusive, supporting both novice and power users.

4. Tone and Relational UX

Autonomous agents often act for the user rather than with the user. That relationship requires a tone that is confident but not authoritarian—collaborative, not condescending.

• Train agents to express intent, not assumption.
  
• Avoid over-promising outcomes (“I’ll try to…” vs. “I’ve solved it”).
  
• Use consistent agent personalities to foster familiarity over time.
  

---

The “AI-First” Design Mindset

What ties all this together is a shift toward the AI-first design philosophy—treating AI agents not as features to fit into old UI patterns, but as primary actors in the product experience.

This mirrors what Robb Wilson calls “the invisible layer” in his book:

“Interfaces will become less visible, but the systems behind them more intelligent. The UX challenge is no longer about placement—it’s about partnership.”

Companies like OneReach.ai are pioneering architectures where agents operate within runtime environments that allow for persistent goals, distributed memory, and composability across functions. These platforms demand a new design grammar—one where intent flows trump screens, and success depends on orchestration, not sequence.

---

From Theory to Practice: Starting Points for Design Teams

Here are a few first principles we’ve borrowed from an open source project called AI First Principles – a kind of Agile Manifesto for this AI moment, meant to help avoid the fragmentation, bureaucracy, and failures we’re seeing. Contributors include execs leading AI strategy at the federal government, large healthcare, Meta, Salesforce, Amazon, Microsoft, several startups, and one of the authors form the original Agile Manifesto (read the entire AI first principles manifesto: https://www.aifirstprinciples.org/manifesto) :

• Design around outcomes, not flows: Start with the goals users want to achieve, then build agent behaviors and UX affordances around them.
  
• Prototype agent behavior: Use scripts, roleplay, or logic models to define how agents should respond in different contexts—before committing to UI decisions.
  
• Create explainability as a service: Design reusable components that show “why” and “how” an agent acted, so every product doesn’t reinvent this wheel.
  
• Involve design early in runtime planning: Your UX team should be in the room when agent architectures and memory strategies are discussed—they directly impact experience.
  

---

Final Thoughts

Autonomous agents change the UX game. They don’t just challenge how we design interfaces—they challenge what an interface is. As AI becomes more proactive, design becomes more about choreography than control.

To keep pace, designers must embrace new mental models, new tools, and new responsibilities. We’re no longer just designing for screens—we’re designing for behavior, for trust, and for collaboration with intelligent systems that never sleep.

And if that sounds daunting, remember: we’ve done this before. Every time technology changed what was possible, design adapted to make it usable.

This time, we’re not just designing machines. We’re designing how machines act for us when we’re not watching.

Sources:

Wilson, Robb (with Josh Tyson). Age of Invisible Machines. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2022. Wiley.com

Invisible Machines (podcast). Hosted by Robb Wilson. UX Magazine. https://uxmag.com/

AI First Principles. “AI First Principles Manifesto.” https://www.aifirstprinciples.org/manifesto (accessed August 15, 2025).

The post Designing for Autonomy: UX Principles for Agentic AI Systems appeared first on UX Magazine.

The world of software development is evolving at a rapid pace, which is no surprise. But lately, it’s not just about new frameworks or languages — it feels like we’re stepping into a whole new way of building software. Enter: vibe coding.

Now, if you’re thinking WTF is vibe coding… I had the same thought, and I was already vibing. Behind the playful name lies a powerful shift in how people are writing code: using AI to translate natural language descriptions into functional software.

What exactly is vibe coding?

Vibe coding is an AI-assisted approach to software development where users describe their ideas in natural language, and AI generates the code for them. This method allows people to build software using conversational language instead of writing syntax-specific code.

The term vibe coding was coined by Andrej Karpathy, a prominent AI engineer and researcher who previously worked at Tesla and OpenAI. In early 2024, Karpathy described vibe coding in a tweet that gained significant attention in the developer community. He characterized it as a process where developers “fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.”

The core concept of vibe coding involves:

1. Describing software ideas and features in plain language.
2. Letting AI interpret and generate relevant code.
3. Iterating and refining the output through conversation with the AI.
4. Deploying the resulting software.

This approach has gained traction due to recent advances in AI and language models, enabling non-programmers to build functional software by working with AI rather than writing code directly. Vibe coding represents a cultural shift in software development, lowering the barrier to entry and potentially transforming how creators and entrepreneurs approach building digital products.

Why does this matter?

The potential impact is massive. Consider these possibilities:

• Lowering the Barrier to Entry: suddenly, software development isn’t just for engineers. Entrepreneurs, designers, and hobbyists can build apps without needing deep technical expertise. In the last few months, I’ve been building my first product with just myself and AI.
• Accelerating Development Cycles: prototyping and MVPs can move from idea to execution in days instead of months.
• Unlocking Creativity: by automating the mundane aspects of coding, developers can focus on the bigger picture — solving complex problems and designing intuitive user experiences.

The current state of vibe coding

It’s not just a futuristic dream. Several AI-powered tools are already making vibe coding a reality:

Several tools are currently available for implementing vibe coding, allowing users to create software using AI-assisted methods. The most prominent options include:

• Cursor: features the Composer tool, which can create, edit, and delete files in your codebase. (my personal favorite)
• Replit: a browser-based and native app tool that offers a full-stack development environment with AI agent integration. It supports multiple programming languages and provides easy deployment options.
• Lovable.dev: designed for beginners, it offers a simple interface with real-time preview and natural language prompting. IMO one of the best for beginners with no coding experience.
• Bolt.new: ideal for quick prototyping with zero setup time, providing a browser-based development environment.
• Windsurf: includes the Cascade feature, which functions similarly to Cursor’s Composer.
• Cline: an open-source vibe coding tool.
• Claude Code: an experimental tool developed by Anthropic, currently available in beta as a research preview.
• GitHub Copilot: an AI pair-programmer developed by GitHub and OpenAI, with a great free tier.
• Aider: a vibe coding tool mentioned in recent developments.
• MetaGPT: the newest edition to the AI Agent coding landscape. It focuses on a multi-agent layered approach.
• v0 by Vercel: this tool is pretty cool, it uses Shadcn for natural language component generation.
• SuperWhisper or Wispr flow: super easy voice dictation. I use Wispr flow for talking to Cursor.

New tools and platforms are emerging all the time, expanding what’s possible with AI-assisted coding, especially for those with little to no coding experience.

How I started and where I’m at

Last November, a friend introduced me to Cursor. He was building his own Figma plugins, and I was really blown away. He gave me a brief tutorial and got me set up, and within a couple of weeks, I was on my way to experimenting and building my own Figma plugin.

After I finished this, I got a little ahead of myself and thought, “Well, if I can make a Figma plug-in, I can build my own app. Why not?” When I started this, Sonnet 3.5 wasn’t even a thing yet.

It’s important to know that I basically have no coding or engineering experience, but what I do have is years of product design and development knowledge. I think this is what has allowed me to get super far with this process. Pair that with I’ve been really deep into generative AI since 2021, and so I’ve been refining the way that I speak to large language models and refining that process, and have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t work.

So what have I been able to do? A lot.

Honestly, when I take a step back and look at what I’ve been able to accomplish basically by myself, I feel like it’s actually pretty impressive. I started to build an idea that I’ve had for a while, which is an AI-powered recipe app. I use AI a lot for cooking, and over the past few years, a lot of our meal planning, prep, and recipes are now actually from my custom chefGPT. So I started building lilchef.app.

Basically, every day I’m able to implement a new feature, and not small ones. The recent release of sonnet-3.7 has drastically sped up my vibe coding process. We’ve been using lil’ chef every day to help with meal planning, recipes, and cooking. I honestly never thought I’d be able to do something like this.

It makes me realize that the future for anyone who has an idea or wants to create something is definitely possible — we’re moving into a world where anyone can quickly spin up and create a custom software or product that is so personalized and contextual to them and their use case that everyone is going to start to become super efficient.

My current vibe code setup

I was texting with a friend the other day, and they asked for an overview of my process.

Here’s my current flow:

I typically start in Perplexity. (You can also use ChatGPT search)
I use Perplexity to do all of the research of what I’m thinking about for either the initial idea, which in this case I’ve already passed, so I now use it for new feature ideation.

I utilize the projects of Perplexity, and I have my old cursor rules file as a grounding documentation in there. So when I’m doing research on a new feature that I want to implement, Perplexity automatically knows my entire tech stack.

When I feel good about where that feature is, I have Perplexity turn it into a simplified PRD that I then turn into a markdown file that I turn into a .md file in my .stories file. (think user stories)

I have my PRD broken down into job stories, and those job stories basically act as “tickets.” Here is an example of a user-story.md:

I have my cursor rules set up for general front-end, backend, etc.

When I get into the cursor if it’s a more complex or larger feature, I sometimes use 03-mini in Agent mode for the foundation, and then I do all of the code implementation with Claude sonnet-3.7, but lately I’ve just been going to sonnet-3.7.

Below is a thread that lists everything I’m currently using for the setup.

The challenges: it’s not all rainbows and unicorns

As exciting as vibe coding is, it’s not without its challenges:

• Security Risks: AI-generated code can be prone to vulnerabilities if not reviewed carefully.
• The Black Box Problem: if you didn’t write the code, how well do you really understand it? Over-reliance on AI without grasping the fundamentals can lead to long-term issues. I struggle with this a lot. Luckily, I have a lot of really smart friends who are engineers and are always willing to help.
• Skill Shifts: while vibe coding lowers the barrier to entry, skilled developers will still be needed to guide and collaborate with AI tools.
• Ethical Considerations: as AI-generated code becomes more powerful, we’ll need to address concerns around bias, responsibility, and transparency.

The future is… vibing?

Vibe coding won’t replace traditional programming overnight. But it’s definitely a game-changer. It has the potential to democratize software development, speed up innovation, and empower a new generation of creators. Like I’ve said before, “if it’s imaginable, it’s achievable.”

As we move forward, we need both excitement and a healthy dose of skepticism. Addressing the risks, refining the technology, and ensuring responsible usage will be key to unlocking its full potential.

Are you currently vibe coding?

The article originally appeared on Medium.

Featured image courtesy: Jacquelyn Halpern.

The post Vibe Coding: Is This How We’ll Build Software in the Future? appeared first on UX Magazine.

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Transcript

[00:00:19] Bob Dunn: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, rebranding Do the Woo, and growing openchannels.fm.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Bob Dunn. Bob is a long standing figure in the WordPress community, having branded himself as BobWP back in 2010. With nearly two decades of experience in WordPress, Bob has become one of the most recognizable voices in WordPress podcasting. Producing shows that have educated, inspired, and connected countless developers, builders, and enthusiasts.

Most recently, he launched Open Channels FM, a rebrand and expansion from his well-known Do the Woo podcast, which was originally focused on WooCommerce, but now explores broader topics around the open web, open source, and the wider maker community.

Bob talks about his journey in podcasting, from running Do the Woo for almost seven years to the decision to rebrand and launch Open Channels FM. He explains why he felt it was time to broaden the focus, welcoming listeners from outside of just the WooCommerce and WordPress ecosystem, and how that led to a network approach with multiple channels and series.

Bob describes how Open Channels is structured. Rather than traditional shows, the network features three flexible channels, Open Makers, Open Source Reach, and Open Web Conversations, each hosting a variety of series. This lets content stay organized and evergreen, and accommodates the 25 to 30 rotating hosts with the freedom to produce series across different topics.

Bob talks about the challenges, and rewards, of handing over the mic, stepping into a more of a managerial and founder role and how he’s building a sustainable, collaborative, podcasting network.

We discuss Bob’s technical approach as well, including how he uses WordPress to manage multiple RSS feeds and subscriptions, making it easy for listeners to follow specific channels or get the fire hose of all content.

Bob also shares insights on rebranding a podcast, managing redirects, retaining audiences, updating hundreds of featured images, and ensuring continuity without confusing listeners.

If you’re interested in open source podcasting, or building community driven content, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Bob Dunn.

[00:03:37] Nathan Wrigley: I am joined on the podcast by Bob Dunn. Hello Bob.

[00:03:40] Bob Dunn: Hey, hello Nathan. Great to be back.

[00:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much for joining me today. Bob and I have been chatting for quite a long time. Actually over many years, we’ve been chatting for quite a long time, because we’re both very, very, very into the exact same thing, and that is podcasting in the WordPress space.

Should anybody not have heard of you, Bob, I know it’s a bit of a generic question. Do you mind doing your little potted bio to tell us who you are, and what you’ve been doing?

[00:04:04] Bob Dunn: Been in business a long time. Two major businesses, branded myself, BobWP in 2010. Did a lot of stuff between then and now.

And, yeah, right now I am doing openchannels.fm. I’m running that, that is a podcast channels with, actually three channels, we’ll be explaining more about that. But yeah, I’ve just been in WordPress quite a while and I think since, oh, I don’t know, about 17, 18 years or so.

[00:04:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s a fairly long time. You were one of the voices, when I joined the WordPress space, you were the established podcast voice I think. There were a few, but not many. And there’s very few that have survived. You’ve managed to, turn a living out of podcasting in the WordPress space. So Bravo, well done.

[00:04:50] Bob Dunn: Thank you. Yeah, it’s been interesting. It’s something you just kind of keep going and, you know, doing it all yourself. It gets to a point where, yeah, it’s a lot of work, but it’s paid off.

[00:05:00] Nathan Wrigley: So a little while ago, I’m going to say about, I don’t know, six months ago, something like that, you can correct me in a moment. But for the longest period of time you’ve had Do the Woo. Prior to Do the Woo, there was a bunch of other naming conventions for your podcast. What was it that, in the most recent past, why did you decide to jettison Do the Woo and create openchannels?

Open channels, by the way, you can be found at openchannels.fm. There’s no hyphens or anything. It’s just as you’d imagine, openchannels.fm. Go and check that out. You’d be able to see what we’re talking about. What was the reasoning behind that?

[00:05:35] Bob Dunn: Yeah, so I actually did the rebrand early June. It was at WordCamp Europe, but I’d been thinking about it for about a year. So you have almost seven years under the belt with Do the Woo, and it started out as a WooCommerce focused podcasts. And over the years I added more WordPress into it.

And then over the last couple years I started talking about a bit more of the, you know, even outside the WordPress bubble. And I felt like something was always missing, because it’s kind of two-prong where WordPress developers, builders, a lot of our audience need to also be aware of other stuff that is going on around them. I’m not trying to push somebody one direction or another. It’s like just know stuff that is happening out there.

And then also for people that don’t know WooCommerce, expanding on that, trying to bring them in on other topics. They would look at WooCommerce or they look at WordPress and say, hey, you know, I’ve never really dug into them. I listen to a few of these.

The two major things that really, I had been chewing on for like, oh man, it had to be almost a year, was growth and sustainability of the site. And, you know, it worked great when it was really WooCommerce focus, but people had the impression that, if they know Woo, they’d look at it and say, oh, it’s a WooCommerce podcast. I’m not going to check it out because I’m not using WooCommerce.

And then of course, people that didn’t know anything about it, they would maybe think it’s, I don’t know, some wrapper or something. I don’t know what, you know, the title is like, it didn’t really define it. And of course they dig in a little bit, they learn what it is.

But, yeah, that was the impetus. It was like, I thought, man, it’s time to, as hard as it is to change a brand or even drop one that has worked for you, I thought we are moving more into content around the open web, open source, fediverse, all these different things. And I really want to make this something where, like I said before, people that don’t know WordPress or WooCommerce would come and listen to other stuff and maybe they’d check it out, maybe they don’t.

And then the WordPress people would continue, because we still have that content in there and they could learn about other stuff. They could learn about things that probably will really help their business even staying in WordPress. So I’m not, again, trying to push them out of it, it’s just open your mind a bit and learn new things.

[00:08:14] Nathan Wrigley: The wisdom that I often get when I read around the podcast industry, and if you are just a consumer of podcasts and you’ve never really dug into that industry, in the same way that WordPress has just a gigantic amount in the background, as soon as you prize open the can and realise that there’s this whole open source software, and there’s events and all of that, the same is true inside of podcasting. There’s a whole industry going on in the background that you may not realise is there.

And one of the pieces of sage advice which is often delivered, is to kind of niche down when you are beginning your podcast. Because obviously, you are going to be a small fish in a very big pond. And so the more specific that you can get, the more likely you are to build up that audience over time.

And so I’m guessing that that’s kind why you went with Do the Woo? So that it was pretty clear at the beginning, okay, we’re really focusing on Woo. So have you noticed that the pivot away from that, so from Do the Woo as a name, even though there was more content in there, to this much more open channel, so open source, whatever that might cover. Has your audience kind of, and I don’t really want to use the word forgiven, maybe I want to use the words, gone with you.

Have they come across that brand transition willingly, or do you sense that some people have, you know, lost interest because now it’s not just Do the Woo? Because that’s, I suppose, something you have to be mindful of.

[00:09:29] Bob Dunn: Yeah. You know, I’m sure some have maybe decided differently, but the interesting thing is how I built it and how I, even after the launch, reorganised it even more, is that all the content that was on there is still on there and continues to be on there. And so as I looked at how can I best organise it, I first put it into like five shows, and it still didn’t quite make sense and gel. So I thought, well, what if I do three channels, and I have an open source reach channel, an open web conversations channel, and an open makers channel.

A lot of the WordPress and Woo stuff went under the open makers channel. So now we still have series, like three or four series on WordPress. At least three series on WooCommerce, and then a variety of other stuff. So the thing was to get people convinced, and when I talked to a lot of people and I was at WordCamp Europe, you know, it’s like, it’s basically the brand is changing, we’re expanding, but the stuff you’ve been listening to is not going away.

And I have to really emphasise that. And it’s, yeah, there’s a bit where you think, oh, you know, am I going to lose it? But then they may come back, they may actually see that, yes, this is still existing, you know, getting this stuff out in front of people. And also, there will be now newer people that will, instead of looking at a name, Do the Woo and thinking, hmm, what do I do? Something like open channels, even though it is a lot broader, might interest them a little bit more.

[00:10:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there’s definitely the ability to tap into a new audience. So this podcast, WP Tavern, it has one show. And on a weekly basis we have a show and, you know, it’s me talking to somebody else. And I guess Do the Woo was a bit more like that. There was this one show and it would drop with a regular cadence and what have you.

And it may have escaped people because we didn’t really introduce it as such. But open channels is not that formula is it? It’s more of a, kind of like a network, I suppose, for want of a better word. You’ve got your own mini kind of network of podcasts. So let’s just dig into that a little bit. So you’ve iterated it a bit. You started with maybe three shows and now it’s up to however many, we’ll get into that. Do you just want to go through what all of the different shows are, and broadly what they cover?

[00:11:41] Bob Dunn: Yeah, so what happened is during this whole time of change, and some of this even happened before June, was that I had a whole bunch of shows. So you go to the thing and you’d see like, I don’t know, there was like 15 shows or something. And it seemed a bit too much to me. You’d go there and it’d be like, whoa, you know? Realistic, you’d think, okay, you’d find the show you like and stuff and listen to it.

But as I was expanding the content I launched on June 5th with, there’s a website, there’s five shows and there’s some series under those five shows. And that still didn’t gel after I started getting in there and start rebranding it and working on it deeper, and I’m still working on it. I realised that what I’d like to do is eliminate the aspect of a show, so when they go there, it’s open channels, so it’s plural.

You’ve got the three channels that I mentioned, and underneath all of those are series. So there’s several. Some of them, there’s quite a few series under open makers. There’s some under the other two channels. And the reason I did that is channels are a lot more flexible, and also series are incredibly flexible. If you have a show and you stop it, it’s like, bam, you know, people, oh, where did that go?

And I thought, what if I had these three umbrella channels that I could put series in? I could start them up. Some of them have been going on forever. Some may just go on a few months, but they’re part of that whole stream under that channel.

Now everybody can go there and get all the podcasts that come in, or they can actually subscribe to the three channels.

But the series are just a variety under it. And I haven’t really, the series are often focused more when they happen, the name of the series. I mean, I decided putting all the series on the site would just confuse people more. It’d be like, oh, what?

Then they can go through and they’ll see, you know, if they look through the episodes, they’ll see the various series. I mean, there’s, under open makers, there’s Woo Product Chat, there’s WP Behind the Builds, there’s WP Agency Tracks. And a lot of those were pre-existing. And so the other channels as well will have specific series under it, like Open Web Conversations has a series on the fediverse. One is on, oh man, I should have written some of this down. I can’t even remember all the series.

Anyway, there’s a few under that and there’s a few under open source. And what the beauty of it is too with as many hosts as we have now, I don’t know if it’s like around 25 to 30 hosts. They can pop around in different channels and under different series, or they come up with an idea for a show and we basically do it, and I say, okay, where should I pop that under? I can pop it under a series. It just makes it a lot more flexible.

Talking about it makes it sound more confusing. Going to the site is a bit more cohesive. But the feedback I got from a lot of people, they loved the idea of the organisation and they loved the idea of expanding into more of the open web and open source stuff.

[00:15:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well, let’s get into that bit in a minute. But let’s just stick to the consumption of open channels. So if you go and subscribe in a podcast player, so, you know, typically on a phone or something like that, to this podcast, WP Tavern, it’s fairly straightforward. You either drop in the RSS feed, which is, you know, available, or you can type in WP Tavern, and that’s then saved. And every episode that we produce, including this one, will appear when it’s published.

How are you doing it for openchannels.fm? Because you’ve obviously got three channels, and then there’s different shows and series which live under that. How is it consumed? Is there just one overall RSS feed which will get you the lot? Or can you say, okay, I only want to, I don’t know, consume the stuff about the open makers or the open web conversations? How does it work?

[00:15:55] Bob Dunn: Yeah. What I’ve done is, you can, if you want the fire hose, you can go to openchannels.fm, it has its own feed, and then I do the feed for each of the channels. Like you said, open makers, open source and open web conversations. I thought of going down even more to every series, but I thought that just confuses people more so, you know, it encapsulates what each of those channels are about.

I mean, open makers is, somebody said, yeah, you know, it’s about people in tech making stuff. You make stuff, even if it’s WordPress only. Sometimes it’s interesting to hear how other people are making stuff. And it opens it enough where it’s long, that long funnel of people that make things, you know, whether the developer, designer, their marketing stuff, whatever.

And so that was, yeah, I think that’s the best way to have people subscribe is, you know, they can get it all. But they can look at the three channels too. So if they go on their pod thing and look for open web conversations, that’s primarily what they’re interested in. What we’re talking about there, they can subscribe to that.

[00:17:04] Nathan Wrigley: Just from a, well, it’s not particularly technical, but from a slightly technical point of view, how do you manage that? If memory serves you’re using Castos, which is a sort of self-hosted, it’s a WordPress plugin, which binds your RSS feed into your WordPress website, but also carries the functionality to have different series and episodes all within the same WordPress website. I might have been kind of promoting that a bit, and it’s not the solution that you used, but I think it is.

[00:17:29] Bob Dunn: Yeah, it is. And so what it allows you to do, I could have actually created feeds for each series, but then I thought, is that going too granular? I mean, are you looking at all this stuff and thinking, so Open Web channel is like the default channel, I mean, openchannels.fm. Then you create three feeds for three shows or channels, which are the other three. And then when I do a series, I just choose to put it under whichever channel it should fall under.

[00:18:01] Nathan Wrigley: Right, okay. So you’ve basically got three places to go and update, and you can handle all of that in the WordPress admin and what have you. I should probably say that there’s a SaaS equivalent as well. You don’t have to use WordPress to make that happen, but it’s so tightly integrated with WordPress, it kind of makes sense.

The other curious thing about it though is that for the longest time we were really familiar with you as a real significant piece of that jigsaw puzzle. You know, Bob would do the episodes. It is always Bob, in the same way that there’s always me on this. But with this, I think you said now you’re up to, did you say 25 or 15 co-hosts, something?

[00:18:36] Bob Dunn: 25-30 hosts.

[00:18:38] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s a lot. So you’ve got 25 other people who are helping you create the content. In effect, they have become you for these shows. They are the host, if you like, and they’re then interviewing people, and talking about whatever that episode may be about.

How are you coping with that? How are you coping with no longer being behind the mic? And you’ve basically become a bit of a manager for a podcast network, which is curious.

[00:18:59] Bob Dunn: Yeah. Yeah, I’d like to, you know, I was talking to somebody about this and to me it was, it ended up being a goal that I didn’t know I wanted it to be a goal. You know, as I started to step back, I thought, well, you know, I’ve talked a lot over the years, I mean, more than anybody ever wanted to hear. I thought, well, maybe, you know, it’s time to get some other voices out there.

For the time being, I’m still doing the opening, but I keep myself as forefront as, I guess you call founder or whatever, of the podcast channel. And I’m cool with it. I love hearing the different opinions. It just was a shift for me at some point where I had no problem with it. And I think testing it in the beginning, I think the first three, so I brought on Brad Williams at the very beginning, because I didn’t want to do it by myself. We were just doing co-hosts and then we continued for a while.

Then I brought on, later on I brought on Mendel Kurland, which at the time was GoDaddy, and Jonathan Wold who at the time, he was at WooCommerce, and now he has his own thing going on. And I would still be part of it, so it was the four of us. But I started liking the idea when I wasn’t part of it. It was fun to see somebody else take and run with it.

And so over that period of years, I became more and more confident with people. Now, it’s basically, unless I have an idea for a guest, a lot of them choose our guests. They choose a topic because they’ve done this long enough. They know what I like to hear. They know what not to do and to do. I keep it pretty open for them. And they love that freedom because they don’t have to, you know, they come in, they do the recording, all the production stuff is not their responsibility.

And I think it’s also helped them to get to know each other more. They’ve gotten to know other guests. It’s built their brands some, I hope. And it became a point where I was just like, I thought this is it, this just works. And I’ve been really lucky with the hosts I’ve had, because they’ve been excellent. I never have problems. I mean, it just is a nice flow and they’ve all become good friends and, yeah, it works.

[00:21:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think if you were looking at it from the outside, there are so many trip wires there where you think, well, that, couldn’t work. You know, 25 hosts, multiple shows, yeah, okay. Good luck with that.

But obviously, the history that you’ve got doing the shows and turning up to WordPress events, presumably you kind of knew most of these people fairly well already, so you had that rapport and trust with each other.

But it’s a lot to trust them to just get on with it. To be able to say, okay, here’s the time slot, go off, get your guests and then just hand me the recording at the end, I’ve got complete trust in you.

But it does sound like you’ve still got your fingers in there a little bit with the kind of like the post-production and the editing, and finally making the episode into what it is and all of that, and shipping it. Do you ever see yourself stepping out to the point where you don’t even do that, where it’s just, there’s just this network?

[00:22:05] Bob Dunn: You know, I’d really like to kind of just have the role as founder. I mean, I’ve done a production and I’ve done this for, when we ran our other business before WordPress, the life and WordPress and stuff, we basically did everything, we didn’t have employees. So I’ve been doing this like over three decades.

You know, I am at a point where, no, I think it’s time to step back from some of this production stuff. I would like to because it, yeah, it buries you. And when it picks up and you have quite a few shows in a row or something, there’s some serious work to do. And I get a little too over picky with editing, probably somebody could do it a lot quicker. I mean, I, it drives me nuts sometimes. I’m thinking, why am I spending this much time on it?

But, yeah, I definitely am looking at some ways of doing that over the next few months. And looking at some other opportunities, but want to still be part of this, because it’s still my baby.

[00:23:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that’s incredible to have that level of trust. I’ve never yet managed to have that relationship where I thought that I wanted to step away. I think for me, the bit that I enjoy more than anything else is this bit that we’re doing now, the bit I’m having a chat with somebody. I really do like the one to one, or one to few. So the most I do is 2, 3, 4 really is the sort of ceiling, and that’s the bit that I like most.

And so the bit that you’ve stepped into, curiously, would be something that I would not really wish to be involved in. I’d rather just hand that off to somebody, but I do know what you mean.

You have a perfectionist approach to the editing, and you can be halfway through it and think, I’ve just spent six hours and all I’ve done is remove empty space that nobody would’ve noticed. Anyway, it can be curious.

So are you still iterating? Are you still willing to take on some new voices? Are you still open to people approaching you?

[00:23:57] Bob Dunn: Yeah, we are. Because I think with this new brand, it’s kind of, before I get into that, I was just going to mention is that when you rebrand, I’m finding there’s a ton of work with post rebranding, and another one of my picky little, I don’t know what you want to call it, is I started looking at the site and I thought, well, I want this site to reflect the new brand a hundred percent. I don’t want people to go back and get confused.

I’ve been changing the featured images on 670 episodes with the new brand. And, you know, that’s just, again, that’s me. But I want, it was quite a shift in rebranding and I want to make sure that, when they even go back, they see that, yes, I’m still on the same podcast, you know, I’m still on the same site so. Now I’ve lost track of what you asked.

[00:24:45] Nathan Wrigley: No, it’s okay. I’m actually going to pivot and just ask you a quick technical question, which is, did you close down your previous RSS feed, and rely on people finding the new one, or is there some clever way of moving people over?

[00:24:58] Bob Dunn: Yeah, you have to redirect it basically. It’s not a lot of steps, but it’s steps that if you don’t do it in the right order, it can really pretty much screw up everything. And right now, I am having a bit of challenge with some of the stuff moving over on Apple and the feeds and stuff, and I just put in a support question with them.

But you basically, eventually I’ll shut down a show called Content Sparks and Do The Woo. Because they were, they’re now under Open Makers as a series, but I kind of got to make sure all the things are connected and working smoothly. So it’s something, if anybody ever does this, whoever’s hosting your podcast, talk to them and ask them questions until you feel confident to be able to do steps one through five, without blowing up your whole podcast.

[00:25:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s a bit like when you move a website, there’s loads of different bits and pieces that you’ve got to get right and in the correct order so that, I don’t know, your email carries on sending, and all the posts that you desperately want to be still in the search engine results, that kind of thing. Yeah, there’s a lot of hoops to jump through.

In fact, so much so that a few kind of pivot ideas that I’ve had, not around WP Tavern, but around other podcasts that I do, I’ve kind of backed away just because the technical challenge was just not worth the time investment for the minor thing that I wanted to do.

Anyway, the question, returning to where we got to. The question was, are you still open to modifying what you do or have you solidified for a little period of time? In other words, if somebody catches sight of your podcast or listens to this one and thinks, do you know what I could contribute? I’ve got an idea in the open space that I would like to contribute. Are you still open to new hosts or is it really just guests now? Have you solidified on the hosts? Where are you at with all that?

[00:26:36] Bob Dunn: You know, the hosts, I think the hosts that are on it right now, they always have the option. I mean, they volunteer their time. I’m hoping they get rewarded by, you know, brand and exposure. And I know a lot of them have met a lot of people and built relationships that they never would’ve been able to because they actually talked with someone.

So that’s another reason this particular structure of it now is so great because it’s so fluid. So it’s easy. If somebody comes in and has an idea, and it kind of gels and I think, okay, this is great, or maybe it exists with an idea I already have going or a series I do. Yeah, I’m always open to that because, you know, and some people kind of serve as, I don’t want to say substitute hosts, but they’re kind of there if I need to grab somebody, or I have an idea and it’s like, I need somebody to host this and this person would be good.

So, yeah, kind of a long answer there, but I’m always open, because this is not, this is a reason to change this is to keep it fluid and make it sustainable basically, where it can continue to grow.

[00:27:42] Nathan Wrigley: So definitely not closed, but you’re happy with where things are at the moment. If the status quo was to continue, that would be great. But, you know, new voices is possible.

Again, not just with the personnel, are you kind of fairly happy with the structure that you’ve got, the three channels that you’ve got now? Have you solidified more? Because it sounds like there’s, you know, been a couple of months of chopping and changing over there. Do you think you’ll stick with what you’ve got?

[00:28:02] Bob Dunn: Yeah, I think that’s definitely, it’s where it is because, like I said, I did something completely different in the rebrand in June, and since then I did something different again.

I think what happens is, when you rebrand and you start restructuring, what you thought was the right structure, you start looking at it and you think, oh, maybe this isn’t quite right. Maybe I should do it this way.

And so I talked to several people. Getting some opinions, it’s nice because sometimes I’m inside my own head and it’s like, I need somebody to tell me if I’m just stupid or it’s a wild idea or, yeah, this is good. So, yeah, I like the three structured channels because it gives me so much flexibility under those.

[00:28:45] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s pretty remarkable what you’ve managed to do. You know, you went from just many, many, many years ago, just beginning a podcast. And just hacking away at that for years and years and years. And now you’ve got this, kind of like little mini network.

But also, I’m getting the intuition, I could be wrong about this, but I get the intuition that you’ve leaned into the word open so that you are no longer limited to just WordPress as a project. Is that the case? Are you going to be leaning into just other open source things, whether that’s other CMSs or, I don’t know, anything in the open source space? Is that in fact the case?

[00:29:19] Bob Dunn: Yeah, you know, I think what it is, in fact I was just talking to somebody, person that does accessibility, she wants to bring on somebody from Joomla and talk about accessibility because she’s under the open source channel. And exactly that. The impact of open source has been so huge and WordPress has been at the core of it. And WordPress will still be a big part of this podcast or this channels. And, yeah, I feel it’s healthy for my hosts. It’s healthy for everybody that listens, and everybody in the WordPress to hear about other stuff.

You know, it just opens your mind. It has you thinking more about things and knowing what’s out there. And sometimes maybe you think, well, you know, I’m burned out on WordPress, but you hear some other stuff and you think, well, maybe it’s not so bad. You get a big picture of the open source and open web.

[00:30:11] Nathan Wrigley: There’s certainly no shortage of things to talk about if you go into open. I mean, obviously WordPress is such a large niche that you really can talk about that until the cows come home. But the you prize open the can of open source, you know, you really are a hundred x’ing the amount of things that you can talk about. So that’s kind of really nice that you can, well, you’ve basically got an infinite horizon of content to make in the near and distant future. And I don’t suppose open source is going anywhere in the short, medium, or long term. It’ll still be around.

Okay, speaking of short, medium, and long term, if you’ve taken yourself away from the mic on every occasion to being in a few, and then kind of now being in the minority of things, and we talked about how you enjoy kind of managing the whole thing, even though it sounds like there’s a lot of shepherding cats, let’s put it that way, in the background.

Is the intention for you to sort of get to the point where you can be invisible in this, well, certainly from a public facing point of view. You wouldn’t have your voice in any of them at some point, and you would be able to, I guess, silently kind of move away. Is this like an end game here? What’s going on?

[00:31:14] Bob Dunn: No, you know, I think I’m going to be involved, and the thing was built on my brand really. And I need to stay and keep my fingers in whatever way works for me. And, you know, I’m, I just turned 68, and I’m ready to do other things every once in a while like sit on a rock on the beach and look the water. You know, important things like that.

But no, it’s, I like looking at it as still being the face of it, but maybe, can I say not so much the voice of it? I’m out there, I’m still, you know, a huge part of it, and probably as long as I have my fingers in it, I’ll occasionally do little short podcasts. Right now, I do some on the updates on the site and, you know, I might even whip up something like, you know, thoughts from the founder, I don’t know.

[00:32:03] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I like it, yeah.

[00:32:05] Bob Dunn: Yeah, something like that. So there’s, I don’t want to just become invisible because it really, how a lot of people have known this, and how I’ve built it is through my personal brand, and I think that’s important to stay intact with it. So I’m not going away anytime soon. And yeah, just need to reevaluate how many hours I put into it and how I can make it, again, more productive and sustainable. Because, you know, if I’m sick, who’s to do the production?

[00:32:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. When it was just you, you could just say, well, I’m not to record that one. I’ll just skip a week. But now that you’ve got like these 25 other hosts, you’ve got to kind of manage all of that. Oh, that’s really interesting. And of course, you’ve got to put time in the calendar to sit on the rock on the beach as well.

[00:32:47] Bob Dunn: Yeah, I know. I’ve got to get that in there, you know. It’s very important.

[00:32:52] Nathan Wrigley: How does this whole thing hang together from a financial point of view then? So is it a sponsorship relationship? Do you onboard sponsors to keep the whole thing, because obviously, you know, it’s trying to, you’re trying to support yourself in all of this. How does that work?

[00:33:03] Bob Dunn: Yeah, it’s basically sponsorship. And the sponsorship model, but ever since I started this podcast, in fact, before I started this one and did another one before that, I started having sponsors right away.

And if your podcast is your main source of income, you got to have something. So yeah, it’s sponsorships. I am sure you relate to it yourself. And, you know, unless you’re famous and they just roll in, or you can get like a million subscribers paying $5 a month or something like that.

So, yeah, we’re constantly looking for sponsors. And I’ve changed the model so many times over the years. And it’ll probably change a little bit here again soon. So it’s never capped at a certain number. That might be capped for a period of time. But, yeah, it’s a constant flex and it’s hard work. And that’s all I can say.

[00:33:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I will just drop the URL for that. So if you’re interested from this conversation, if you’re interested in getting on as a sponsor for the openchannels.fm network, it’s the regular URL, openchannels.fm, but then append to the end of that, /sponsors, plural, or you can just find it in the main menu at the top of the site. That will also get you there and, yeah, you’ll be able to find out more about how you might make the journey into sponsoring that podcast.

Well, Bob, I know that you are a busy man. You’ve got 25 cohosts to shepherd and lots of editing to do, and dare I say it, sitting on a rock on the beach is also going to feature at some point during the day as well.

So thank you so much for chatting to me today. Once more, if you want to check out what Bob is doing with all of his co-hosts and his new structure, go to openchannels.fm to find out more. Bob Dunn, thank you so much for chatting to me today.

[00:34:47] Bob Dunn: Thank you. Always a pleasure.

On the podcast today we have Bob Dunn.

Bob is a long-standing figure in the WordPress community, having branded himself as BobWP back in 2010. With nearly two decades of experience in WordPress, Bob has become one of the most recognisable voices in WordPress podcasting, producing shows that have educated, inspired, and connected countless developers, builders, and enthusiasts. Most recently, he’s launched Open Channels FM, a rebrand and expansion from his well-known “Do the Woo” podcast, which was originally focused on WooCommerce but now explores broader topics around the open web, open source, and the wider maker community.

Bob talks about his journey in podcasting, from running Do the Woo for almost seven years, to the decision to rebrand and launch Open Channels FM. He explains why he felt it was time to broaden the focus, welcoming listeners from outside of just the WooCommerce and WordPress ecosystem, and how that led to a network approach with multiple channels and series.

Bob describes how Open Channels is structured. Rather than traditional shows, the ‘network’ features three flexible channels, Open Makers, Open Source Reach, and Open Web Conversations, each hosting a variety of series. This lets content stay organised and evergreen, and accommodates the 25 to 30 rotating hosts with the freedom to produce series across different topics.

Bob talks about the challenges and rewards of handing over the mic, stepping into more of a managerial and founder role, and how he’s building a sustainable, collaborative podcasting network.

We discuss Bob’s technical approach as well, including how he uses WordPress to manage multiple RSS feeds and subscriptions, making it easy for listeners to follow specific channels, or get the firehose of all content. Bob also shares insights on rebranding a podcast, managing redirects, retaining audiences, updating hundreds of featured images, and ensuring continuity without confusing listeners.

If you’re interested in open source, podcasting, or building community-driven content, this episode is for you.

Useful links

BobWP website

openchannels.fm

Castos

Sponsor Open Channels FM

Design career origin stories often sound clean and linear: a degree in Fine Arts, a lucky internship, or a first job that launches a linear, upward path. But what about those whose paths were not so straight? The ones who came from service, retail, construction, or even firefighting — the messy, winding paths that didn’t begin right out of design school — who learned service instincts long before learning design tools?

I earned my Associate in Science way later than planned, after 15 years in fine dining, which I once dismissed as a detour delaying my “real” career. But in hindsight, it was anything but. Those years built skills and instincts I still rely on daily — in meetings, design reviews, and messy mid-project pivots.

Your Past Is Your Advantage

I still have the restaurant dream.

Whenever I’m overwhelmed or deep in a deadline, it comes back: I’m the only one running the restaurant floor. The grill is on fire. There’s no clean glassware. Everyone needs their check, their drink, and their table turned. I wake up sweating, and I ask myself, “Why am I still having restaurant nightmares 15 years into a design career?”

Because those jobs wired themselves into how I think and work.

Those years weren’t just a job but high-stakes training in adaptability, anticipation, and grace under pressure. They built muscle memory: ways of thinking, reacting, and solving problems that still appear daily in my design work. They taught me to adapt, connect with people, and move with urgency and grace.

But those same instincts rooted in nightmares can trip you up if you’re unaware. Speed can override thoughtfulness. Constant anticipation can lead to over-complication. The pressure to polish can push you to over-deliver too soon. Embracing your past also means examining it — recognizing when old habits serve you and when they don’t.

With reflection, those experiences can become your greatest advantage.

Lessons From The Line

These aren’t abstract comparisons. They’re instincts built through repetition and real-world pressure, and they show up daily in my design process.

Here are five moments from restaurant life that shaped how I think, design, and collaborate today.

1. Reading The Room

Reading a customer’s mood begins as soon as they sit down. Through years of trial and error, I refined my understanding of subtle cues, like seating delays indicating frustration or menus set aside, suggesting they want to enjoy cocktails. Adapting my approach based on these signals became instinctual, emerging from countless moments of observation.

What I Learned

The subtleties of reading a client aren’t so different in product design. Contexts differ, but the cues remain similar: project specifics, facial expressions, tone of voice, lack of engagement, or even the “word salad” of client feedback. With time, these signals become easier to spot, and you learn to ask better questions, challenge assumptions, or offer alternate approaches before misalignment grows. Whether a client is energized and all-in or hesitant and constrained, reading those cues early can make all the difference.

Those instincts — like constant anticipation and early intervention — served me well in fine dining, but can hinder the design process if I’m not in tune with how I’m reacting. Jumping in too early can lead to over-complicating the design process, solving problems that haven’t been voiced (yet), or stepping on others’ roles. I’ve had to learn to pause, check in with the team, and trust the process to unfold more collaboratively.

How I Apply This Today

• Guide direction with focused options.
  Early on, share 2–3 meaningful variations, like style tiles or small component explorations, to shape the conversation and avoid overwhelm.
• Flag misalignment fast.
  If something feels off, raise it early and loop in the right people.
• Be intentional about workshop and deliverable formats.
  Structure or space? Depends on what helps the client open up and share.
• Pause before jumping in.
  A sticky note on my screen (“Pause”) helps me slow down and check assumptions.

2. Speed Vs. Intentionality

In fine dining, multitasking wasn’t just helpful, it was survival. Every night demanded precision timing, orchestrating every meal step, from the first drink poured to the final dessert plated. The soufflé, for example, was a constant test. It takes precisely 45 minutes — no more, no less. If the guests lingered over appetizers or finished their entrées too early, that soufflé risked collapse.

But fine dining taught me how to handle that volatility. I learned to manage timing proactively, mastering small strategies: an amuse-bouche to buy the kitchen precious minutes, a complimentary glass of champagne to slow a too-quickly paced meal. Multitasking meant constantly adjusting in real-time, keeping a thousand tiny details aligned even when, behind the scenes, chaos loomed.

What I Learned

Multitasking is a given in product design, just in a different form. While the pressure is less immediate, it is more layered as designers often juggle multiple projects, overlapping timelines, differing stakeholder expectations, and evolving product needs simultaneously. That restaurant instinct to keep numerous plates spinning at the same time? It’s how I handle shifting priorities, constant Slack pings, regular Figma updates, and unexpected client feedback — without losing sight of the big picture.

The hustle and pace of fine dining hardwired me to associate speed with success. But in design, speed can sometimes undermine depth. Jumping too quickly into a solution might mean missing the real problem or polishing the wrong idea. I’ve learned that staying in motion isn’t always the goal. Unlike a fast-paced service window, product design invites experimentation and course correction. I’ve had to quiet the internal timer and lean into design with a slower, more intentional nature.

How I Apply This Today

• Make space for inspiration.
  Set aside time for untasked exploration outside the norm — magazines, bookstores, architecture, or gallery visits — before jumping into design.
• Build in pause points.
  Plan breaks between design rounds and schedule reviews after a weekend gap to return with fresh eyes.
• Stay open to starting over.
  Let go of work that isn’t working, even full comps. Starting fresh often leads to better ideas.

3. Presentation Matters

Presentation isn’t just a finishing touch in fine dining — it’s everything. It’s the mint leaf delicately placed atop a dessert, the raspberry glace cascading across the perfectly off-centered espresso cake.

The presentation engages every sense: the smell of rare imported truffles on your truffle fries, or the meticulous choreography of four servers placing entrées in front of diners simultaneously, creating a collective “wow” moment. An excellent presentation shapes diners’ emotional connection with their meal — that experience directly impacts how generously they spend, and ultimately, your success.

What I Learned

A product design presentation, from the initial concept to the handoff, carries that same power. Introducing a new homepage design can feel mechanical or magical, depending entirely on how you frame and deliver it. Just like careful plating shapes a diner’s experience, clear framing and confident storytelling shape how design is received.

Beyond the initial introduction, explain the why behind your choices. Connect patterns to the organic elements of the brand’s identity and highlight how users will intuitively engage with each section. Presentation isn’t just about aesthetics; it helps clients connect with the work, understand its value, and get excited to share it.

The pressure to get everything right the first time, to present a pixel-perfect comp that “wows” immediately, is intense.

Sometimes, an excellent presentation isn’t about perfection — it’s about pacing, storytelling, and allowing the audience to see themselves in the work.

I’ve had to let go of the idea that polish is everything and instead focus on the why, describing it with clarity, confidence, and connection.

How I Apply This Today

• Frame the story first.
  Lead with the “why” behind the work before showing the “what”. It sets the tone and invites clients into the design.
• Keep presentations polished.
  Share fewer, more intentional concepts to reduce distractions and keep focus.
• Skip the jargon.
  Clients aren’t designers. Use clear, relatable terms. Say “section” instead of “component,” or “repeatable element” instead of “pattern.”
• Bring designs to life.
  Use motion, prototypes, and real content to add clarity, energy, and brand relevance.

5. Composure Under Pressure

In fine dining, pressure isn’t an occasional event — it’s the default setting. Every night is high stakes. Timing is tight, expectations are sky-high, and mistakes are rarely forgiven. Composure becomes your edge. You don’t show panic when the kitchen is backed up or when a guest sends a dish back mid-rush. You pivot. You delegate. You anticipate. Some nights, the only thing that kept things on track was staying calm and thinking clearly.

“This notion of problem solving and decision making is key to being a great designer. I think that we need to get really strong at problem identification and then prioritization. All designers are good problem solvers, but the really great designers are strong problem finders.”

— Jason Cyr, “How being a firefighter made me a better designer thinker”

What I Learned

The same principle applies to product design. When pressure mounts — tight timelines, conflicting feedback, or unclear priorities — your ability to stay composed can shift the energy of the entire project.

Composure isn’t just about being calm; it’s about being adaptable and responsive without reacting impulsively. It helps you hold space for feedback, ask better questions, and move forward with clarity instead of chaos.

There have also been plenty of times when a client doesn’t resonate with a design, which can feel crushing. You can easily take it personally and internalize the rejection, or you can pause, listen, and course-correct. I’ve learned to focus on understanding the root of the feedback. Often, what seems like a rejection is just discomfort with a small detail, which in most cases can be easily corrected.

Perfection was the baseline in restaurants, and pressure drove polish. In design, that mindset can lead to overinvesting in perfection too soon or “freezing” under critique. I’ve had to unlearn that success means getting everything right the first time. Now I see messy collaboration and gradual refinement as a mark of success, not failure.

How I Apply This Today

• Use live design to unblock.
  When timelines are tight and feedback goes in circles, co-designing in real time helps break through stuck points and move forward quickly.
• Turn critique into clarity.
  Listen for what’s underneath the feedback, then ask clarifying questions, or repeat back what you’re hearing to align before acting.
• Pause when stress builds.
  If you feel reactive, take a moment to regroup before responding.
• Frame changes as progress.
  Normalize iteration as part of the process, and not a design failure.

Would I Go Back?

I still dream about the restaurant floor. But now, I see it as a reminder — not of where I was stuck, but of where I perfected the instincts I use today. If you’re someone who came to design from another path, try asking yourself:

• When do I feel strangely at ease while others panic?
• What used to feel like “just part of the job,” but now feels like a superpower?
• Where do I get frustrated because my instincts are different — and maybe sharper?
• What kinds of group dynamics feel easy to me that others struggle with?
• What strengths would not exist in me today if I hadn’t lived that past life?

Once you see the patterns, start using them.

Name your edge. Talk about your background as an asset: in intros, portfolios, interviews, or team retrospectives. When projects get messy, lean into what you already know how to do. Trust your instincts. They’re real, and they’re earned. But balance them, too. Stay aware of when your strengths could become blind spots, like speed overriding thoughtfulness. That kind of awareness turns experience into a tool, not a trigger.

Your past doesn’t need to look like anyone else’s. It just needs to teach you something.

Further Reading

• “If I Was Starting My Career Today: Thoughts After 15 Years Spent In UX Design” (Part One, Part Two), by Andrii Zhdan (Smashing Magazine)
  In this two-part series, Andrii Zhdan outlines common challenges faced at the start of a design career and offers advice to smooth your journey based on insights from his experience hiring designers.
• “Overcoming Imposter Syndrome By Developing Your Own Guiding Principles,” by Luis Ouriach (Smashing Magazine)
  Unfortunately, not everyone has access to a mentor or a guide at the start of the design career, which is why we often have to rely on “working it out” by ourselves. In this article, Luis Ouriach tries to help you in this task so that you can walk into the design critique meetings with more confidence and really deliver the best representation of your ideas.
• “Why Designers Get Stuck In The Details And How To Stop,” by Nikita Samutin (Smashing Magazine)
  Designers love to craft, but polishing pixels before the problem is solved is a time sink. This article pinpoints the five traps that lure us into premature detail and then hands you a rescue plan to refocus on goals, ship faster, and keep your craft where it counts.
• “Rediscovering The Joy Of Design,” by Pratik Joglekar (Smashing Magazine)
  Pratik Joglekar takes a philosophical approach to remind designers about the lost joy within themselves by effectively placing massive importance on mindfulness, introspection, and forward-looking.
• “Lessons Learned As A Designer-Founder,” by Dave Feldman (Smashing Magazine)
  In this article, Dave Feldman shares his lessons learned and the experiments he has done as a multidisciplinary designer-founder-CEO at an early-stage startup.
• “How Designers Should Ask For (And Receive) High-Quality Feedback,” by Andy Budd (Smashing Magazine)
  Designers often complain about the quality of feedback they get from senior stakeholders without realizing it’s usually because of the way they initially have framed the request. In this article, Andy Budd shares a better way of requesting feedback: rather than sharing a linear case study that explains every design revision, the first thing to do would be to better frame the problem.
• “How being a Firefighter made me a better Designer Thinker“ by Jason Cyr (Medium)
  The ability to come upon a situation and very quickly start evaluating information, asking questions, making decisions, and formulating a plan is a skill that every firefighter learns to develop, especially as you rise through the ranks and start leading others.
• “Advice for making the most of an indirect career path to design,” by Heidi Meredith (Adobe Express Growth)
  I didn’t know anything about design until after I graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a degree in English Literature/Creative Writing. A mere three months into it, though, I realized I didn't want to write books — I wanted to design them.

I want to express my deep gratitude to Sara Wachter-Boettcher, whose coaching helped me find the clarity and confidence to write this piece — and, more importantly, to move forward with purpose in both life and work. And to Lea Alcantara, my design director at Fueled, for being a steady creative force and an inspiring example of thoughtful leadership.

Recently, I found over 18,000 spam entries had flooded one of my lead generation forms overnight.

And more kept coming, which meant trouble. If I emailed all those fake addresses, it would have increased my email bounce rate – the percentage of emails that don’t get delivered to recipients’ inboxes.

A higher bounce rate damages my sender reputation with email providers, meaning even my emails to legitimate subscribers could end up in spam folders.

So, I immediately looked into what was happening. I had created this lead form a few years ago, but never updated it. This mistake was now threatening my entire email marketing operation.

Fortunately, I was able to stop the attack within about 10 minutes.

Here’s exactly what I did.

My 10-Minute Hack to Fix Lead Spam Issue!

How can you protect a lead generation form in just 10 minutes… without making it harder for real people to sign up?

Most people use CAPTCHA to block spam. But when it comes to lead generation forms, the problem is that CAPTCHA can annoy visitors and stop them from joining your email list.

I didn’t want that.

I needed a way to keep our signup form easy for real users, but hard for spammers. So, I looked for a better way to STOP fake signups… one that worked in the background and didn’t bother our real readers.

Fortunately, this is where WPForms‘ spam protection features came in really handy and saved the day.

Here’s what I did to fix the problem while still getting real leads.

Step 1: Turn On Modern Anti-Spam Protection

The first thing I did was enable the modern anti-spam protection setting.

This tool quietly works in the background to spot and block spam bots, so real users don’t even notice it’s there.

Plus, they don’t have to do anything extra.

It’s the easiest first step you can take.

To turn it on, you need to edit your form in the WPForms builder.

Go to Settings » Spam Protection and Security.

Next, just click the toggle to enable the ‘modern anti-spam protection’ option. It’s that simple.

This one change immediately blocked a huge number of automated POST requests.

Step 2: Add Rate Limiting & Block

After enabling modern anti-spam, I wanted to add an extra layer of protection for even more security.

Spammers are always finding new ways to target forms, often by sending repeated submissions from the same IP address or email domains. Their aim is to flood your site with as many fake entries as possible, as quickly as they can.

If you let that happen, you could end up with hundreds or even thousands of fake submissions in a matter of hours.

Rate limiting stops this kind of abuse in its tracks. By capping the number of entries allowed from a single IP or email address, you can block these repetitive spam attempts without touching legitimate users.

To switch it on, you need to go to Settings » Form Locker in the WPForms form builder.

Then, toggle the switch next to the ‘Enable User Entry Limit’ option located under Entry Limits & Restrictions.

You can limit by email, IP address, or both. Then, you can choose how many entries you want to allow from each IP address and what message to show them if they exceed this limit.

However, some advanced spam bots can get around simple protections by using many different email addresses and IPs. This makes it much harder to block them with basic rate limiting alone.

To catch these smarter tactics, I needed a more flexible way to spot unusual patterns and stop suspicious entries in real time.

That’s when I turned to the conditional logic feature in WPForms.

Step 3: Use Conditional Logic to Protect Your CRM

It’s important to keep these tricky spam entries out of your CRM and email marketing lists. Not only are bad leads frustrating, but they can also mess up your data, lead to more spam complaints, and damage your email deliverability.

The good news is that WPForms allows you to apply conditional logic with your marketing integrations. This means you can create specific rules so only real, high-quality leads make it into your CRM.

For example, I set up a rule that filtered out any entries containing common spam patterns, such as suspicious keywords or links. If a form submission looked suspicious, it was automatically kept out of my CRM.

To do the same in your form, just go to Marketing » [Your CRM Name].

Then, enable ‘Conditional Logic’ and add a rule.

For example, you could add ‘Don’t Process this connection if the email field ends with .ru’.

This was the final nail in the coffin for the spammers who attacked my form.

And overall, it took me about 10 minutes to implement all of these changes.

My Final Thoughts on Form Spam

Dealing with this wave of spam was definitely stressful, but it also highlighted how important it is to protect your forms. Security isn’t just a nice feature anymore. It’s a must-have for any business that relies on quality leads.

If you value high-quality leads, then you can’t afford to let spam get in the way.

I’m incredibly proud of the work the WPForms team is doing. I get to use the tools we build every day to power our businesses, and this week, WPForms really saved the day.

Here are some of the cool features they recently added:

• Form Entry Automation – Set automated schedules to export and delete form entries.
• Google Drive Integration – Automatically send form submissions to Google Drive and organize files in folders with team access.
• AI-Powered Calculations – This allows you to create complex calculations by describing them in plain English. It can build dynamic formulas based on user inputs and validate them in real-time to ensure accuracy.

For more details, see our full WPForms review.

I hope my story helps you protect your own website. Taking a few minutes to check your forms today can save you a huge headache later.

---

Frequently Asked Questions About WordPress Form Spam (FAQ)

After I posted this on LinkedIn, some of my followers reached out with a few follow-up questions.

Here are my answers to those questions.

Do I need all these WPForms features to stop spam?

Often, just enabling the modern anti-spam protection is enough for most websites. However, if you are under a heavy attack like I was, then using layers of protection, like rate limiting, is very effective.

Will these anti-spam features slow down my website?

No. All of these features are built to be lightweight. They add security without negatively impacting your site speed or the user experience.

Is adding a CAPTCHA a good idea?

A CAPTCHA can be effective, but it adds friction for your users and can lower your form conversion rate. I always recommend using it as a last resort after trying invisible methods first.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How I Blocked 18,000 Spam Lead Attacks in My WordPress Form first appeared on WPBeginner.

Explore the key differences between Tailwind CSS and Bootstrap. Discover their pros, cons, and ideal use cases to decide which CSS framework is best for your next web development project.

Continue reading Tailwind CSS vs. Bootstrap: Which Framework Is Right for Your Next Project? on SitePoint.

AI is almost everywhere — it writes text, makes music, generates code, draws pictures, runs research, chats with you — and apparently even understands people better than they understand themselves?!

It’s a lot to take in. The pace is wild, and new tools pop up faster than anyone has time to try them. Amid the chaos, one thing is clear: this isn’t hype, but it’s structural change.

According to the Future of Jobs Report 2025 by the World Economic Forum, one of the fastest-growing, most in-demand skills for the next five years is the ability to work with AI and Big Data. That applies to almost every role — including product design.

What do companies want most from their teams? Right, efficiency. And AI can make people way more efficient. We’d easily spend 3x more time on tasks like replying to our managers without AI helping out. We’re learning to work with it, but many of us are still figuring out how to meet the rising bar.

That’s especially important for designers, whose work is all about empathy, creativity, critical thinking, and working across disciplines. It’s a uniquely human mix. At least, that’s what we tell ourselves.

Even as debates rage about AI’s limitations, tools today (June 2025 — timestamp matters in this fast-moving space) already assist with research, ideation, and testing, sometimes better than expected.

Of course, not everyone agrees. AI hallucinates, loses context, and makes things up. So how can both views exist at the same time? Very simple. It’s because both are true: AI is deeply flawed and surprisingly useful. The trick is knowing how to work with its strengths while managing its weaknesses. The real question isn’t whether AI is good or bad — it’s how we, as designers, stay sharp, stay valuable, and stay in the loop.

Why Prompting Matters

Prompting matters more than most people realize because even small tweaks in how you ask can lead to radically different outputs. To see how this works in practice, let’s look at a simple example.

Imagine you want to improve the onboarding experience in your product. On the left, you have the prompt you send to AI. On the right, the response you get back.

Input	Output
How to improve onboarding in a SaaS product?	👉 Broad suggestions: checklists, empty states, welcome modals…
How to improve onboarding in Product A’s workspace setup flow?	👉 Suggestions focused on workspace setup…
How to improve onboarding in Product A’s workspace setup step to address user confusion?	👉 ~10 common pain points with targeted UX fixes for each…
How to improve onboarding in Product A by redesigning the workspace setup screen to reduce drop-off, with detailed reasoning?	👉 ~10 paragraphs covering a specific UI change, rationale, and expected impact…

This side-by-side shows just how much even the smallest prompt details can change what AI gives you.

Talking to an AI model isn’t that different from talking to a person. If you explain your thoughts clearly, you get a better understanding and communication overall.

Advanced prompting is about moving beyond one-shot, throwaway prompts. It’s an iterative, structured process of refining your inputs using different techniques so you can guide the AI toward more useful results. It focuses on being intentional with every word you put in, giving the AI not just the task but also the path to approach it step by step, so it can actually do the job.

Where basic prompting throws your question at the model and hopes for a quick answer, advanced prompting helps you explore options, evaluate branches of reasoning, and converge on clear, actionable outputs.

But that doesn’t mean simple prompts are useless. On the contrary, short, focused prompts work well when the task is narrow, factual, or time-sensitive. They’re great for idea generation, quick clarifications, or anything where deep reasoning isn’t required. Think of prompting as a scale, not a binary. The simpler the task, the faster a lightweight prompt can get the job done. The more complex the task, the more structure it needs.

In this article, we’ll dive into how advanced prompting can empower different product & design use cases, speeding up your workflow and improving your results — whether you’re researching, brainstorming, testing, or beyond. Let’s dive in.

Practical Cases

In the next section, we’ll explore six practical prompting techniques that we’ve found most useful in real product design work. These aren’t abstract theories — each one is grounded in hands-on experience, tested across research, ideation, and evaluation tasks. Think of them as modular tools: you can mix, match, and adapt them depending on your use case. For each, we’ll explain the thinking behind it and walk through a sample prompt.

Important note: The prompts you’ll see are not copy-paste recipes. Some are structured templates you can reuse with small tweaks; others are more specific, meant to spark your thinking. Use them as scaffolds, not scripts.

1. Task Decomposition By JTBD

Technique: Role, Context, Instructions template + Checkpoints (with self-reflection)

Before solving any problem, there’s a critical step we often overlook: breaking the problem down into clear, actionable parts.

Jumping straight into execution feels fast, but it’s risky. We might end up solving the wrong thing, or solving it the wrong way. That’s where GPT can help: not just by generating ideas, but by helping us think more clearly about the structure of the problem itself.

There are many ways to break down a task. One of the most useful in product work is the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework. Let’s see how we can use advanced prompting to apply JTBD decomposition to any task.

Good design starts with understanding the user, the problem, and the context. Good prompting? Pretty much the same. That’s why most solid prompts include three key parts: Role, Context, and Instructions. If needed, you can also add the expected format and any constraints.

In this example, we’re going to break down a task into smaller jobs and add self-checkpoints to the prompt, so the AI can pause, reflect, and self-verify along the way.

Role
Act as a senior product strategist and UX designer with deep expertise in Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) methodology and user-centered design. You think in terms of user goals, progress-making moments, and unmet needs — similar to approaches used at companies like Intercom, Basecamp, or IDEO.

Context
You are helping a product team break down a broad user or business problem into a structured map of Jobs To Be Done. This decomposition will guide discovery, prioritization, and solution design.

Task & Instructions
[👉 DESCRIBE THE USER TASK OR PROBLEM 👈🏼]
Use JTBD thinking to uncover:

• The main functional job the user is trying to get done;
• Related emotional or social jobs;
• Sub-jobs or tasks users must complete along the way;
• Forces of progress and barriers that influence behavior.

Checkpoints
Before finalizing, check yourself:

• Are the jobs clearly goal-oriented and not solution-oriented?
• Are sub-jobs specific steps toward the main job?
• Are emotional/social jobs captured?
• Are user struggles or unmet needs listed?

If anything’s missing or unclear, revise and explain what was added or changed.

With a simple one-sentence prompt, you’ll likely get a high-level list of user needs or feature ideas. An advanced approach can produce a structured JTBD breakdown of a specific user problem, which may include:

• Main Functional Job: A clear, goal-oriented statement describing the primary outcome the user wants to achieve.
• Emotional & Social Jobs: Supporting jobs related to how the user wants to feel or be perceived during their progress.
• Sub-Jobs: Step-by-step tasks or milestones the user must complete to fulfill the main job.
• Forces of Progress: A breakdown of motivations (push/pull) and barriers (habits/anxieties) that influence user behavior.

But these prompts are most powerful when used with real context. Try it now with your product. Even a quick test can reveal unexpected insights.

2. Competitive UX Audit

Technique: Attachments + Reasoning Before Understanding + Tree of Thought (ToT)

Sometimes, you don’t need to design something new — you need to understand what already exists.

Whether you’re doing a competitive analysis, learning from rivals, or benchmarking features, the first challenge is making sense of someone else’s design choices. What’s the feature really for? Who’s it helping? Why was it built this way?

Instead of rushing into critique, we can use GPT to reverse-engineer the thinking behind a product — before judging it. In this case, start by:

1. Grabbing the competitor’s documentation for the feature you want to analyze.
2. Save it as a PDF. Then head over to ChatGPT (or other models).
3. Before jumping into the audit, ask it to first make sense of the documentation. This technique is called Reasoning Before Understanding (RBU). That means before you ask for critique, you ask for interpretation. This helps AI build a more accurate mental model — and avoids jumping to conclusions.

Role
You are a senior UX strategist and cognitive design analyst. Your expertise lies in interpreting digital product features based on minimal initial context, inferring purpose, user intent, and mental models behind design decisions before conducting any evaluative critique.

Context
You’ve been given internal documentation and screenshots of a feature. The goal is not to evaluate it yet, but to understand what it’s doing, for whom, and why.

Task & Instructions
Review the materials and answer:

• What is this feature for?
• Who is the intended user?
• What tasks or scenarios does it support?
• What assumptions does it make about the user?
• What does its structure suggest about priorities or constraints?

Once you get the first reply, take a moment to respond: clarify, correct, or add nuance to GPT’s conclusions. This helps align the model’s mental frame with your own.

For the audit part, we’ll use something called the Tree of Thought (ToT) approach.

Tree of Thought (ToT) is a prompting strategy that asks the AI to “think in branches.” Instead of jumping to a single answer, the model explores multiple reasoning paths, compares outcomes, and revises logic before concluding — like tracing different routes through a decision tree. This makes it perfect for handling more complex UX tasks.

You are now performing a UX audit based on your understanding of the feature. You’ll identify potential problems, alternative design paths, and trade-offs using a Tree of Thought approach, i.e., thinking in branches, comparing different reasoning paths before concluding.

or

Convert your understanding of the feature into a set of Jobs-To-Be-Done statements from the user’s perspective using a Tree of Thought approach.

List implicit assumptions this feature makes about the user's behavior, workflow, or context using a Tree of Thought approach.

Propose alternative versions of this feature that solve the same job using different interaction or flow mechanics using a Tree of Thought approach.

3. Ideation With An Intellectual Opponent

Technique: Role Conditioning + Memory Update

When you’re working on creative or strategic problems, there’s a common trap: AI often just agrees with you or tries to please your way of thinking. It treats your ideas like gospel and tells you they’re great — even when they’re not.

So how do you avoid this? How do you get GPT to challenge your assumptions and act more like a critical thinking partner? Simple: tell it to and ask to remember.

Instructions
From now on, remember to follow this mode unless I explicitly say otherwise.

Do not take my conclusions at face value. Your role is not to agree or assist blindly, but to serve as a sharp, respectful intellectual opponent.

Every time I present an idea, do the following:

• Interrogate my assumptions: What am I taking for granted?
• Present counter-arguments: Where could I be wrong, misled, or overly confident?
• Test my logic: Is the reasoning sound, or are there gaps, fallacies, or biases?
• Offer alternatives: Not for the sake of disagreement, but to expand perspective.
• Prioritize truth and clarity over consensus: Even when it’s uncomfortable.

Maintain a constructive, rigorous, truth-seeking tone. Don’t argue for the sake of it. Argue to sharpen thought, expose blind spots, and help me reach clearer, stronger conclusions.

This isn’t a debate. It’s a collaboration aimed at insight.

4. Requirements For Concepting

Technique: Requirement-Oriented + Meta prompting

This one deserves a whole article on its own, but let’s lay the groundwork here.

When you’re building quick prototypes or UI screens using tools like v0, Bolt, Lovable, UX Pilot, etc., your prompt needs to be better than most PRDs you’ve worked with. Why? Because the output depends entirely on how clearly and specifically you describe the goal.

The catch? Writing that kind of prompt is hard. So instead of jumping straight to the design prompt, try writing a meta-prompt first. That is a prompt that asks GPT to help you write a better prompt. Prompting about prompting, prompt-ception, if you will.

Here’s how to make that work: Feed GPT what you already know about the app or the screen. Then ask it to treat things like information architecture, layout, and user flow as variables it can play with. That way, you don’t just get one rigid idea — you get multiple concept directions to explore.

Role
You are a product design strategist working with AI to explore early-stage design concepts.

Goal
Generate 3 distinct prompt variations for designing a Daily Wellness Summary single screen in a mobile wellness tracking app for Lovable/Bolt/v0.

Each variation should experiment with a different Information Architecture and Layout Strategy. You don’t need to fully specify the IA or layout — just take a different angle in each prompt. For example, one may prioritize user state, another may prioritize habits or recommendations, and one may use a card layout while another uses a scroll feed.

User context
The target user is a busy professional who checks this screen once or twice a day (morning/evening) to log their mood, energy, and sleep quality, and to receive small nudges or summaries from the app.

Visual style
Keep the tone calm and approachable.

Format
Each of the 3 prompt variations should be structured clearly and independently.

Remember: The key difference between the three prompts should be the underlying IA and layout logic. You don’t need to over-explain — just guide the design generator toward different interpretations of the same user need.

5. From Cognitive Walkthrough To Testing Hypothesis

Technique: Casual Tree of Though + Casual Reasoning + Multi-Roles + Self-Reflection

Cognitive walkthrough is a powerful way to break down a user action and check whether the steps are intuitive.

Example: “User wants to add a task” → Do they know where to click? What to do next? Do they know it worked?

We’ve found this technique super useful for reviewing our own designs. Sometimes there’s already a mockup; other times we’re still arguing with a PM about what should go where. Either way, GPT can help.

Here’s an advanced way to run that process:

Context
You’ve been given a screenshot of a screen where users can create new tasks in a project management app. The main action the user wants to perform is “add a task”. Simulate behavior from two user types: a beginner with no prior experience and a returning user familiar with similar tools.

Task & Instructions
Go through the UI step by step and evaluate:

1. Will the user know what to do at each step?
2. Will they understand how to perform the action?
3. Will they know they’ve succeeded?

For each step, consider alternative user paths (if multiple interpretations of the UI exist). Use a casual Tree-of-Thought method.

At each step, reflect: what assumptions is the user making here? What visual feedback would help reduce uncertainty?

Format
Use a numbered list for each step. For each, add observations, possible confusions, and UX suggestions.

Limits
Don’t assume prior knowledge unless it’s visually implied.
Do not limit analysis to a single user type.

Cognitive walkthroughs are great, but they get even more useful when they lead to testable hypotheses.

After running the walkthrough, you’ll usually uncover moments that might confuse users. Instead of leaving that as a guess, turn those into concrete UX testing hypotheses.

We ask GPT to not only flag potential friction points, but to help define how we’d validate them with real users: using a task, a question, or observable behavior.

Task & Instructions
Based on your previous cognitive walkthrough:

1. Extract all potential usability hypotheses from the walkthrough.
2. For each hypothesis:
   • Assess whether it can be tested through moderated or unmoderated usability testing.
   • Explain what specific UX decision or design element may cause this issue. Use causal reasoning.
   • For testable hypotheses:
     • Propose a specific usability task or question.
     • Define a clear validation criterion (how you’ll know if the hypothesis is confirmed or disproved).
     • Evaluate feasibility and signal strength of the test (e.g., how easy it is to test, and how confidently it can validate the hypothesis).
     • Assign a priority score based on Impact, Confidence, and Ease (ICE).

Limits
Don’t invent hypotheses not rooted in your walkthrough output. Only propose tests where user behavior or responses can provide meaningful validation. Skip purely technical or backend concerns.

6. Cross-Functional Feedback

Technique: Multi-Roles

Good design is co-created. And good designers are used to working with cross-functional teams: PMs, engineers, analysts, QAs, you name it. Part of the job is turning scattered feedback into clear action items.

Earlier, we talked about how giving AI a “role” helps sharpen its responses. Now let’s level that up: what if we give it multiple roles at once? This is called multi-role prompting. It’s a great way to simulate a design review with input from different perspectives. You get quick insights and a more well-rounded critique of your design.

Role
You are a cross-functional team of experts evaluating a new dashboard design:

• PM (focus: user value & prioritization)
• Engineer (focus: feasibility & edge cases)
• QA tester (focus: clarity & testability)
• Data analyst (focus: metrics & clarity of reporting)
• Designer (focus: consistency & usability)

Context
The team is reviewing a mockup for a new analytics dashboard for internal use.

Task & Instructions
For each role:

1. What stands out immediately?
2. What concerns might this role have?
3. What feedback or suggestions would they give?

Designing With AI Is A Skill, Not A Shortcut

By now, you’ve seen that prompting isn’t just about typing better instructions. It’s about designing better thinking.

We’ve explored several techniques, and each is useful in different contexts:

Technique	When to use It
Role + Context + Instructions + Constraints	Anytime you want consistent, focused responses (especially in research, decomposition, and analysis).
Checkpoints / Self-verification	When accuracy, structure, or layered reasoning matters. Great for complex planning or JTBD breakdowns.
Reasoning Before Understanding (RBU)	When input materials are large or ambiguous (like docs or screenshots). Helps reduce misinterpretation.
Tree of Thought (ToT)	When you want the model to explore options, backtrack, compare. Ideal for audits, evaluations, or divergent thinking.
Meta-prompting	When you're not sure how to even ask the right question. Use it early in fuzzy or creative concepting.
Multi-role prompting	When you need well-rounded, cross-functional critique or to simulate team feedback.
Memory-updated “opponent” prompting	When you want to challenge your own logic, uncover blind spots, or push beyond echo chambers.

But even the best techniques won’t matter if you use them blindly, so ask yourself:

• Do I need precision or perspective right now?
  • Precision? Try Role + Checkpoints for clarity and control.
  • Perspective? Use Multi-Role or Tree of Thought to explore alternatives.
• Should the model reflect my framing, or break it?
  • Reflect it? Use Role + Context + Instructions.
  • Break it? Try Opponent prompting to challenge assumptions.
• Am I trying to reduce ambiguity, or surface complexity?
  • Reduce ambiguity? Use Meta-prompting to clarify your ask.
  • Surface complexity? Go with ToT or RBU to expose hidden layers.
• Is this task about alignment, or exploration?
  • Alignment? Use Multi-Roles prompting to simulate consensus.
  • Exploration? Use Cognitive Walkthrough to push deeper.

Remember, you don’t need a long prompt every time. Use detail when the task demands it, not out of habit. AI can do a lot, but it reflects the shape of your thinking. And prompting is how you shape it. So don’t just prompt better. Think better. And design with AI — not around it.