Discover why design systems are essential for consistent UX in 2025. Learn how top companies like Google, Apple, and IBM use design systems to scale efficiently while maintaining creativity. Explore upcoming trends in AI, AR/VR integration, and ethical design practices.

Continue reading Design Systems in 2025: Why They're the Blueprint for Consistent UX on SitePoint.

Ensure your digital products meet the EAA standards before the June 2025 deadline. This guide provides a practical checklist for developers to audit, fix, and maintain accessibility compliance while improving user experience.

Continue reading Meeting European Accessibility Act (EAA) Standards: A Developer’s Checklist on SitePoint.

Read How to Conduct Accessibility Testing with Screen Readers and learn Web with SitePoint. Our web development and design tutorials, courses, and books will teach you HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and more.

Continue reading How to Conduct Accessibility Testing with Screen Readers on SitePoint.

Discover essential accessibility best practices for Single Page Applications (SPAs) to ensure dynamic content, focus management, and navigation are user-friendly for everyone.

Continue reading Accessibility Best Practices for Single Page Applications (SPAs) on SitePoint.

Read Dev Hackathon: Reusable Creativity on Wix Studio and learn Web with SitePoint. Our web development and design tutorials, courses, and books will teach you HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and more.

Continue reading Dev Hackathon: Reusable Creativity on Wix Studio on SitePoint.

In this podcast, Motley Fool analyst Jason Moser and contributor Lou Whiteman discuss:

• Starbucks' move to sell part of its China business.
• Hershey hires a new CEO.
• Meta moves for more talent and invests in eyewear.
• What should be on investors' radar this earnings season.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Learn More »

A full transcript is below.

Should you invest $1,000 in Starbucks right now?

Before you buy stock in Starbucks, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Starbucks wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $680,559!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $1,005,670!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 1,053% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 180% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of July 15, 2025

This podcast was recorded on July 09, 2025.

Jason Moser: Starbucks pivots in China and Meta makes some big investments. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Jason Moser, joining me today. It's Motley Fool analysts Lou Whiteman. Lou, thanks for being here.

Lou Whiteman: Great to be seen.

Jason Moser: On today's show, Hershey has a new CEO. Meta is making some big investments in AI, and earning season is, believe it or not, right around the corner. But today, we begin with the king of coffee. Reports are that Starbucks has garnered quite a bit of interest in its China business, as it looks possibly selling a majority stake in that business. The company said, "We remain committed to China and want to retain a meaningful stake in the business. Any deal must make sense for Starbucks business and partners." Lou, China has been a bit of a challenge for Starbucks as of late. Do you think this is the right move to try to sell the majority stake in this business?

Lou Whiteman: I do. I like this a lot. New CEO Brian Niccol, he's got a lot on his plate. He's articulated a plan, the back to Starbucks. He's going to revitalize to domestic business. But look, it's going to take time, it's going to take resources. Finding a partner to work with China, it would allow Starbucks to retain some of the upside, but it is a massive market. I get it. But it would provide a cash infusion and take one thing off that plate off of that daily agenda. It feels like a win-win.

Jason Moser: It seems like there was a lot of interest. Something close to 30 equity firms and whatnot actually submit it.

Lou Whiteman: Big money?

Jason Moser: Yeah, big money, valuing it anywhere from, 5-$10 billion, I saw. You talk about the growth opportunity in China, and that's been part of the story. I think with Starbucks for many of us for many years, it's not to say they haven't grown there. They have almost 8,000 stores in China to date. But, they're talking about really going so far beyond that. It's 10% of overall revenue right now. It's meaningful, but it seems like it could be more meaningful. How big do you think they can grow as part of the business?

Lou Whiteman: They talk about 20,000 locations, which is more than double. That, honestly, I don't know about that. That's part of why I think I'm OK with them at least finding a partner or keeping some upside, but not all of it. I think the Chinese consumer, like the American consumer and most other consumers, I think they're going to lean into domestic brands over international ones as that market matures. I think to some extent, it's happening. Maybe refocusing the operations, finding a partner, growing that way and doing it, not just rubber stamping what Starbucks is here. I think there's probably room for growth, but I don't think maybe it's what we were talking about a few years ago, and I don't think it's priority one right now for them, either.

Jason Moser: This seems like a little bit like history repeating itself. You remember in the early days when they were growing internationally, and they had, in most places, they were taking that company owned approach to the stores. Then, it turns out not every country is the same, Lou, and the cultural clashes, the differences, it was all very different in so many different ways, in so many different locations. They pivoted to partnering up with local partners in those respective markets. I'm with you. I think this is a good move. I actually like it. I think it gives them the opportunity to participate in the upside without having to devote so many resources to it. I like the decision. I feel like this is something that Niccol has been mulling around for a while. I'd be curious to know. He's closing in on a year in September with the company. What grade would you give Brian Niccol today?

Lou Whiteman: Forget what I think. [LAUGHTER] Howard Schultz seems bought in. I think we can all agree. Howard's very smart and also can be a meddler. I think Howard Schultz giving him an A is very important. But I don't think Howard's wrong. I think Niccol's plan to refocus Starbucks give us back the experience we fell in love with and also adjust the menu, so we're not waiting in line for 40 minutes in the drive through. It all makes sense. It's a strong grade, it's an incomplete grade because it's one thing to say it. We have to execute and do it. But I like where they're going with.

Jason Moser: The stock is basically flat since Niccol took over, or you think it's just a couple of percentage points. But it still boasts a premium multiple at 34 times earnings, do you think this stock from to date, do you think this is an outperformer in the coming five years?

Lou Whiteman: I think so. I'll be honest. The valuation gives me pause. I don't think it's going to be, I think maybe the hypergrowth days are over. But look, the brand resonates. I think you'll see operational improvements under Niccol which will boost results. You have, what, 2.5% dividend yield to boost your total return. Yeah, maybe it isn't what the growth was before, but it still, I think, has the bones of a market beater of just a top operator.

Jason Moser: Yeah, I'm with you. I'm hanging on in my shares too. Well, next up, Hershey has a new CEO.

Hershey: Hey, managers, leaders and entrepreneurs, do you want to run your meetings more efficiently and productively, especially on those crazy busy skip lunch days? Met plod note, a credit card sized AI gadget attachable to the back of your phone. Whether you're having business calls or in-person meetings can be your ultimate business assistant. The gadget records audio and the app automatically creates accurate transcripts, summarizes key points, and even provides mind-maps to visualize everything. Wildest part is that you can even talk and brainstorm with it because the AI not only takes notes, but also understands them. Cloud has been trusted by over 700,000 buyers globally, and more than 200,000 managers and leaders are using it every day to save time and improve collaboration. Ready to take your meeting to the next level, tap P-L-A-U-D into Google and get a 10% off discount with our code fool. That's F-O-O-L. Check out the sleek look. Tell me it's not the best looking AI product you've seen. Get it for yourself or your best friend at work. The website is P-L-A-U-D.

Jason Moser: Hershey Company has a new CEO, Wendy's CEO Kirk Tanner will replace Michele Buck, who's retiring after almost eight years as CEO of the company. Tanner will take over on August 18th and previously served over 30 years at Pepsi. Lou, I was talking with our colleague, Ant Schiavone, who follows Hershey closely. He said that while Tanner definitely has the resume to be CEO with those three decades at PepsiCo., and he had a short stint at Wendy's, it started in February 2024. It was a bit shaky. Shares down around 40% during his tenure. They had to cut the dividend earlier this year. The Ant noted that was likely to happen regardless who was CEO. What do you think his biggest challenge right off the bat is going to be taking over for such a, I mean, this is just a legendary, iconic American brand. They're going through some tough times. What do you think the biggest challenge he's facing us?

Lou Whiteman: A brand that has always or mostly promoted from within, too, which I think is interesting, too. I think you said it well. It's hard to judge the time at Wendy's, both because it was so short and he did step in at a difficult time. But it feels like Hershey's is more similar to what he did at Pepsi and he was successful there. Wendy's is more retail focused. I think that's a positive. I suspect his biggest challenge is to continue the pivoted way from chocolate, from cocoa prices. Hershey's has quietly built up this roster.

Jason Moser: What?

Lou Whiteman: Pirate Booties, Dot's Pretzels, SkinnyPop. It feels like there's further opportunities to go in that direction, and bringing someone in from Pepsi suggests to me, at least that that's where the board is focused. That's his challenges to execute there and make that happen.

Jason Moser: I think you're right. You got to broaden that portfolio because we've seen this over the last several quarters, years, the cocoa prices have really been hammering Hershey, and it's always fun to pay attention during Halloween to see what candy he's selling. Last year, we definitely saw a trend toward, like, the fruity, sugary candies, chocolate, a little bit less so because it was getting more expensive. Then the dreaded shrinkflation came into play. They're making the candy bar smaller Lou. Not cool, but I guess I get it.

Lou Whiteman: Hey, my doctor likes it, even if I don't.

Jason Moser: Exactly. We talked about Brian Niccol. Now we're talking about Hershey here with Kirk Tanner. When you see new leadership in play here, how long do you typically give new leadership to start delivering?

Lou Whiteman: It's so hard, because obviously, every situation is different. You have to factor in macro, what situation does a new leader drop into. But look, generally, I think, at least a year, we talk about this a lot. We're long term focused investors. We understand that quarter to quarter fluctuations happen, and they're part of the business, and we don't panic. We don't freak out with one quarter. We don't get too excited. I think we have to give leadership the same understanding, the same philosophy. In a case like this the challenges, the consumer, cocoa prices, perhaps maybe you need more time, but I'll tell you what I do want Jamo and what I'd like to see is within a year, what Niccol gave us, I want to hear our leadership articulate a plan. I want something I can evaluate from here. You may not be able to solve the problem in a year, but I want to hear how you're planning on doing it within a year.

Jason Moser: I like that. One of Tanner's go to moves at Wendy's was offbeat collaborations. They did a Girl Scout thin mint frost Deep. Tried that one, it was good. Spicy Taki chip chicken sandwiches. Hey, man, I love Takis and I love chicken sandwiches.

Lou Whiteman: I don't love that.

Jason Moser: Sponge Bob brand and burgers. Let's play armchair CEO for a second. What brand collaboration would you recommend for Hershey's?

Lou Whiteman: The company that brought us peanut butter and chocolate, [LAUGHTER] they have to get collaborations. This is a no brainer, but I love Dot's Pretzels. Looking at the website, they have cinnamon season. They have barbecue. They have honey mustard. They don't have chocolate covered pretzels.

Jason Moser: That crossed my mind.

Lou Whiteman: It seems so obvious.

Jason Moser: I have more of a salt tooth than a sweet tooth. I was thinking, I love Dot's Pretzels. I have in the pantry at home. I also like SkinnyPop. That's pretty good stuff. I was thinking, Hey, you get SkinnyPop and you partner up with McCormick for some old bay SkinnyPop? You can cheat and put the stuff on at home, but I guarantee the stuff in the bag is going to be way better. You're bringing two worlds together right there. I'd be all in.

Lou Whiteman: My Baltimore roots are speaking to me right now. [LAUGHTER] I'm in for that. Mr. Tanner, get on that.

Jason Moser: Last question on Hershey, do you think Tanner is still here in five years?

Lou Whiteman: I do. I do think fit matters, and I think the resume implies a better fit, like we said. To use the Willy Wonka, I think maybe this is a golden ticket, and I think it can work out well for Tanner and for Hershey shareholders.

Jason Moser: Lou Meta continues to make big investments in AI. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is spending big to recruit AI talent. We're talking tens, hundreds of millions of dollars from reports. Now we also saw that the company's taking a minority stake in Ray-Ban maker Es Luxottica, and that really plays into these Ray-Ban AI glasses that they're starting to get out there. I'll be interested to see how this holiday season, how those are received. Now, as we saw with the Metaverse, Zuckerberg's playbook is to go big or go home, $3.5 billion investment in Ray-Ban, reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars in recruiting bonuses. that's a lot. What should investors make of all the spending?

Lou Whiteman: Usually I find interesting back in January, Meta committed to, what, spending $70 billion in CapEX, mostly to build out AI. Our focus was on chips at the time. Certainly Invidia is getting a lot of love here. But, it feels like we're kidding that next step, where, what do we do with all that capacity, making the magic happen? Look, if you think chips are hard to come by and they are, just how hard is it going to be to get the right talent and the right partners and all of that. I think be aggressive makes sense. Zuckerberg likes to be aggressive, but focus on the big picture of try and be a first mover here. I get what they're doing, and I think it makes sense, because at some point, we got to use all these chips or something, and it better be neat.

Jason Moser: Yeah, this is an arms race like we haven't seen in some time. All these companies is just foot on the gas, and they're spending a lot, but clearly, that's telling us something. I think we're in the middle of something big here. Now, the Metaverse spending, that led to the year of efficiency, if you remember that. Investors became worried about return on investment, do you see this playing out the same way or like, how long of a leash does Meta have here to ultimately build out their AO chops and demonstrate real return?

Lou Whiteman: I'm curious what you think. I think here the difference is last time they were out on their own. They literally changed their name to Meta. They were the Metaverse island. For better or for worse, it ended up worse. They owned that space, and there's a lot more there with AI, I think.

Jason Moser: I agree.

Lou Whiteman: If there's not, we have a lot of people going along for the ride. I think as long as everyone else is spending, I think it's a much longer leash.

Jason Moser: I think so, too. I think you said it perfectly. There's a there there. AI, it just seems so much bigger. When we're looking at augmented and virtual reality in the Metaverse, it's fascinating technology, but it certainly is more niche, and it's really not quite developed. The obvious use cases that we're seeing play out with AI. The stock, let's talk about the stock. It's had a good year to date. It's up almost 25%, outperforming the market nicely. At around 28 times earnings today, is this something you're interested in? Do you think this is an outperformer over the next five years at today's levels?

Lou Whiteman: So 28 times earnings. What? That's second most affordable among the Mac 7, which for what it is. But look, for all the talk about AI, we you bury the lead when you don't talk about that core advertising business and its ability to just generate. I'm excited about AI, but I just that core business, I don't see a disruption on the horizon here, and with that business, I think the stock beats to market. That is the engine.

Jason Moser: I think AI is really ultimately making that core business even better. That really is the point. they're going to do ancillary stuff with it. But it is making that core business better, and man, they really own a big slice of that ad market, like you said. Next up, earning season is right around the corner. Lou, believe it or not, earnings season is upon us again. JP Morgan unofficially kicks things off on Tuesday, July 15th. What's something that you'll be paying close attention to this earning season? A trend, policy, specific company, and industry? What you got.

Lou Whiteman: We just talked about Meta's year of efficiency. If we want to talk about so far this year, and we're still early into this year. It has been the year of uncertainty, for public companies. Investors largely gave management teams a pass last quarter when they said, I don't know when it comes to guidance. I think that's understandable. I was one of those investors who, I don't know what's going on either, so that's fine. Two related big picture questions I have as I'm watching now is, A, is there more clarity now than there was three months ago? Is there more management teams that are willing to stick their neck out? Since I'm guessing the answer is maybe not, will investors continue to be patient? Will the 'I don't know answer', will that be acceptable now the way it was last quarter? I think, probably, but I'm curious to see how things play out just kind of. We're always forward looking. As investors, it's scary when there's clouds forward. It's a weird time. How about you.

Jason Moser: Well, I think in regard to your points there, two. We're seeing a lot of headlines coming out here again, regarding tariffs. It's leading right in earnings season. It would be understandable if you hear that uncertainty language. But I don't know, do you feel like folks are just getting tariff exhaustion. Like, it's just day after day, so you know that it's happening, and at some point, you just got to let it go and keep running your business.

Lou Whiteman: Yeah, it feels like it's going to net out as a drag on earnings indefinitely that we're just going to have to grin and bear it with, which is a terrible medium because it's just going to be a slog, unfortunately.

Jason Moser: Well, you asked what I was looking at, and for me, it's in regard to enterprise spending trends, over the last several quarters, there's a phrase that we've seen on a lot of these earnings calls, whether it's Twilio or Cloudflare or CrowdStrike, Palo Alto. You name it. These big enterprise servers, the phrase elongated sales cycles, to your point about uncertainty. Their enterprise customers are just simply not quite certain what the future holds. They're spending with some trepidation and maybe not fully committing. We saw just elongated sales cycles on so many earnings calls over the last several quarters. I wonder if that's starting to come to a close. I wonder if we're going to start seeing some more bold spending from a lot of these big enterprises. I'm going to be following a lot of those companies like I just mentioned, those earnings calls, and that will be one key term that I'll be searching through all those calls, elongated sales cycles. That's just telling you, they're just not spending as much as quickly, and we want to see that turnaround.

Lou Whiteman: It's a great point because putting it both together, there is so much uncertainty. It's understandable not to want to make bold moves, but at some point, business has to go on. Where are we in balancing that? That's going to be fascinating to say.

Jason Moser: Well, we'll leave it there. Lou Whiteman, thanks again for being here.

Lou Whiteman: Always a pleasure.

Jason Moser: As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and are not approved by advertisers. Advertisements or sponsored content are provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. I'm Jason Moser. Thanks for listening. Will see you.

Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. JPMorgan Chase is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. Jason Moser has positions in McCormick, Starbucks, and Twilio. Lou Whiteman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends CrowdStrike, Hershey, JPMorgan Chase, Meta Platforms, Starbucks, and Twilio. The Motley Fool recommends McCormick and Palo Alto Networks. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

In this podcast, Motley Fool analyst Matt Argersinger and host Ricky Mulvey discuss:

• What home sales data says about the economy.
• A traffic slowdown at Chipotle, and the restaurant chain's strong unit economics.
• The reasons why Warren Buffett could be sitting on a record amount of cash.

Then, Motley Fool host Mary Long and analyst Asit Sharma continue their conversation about AMD, and discuss the impact of tariffs and export controls on the chip designer.

Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Learn More »

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

A full transcript is below.

Should you invest $1,000 in Berkshire Hathaway right now?

Before you buy stock in Berkshire Hathaway, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Berkshire Hathaway wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $659,171!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $891,722!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 995% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 172% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of June 9, 2025

This video was recorded on April 24, 2025

Ricky Mulvey: Berkshire Hathaway is sitting on more cash than any company in history. You're listening. It's Motley Fool Money. I'm Ricky Mulvey joined today by Matt Argersinger. Matt, thanks for being here.

Matt Argersinger: Hey. Great to be here, Ricky.

Ricky Mulvey: Good to have you on a day where we're getting some home sales data. As I was looking through the headlines this morning, I got three headlines that, all of which seem to be telling different stories. From CNBC. Home sales last month dropped to their slowest march pace since 2009. From Bloomberg, US new home sales top all estimates on surge in the South. From the Wall Street Journal, home sales in March fell about six percent biggest drop since 2022. Which one are you buying here?

Matt Argersinger: I'm going to buy the CNBC headline only because I love data points that go back way long in time. The fact that we're at the slowest sales pace since 2009, I mean, remember from a moment where we were in 2009. That's right. In the midst of a global financial crisis caused in part by a housing crash. If you're telling me that we're at the slowest pace of home sales since that period of time, that's going to get my attention. I'm definitely buying the CNBC version of this story.

Ricky Mulvey: Also pointing out that it's the March 1. We're only doing every March from this year. There's a little bit of trickiness within the way they're positioning this. I want to dig into this Wall Street Journal commentary though, which is that so far this spring supply is increasing faster than demand. The inventory of homes for sale is rising because some sellers who have been waiting for mortgage rates to fall have decided that they can't keep waiting. This is a big difference. I'm thinking about during the pandemic, being in a neighborhood in Cincinnati while I'm watching streams of people trying to look at one existing home and offers are getting taken off the marketplace instantly. This is one data point, Matt, but is this an inflecting point? Is this one data point? What are you seeing here?

Matt Argersinger: No, I hate to say that. But I think it's one data point. Yes, inventories were up 20% year over year. Probably a good sign. But remember, this data largely reflects contracts that were signed in January and February before we had all these tariff developments. People thin were probably a lot more certain and less worried about the economy than they are today. I think sadly, the data could actually inflect downward Ricky, because you have to remember the situation we're in. We still have millions of homeowners. We're locked into long term fixed mortgage rates under 5%, under 4%, in many cases, under 3%. If mortgage rates are still above 6.5% right now, which they are, I still think the vast majority of sellers are willing to wait longer, especially now if they feel even more uncertain about the economy. I feel like, yes, we've got this rise in inventory data for March, but I don't think it's Dick's. I think we're probably still in a situation where less inventories come to the market and sellers are still in this frozen mode.

Ricky Mulvey: Maybe two very different markets for existing homes and also new homes. On this coming Monday's show, I'm going to dive into some specific Home Builders with Anthony Shavon. But for now, there's a pretty odd disconnect going on with this where the data for March is showing that purchases of new single-family homes rose 7.4%. You mentioned home sellers being hesitant to leave. Home construction is still happening. You look at a company like D. R. Horton. This is the country's largest home builder and they recently reported they're telling a very different story. In their latest earnings call, sales dipped, the company's lowering sales guidance. There's a lot of questions for these Home Builders, specifically around tariffs as you mentioned. Also, worth mentioning, a lot of the people that are involved in new home construction Matt, are immigrants and that's going to be a challenge for these Home Builders. On the one side of this specific data point, you see a macro trend way more purchases of new single family homes and yet the country's largest home builder is saying, we're selling fewer homes and we expect that trend to continue. Makes sense of that. What's going on?

Matt Argersinger: It does feel paradoxical, in a way. But you have to remember, the new home sale side of the housing market pie so to speak, is very small. But it's important and I think the fact that Home Builders for the most part, have kept building throughout this whole period and have kept selling homes is important. But when I see the new home sales data, what I think it tells me is more about the demand side of the equation, which we know to be strong. We've got the biggest generation of first time home buyers in history. Ricky, I think that's you. But millennials who are desperately in a lot of cases trying to buy homes and they just can't because there's really no inventory despite the small rise that we saw in March. I think that generation, by the way, like previous generations is largely unfazed by mortgage rates. I think they understand the situation they're in. They just want a home. They're getting a job, they're moving to someplace. They'd love to be able to buy a home and not rent a home.

But I think on the Home Builder side, so to take D. R. Horton side, you're pushing discounts to move inventory right now. You know mortgage rates are expensive, financing is hard to get. To get deals done, you have to do discounts which hurts your sales. At the same time, you mentioned you got higher labor costs, you've got higher input costs. You now have a lot of uncertainty about the economy and what these tariffs are going to do to your business. You're putting less shovels into the ground. You're probably pushing off new development, holding that land a little bit longer than you want to. I wouldn't say this number is a blip. I think it's important that new home sales are up for the month, but I don't think it's telling the whole story about the demand and supply problem that we still have and I tend to buy what D. R. Horton is saying. New home sales are probably going to be heading in the wrong direction for the time being.

Ricky Mulvey: I'm out in Denver and the rental market still significantly different than buying a home out here right now. I'll be staying in the rental market for maybe a year or two, Matt. Let's move on to Chipotle Earnings. They reported yesterday after the bell. Matt, the big story is the comp sales decline, comparable sales for Chipotle dropping about half a percent. This is the first drop since COVID and also coming off a heater, a five ish percent rise from last quarter. CEO Scott Boatwright, very quick to mention that this could be a weather problem and a macro problem, you never love seeing a CEO immediately going after the weather in the first few sentences of a call. But that's what they're going for. Are you agreeing with what they're selling here?

Matt Argersinger: I will buy the macro story there, Ricky. I don't know about the weather angle. I don't know about you. I still buy burritos, even if it's rainy or cold out. But yeah, the macro story is something. If you look at what Chipotle did last year, mid to high single digit comps every quarter, they did over 7% in comps for all 2024. The negative comp this quarter was definitely a shocker, especially because Chipotle had been really holding its own. I mean, if you look at other restaurant brands, including Starbucks, which I think serves a similar demographic, I mean, they were already seeing coms fall off the table by last summer, where Chipotle really held its own. But I think it's this slowly leaking economy that we're seeing. It's lower consumer spending, it's lower consumer confidence and I think that's finally catching up even with the Chipotles of the world. Look, I think it's actually going to get a little worse going forward. I think management said they expect things to improve by the second half. They expect comps to be positive overall for the year. But you have to remember what they did last year.

Look at COMMS Q2 of last year up 11.2%. That just shows you how tough the comparisons are going to get this year. Especially now that there's this elevated level of uncertainty among its customers which they said bled into April. I expect July's results when we get them will be pretty challenging. I think if you're a Chipotle shareholder, you certainly have to anticipate that growth this year is going to be a lot slower than it was last year. A lot of the growth is really just going to come on the revenue side, is just going to come from new store openings. It's not going to really come from the comp side. If you look at Chipotle's stock price, yes, it's down roughly 30% from its all time high. That's a big drop. I'm a shareholder. That hasn't felt good, but it still trades at a very rich valuation. This year's results certainly aren't going to support that any longer. Hopefully, this is a situation where 2026 is the year when things really turn around.

Ricky Mulvey: I want to start seeing management credit the weather when things are going well for them. Weather is only a problem. It's only a headwind. You never hear a CEO saying, who's really nice out this spring and we saw more people coming in. Yes. Few other parts of the business results and I think it is worth mentioning why this stock trades at such a rich premium is that even with this decline in comparable sales, these are incredibly profitable businesses. Later in the call, they're mentioning that the year two cash on cash returns for a new restaurant. A restaurant that's been open a little bit is 60%, for older restaurants, it's 80%. You follow the commercial real estate market. I mean, that is blowing the socks off any office building, retail establishment. These are still incredibly strong businesses. Sales still growing six percent to about three billion dollars and they're still opening new restaurants, 57 new restaurants open in the quarter. What else in the business results stood out to you?

Matt Argersinger: No, I mean, that was certainly it. Those returns cash on cash returns for store openings, it's incredible. That's why I believe the story when management says we can ultimately have 7,000 stores. I mean, of course, you're going to open that many stores if they can be this profitable. Yeah, having them observed real estate, other retail businesses, I mean, they're hoping for cash on cash returns in the high single digits, maybe low double digits so they can get it. Sixty percent in year two, that's extraordinary.

Ricky Mulvey: There's a Wall Street Journal column earlier this month that had the unfortunate title of your new lunch habit is hurting the economy. There's a few key points here that I think relate to Chipotle. One of which is that the number of lunches bought outside the home were lower in 2024 than in 2020, in the height of the pandemic. Also going out to lunch right now is just stupid expensive. Hybrid office workers spending about $21 on lunch in 2024. That was up from 16 bucks in 2023. That research coming from a video conferencing company called Owl Labs. Shout out to them for finding out the cost of lunch. I still think there's a version where Chipotle wins in this environment, where people are tightening their spending, but I still want to go out to eat. If I go to Chipotle, I can get a steak bowl for about $11.50. I'm not getting the 20% tip screen. There's some headwinds here, but this is still really affordable compared to a lot of their competitors, Matt.

Matt Argersinger: It is. I mean, I think of Chipotle as high quality food at a reasonable price. I think that works no matter what happens to the economy. But I have to say Ricky, lunch is stupid expensive. If I could share one anecdote, I just recently helped my wife and son move up to New York City. They're spending the spring and summer there and we rented an apartment, and I was helping the move in. Of course, when you're moving in, people get hungry, you don't have any food, you haven't been in the grocery store. I made the mistake of ordering from Uber Eats, three sandwiches from a local deli, $55 for the sandwiches. Uber Eats fees plus tip, I was close to 80 bucks for lunch for three people.

Ricky Mulvey: What are you putting in the sandwiches?

Matt Argersinger: I mean, they were good sandwiches. One was a meatball, one was a turkey. I think the other one was roast beef. I mean, they were good, $80 good? I'm not so sure.

Ricky Mulvey: Yeah, we're seeing a similar thing in Denver and what I've noticed is sometimes the mains are still all right but now it's like a bag of chips. It's three bucks and then we're adding on more of the toast tipping environment. It makes it very unaffordable very quickly. Let's move on to this Berkshire story. Lot of Wall Street Journal today. I promise I read other news outlets. This is a column from Spencer Jacob, which I thought was good. It was actually sent to us from a listener named Chris pointing out that the annual Berkshire meeting is coming in less than two weeks. There's a question for shareholders, which is what is Uncle Warren going to do with all that cash? Right now, Berkshire Hathaway is sitting on more cash than any company ever in history including Berkshire Hathaway. It's about $318 billion. This is how he got there. He's collecting a lot of the cash dividends that the businesses send him. Also, he sold about $80 billion worth of Apple stock back in 2024. To be clear, Berkshire still has about $174 billion worth of Apple stock, so not a complete sale, but trimming some of the winners. I think the first thing people may be wondering, is this a macro signal? Is Warren Buffett battening down the hatches to buy up a bunch of stuff if the market turns south? Are you taking this cash pile as a macro signal?

Matt Argersinger: I've tried to reason my way through this a few different ways. Warren is 94-years-old. Is this just him being very conservative with the time he has left? No. First of all, he's always invested with a long term mindset. He did that through his 70s, 80s when most of us would be at that point in our lives, 100% in bonds or treasuries. He was still taking risks with equities so I don't think that's the answer. I think he's probably investing like he's going to live on 20 years. But relatedly, could it be succession planning? After all, we've known since about 2021 that Greg Abel is going to be taking Buffett's place. Is he just setting up Abel with a lot of cash, a clean slate when it comes to allocating Burch's capital? No, I don't think that could be the answer either. I think if Buffett saw a compelling investment or acquisition opportunity, he'd make it probably regardless of what Abel or anyone thinks. He's certainly proven that over time. Is it because he's lost faith in the direction of the country and therefore the US economy and maybe therefore US corporate profits?

No. I mean, Buffett is the ultimate optimist. We know this when it comes to the future of the US and that's regardless of who may currently be in the White House. I can't help but conclude Ricky, that I think this is actually macro sickling. I mean, forget the investments for a moment. Berkshire the corporation has 200 billion in net cash. Take all the cash, take out all the debt, and it still has over 200 billion. That's up from 35 billion a year ago. If you go back a little over two years ago, they actually had net debt of about seven billion. In a little over two years, they've gone from a net debt position to over 200 billion in net cash. I do think Buffett is making a market call here. You remember, one of his favorite market valuation tools is the market cap GDP ratio. It's often called the Buffett indicator for good reason, but it's the total market capitalization of a country stock, US, relative to its gross domestic product. He said in the past, when that ratio is above 100%, the market is overvalued when it's below 100%, that might suggest undervaluation. Depending on what source you use and how you calculate the US total market cap of stocks here, that ratio was over 200% coming into the year. That was at or near a record high. It's actually higher than it was in the peak of the dot-com boom. I'm finally here. I think the evidence is undeniable that Buffett thinks or thought that valuations were expensive, and he was preparing Berkshire Hathaway for just that.

Ricky Mulvey: It's not that he can only shoot with what is it? He can only shoot with an elephant gun. When you have that much cash, your only option is to take companies private or you're looking at Coca Cola or American Express, you don't think it's that.

Matt Argersinger: No. I would say it's him being patient. I think he does see a lot of clouds on the horizon. I think there's probably storms ahead, not just for US stocks, but I think for the US economy. I think Buffett believes that. You mentioned the elephant gun. He wants to make 50, 60, $70 billion blasts with first year's capital. The only way he's going to be able to do that if there are big dislocations in the market. I do think he thinks or expects there might be in the near future and that's why he's going.

Ricky Mulvey: We'll keep watching. We'll see what happens. The annual Berkshire meeting less than two weeks. Matt Argersinger, thanks for being here. Appreciate your time and insight.

Matt Argersinger: Thanks, Ricky.

Ricky Mulvey: Up next, Mary Long and Asit Sharma continue their conversation about AMD and how macroeconomic forces are impacting the chipmaker.

Mary Long: Asit a big ongoing news story that's a subsection of the tariff story has been how changing export rules have affected semiconductor stocks, in particular, how they've affected Nvidia and AMD. Last week, US government changed its export rules for certain chips last week, particularly those that are going to China. This was a big news for Nvidia which warned of a $5.5 billion write off as a result of that rule change. AMD was hit by those changes too. We on the show have already talked about the impact of that $5.5 billion write off on Nvidia. But while I have you I want to focus on what that might mean for AMD. This company is racing for closer to an $800 million impact as a result of these rule changes. Help us understand this a bit better. These rule changes impact AMD's MI308 chip. Numbers, letters, you and I talk a lot about names. What does that chip actually do? How is it different from AMD's other chip offerings? It's MI400 offerings, for example.

Asit Sharma: Yeah, so the MI308 chips are, as you suggest, basically pared down versions of AMD's latest GPU series accelerators that go in data centers. They're purpose made for this market and the interesting thing Mary, is that 2025 was supposed to be the launch year for these. They have been in prototype and the R&D phase so we didn't see a lot of sales to China in GPUs from AMD last year. This was going to be the beginning of a pretty nice opportunity. If we can translate that $800 million that the company has signaled, it's going to take us right down on inventory and work in process and translate that to revenue, probably it means about 1-$2 billion in revenue each year. Now, as a function of $31 billion in estimated revenue for 2025. That's not a huge chunk. Let's say it's going to land somewhere between four and 6% of total revenue this year. But it's really about the Ford opportunity. What the US is doing, in essence and this is not just on the Trump administration. It started with the Biden administration, but the US is increasingly putting up barriers for its greatest companies that develop AI technology like Nvidia, like AMD, making it harder for them to play in what, in essence, is the world's fastest growing market or market of most demand for these chips. The companies have been working around export controls for some time. They already understand they can't sell their most capable accelerators into China. But here we have a situation where, look even the pare down versions aren't going to be able to gain the required export licenses and hence, AMD and Nvidia are getting shut out of a market even on the lower end.

Mary Long: Where exactly in the production process were these MI308 chips? Were they designed but not yet built? Were they built, and there's already orders for them? Is there a stockpile of these designed manufactured chips that AMD thought it was going to be able to deliver to China that now is just going to sit there, or they're going to have to find another market for or is this more theoretical revenue that they were planning on that they have to find another way to generate?

Asit Sharma: Well, I think your question beautifully illustrates what we read in the very brief description, the 8K filing that AMD released, which is to say they're hinting that it's inventory, it's prototypes, it's some capitalized R&D, and it's some product that was ready to change hands. It's really a mix of everything, but we do know from that press release that some of it was inventory. This was stuff that was already developed, probably waiting to be shipped. Total cost of all of this including some of the prototyping and investment is about 800 million. Not a huge hit for AMD when all is said and done. But really, again, to come back to this point that it is taking some future opportunity off the books.

Mary Long: How much does that subtraction of future opportunity change or impact your overarching thesis for AMD? Do you view this as materially impactful to the company? Upon hearing this news, the stock market reacted like, hey, this is a big deal to both what it meant for Nvidia and AMD. How does Asit Sharma react to that news?

Asit Sharma: Yeah, same way as the market, Mary. You rerate the multiple on the company to adjust for that lost opportunity. But again, you mentioned the company has good business in China. Last year, it was about 25% of revenue that AMD derived from China, 6.23 billion. But most of this was in server chips, chips that found their way into desktop computers, gaming computers. There is a whole ecosystem of chips that are below the radar of US regulators that AMD is selling in China, those really aren't going to be impacted. The impact on my thesis isn't material. I have the same view of this as I have of Nvidia is that the demand for generative AI technology and the ability to just serve up inference and also train new models is going to be huge for a long time even as we see innovations come out of China and they will because we are forcing China to innovate. These two companies will still have a lot of white space to play in, so they'll make it up elsewhere over time. Near term though, there is, of course, that little bit of rerating on the stock. It was down, I think five or 6% on the news the day that they had their press release.

Mary Long: There's another branch of this that I want to touch on. It plays less to the changing export rules story, but more to the geopolitical situation, trade war situation more broadly. CEO of AMD, Lisa Su announced that the company will be producing key processor units in the United States for the first time. Historically, AMD has relied on manufacturers like Taiwan Semiconductor to build its chips. Historically, TSMC's manufacturing has taken place in you guessed it, Taiwan. Now though, TSMC has a new production facility in Arizona in the US and so more manufacturing will be able to take place stateside. The timing of this announcement, it was pretty recent. The timing of it makes it very easy to assume that, this movement, this change, this is the result of President Trump's trade war and the recent push for American manufacturing. But in actuality, these plans have been in place for a long time. Let's put the tariff situation aside for a moment. Big hypothetical, but let's just do that for the sake of conversation. What does making its chips in America mean for AMD on a cost basis? Again, putting the larger ever changing tariff situation aside for the moment.

Asit Sharma: I think it's a net positive on a cost basis. You would say glancing at this proposition how could it cost AMD less to have chips manufactured in the US versus Taiwan? Even though those chips have to be shipped over assembled in different components and pieces. Well, the answer is there's some opportunity cost here that plays into AMD's calculations. What if supply chains get disruptive? What if there's an earthquake in Taiwan which is a key risk that's always been there with TSMC. What if China invades Taiwan? That's always been a key risk. For AMD, on a long term basis for its supply, when it extrapolates costs of the chips themselves to its operating margin which you and I have been talking about, it makes sense to start having some of those chips made here. I think this is a big win for TSMC, because TSMC, for a long time itself didn't believe that it could be able to manufacture chips outside of Taiwan because they have such a specialised engineering workforce there. The Taiwanese, the engineers there, work incredible hours relative not just to the United States, but other parts of Asia.

I mean, these are specialized engineers who work very hard and it's extremely complex to make this advanced chip packaging. But TSMC has surprised itself. It's branched out into South Korea, it's branched out into Japan. It's branched out into Germany. It's branched out into Arizona of all places, and they are looking to have smaller and smaller node processes out of that Arizona facility which is a boon for TSMC, but it's also a boon for AMD because then that cost proposition doesn't look so bad. If it's a little more expensive to make it here in the US, well, you'll take that trade if you're AMD. Look, in a tariffs world, it makes even more sense. I think Lisa Su is feeling pretty good about those commitments and the decision to try to bring some of that manufacturing here and participate with TSMC. As a shareholder, I'm all for it.

Mary Long: We'll leave it there because Shocker Asit, I believe you and I are out of time, but always a pleasure. Thanks so much for shining a light on this company and how it exists in the ever changing geopolitical landscape.

Asit Sharma: Thanks a lot for having me, Mary. Always happy to talk AMD.

Ricky Mulvey: As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. While personal finance content follows Motley full editorial standards and are not approved by advertisers. Motley Fool only picks products that it would personally recommend to friends like you. I'm Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

American Express is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. Asit Sharma has positions in Advanced Micro Devices, Coca-Cola, and Nvidia. Mary Long has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Matthew Argersinger has positions in Chipotle Mexican Grill, Coca-Cola, and Starbucks and has the following options: short June 2025 $90 puts on Starbucks. Ricky Mulvey has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, Chipotle Mexican Grill, D.R. Horton, Nvidia, Starbucks, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: short June 2025 $55 calls on Chipotle Mexican Grill. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

AI, marketing, brand, creativity, These are just a few of the subjects that Seth Godin can talk about with eloquence and insight. In this episode of Rule Breaker Investing, the Purple Cow author joins Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner and guest host Andy Cross, The Motley Fool's chief investment officer, to shed light on what earns attention, transaction, and loyalty.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Learn More »

A full transcript is below.

Where to invest $1,000 right now

When our analyst team has a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, Stock Advisor’s total average return is 995%* — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 172% for the S&P 500.

They just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy right now, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of June 9, 2025

This podcast was recorded on May 21, 2025.

David Gardner: This week a special treat. Seth Godin, only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

Among the many remarkable traits of Seth Godin, one of my favorites is the power of his brevity. In honor of Seth, you just got the shortest cold open I've ever done. This week, I'm featuring our recent Motley Fool interview from Fool24. That's the video channel on our website with superstar business author Seth Godin, joined by Andy Cross, as well, our Chief Investment Officer, that interview is coming right up. But first, a quick reminder next week is your mailbag. I love receiving your thoughts and questions every month. Reach us at [email protected] or tweet us at RBI podcast.

As I shared at the start of the year, my 2025 book, Rule Breaker Investing is now available for pre-order. After 30 years of stock picking, this is my magnum opus, a lifetime of lessons distilled into one definitive guide, and each week until the book launches on September 16, I'm sharing a random excerpt. I crack open the book to a random page and read a few sentences. Let's do it. Here's this week's Page Breaker preview a succinct Godin-like statement, summing up my investing approach in exactly 20 words. I quote. "I try to find excellence, buy excellence, and add to excellence over time. I sell mediocrity. That's how I invest." That's this week's Page Breaker preview to pre-order my final word on stock picking shape by three decades of market crushing success. Just type Rule Breaker Investing into amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, or wherever you shop for great books. When you think about it, a great investment book literally pays for itself, and then some. To everyone who's already pre-ordered, thanks. That means a lot to me. In the words of the poet, Taylor Allison Swift, our next guest is feeling 22. Seth Godin has 22 best sellers in 39 languages. He's an Internet entrepreneur, best-selling author, renowned speaker and marketing. Sure, expert. He's posted more than 9,000 times on his blog, and his 22 books, I think I have that number right. He can correct me if I'm wrong. It'll destroy the Taylor Swift opening if I don't have that right, Andy. His 22 books include The Dip, Linchpin, Purple Cow, and Tribes. I want to throw Free Prize inside in there as well, book I love. His newest book is the best seller, This is Strategy Make Better Plans, published last year. He's one of the two most famous people from Mount Vernon, Virginia. Seth Godin, welcome back.

Seth Godin: You guys, you're great. David, you're a genius. I'm from Mount Vernon, New York, but I'll take it.

David Gardner: I rarely do this step. I'm going to throw my producer Mac Greer under the bus for, I would say, inadequate research that caused me to make, What is an embarrassing gas?

Seth Godin: It's not embarrassing. I just don't want to take any credit for being from a place I'm not from and move people from Virginia down the ladder. It's not fair. [laughs].

Andy Cross: It's all in the storytelling, anyways, Seth.

David Gardner: Seth, let's go right to AI because how can we not? Seven years ago, you joined me on my podcast. You were my first ever author in August. It was August 1st, 2018, and you described daily blogging back then as the best way to sharpen your thinking. Today, so many creators lean on AI assistant like ChatGPT to draft, edit, spark ideas. How has AI changed your own writing process, Seth, if at all, and what would your advice be to someone who worries that AI will cheat their way to insight?

Seth Godin: Let's say it's 1,900, 1905, and we're talking about electricity. I think it's a little bit of a trap to ask about, are you using a light bulb at night to help you type? Because electricity opened the door for so many miracles that we had no idea were coming. Claude is one of my closest compatriots. I find ChatGPT to be arrogant and lazy, but Claude and I get along great, and I never ask it to do my writing for me, but that's a personal choice because I write because I want to, not because some teacher told me I had to. What I do with Claude that continually amazes me are two things. First, is if you have a complicated document, 30, 40 pages, I had one that was written by 10 different people over the course of a year, and you upload that document and say to Claude, "Please find the internal inconsistencies, please ask me five hard questions, please criticize the structure," it will write you a two page memo better than most humans could do. The second thing I use it for is, I'll come up with a list of three or four or five things and say, "Give me four more." Of the four it gives me, at least two of them are things I never thought of that are really important. This idea of, did I think of all the things on my list, is great, but, two years from now, both of these uses are trivial compared to what AI is going to be doing to our lives.

David Gardner: Do you want to make any predictions, Seth?

Seth Godin: My prediction is this. Everything AI has done so far for the typical person in business in the developed world is solo. It's me and the AI. But the Internet has two words in it, Inter, which means connected and net, which means connected. That's what fuels everything that works on the Internet. Once AI says to me, "I noticed you were writing X, Y or Z, David, who's also using the same tool is working on the same thing. Should I connect you guys?" Whoa. What happens when my databases talk to each other or my databases talk to your databases? What happens when we create this amplification of community, not just amplification of knowledge? That adds two zeros, I think, to the way the world works.

David Gardner: Seth, you've written about how true pros don't fear amateurs, but I think a lot of pros are fearing ChatGPT, generative AI, Claude, whatever it is. Should we?

Seth Godin: Well, I've had technology put my projects out of business before, and it will do it again. What I mean by true pros, don't fear amateurs, when the camera came along, a whole bunch of people who were painters poo putt it. When the iPhone came along, wedding photographers freaked out. How dare guests at a wedding take pictures? Don't they know how hard I work to get all this fancy equipment? But the best wedding photographers got busier after that, not less busy because you're now charging for something that's not a commodity. If you made a living doing genre covers for science fiction novels, you don't have a job anymore, because if there's a genre, AI can do it better than you can. What it does is it requires you to go beyond genre and to be on the frontier. If I think about something like radiology, there are plenty of professional radiologists, but they're doing genre radiology by the book. Now an X-ray machine can instantly and for free, read a wrist fracture 95% of the time. I don't need a mediocre radiologist ever again. This is great news because now the 90% of the population that didn't even have access to X-rays and is going to. It's really bad news if you're by the book anything, and so that's what I mean by being a professional is you're not just checking the box and handing in the form.

David Gardner: Such a good distinction. Let's talk a little bit more about AI. I'm wondering, especially Seth, I admire so much so many of your thoughts, words, deeds, your books. I've read a bunch of them. Branding is always top of mind when I think about you, and obviously, I think about the Motley Fool brand. That's just our company, but branding matters a lot to me as an investor. In fact, I think that branding is often misunderstood because there's no number for it on the balance sheet or the income statement, and so most people calculate their valuation ratios without factoring in what, to me, might be the central asset of every great company. Every great company sets go and ends up looking overvalued because we're not counting brand. But I care about brand. Do you think AI is being well-branded today? Does AI have a branding problem?

Seth Godin: What's a brand? It's not a logo. The Motley Fool logo is a tiny fraction of the goodness of Motley Fool. You didn't win the logo sweepstakes, but you built a brand that matters. And if you look at AI logos, they're terrible. A brand is simply the promise that an organization makes and our expectation of what to expect. Hyatt has a logo, but Nike has a brand. If Hyatt came out with a line of sneakers, we have no idea what it would be like. But if Nike opened a hotel chain, we all know what it would be like. [laughs] And so that's the brand value, if you're not paying extra, there is no brand value, if you're not taking risks because you give them the benefit of the doubt, there is no brand value. Fifty years ago, the mass murderer Marlborough had an enormous brand value because people would cross the street if the convenience store was sold out of Marlborough's and buy their brand across the street. The thing about AI is anthropic as they say 600 people in their marketing department. I have no idea what they're doing because there's no consistency, there's no structure to what I should be expecting from them. It's just engineers launch stuff, and then the marketing people go to meetings and try to catch up.

AI has a brand in the sense that more people are paying more money for this new technology than has ever happened before for any technology I can recall. We're paying the money because of what it's going to do for us tomorrow, and so there's this expectation. The challenge they have, is in order to get our attention, they have made insane promises, and regularly they break those promises, and so I wouldn't trust AI to drive my car, and I wouldn't trust AI to write my prescriptions, and I wouldn't trust AI to write my books. But it does a little of those things all the time. Going forward, if there's going to be enterprise value greater than the tech value, they're going to have to develop this soft tissue brand, because I think the tech value, as always happens, will become a commodity. That means you either have to have a network effect, or a benefit of the doubt loyalty brand, or else it's a commodity you're going to charge with, it costs you to make the electricity work and a penny more, but you can't get a premium because if not, I'll just switch to somebody else.

Andy Cross: Seth, just a quick follow up there. You've written a lot about authenticity of brands. Generative AI and those tools, do they have an authenticity problem? Then a parallel to that is just in general, how do you evaluate the authenticity of a brand's marketing?

Seth Godin: I've written that I think authenticity is a crock, and I think it's a trap, and I think it should be avoided. Friends should be authentic, professionals should be consistent. If I go to see Taylor Swift and I pay $2,000 for the tickets, and she has a cold, I don't want her to act like she has a cold. I want her to fake it, and act like the best version of Taylor Swift, because she's a professional, and the same thing is true for anything I transact with a stranger hoofer. What I want from AI is not authenticity because I don't care if it's authentically having a hallucination. I want it to consistently keep its promise, and part of the job the marketers have. Well, so let me explain about marketing in tech firms. The greatest value created ever by a marketer in a tech firm is not Steve Jobs, it's Marissa Mayer. Marissa Mayer, who didn't have marketing in her title was one of the first employees at Google. At the time I was at Yahoo. Yahoo had 183 links on its homepage. Google was heading down that path really fast, and Marissa Mayer put a stake in the ground and stopped at two, and every time the engineers tried to make Google more complicated, she made them stop. That single act, which took five plus years of diligence, created what is it now, $1 trillion worth of value, because otherwise, it would have just been another place to do search. Yahoo was lazy.

I was the third member of the marketing department after they acquired my company, and so the two people who were in the marketing department, they were just in charge of putting up a billboard here and there. That wasn't marketing. Marketing is, what is the story we're going to live? What are the promises we're going to make and the promises we're not going to make? When people think of us, what are they going to think of? This has been missing in tech for a long time, and so you end up with people who let the tech run the company, and as a result, they inevitably slam into the wall.

David Gardner: I want to make sure I have my math and my history right. Seth, when you said there are two options on the Google homepage, I think one was search, and the other was, I'm feeling lucky?

Seth Godin: Correct. They're taking it down as of, like, the next couple of weeks.

David Gardner: I have to admit I haven't really clicked. I'm feeling lucky for a long time, so maybe but I love the whimsy of it.

Seth Godin: They didn't want anyone to click on it. They just wanted to show confidence. [laughs]

David Gardner: Let's shift now from branding to permission marketing. Early on, Seth Godin coined the term permission marketing to contrast with interruption tactics. These days, we've got some cookies crumbling, privacy regulations, proliferating, first party data, now king. Seth, how do you see permission marketing evolving and where should marketers focus to earn genuine consent permitted consent in 2025?

Seth Godin: When you and I met, it was 1991 or '92, and I think somewhere in there and I had just invented email marketing. Someone needed to invent it, and it was me. The whole point was, it's not spam. I testified at the US Senate against spam and got kicked out of the Direct Marketing Association in response. The Direct Marketing Association said, how dare you invite regulation of anything any company wants to do to steal attention? I said, you're completely missing the point. The good guys want there to be regulation. The good guys want it to be rational and quiet and trustworthy. It's the scammers and the spammers that want it to be the Wild West. You, the DMA, you should be on my team. I was thrilled years later, they let me back in because they understood the mistake they had made. The stuff you're talking about, it's all ham-handed, but it's all in response to greedy, lazy organizations skirting around the edges. Permission is simple. It's not the fine print. It's a simple question. If you didn't show up tomorrow, would we miss you? Would we miss you if you didn't send us that email? Would we miss you if you didn't update your website? If the answer is no, then you're a spammer, and if the answer is yes, you've earned permission. I'm confident that if the Fool stopped sending its fans and its subscribers your newsletter, you would hear from a lot of people within five minutes. That's because you've earned their permission, not you have some legal loophole you're exploiting.

David Gardner: I really appreciate that point, and I do think the Motley Fool does a good job in some regards, and I think we also send out a lot of emails, too. I don't think we're 100% yet, but I certainly think we're on the path. Thirty-one years in since you embedded email marketing Seth, a lot of people are still just trying to figure out how to do it best. It's funny, just a quick reflection, and then Andy's going to have a follow up, but my reflection is that what you just said, if we didn't send it, would anyone notice? Would anyone care? That's exactly the question that I ask in something I call the snap test when I look at companies, and I'm thinking like, will I invest in this stock or that one? The snap test was later made popular. I first wrote about this in our 1998 book, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers but it was later made popular by Thanos of Marvel Avengers fame when he snapped his fingers and half of the world, including superheroes, disappeared. But literally in 1998, I said, here's the way I think you can decide whether you should buy a stock or not. When you snap your fingers, if that company disappeared overnight, would anyone notice? Would anyone care? It has focused on impact and who's got the love out there and it's just fascinating to me that you basically said the same thing, and we're using different contexts.

Seth Godin: Well, I'm just stealing all your ideas.

David Gardner: Not at all. No, we stole email marketing from you, sir. [laughs] Andy,

Andy Cross: Seth, how about the progression or the regression in permission marketing when you think about the technology of programmatic ads and cookies and targeting over the years? Where do we stand nowadays with permission marketing?

Seth Godin: Well, it's like when one of your kids grows up and ends up in a federal prison. [laughs] When we were running Yoyodyne, we had a 82% open rate and a 33% response rate to the emails we sent. We're the largest recipient and sender of email in the world at the time that was doing permission marketing. Those were our numbers week after week. Now, for most organizations, it's 0.000001%, and the reason is the inevitable race to the bottom caused by people skirting around the edges to make their quarterly income go up. Because they're like, It's OK if I burn it down because it's an emergency, and so they cheat. It was naive of me when I wrote the book and in the years afterwards to not expect that that would happen because it always happens. What Google could have done is established better standards for how these interactions are going to go down so that good action would be more rewarded, and the open web is magnificent. We don't have an open web. We have a semi-open web, and when somebody who has enough money and resources comes in and decides to bend it to their will, then the principles and ethics of what I'm talking about often go out the window because Milton Friedman was wrong. We need both independent entities they are trying to maximize their profit and their shareholder value and community action that's organized around what's best for the culture. The purpose of culture isn't to enable capitalism. The purpose of capitalism is to enable culture, and so we're going to see all of this craft and destruction, and then the next thing is going to come, and then the next thing is going to come. My hope is that AI is going to work at least as hard to defend my attention as it's going to work to steal my attention.

David Gardner: Seth, let me shift now to something that I really appreciate about you, and that's your terseness. That's how concise you are. Truly, and I remember talking about this seven years ago with you on the Rule Breaker Investing podcast, for every blog you write, you've thrown out four or five. There's a lot, and you probably still do that or maybe you're more efficient. It's just two or three of these days, but I really appreciate the effort that you've put in to make things as tight as possible. I would say in some ways, Seth, you've built a career on brevity. Today's short form video, this is where I'm heading now, thinking TikTok I don't actually use TikTok, but turns out a lot of people do, I think Instagram. I also don't use it, and even punch your economy of attention, 15 seconds of content for a lot of videos. What lessons from your writing practice might you do this content yourself? If so, what translates?

Seth Godin: What do we make? I think most people who listen to this make decisions. You don't make pottery, you don't dig ditches, you make decisions. Maybe you make a difference, and maybe you make change happen. I'm a teacher. What I make is I help my students who have opted in to whatever we're doing like right now, change the way they see the world, change the way they get what they're getting. The rule is, put the effort in to make the teaching as cogent and concise as possible, but no more than that.[laughs] There are all these ancient fables of the guy who knocks on the Sage's door and says, wise guy, while I'm standing here on one foot, teach me everything there is, the meaning of life. My response would be, if you're only willing to wait long enough for you to stand on one foot, you don't care enough to change, and I'm not here to entertain you.

The reason I don't show up on TikTok is not that I couldn't get a lot of use because I understand the medium and I understand how to do a dance there that people might click on or the algorithm would like. It's that it wouldn't get me anything. I don't sell stuff online, but I know people who have had 42 million views of something and sold four units. The goal is not to make Mark Zuckerberg happy. The goal is not to make the TikTok algorithm happy. The goal is to achieve what you set out to achieve. What's the purpose of this work? I sometimes run into people who said, I read a two-paragraph blog post of yours, and it changed my life, but I'm way more likely to run into someone who says, I read your book and it changed my life. I'm even more likely to run into someone who said I took the altMBA, which I used to run, and that changed my life. What I'm looking for are people who are ready to lean in, and the short stuff opens the door, but they've got to then teach themselves or it's not going to work, and the problem with TikTok is there's not a lot of autodidactic experience going on there. There's just amusement.

David Gardner: Do I recall correctly that you only took one English course in high? There's some story, I remember you telling Seth about your own schooling in English.

Seth Godin: My high school English teacher, I took all the classes in high school, but she wrote in my yearbook, you are the bane of my existence, and you will never amount to anything. I still have it. I dedicated one.

David Gardner: Is that really what a teacher wrote into all like that?

Seth Godin: I dedicated one of my books to her cause was slightly tongue in cheek. My dad made a deal with my two sisters and me. We'd have to pay room and board in college. He'd pay tuition, but we had a major in engineering in exchange. Because he said, learn to solve problems, the rest of this is a bonus. Take as many English classes as you want, but first learn to solve problems. When I got to school, I discovered a loophole in the course catalog, so I took engineering and a lot of philosophy classes. I loved the thinking and philosophy, and I took exactly one English class. What I discovered is college-level English, at least for me, wasn't about learning to express myself the way I wanted to in a practical way. It was about literature, and I have too short of an attention span for that. That's correct. One English class in college.

Andy Cross: Seth, back to the, well, a little bit tied to attention spans and the marketing question that David had asked. I'm really curious about this concept between grabbing and earning someone's attention, especially today, as David said and you all were talking about just the brevity of information out there and the volume of information out there. Explain to us how we can earn someone's attention versus grabbing someone's attention?

Seth Godin: Two quick case studies. This is a book that saved my career. I'd been kicked out of publishing, and then I wrote this book called Purple Cow. It came in a milk cart, and I self-published the first 10,000 copies. Now, that's a gimmick, and I'm aware it's a gimmick, but I was only selling it to people who already liked my work, who were reading me in Fast Company. I sold out of the 10,000 copies, five dollars a copy, broke even. How did everyone else find out about it so that it has sold millions of copies? Is it because I did stunts and hung from a building and figured out how to make a commotion? Zero people. It's because somebody put this on their desk. They didn't put it on their desk because they like me. They don't know me. They put it on their desk because it would benefit them, earning them status or affiliation or the workplace they wanted to be if their co-workers knew about it. You earn attention never by doing a stunt or by grabbing it. You earn attention when someone who likes you tells someone else. If I think about David and the heritage of the Motley Fool, you had a lucky break at the beginning, which is that Ted gave you a channel on basically the pre-Internet. But that was still only what, 10,000 people at the beginning? How did you get from 10,000 people to the millions of people that know you and trust you now? Is it because you ran a billboard in Times Square? I don't think so.

It's because people who were on board with you told their friends, they told their spouse, they told their peers. Why did they do that? Because you did something worth talking about. This is the essence of the Purple Cow, and it is missed by almost everybody. When Apple goes out and hypes and hypes a TV show. Well, that's because they don't believe in themselves enough to have the show do what it could do, which is spread organically from viewer to viewer. That is how we ended up with everything that happened after the original Super Bowl ad. It wasn't that Apple ran better ads after that. It's that they made a product that people like me told their friends about. I think that Serrandos said Netflix understands this way better than whoever's running Apple TV, because they're trying to make shows that don't make critics happy, but that people want to talk about. It's that simple.

David Gardner: Let's stick with Purple Cow, one of my favorite business books. Back in Purple Cow, at one point in the book, Seth, you argue that winning companies, a fun word, cheat by building unique assets. I'm going to quote because, in fact, I have a book called Rule Breaker Investing coming out this fall, and I quote directly from you, this passage because it's so relevant for me when I think about what companies I want to be invested in. Here's a little bit of Seth Godin. "Starbucks is cheating. The coffee bar phenomenon was invented by them, and now whenever we think coffee, we think Starbucks. Vanguard is cheating. Their low-cost index funds make it impossible for a full service broker to compete. Amazon.com is cheating. Their free shipping and huge selection give them an unfair advantage over the neighborhood store." A little bit later in that passage, you end up asking, "Why aren't you cheating?" You ask rhetorically, of the reader. I will note some years later, you wrote a separate blog about how you really shouldn't cheat. Cheating is not a good thing, and you explain very clearly the other cheating that we think of, and that's not good. But I've always loved that passage, and that's why I adduce it in my book. But Seth, I want to ask you, I don't know how much time you spend looking at emerging businesses or industries today. I hope some because that's my question.

Do you see anybody cheating today in a way that impresses you? They just have an unfair advantage and they're exploding it.

Seth Godin: First, I don't remember writing any of those words. It makes me smile to read it. It was so long ago I had to call it amazon.com.

David Gardner: It's true.

Seth Godin: I made the decision a long time ago that I generally don't talk about what's going to be the next big company because every time I do, I curse them and they fail. This is your job. You are much better at it than me. [laughs] But here's what I would say. If you think of a brand that you admire, it's not because they have a good logo. It's because that brand is doing something that is an unfair advantage. I am deep in on Patagonia, almost every article of clothing I own. Could I tell if my eyes were closed, if it was Patagonia? Probably not. But I like the way it makes me feel to be the person that is going to buy that item from a company that stands for that. No one's going to be the next Patagonia because that slot is taken. Luxottica figured out how to corner the market, and it took an innovator like Neil at Warby Parker to expose the $400 premium that they had been charging as a tax to everybody. No one's going to be the next Warby Parker. There's no room to be the next Warby Parker. You can be a bottom fisher making a nickel at a time, but Warby Parker figured out how to play a remarkable game when the space changes.

My dad used to call this a change agent. Technology, big shifts, these are agents of change. When it shows up, we rescramble the board, and we saw this happen when we got streaming and YouTube and everything and cable before that. ABC, CBS, NBC, boom, toast because we scrambled the board. What I'm seeing right now is the biggest scramble of the board since the Internet and probably bigger, which is AI. If you have a job where you do something that someone could write down what they want, they're probably going to get AI to do it cheaper because if that's all the job involves is writing down the steps in the spec, I got a machine that's going to do that for me for $20 a month. That giant scramble means a whole bunch of organizations that do something that requires judgment and insight are going to arise. I think many of them are going to have very few people who work there, and most of them aren't going to need to go public, but some of them will choose to, and we're not going to recognize the corporate landscape, I think, in eight years. I really don't.

Andy Cross: Seth, when you think about remarkable companies tied to the purple cows, are there key signs of what makes in your eyes a remarkable company?

Seth Godin: Generally, there's only a little bit about them that's interesting, and then everything else they're doing is boring. That they're not trying to change everything all at once all the time. They have one principle that they stick with. In the new book, This is Strategy, I call this an elegant strategy. Microsoft said, "We're going to be the IBM of software." That's it. If we do this right, if everything we do is not about making the single best product or the most cutting edge product, but just a well supported, well sold product that the Fortune 1000 wants to buy, and we just keep doing that. No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft, we'll do fine. That we can go down the list of companies for the ages. It's not that they have a fancy elevator pitch because no one ever bought anything on an elevator. That's not it. [laughs] It's that they have a compass. The compass says, the more we do this, the better it goes. That's what you need to have. At Walmart, one of the rare exceptions, Walmart's exception was, the more we lower price, the better we do. Because lower price got the more volume, volume got the more container ships, more container ships, got the lower price, and they could repeat and repeat . But everybody else who's remarkable has to say something other than low price. The more Shake Shack acts in a way that McDonald's is afraid to go, they do better. Just keep going down the list. The more we do blank, the better we do. That's what makes you remarkable.

Andy Cross: That's great. I think that reminds me of Costco for the same reason. They're remarkable is because they have the membership business that is so reasonably priced, and they use the advantages of their scale and their low product footprint to be able to keep prices at rock bottoms level, and they make the profit up on the membership side.

Seth Godin: Well, also, and you guys are much more expert than me. As a marketer, I think what Costco did was they created a cultural narrative that said, I'm a good parent because I'm willing to buy ridiculous quantities of ridiculous items to support my family. Having 40 pounds of Vlasic pickles in a container, that's part of the brand ethos. They didn't try to out Walmart . I'll tell you one aside about this. In 1999, 2000, Walmart hired me to come give a speech to their entire digital division. I flew to Bentonville, Arkansas. The local only hotel lost my reservation. I slept on the floor in their lobby. The next morning, I went to the headquarters. There's 400 people in the room, and there's a banner behind me. It had been there for six months. Remember, this is 25 years ago. The banner says, "We can't out Amazon. Twenty five years ago, they realized their strategy was their strategy, and Jeff's was Jeff's, and if they started chasing him, the public markets would just murder them. They had to say, "No, we got 25 years to do a different thing, and then we'll see what happens." You need the humility to realize you're not going to be for everybody, but you got to be for somebody.

David Gardner: Let's stick a little bit with stuff that's cheap and stuff that's increasingly free. Because Seth, I'm just curious of your thoughts on the topic of, "Hey, I'm about to lose my job because something can do it faster, cheaper, easier." If that happens enough times, I've sometimes wondered whimsically, rhetorically aloud. If that happens enough times, that means so much stuff has gotten so cheap that maybe we don't actually need full time jobs as we once did, because these days we get Khan Academy lectures for free. You and I used to have to dial, collect, mom and dad, collect call from Seth, dollar an hour international fees. That's all free today. Google Docs, last I checked, turn-by-turn GPS navigation. There are so many things now in 2025 that are cheap or near free that we used to pay quite a bit for. I'm just curious, Seth, can you see a future where stuff keeps getting more shared, more cheaper, more free, where we don't actually worry about being displaced from our full time job?

Seth Godin: There are a few things you're twisting together here. Again, there are parts of this where I'm consistently wrong, so let's just leave that aside for a second. [laughs] Historically, every piece of technology has displaced a certain labor. When the steam shovel came along, ditch diggers were not happy. When writing came along, Plato famously said it's the end of civilization because people won't have to memorize stuff anymore. It's been going on for a very long time. Every single time that displacement has led to more jobs, not fewer jobs. Past performance might not be an indicator of future, but that's been true every single time. Number 2, we keep making certain things cheaper. The amount of time somebody used to have to go to work to get an hour of light in their home in the evening was three hours of work. Now, it's two seconds. The amount of money this pencil used to cost out of my income, it's so vanishingly small that pencils are free. Keep going down the list. We've been doing this for a very long time. But at the same time, we keep inventing all of this stuff that people say they need that they actually want. Most of what we do and buy and pay attention to in 2025 didn't exist in 1950 and no one missed it. [laughs] We're going to keep inventing these desires because human beings want two things in all areas.

Once we have a roof over our head, and we're not going to die tomorrow, we only want two things status and affiliation. Status is who eats lunch first? Who's up and who's down? Am I winning? What am I winning at? Some people get status by showing up at a board meeting in ratty clothes. Some people get status by showing up in a civil suit. Or affiliation, people like us do things like this. One of the rules apparently at the Motley Fool is you got to have those big headphones maybe with a little thing there [laughs] because people like us, that's how we show up at these events. [laughs] Affiliation works, for example, in Disney's favor, because if your kids are really into Mickey, it's probably because their friends are really into Mickey. If every single person had their favorite superhero, no one could make a living selling superhero stuff. Affiliation and status. Once we don't have to work, three hours to get an hour of electricity. Why do we still work? Why is it? David, how many billionaires do you know? 100, probably?

David Gardner: I'm invested in more than I know, I can say that.

Seth Godin: But I'm guessing you could pick up the phone and talk to 100 different billionaires, all of whom still work. What are they going to work for?

David Gardner: Good point?

Seth Godin: They're going to work for status and affiliation. We're not going to stop doing that. I am certain we're not going to stop doing that. Just like in the Star Trek world, people fight to get on the enterprise. Why? They could just stay home and use the Matter thing and eat peeled grapes, but they don't. Status and affiliation.

Andy Cross: Seth, outside of the billionaire landscape and the community, do you think that stands for everybody? Because I think there is this as we're thinking about 2025 and AI, we talked a little bit about it earlier. Just a little bit of fear out there about what is going to take my job the white collar side, that I didn't have even just six months ago or 12 months ago.

Seth Godin: The white collar people didn't complain when the punch press and the robot came along and took away the blue collar jobs and certainly, they're whining like crazy. It's going to take away your job. I am not doubting that one bit. What's going to happen is somebody is going to invent new jobs that offer status and affiliation for people who have pencils and light and all this other stuff they didn't have to pay for anymore because we keep doing that. If you do average work for average pay, for average customers, be prepared to be replaced. I am really confident that is likely. I'm not in favor of it. I wish people to have a smooth and calm life. But this is as normal as the world is ever going to be again. Today is peak normal.

Andy Cross: Seth, because you've written and talked so much about creativity, does that make creativity more important today or certainly as important as it was even just a few years ago?

Seth Godin: This is really cool. Do I have like four minutes to tell you the history of creativity? [laughs].

Andy Cross: Let's go.

Seth Godin: I just learned this the other day. The word creativity only showed up in the dictionary in the last 100 years. Creativity at work was invented by the Department of Defense in the 1950s and promoted as a way to keep white collar workers from getting too antsy. They started this whole idea of the creative at the ad agency and creativity. Before that, the expectation at work was you were going to do what you're told, and it was going to be brain dead boring. When the Industrial Revolution came to Manchester, England, they didn't have coffee carts that went up and down the aisle. They had gin carts, because people who were used to freedom in the farm had to go for 12, 13 hours in a dark room following instructions and then we got used to it. Most people do pretend creative work. The rest of the time, they're checking the boxes and filling out the forms and being part of the system. But now, that we've got a machine that's going to check the boxes, fill out the forms, and be the system, you're going to have to do actual creative work. That's going to be really stressful, particularly for people who are over 15-years-old, who got successful by turning off the part of their brain that wanted to have a spark, and now they're going to be on the hook for it. It's going to be as big of shift as when Gutenberg came out with the Bible, which caused meltdowns all over Europe because for the first time people could read this thing, instead of having someone tell them what it said. AI is going to say, "If you can't figure out how to do something that I haven't already imagined, you're going to be lower and lower in status." That's going to put a lot of people in a bad place for a while.

David Gardner: Seth, you referenced it briefly. Let's talk about it. Your new book, This is Strategy: Make Better Plans. This is the one I haven't read yet. Can you give us without causing our listeners not to go out and buy it a short prose, a cliffs notes version of This is Strategy: Make Better Plans.

Seth Godin: Part of my goal is that people don't need to buy my books because the book is an excuse for me to talk about it. If you want the souvenir edition, that's fine, and if you don't, that's fine. [laughs] If I could tell you everything in the book in 90 seconds, I would. The short version is tactics aren't the same as strategy. Strategy is a philosophy of becoming. It's the hard work we do before we do the hard work. If you have an elegant strategy, new tactics present themselves, that Warren Buffett told everybody his strategy and then just repeated the tactics as they shifted through the years. But the strategy stays the same, and what is missing from most people and most organizations is an ability to even talk about it. I argue that there are four surprising components which are systems because if you don't see the system, that means it's taking advantage of you. The college industrial complex, the wedding industrial complex, the capitalist system that drives you to think of some things as normal. It's a non-secret conspiracy that we never notice. There's time because tomorrow is different than today and everything the Motley Fool has ever done is about time because no one cares what a stock did yesterday, you're only talking about what it's going to do tomorrow. The third one games. Games are any human situation where there's scarcity and choices to be made. The fourth one I don't remember. But it's important that we learn to see how these pieces fit together so that we will be ready to make the change we want to make tomorrow.

David Gardner: When did the idea for the book first present itself to you years ago? Was it in a blog? How did these things germinate?

Seth Godin: It's all over the map. When we first met, I was in the book business, and so I went to bed every night knowing I needed to wake up in the morning with a book idea. I could only do a couple of books or one book a year, and I had to take my best shot. A book takes a really long time to write but I did it for work, and after a bunch of books, I stopped doing that because it's too much work. It doesn't pay to do it for a living. I only write a book when I have no choice. I write a book when it's the best way for me to share an idea. Some books like my book, Survival Is Not Enough, took me eight hours a day every day for a year, I threw out 100,000 words before the book was finished. Other books like The Dip I wrote in an 11-day fugue state, and it just came to me one day, and then I just wrote it. This book is a love letter to my friends who are stuck and it didn't take very long to write, but it's heartfelt in the sense that because I don't charge to coach my friends and because I don't do any consulting, I said if I was going to talk to someone I care about about why they're stuck or how the world works, what would I say? That's what this is.

Andy Cross: Seth, we spend a lot of time as analysts studying strategic plans of the companies we follow, and I want your guidance on how we can identify companies that truly have good strategic plans versus those that do not.

Seth Godin: In my experience, the ones that have a good strategic plan, it's really obvious that they do. Just before we got on, we were talking about that guy, Brad, who's building the roofing company. His strategy is super simple and it's like, on the first page of their 10K. Done. You might not agree with the strategy, but the strategy is not hidden. When Yahoo stopped being the center of the Internet, if you asked any 10 people at Yahoo, what's your strategy, they would give you 14 different answers, and they haven't had a strategy ever since. It's right there. Google had a strategy. then when they invented LLMs and what became AI, they freaked out because they said, this completely undermines our existing strategy. We don't know what to do, so they tried to keep the world from seeing AI, and now they're toast, because they can't do their old strategy anymore, and they're not winning with their possible new one. That was a good long run, but they lost the thread.

David Gardner: Let's move now to our game, buy sell or hold. Seth, you may or may not remember this. I'm springing this on you. I know you're ready for it. The key is, and I know you appreciate this about buy, sell, or hold. These are not stocks we're talking about.

Seth Godin: Oh, good. Then I'm fine.

David Gardner: We're talking about things happening in the world at large. The worlds of business in life and ask if they were stocks, Seth Godin, would you be buying, selling or holding? Let me kick it off with, let's go with this one. Is turning down more opportunities the key to doing your best work, or is that a branding luxury, Seth Godin buy, sell, or hold saying no as a growth strategy?

Seth Godin: Strong buy.

David Gardner: Why?

Seth Godin: Because no is a complete sentence. No lets you stop hiding. No puts you on the hook. No gives you the chance to become a meaningful specific instead of a wandering generality. I have never met anyone who yesed their way to where they wanted to go.

David Gardner: Brilliant. Next one up. We may have covered this one already, but let's go there again anyway. The word authentic in 2025, has it become inauthentic, buy, sell, or hold, authentic?

Seth Godin: Short. Sell. It's like, what a disaster.

David Gardner: Let's keep moving. AI tools in the creative process. A brainstorming partner or the beginning of creative complacency, buy, sell, or hold the AI creative tools.

Seth Godin: Well, what you just said is both of those sentences are true. That the same way typesetting shifted when we got desktop publishing. Some people use it to make the greatest type ever set, and some people made bank ransom notes. The same thing is going to happen here.

David Gardner: This next one comes via text beforehand, Andy Cross asking me, what does Seth, does he watch this TV show? We're about to find out. Buy, sell, or hold, Shark Tank as a lens on entrepreneurship?

Seth Godin: True story. Before they were on in the United States, the phone rang and they said, would I please audition to be the judge? I said, "What do you mean?" They said, "We want you to be the nasty, bald, possibly semitic judge." I said, "You got the wrong guy. I'm not going to show up there and scotch people's dreams."

David Gardner: Love it. Great answer. Next one up. The personal newsletter Renaissance, so from Substack to Buttondown, are curated, thoughtful emails, the new social media, buy, sell or hold?

Seth Godin: I'm buying the idea that anybody who wants to be a singular voice benefits from having this newsletter. I don't think email is the best way to deliver it, and I don't think that Substack is your friend in the long run, but I do think no matter how many people are reading it, if you can write and leave behind a legacy of work you are proud of, I'm up to 3.4 million words, that's a useful way for you to spend your time. Do not expect that it is going to come with prizes and cash, but it will build you the authority and consistency to stand for something, and it won't cost you anything.

David Gardner: Well said and hear-hear., Seth, how do you count those 3.4 million words? Is there a counter? How are you doing that?

Seth Godin: Every once in a while, I download the entire blog just in case something bad happens, and then there's something called word count because I don't keep track of any stats. I don't know how many people are reading it today. I don't have comments, but the incremental thing, about 10 years ago, I realized I had a streak, and so my blogs are queued up so even after I'm dead, there'll be new blogs coming out because I don't want this streak to end. It's just it's one of the only things that I've got right this minute that no one's ever going to catch up to, and I'm still going.

David Gardner: We love that about you, and I'm curious, Seth, do you find yourself attracted by streaks in other contexts in your life? Duolingo, for example, has this whole thing where if you start learning Spanish or Chinese, it's going to say come back tomorrow, and then it's going to start saying you've come back 57 days in a row, do you find yourself ever beholden to other streaks?

Seth Godin: Yeah, I have a lot of willpower, but Duolingo tried and failed, 40 days, my streak lasted, and I just couldn't do it. But this thing on my wrist, I'm up to 450 days. It got my health back after long COVID. It's not for everybody, but the idea that I'm going to break a 450 day streak, I'll hook it up to one of those goodwill cats or whatever. There's just no way this streak is ending.

David Gardner: Love it. For podcast listeners who can't see what you just did, Seth, what product did you just influence?

Seth Godin: Oh, there was one of those watches that keeps track of your fitness.

David Gardner: A couple more for you. I mean, I could do this all day. Buy, sell, or hold is so much fun and especially with Seth Godin. Seth, crowdsource governance, algorithmic leadership, phrases that are coming to mind, things we couldn't have imagined before, radical transparency or chaos in the C suite, buy, sell, or hold, public companies with no CEOs?

Seth Godin: There's not going to be public companies with no CEOs. But the idea of a Dow, a DAO, the idea of new sorts of institutions, that's inevitable, and it's going to be great if it's not run by a grifter or something that's part of an MLM scam. But that hasn't happened yet. But the idea that an entity can be true to what it said it was going to be true to and stick around for the long haul. I think that happens. Neal Stephenson wrote a book years ago that the whole idea that if you look at the longest lived institutions, they tend to be orders of monks, they tend to be places that have a constitution, a moat, and a way of governance that gives them consistency but flexibility. I think that we're going to see more of those, but they have no need to go public. Why would they?

David Gardner: Which Neal Stephenson book was that? I read The Diamond Age, but I don't think that was The Diamond Age.

Seth Godin: No, that wasn't. The Diamond Age and Snow Crash should be required reading for every single person. This was another one. I don't remember anything about it other than that it was tedious once I got the joke, so I didn't even finish it.

David Gardner: Let's go with this one. I think there are two more because I have a bonus one in mind. Andy, Mac Greer is going to make a toward the end of this hour together.

Andy Cross: He needs his comeback.

David Gardner: That's right. Here's my last official one. Seth Godin, buy, sell, or hold, branding yourself, are you with me here, as anti-hustle? Has rejecting the grind become the new grind? [laughs]

Seth Godin: What's Hustle? Hustle, in honor of Pete Rose, hustle is not the effort one puts into winning at hockey. Hustle is shortcuts and invading other people's space, throwing an elbow to the face and hoping you don't get caught, hustle is spamming people, hustle is asking a friend for something that they don't want to do for you and just piling up a whole bunch of favors. I am anti-hustle because you don't ever want to burn trust to earn attention. Trust is worth more than attention, and it's generative, and it lets you play the game for longer. There is this idea that shortcuts are possible and a grind is to be avoided. so the question is, is your grind additive or is it simply an endless treadmill? If you're on an endless treadmill where the grind isn't getting you anywhere, you're not in a dip, you're in a cul de sac. It's like emphysema. It's not going to get better. What you want is a grind that eventually is going to get you to the other side, and you want to do that grind without hurting the trust other people have in you. There are plenty of organizations that have done that, and we don't hear from them for a long time, and then suddenly they're an overnight success. Well, they're not an overnight success. You're just noticing them at the end.

David Gardner: Love it. "Trust is the coin of the realm." wrote dearly departed George Schultz in an excellent essay that is worthy of everyone's attention. Last one for you, Seth. He Googled you in preparation for today's interview and discovered on the Google overview page, check it, if you Google Seth Godin, it says, Seth Godin was born in George Washington's Mount Vernon, Mount Vernon, VA. My question, Seth is, that person is Mac Greer, buy sell or hold Mac Greer.

Seth Godin: Oh, I love Mac. We've never met, but I'm a fan. I have no idea how to fix the Internet. If you can get around to fixing it, please do. I never look at my Wikipedia page. It can make you go blind. If someone else wants to fix my Wikipedia page, please do.

David Gardner: Well said. Andy, last thought from both of us. I'll let you go first.

Andy Cross: Seth, thank you so much. This has been just brilliant. The only question, a topic I wanted to talk to you about because we focused so much on decision making at the Motley Fool for investors, is this concept of the lizard brain. I know we don't have much time, but I wanted to give you a chance to give us some guidance on how we can avoid being a lizard.

Seth Godin: Real science has said that maybe the amygdala isn't the lizard brain, and I'm not a neurologist. But what I would say is, please go read Steve Pressfield's book, The War of Art, and go read Annie Duke's book, Thinking in Bets.

Andy Cross: Yes.

Seth Godin: Before you spend $1 of your family's savings investing in anything, understand what those two people are telling you.

David Gardner: I want to thank Seth Godin for a very special hour here on Fool 24 and some podcast-worthy stuff that we'll be sharing throughout the fool world in the next week. Seth, I want to just say thank you, friend, and you always make me laugh, and you always make us think. Here's to the next 3.4 million words.

Seth Godin: Thank you both.

John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Andy Cross has positions in Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, and Starbucks. David Gardner has positions in Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Duolingo, Netflix, Nike, Starbucks, and Walmart. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, International Business Machines, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Starbucks, and Walmart. The Motley Fool recommends Duolingo and Warby Parker and recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

When Baiju Bhatt stepped away from his role as Chief Creative Officer at Robinhood last year, only those close to him could have predicted his next move: launching a space company built around tech that the aerospace industry has largely dismissed, and which might be more groundbreaking than anyone realizes. If people aren’t paying much […]

In this video, Motley Fool contributor Jason Hall explains why he believes Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) is primed to outperform the market over the next five years and beyond.

*Stock prices used were from the afternoon of June 3, 2025. The video was published on June 7, 2025.

Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Continue »

Should you invest $1,000 in Starbucks right now?

Before you buy stock in Starbucks, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Starbucks wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $657,871!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $875,479!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 998% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 174% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of June 9, 2025

Jason Hall has positions in Starbucks and has the following options: short September 2025 $125 calls on Starbucks. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Starbucks. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

As the latest 'Gundam' series enters its dramatic climax, its parallels to the 1979 continue to grow—and so do its echoed horrors.

You’ve spent hours perfecting your WordPress website. The design looks great, your content is solid, and your products or services are top-notch. But something’s wrong. Visitors aren’t staying long, and you’re not getting the results you expected.

Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Many small business owners face this exact problem. The issue often isn’t what’s on your site—it’s how people experience it.

Poor user experience is a silent business killer. When your site is slow, confusing, or hard to navigate, potential customers leave before giving you a chance. They head straight to your competitors who offer a smoother online experience.

The good news? You don’t need to be a tech expert or hire expensive developers to fix this. Simple, strategic improvements can transform how visitors interact with your WordPress site.

In this guide, I’ll share 13 practical tips that consistently improve user experience on WordPress websites. These simple changes can dramatically boost your conversions and keep visitors coming back for more.

Why User Experience Matters for Your WordPress Site

User experience (UX) is about how easy and enjoyable it is for visitors to use your WordPress website. This applies whether they’re reading your blog, exploring your services, or making a purchase.

Think about what happens when customers walk into a well-organized store. 🛒

If everything’s easy to find and the checkout is quick, people are more likely to stay longer, browse, and buy.

The same applies to other websites: a clear navigation menu, fast load times, and a clean design keep visitors engaged.

But if your site is confusing, slow to load, or crowded with too many elements, many users will get frustrated and leave. And most won’t come back. In fact, even a one-second delay in page speed can cause conversions to drop by 7%.

That’s why good UX isn’t optional — it’s essential. The right design choices make your site easier to use and help guide visitors toward taking action, whether that’s subscribing to your email newsletter or making a purchase.

And the best part? Many of these improvements are easy to set up, even if you’re not a developer. I’ll walk you through the most effective tips in the sections below.

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

Ready? Let’s get started.

Tip #1: Understand Your Users

Before you can improve your WordPress site’s user experience, you need to know who you’re designing for. A great way to start is by creating simple user personas, which are fictional profiles that represent your typical visitors.

For example, if you’re running a WordPress blog targeting busy parents, one of your personas could be a working mom. She’s looking for time-saving tips, easy-to-follow guides, and parenting hacks to manage her busy life. Let’s call her ‘Sarah

Having user personas in mind helps you tailor your website’s features and content to better serve your audience. To create one, I recommend trying the free HubSpot Make My Persona tool.

Once you understand who your users are, it becomes easier to make design and content choices that actually help them.

It’s even more important to get direct feedback from your visitors if your site is already up and running. In my experience, even a simple feedback survey can uncover valuable insights about your site’s navigation, design, or content.

You can gather instant feedback using tools like UserFeedback. UserFeedback is the best choice if you want to conduct surveys among first-time site visitors. For example, you can create a feedback form asking your first-time visitors what’s working (or what isn’t) on your site.

You might also ask user experience feedback questions like, “Was this page helpful?” or “What information were you hoping to find?” This way, you collect direct, actionable feedback.

If you want to create surveys and polls to gather feedback from existing customers, then use a tool like WPForms. For instance, you could run a quick poll asking which new website features your users would like to see next.

The more you learn about your audience, the better your UX decisions will be — and the more likely your visitors will be to stick around, explore, and take action.

For more details, we have a full guide on how to choose a target audience.

Tip #2: Do a UX Audit

A UX audit is basically a deep dive into your website from a visitor’s point of view. It helps you spot anything that might be confusing, so you can fix it as soon as possible.

One of the first things you’ll want to do is test your site for usability issues. This means checking how easily someone can navigate your site, find what they need, or complete an action.

Even minor issues, like a misplaced or hidden button, can negatively impact the user experience.

I always recommend walking through important steps on your site, like submitting a contact form or making a purchase, just like a first-time visitor would.

Take note of any steps that feel confusing, slow, or frustrating — these are your pain points and bottlenecks to address.

It’s also a good idea to track the time it takes to go from finding a feature to completing the desired action. This way, you know exactly how much time a user typically takes to convert or complete a specific action.

For a full walkthrough, be sure to check out our expert tips for how to do a UX audit in WordPress.

Tip #3: Use Analytics to Guide UX Improvements

User experience isn’t just about design — it’s also about understanding how people actually use your site. By looking at data, you can make smart decisions to improve your website’s usability and get better results.

A great way to see how visitors interact with your pages is by using heatmaps and session recordings. Tools like UserFeedback and Microsoft Clarity can be very helpful here.

Heatmaps show you a visual map of where users click, move their mouse, and how far they scroll on your pages. Session recordings let you watch replays of actual user visits.

This is super useful for spotting areas where people might be getting confused, what they’re paying attention to, or what parts of your layout they might be ignoring.

For example, you might see that users are trying to click on something that isn’t a link, or that they’re not scrolling down to see an important call to action. This kind of direct insight helps you make specific changes to improve your design and guide users better.

This is especially helpful for improving navigation paths or identifying parts of your layout that are being ignored. For more information on this topic, read our guide on how to set up heatmaps in WordPress.

While heatmaps show you what’s happening on individual pages, you’ll also want to understand bigger trends across your entire website. This is where website analytics tools like Google Analytics can help.

Google Analytics is powerful, but it can be a bit technical for beginners, especially with newer versions like GA4. That’s why I often recommend using a plugin like MonsterInsights.

MonsterInsights makes it easy to see your Google Analytics data right in your WordPress dashboard. It simplifies the complex reports and helps you focus on information that can improve your site’s performance.

Our team uses it every day to continuously improve user experience, and it’s been very helpful. For more insights into its features, see our full MonsterInsights review.

With MonsterInsights, you can follow important trends like:

• User Engagement: This shows how much visitors interact with your content, including how long they stay or if they visit multiple pages. High engagement usually means your content is helpful and easy to use.
• Top Performing Content: See which pages and posts are most popular. This helps you understand what your audience likes so you can create more of it.
• Audience Insights: Learn about your visitors, like their location or the devices they use (desktop, mobile). This can help you tailor your site to their needs.
• Behavior Flow: Understand the paths users take through your site and where they might drop off. This helps you find and fix issues in your site’s navigation or content that might be causing users to leave.

These insights, which are accessible on the MonsterInsights Reports page, help you spot what’s working and what needs improvement for a better user experience.

For more information, see our guide on WordPress conversion tracking.

Tip #4: Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly

With more and more people browsing the web on their smartphones, making your website mobile-friendly is essential.

A site that’s hard to use on a small screen can frustrate visitors and cause them to leave. Plus, Google often prioritizes mobile-friendly sites in search results, so it’s important for your SEO, too.

A good starting point is to use a responsive WordPress theme, as these automatically adjust your site’s layout for different screen sizes.

I also recommend paying attention to your buttons and other clickable elements.

On mobile, these need to be large enough for users to tap easily with their fingers, without accidentally hitting something else nearby. This helps prevent frustration and makes your site much easier to navigate on the go.

Next, think about how your text appears on smaller screens. It’s important that your content is readable without users needing to pinch and zoom.

You can do this by choosing clear, legible fonts and ensuring the font size is large enough to read. Good contrast between your text and its background also boosts readability on mobile devices.

Another important feature is your site’s navigation. A menu that works well on a desktop might be too hard to use on mobile devices.

For instance, long or complex menus can overwhelm users on a small screen. It’s often better to use a collapsed menu, sometimes called a “hamburger” menu (an icon with three horizontal lines), or a simplified menu showing only the most essential links for mobile visitors.

Finally, make sure any forms on your site are easy to fill out on a mobile device. This can be a common pain point for users, so it’s a good idea to keep your forms as short as possible.

Using a single-column layout, making form fields large enough to tap into easily, and ensuring labels are clear will make a big difference. This makes it much simpler for users to complete sign-ups, contact forms, or checkouts on their phones.

Testing your site on different mobile devices is always a good idea to catch any usability issues.

The good news is that you can preview the mobile layout of your site from your WordPress content editor.

Some page and theme builders even let you customize the mobile version of your site from the editor.

For more detailed steps, you can check out our guide on how to make your WordPress site mobile-friendly.

Tip #5: Improve Accessibility for All Users

Did you know that websites are considered “places of public accommodation”? That’s why the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) allows individuals to file complaints if a website fails to meet accessibility standards.

This is a good reason to make sure your site is inclusive for all users, including people with visual, hearing, or motor impairments.

But making your website accessible doesn’t just help people with disabilities. It also improves the user experience for everyone.

One easy accessibility adjustment you can make is adding alt text and titles to your images.

Alt text is a short description of an image that screen readers read aloud. It can help visually impaired users while also giving search engines more context about your visual content for better image SEO.

On the other hand, image titles can appear when users hover over an image, providing additional context. You can add these directly through your WordPress media library.

When it comes to fonts, you’ll want to pick options that are easy to read for everyone. This often means choosing clear, simple font styles.

For example, sans-serif fonts are generally recommended for web content due to their clean appearance.

But simply choosing a good font isn’t enough. You also need to make sure there’s enough contrast between the text and the background color. If the contrast is too low, it can be very difficult for people to read your content.

You can check your color combinations using free online tools like the WebAIM Contrast Checker.

Even with the right font and good contrast, some users may still struggle to read the text if it’s too small. One simple way to make your site more accessible is to make sure that your site design allows visitors to resize the text, which many modern web browsers support.

You can also use a WordPress accessibility plugin to add other helpful features. For example, a plugin like WP Accessibility can add “skip links,” which allow users with screen readers to jump directly to the main content, bypassing menus and headers.

All that said, true ADA compliance goes beyond just these basic steps. It involves adhering to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which provide a comprehensive framework for making web content accessible to people with disabilities.

For more in-depth insights, check out our guide on how to improve accessibility on your WordPress site.

Tip #6: Simplify Your Website Navigation and Search

Confusing navigation is one of the fastest ways to lose visitors. But the good news is that you can avoid this with an intuitive navigation menu. You’ll want it to be clear, simple, and easy to follow.

To improve navigation, it helps to walk through a few simple steps.

You can start by creating a logical menu structure. Stick to familiar terms like “Home,” “About,” “Blog,” “Shop,” and “Contact” so users immediately know where to go.

For example, if you’re running a business website where you sell software, your navigation should make it easy for visitors to learn about your products. In this case, key links might include “Features,” “Solutions,” “Pricing,” and “Resources.”

Plus, you may want to group similar content under dropdowns to avoid cluttering the top menu with too many items. Just make sure the dropdowns are easy to use on mobile devices.

A mega menu can be particularly helpful for larger sites. This basically consists of multiple dropdown menus to help organize large amounts of content, products, or information.

For more information, see our guide on how to add a navigation menu in WordPress.

It’s also a good idea to add breadcrumbs, which are small links that show users where they are on your site (like Home > Blog > Article Name).

Breadcrumbs make it easy for visitors to backtrack and are especially helpful for blogs and online stores with lots of content.

Finally, if you want to provide your visitors with the best possible navigation experience, I suggest optimizing your WordPress search.

You’ll want to make sure the search bar is easy to tap and works well on mobile devices.

The default search function isn’t always the most accurate or helpful. So, upgrading it can make a big difference, especially if you have a content-heavy site where users need to quickly find posts, products, or resources.

To do this, I recommend starting by reviewing your site’s search stats. This can show you what visitors are looking for, what they can’t easily find, and whether your current search function is meeting their needs.

From there, you can improve your WordPress search to deliver faster, more accurate results. Learn more about it in our guide on how to improve WordPress search.

Tip #7: Use Clean, Minimalist Design

A cluttered website can overwhelm your visitors and make it hard for them to focus. It can be tempting to overdo your design with fancy features, loud colors, and animations, but it’s not always the best option.

On the other hand, clean design helps guide people’s attention to what really matters — whether that’s your content, products, or call-to-action.

That’s why I strongly recommend using clean, minimalist design principles.

For starters, it’s usually best to stick to a consistent color scheme and limit your font choices to two or three. This keeps things looking polished and makes your content easier to read.

Instead of focusing on the exact fonts or colors used on other sites, aim for consistency and readability across your own pages.

Using plenty of white space also prevents your layout from feeling crowded or cluttered. It not only looks modern but also makes your site feel more organized and professional.

I also recommend keeping each page focused by limiting the number of elements, like popups, banners, and widgets, unless they serve a clear purpose.

Too many distractions can make it hard for visitors to choose what to do next, which often leads to confusion or even higher bounce rates.

In contrast, a clean and minimalist design improves the user experience. This can also increase conversions, generate more leads, and boost engagement.

One of the easiest ways to ensure a good balance of color, fonts, and white space is by using a well-designed theme.

For tips on picking the right theme, check out our guide on selecting the perfect theme for WordPress.

If you already know you want something minimalist and easy to set up, you can take a look at our list of the best simple WordPress themes for a professional, clutter-free design.

Alternatively, you can use a page builder like SeedProd to create custom layouts that give you more control over design elements.

SeedProd lets you drag and drop elements to build landing pages, sales pages, coming soon pages, and even entire WordPress themes — no coding needed.

It’s a flexible option for beginners and non-technical users who want a completely custom look without starting from zero.

To get started building your custom pages, see our expert checklist of key design elements for an effective WordPress website.

Tip #8: Present Content in a User-Friendly Way

When you show your content in an organized and user-friendly way, you’re more likely to get your message across and make it easier for visitors to understand.

To organize your content better, I recommend starting by using clear headings. They are like signposts that guide visitors along your page and help them find what they’re looking for.

You can also use these headings to create a table of contents, like we do on the WPBeginner blog. That way, readers can quickly jump to the parts of a post or page that interest them most.

Many of our posts also start with a brief overview and then break into actionable steps using bullet points. Here’s why that helps with content organization:

• Big blocks of text can overwhelm readers who skim.
• Bullet points highlight key details quickly, while short paragraphs keep content light and digestible.
• Together, they make your posts and pages more engaging, encouraging visitors to stay and interact longer.

Visuals can make a big difference, too. Adding images, videos, or infographics can help illustrate your points and simplify complex ideas.

In our A/B test tutorial, for example, we included a screenshot of our test results. This visual comparison helped readers quickly see which version won and why it was more effective, making the concept of A/B testing more concrete and actionable. (You’ll learn more about A/B testing in Tip #10!)

Additionally, a quick explainer GIF can help keep visitors engaged and make your content more memorable.

Want to boost interaction? I also recommend including interactive polls, sliders, or fun quizzes using WordPress plugins. These small touches can make your content feel more dynamic and invite visitors to actively participate.

Looking for more details on how you can improve the way you present content? Check out our guide on how to write a great blog post and structure it.

Tip #9: Speed Up Your Website

How quickly your website loads plays a big role in user experience. A delay of just one second can cause people to lose interest and leave your site.

That’s why improving your WordPress website’s speed and performance should be a top priority.

To start, you’ll want to use a caching plugin. Caching stores a ready-to-go copy of your site, so it loads much faster for repeat visitors.

Plugins like WP Rocket or WP Super Cache make this super easy to set up in just a few clicks. I use WP Rocket on a lot of different websites, and I’ve found that it drastically improves website loading speeds.

Most caching plugins also let you fine-tune your setup for even better results. For example, enabling mobile caching helps your site load faster on smartphones and tablets.

If your site includes logged-in users — like customers on a WooCommerce store or members of a private membership site — turning on user caching helps pages load faster for them, too.

Finally, enabling lazy loading delays loading images until they appear in the visitor’s viewport. This keeps your initial page load light and fast, especially on media-heavy pages.

Even a few of these settings can noticeably improve your load time and reduce bounce rates, helping users stay longer and engage more with your content.

If you’d like help configuring these features, check out our full guide on how to properly install and set up WP Rocket in WordPress.

Another way to boost your speed is by adding a CDN (Content Delivery Network).

A CDN stores copies of your site’s files on servers around the world, which means users load your site from the server closest to them. This can dramatically cut down load times, especially if you have visitors from different parts of the globe.

If you’re not sure where to start, we have a handy guide on how to set up Cloudflare’s free CDN in WordPress.

It’s also important to compress your images. Large image files are one of the biggest reasons sites slow down.

You can shrink your images without losing quality by using tools like TinyPNG or plugins like EWWW Image Optimizer that automate the process for you.

While you’re at it, consider switching to modern image formats like WebP. These formats offer better compression compared to traditional JPEG or PNG files, so your pages load even faster without sacrificing image quality.

Finally, don’t forget to test your site’s performance regularly. Free tools like GTmetrix or Google PageSpeed Insights can analyze your site and give you specific suggestions to make it even faster.

For more information and tips on improving site speed, refer to our ultimate guide to boosting WordPress performance.

Tip #10: Test Website Changes with A/B Testing

When it comes to improving your site’s user experience, small tweaks can lead to big results. But how do you know what actually works?

That’s where A/B testing comes in.

A/B testing is a method for comparing two versions of a webpage or element (like a button or headline) to see which one performs better.

Here’s how it works: You create two variations (A and B), show them to different groups of visitors, and track which version gets more clicks, conversions, or engagement.

With tools like Thrive Optimize, setting up an A/B test is straightforward. It can automatically measure which version performs better for goals like clicks, signups, or purchases.

You can test things like:

• Headline variations
• Button color or text
• Page layout or section order
• Different images or testimonials

For example, I ran a test in Thrive Optimize where I changed the color of the call-to-action button on a landing page. After editing the variation, I split the traffic between both versions and let the test run.

The process was simple, and the data clearly showed which version performed better. It’s a great way to improve pages based on actual results — not just assumptions.

You might find that a shorter headline keeps users engaged longer, or that placing your CTA higher on the page increases conversions.

Most A/B testing tools will automatically switch to the winning version once enough data is collected, helping you continuously improve your site’s performance.

For details on how to do it, just see our guide on how to do A/B split testing in WordPress.

Tip #11: Be Selective With Your Content

If your posts or pages include too much unnecessary content, it can make it harder for your audience to understand your message.

That’s why it’s always best to keep your content focused and intentional. Every page should have a clear goal, and every section of content should support that goal.

If you’re building a landing page, for example, the layout and copy should guide visitors toward a single action — like signing up for your newsletter or downloading a free resource.

For tips on building landing pages, see our complete guide on increasing your landing page conversions.

When it comes to writing blog posts, the same rule applies. Publishing every idea that comes to mind might fill your site with content, but it won’t always serve your readers.

It’s better to focus on topics that align with your niche and help your audience solve real problems.

To take it a step further, you can group related posts around a main pillar page using a content cluster strategy. This helps improve navigation and build authority in your niche.

We have a full tutorial on how to build content clusters in WordPress, including how to plan them around your areas of expertise.

It also helps to do regular content audits. Over time, some posts stop performing well, either because they’re outdated or because search intent has changed.

This is called content decay. For example, a blog post titled “Top SEO Tips for 2020” might no longer rank well in search results because SEO practices have evolved.

So during your content audits, take time to review older pages and decide: should I keep, update, or delete this content?

A little cleanup goes a long way in keeping visitors engaged and helping them find exactly what they need.

Tip #12: Encourage User Interaction 

When people can actively interact with your pages, they will naturally stay on your site longer.

Creating opportunities for user interaction can make all the difference. It encourages visitors to stick around, share feedback, and even return later.

A great place to start is your comments section. If it feels outdated, clunky, or inactive, people might not bother leaving a reply.

To give it an update, you can add like/dislike buttons. This way, your visitors can engage with the conversation even if they don’t want to post.

Alternatively, you might want to feature a simple user ranking system. For instance, you can pin top comments or award badges to users who consistently leave helpful remarks.

To make these improvements, you can upgrade your comment system using a plugin like Thrive Comments. It helps create a better experience that encourages more interaction and discussion.

For more options, see our pick of the best WordPress comment plugins.

You can also boost engagement by adding polls, quizzes, or quick feedback forms with a plugin like WPForms. These interactive elements encourage participation without requiring a full comment.

If you’re not sure where to start, here’s our guide on how to create an interactive poll in WordPress.

Another great strategy is gamification. This means rewarding visitors for completing certain actions — like leaving a comment, making a purchase, or finishing a quiz. You can offer points, badges, or levels that make your site more fun and encourage users to come back.

These small touches not only increase engagement, but they also boost the amount of time that users spend on your website and help build a stronger community around your content.

Tip #13: Build Community with Live Chat or Chat Rooms

Want to take user interaction to the next level?

Adding live chat or real-time discussion spaces can turn passive readers into active participants, and help build trust faster.

When visitors can ask questions, get instant support, or connect with others in real time, they’re far more likely to stay, return, and engage with your content or product.

This kind of interaction boosts retention and makes your website feel more dynamic and responsive — like a real community instead of just a static page.

If you’re running an eLearning, support-based, or membership site, adding a live chat feature can make a big difference. It allows users to ask questions about course material, get help with platform features, or feel supported as part of a larger group.

For stores or service-based websites, live chat offers instant support. It lets you answer product questions, clarify service details, or resolve issues in real time. This helps reduce cart abandonment and improves customer experience.

You can follow our tutorial on how to add free live chat in WordPress to get started.

To boost user interaction even further, I recommend creating private chat rooms or discussion boards using a tool like BuddyBoss.

It’s especially useful for membership communities or online courses, where learners benefit from peer support and group interaction.

Check out our guide on how to create chat rooms in WordPress to learn more about adding this functionality to your site.

Bonus Tip: Detect Design Issues with Visual Regression Testing 🕵️

Sometimes, even a small theme or plugin update can break your layout without you noticing. That’s where visual regression testing comes in.

Visual regression testing (VRT) helps you make sure that updates to your website don’t accidentally mess up its look or design.

The process is simple – your VRT software takes ‘screenshots’ of a page before and after you make changes to it. It analyzes the code or pixel differences of these pages to catch any visual issues early, before they hurt the user experience.

The VRTs plugin is one of the best tools for automating this process. For step-by-step instructions, you can read our guide on how to do visual regression testing in WordPress.

I hope my tips and tricks help you improve user experience in WordPress. Next, you might want to check out our guide on how to add a forum to your site and our expert picks of key design elements for an effective WordPress website.

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 Improve User Experience in WordPress (13 Practical Tips) first appeared on WPBeginner.

When I first started working on my WordPress websites, I was mostly guessing what visitors wanted. It wasn’t until I started using heatmaps that I truly understood how people interacted with my site — where they clicked, how far they scrolled, and what actually caught their attention.

If you’re trying to improve your WordPress site but aren’t sure what’s working and what’s not, then heatmaps can give you some answers.

After testing several tools over the years, I’ve narrowed it down to 2 easy ways to set up heatmaps in WordPress: Microsoft Clarity and UserFeedback.

In this guide, I’ll go through each setup process step by step. By the end, you’ll have the tools you need to make data-driven changes to your site. 🔥

Why Do You Need to Set Up WordPress Heatmaps?

A heatmap is a visual tool that shows you exactly how visitors interact with your WordPress website. It uses color coding to highlight the most and least active areas on a page:

• Red, orange, and yellow (“hot” areas) show where visitors click, tap, or spend the most time.
• Blue and green (“cold” areas) show spots that get little or no attention.

By seeing this activity mapped out, you can stop guessing about what’s working and what’s not. In other words, heatmaps help remove the guesswork by giving you clear insights into visitor behavior.

They help you answer important questions, such as:

• Are people clicking your CTA buttons?
• Do they scroll down far enough to see your content?
• Are they clicking on things that don’t do anything?

With this information, you can make smart changes to your site. You’ll know what to fix, what to move, and what to improve.

You can use that insight to get more readers, boost sales, or increase inquiries from potential clients — all by making simple changes based on how people actually use your site.

In the following sections, I’ll share how to set up WordPress heatmaps using 2 of the best tools for adding heatmaps. One is completely free, and the other is a premium option with extra features.

Feel free to use the jump links below to go to your preferred method:

Step 0: Preparing Your WordPress Site for Heatmaps

Before you add heatmaps to your WordPress site, it’s important to make sure your site is properly prepared. Taking a few precautionary steps can help prevent any issues as you get started.

If you’re adding heatmaps to your live site for the first time, it’s a smart move to test everything on a staging site first.

A staging site is essentially a duplicate of your live website, where you can make changes and test new features without affecting your real website. It allows you to try out new tools, like heatmaps, safely, without risking any disruptions to the user experience.

Then, you can simply push the changes live to apply them to your real website.

If you use Bluehost, then you can easily create a staging site, thanks to their quick 1-click solution.

That said, if you don’t have access to staging through your hosting, then you can also use plugins like WP Stagecoach to create staging sites.

For a full walkthrough, you can check out our guide on how to create a staging site for WordPress.

Additionally, always back up your site before making any major changes. Having a backup ensures that, in case something goes wrong during the setup process, you can easily restore your site to its previous state without losing any important data.

Finally, remember that heatmaps work best when used alongside other analytics tools and user feedback.

Think of them as a starting point for uncovering potential issues or opportunities, not the only source of information. Combining insights from heatmaps with broader data gives you a clearer, more accurate picture of how visitors interact with your site.

Method 1: Set Up WordPress Heatmaps Using Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity is a free, easy-to-use heatmap and session recording tool that integrates seamlessly with WordPress. It’s best for overall site analysis, ideal for beginners, bloggers, and small business owners who want to understand visitor behavior.

That’s why we use it across some of our partner websites to track heatmaps and gain insights into user interactions.

Step 1: Create a Free Microsoft Clarity Account

To set up WordPress heatmaps with Microsoft Clarity, you’ll first need an account.

Go to the Microsoft Clarity website and click ‘Get Started.’

In the popup that appears, you’ll see that you can sign up with a Microsoft, Facebook, or Google account. Just click on the one you prefer.

For this tutorial, I’m going to select ‘Sign in to Google.’

After that, you can follow through the signup process by choosing the appropriate account.

Then, click ‘Continue’ on the confirmation page.

Upon signup, you’ll be asked to confirm your email address.

Don’t forget to check the Clarity Terms of Use and click the checkbox before continuing.

You’ll then be prompted to create a new project for your WordPress site.

You just need to give your project a name, enter your website URL, and choose your industry from the dropdown menu.

With that done, go ahead and click ‘Add new project’ to finish the setup.

With that done, you’re now ready to install the Microsoft Clarity WordPress plugin to set up heatmaps on your website.

Step 2: Install Microsoft Clarity in Your WordPress Site

In this step, you’ll install the Microsoft Clarity plugin and connect it to the account you just created.

From your WordPress dashboard, let’s go to Plugins » Add New Plugin.

Use the search bar to quickly find the Microsoft Clarity plugin.

Just click ‘Install Now’ on the relevant search result, and once again on ‘Activate’ when it appears. 

For step-by-step instructions, see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon plugin activation, the next step is choosing a Clarity project to connect both tools.

You can navigate to Clarity from your WordPress admin area and choose the project you just created from the dropdown menu.

In the next few seconds, you should see a ‘Project integrated successfully’ notification.

For more details, you can see our guide on how to install Microsoft Clarity Analytics in WordPress.

💡 Note: If you are using a WordPress caching plugin, then you need to clear your WordPress cache after connecting Microsoft Clarity to your website. This is important because, otherwise, Microsoft will not be able to verify your site for a few hours.

Step 3: Set Up Heatmaps in Microsoft Clarity

Once you connect Microsoft Clarity, it will automatically start tracking your visitors — no need to paste any code manually or mess with theme files.

Inside your Clarity dashboard, you’ll find useful reports that give you an overview of how people interact with your WordPress blog or site.

Some of the key metrics include:

• Sessions – This shows how many individual visits your site received.
• Pages per session – Tells you how many pages a visitor viewed during one session.
• Scroll depth – Shows how far users scroll down each page.
• Active time – Tracks how long users are actively engaging with your page (not just leaving it open in a background tab).

You’ll also find pre-built widgets like the ‘User Overview,’ which highlights visitor types and devices.

Plus, there are behavioral insights such as rage clicks (when users repeatedly click in frustration) and excessive scrolling (when users scroll too much, possibly looking for something).

To see your heatmaps, go ahead and switch to the ‘Heatmaps’ tab.

Once inside, you’ll see a list of all the page heatmaps that Clarity automatically recorded.

Just click on a page you want to analyze.

Once you open a heatmap, you’ll see three main views: Clicks, Scroll, and Attention.

You can switch to ‘Click’ to see where visitors are clicking the most.

To find out your scroll depth, simply move to the ‘Scroll’ tab.

Here, Clarity will reveal how far users scroll down your page. This helps identify if they miss your key content.

Finally, go ahead and click on the ‘Attention‘ button to see the average time visitors spend on different parts of the page.

Red zones indicate higher attention, while blue areas get less.

That’s all – You’ve successfully set up WordPress heatmaps using Microsoft Clarity!

Method 2: Set Up WordPress Heatmaps Using UserFeedback

UserFeedback by MonsterInsights combines heatmap-style feedback with surveys and advanced targeting. It’s a powerful option for growing websites, online stores, and agencies needing deeper insights and more control over how to collect visitor feedback.

At WPBeginner, we have used UserFeedback to gain insights into what our web design customers want and expect from us. We’ve had a great experience with it, and you can check out our full UserFeedback review to see why we recommend it!

Step 1: Install and Activate UserFeedback

First, you’ll need to set up a UserFeedback account. You can do this by visiting the UserFeedback website and signing up for a plan.

Once you’ve signed up for an account, you’ll be redirected to your UserFeedback account dashboard, where you can find the download link to the UserFeedback zip file and your license key.

Now, it’s time to install the plugin.

From your WordPress dashboard, you need to go to Plugins » Add New.

On the next screen, let’s search for UserFeedback.

You can then install and activate the plugin like you would any other WordPress plugin.

New to installing plugins? Here’s a detailed guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Once activated, you can enter your license key to unlock all the pro features that come with your plan.

To do this, you can navigate to UserFeedback » Settings. Then, simply copy and paste your license key from your UserFeedback dashboard into the ‘License Key’ field.

Go ahead and click the ‘Verify’ button to start the verification process.

In a few seconds, you should see a verification success message.

Step 2: Enable the Heatmaps Addon

Now, let’s go to UserFeedback » Addons to install the Heatmaps addon.

You can just scroll down the page to find the Heatmaps addon and click ‘Install Addon’ in the appropriate box.

Once installed, make sure it’s activated by clicking the ‘Activate’ button.

Step 3: Create a New Heatmap

With the Heatmaps addon activated, you can now create your site’s heatmap.

Let’s go to UserFeedback » Heatmaps in your WordPress dashboard, and click the ‘New Heatmap’ button.

In the popup that appears, expand the dropdown menu to select the specific page you want to track. For example, you can create a heatmap for your homepage, landing page, or blog post.

Go ahead and hit the ‘Create’ button to set up the heatmap.

Step 4: View Your Heatmap Results

After you create a heatmap, UserFeedback will start collecting user data immediately.

Let’s go to UserFeedback » Heatmaps and click on a heatmap to see detailed visual insights.

On the next screen, you’ll be able to view detailed insights about your visitors, including:

• Device Filter – Compare user behavior across desktop, tablet, and mobile.
• Clicks – See exactly where people are clicking on your page.
• Mouse Movements – Track how users move their mouse across the screen.

If you’re promoting your site across multiple channels, then you can also filter the data by UTM campaign, source, or medium. This helps you understand how visitors from different marketing efforts interact with your site.

And that’s all there is to it – You’ve successfully set up WordPress heatmaps using UserFeedback!

Bonus Steps: Maximize Your Heatmap Insights 🔥

Heatmaps are only useful if you know how to act on what they’re telling you. Here’s how to turn the insights from your heatmaps into real improvements for your WordPress site.

Fix Where Visitors Drop Off

You can use scroll maps to see how far down your visitors go on a page. If important content is buried too far down the page, then most people may never see it.

You can try moving key elements like CTAs or offers higher on the page, and break up long pages with smaller sections and clear headings. You can also use date filters to track how these changes affect visitor behavior over time.

This small change can reduce bounce rates and keep your visitors engaged longer.

Spot and Solve User Confusion

Sometimes, visitors try to click on images, icons, or text that aren’t clickable. This shows that they’re confused or expecting something different.

You can review your click maps and mouse movements to spot these areas. If necessary, you can link those images or add buttons nearby to make things easier for users.

You can also set up a quick survey with UserFeedback to ask what users were expecting to find.

Identify and Fix Navigation Issues

If you see visitors frequently jumping between pages without clear direction, it’s a sign that your navigation may be confusing.

Simplify your navigation by making sure information is easy to find and adjusting anything that could cause confusion. You can also walk through important steps on your site like a first-time visitor to ensure everything functions properly.

You may also want to see our guide on how to create a custom navigation menu in WordPress.

Make Your CTA Buttons Impossible to Miss

If your CTAs (call-to-action buttons) aren’t getting enough clicks, then I recommend adjusting their color, text, or placement to make them stand out more.

Go ahead and use your mouse movement insights to spot hesitation before clicking and check device filters to ensure your CTAs are visible and easy to click on all devices, especially mobile.

I hope this article has helped you set up WordPress heatmaps. Next, you might want to explore our expert-curated landing page tips to skyrocket WordPress conversions and our ultimate guide on geolocation targeting.

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 Setup WordPress Heatmaps (2 Easy Ways) first appeared on WPBeginner.

Last week, a friend who manages multiple WordPress sites called me in a panic. A routine plugin update had broken his client’s navigation menu, but he didn’t notice until customers started complaining.

This is a common problem I’ve seen countless times, and it’s exactly why visual regression testing is so important for WordPress website owners.

Visual regression testing might sound complicated. However, it’s actually a simple solution that can save you hours of manual checking and prevent embarrassing layout issues.

Typically, it works by automatically comparing before-and-after screenshots of your pages. This helps catch even the smallest visual changes that might break your site’s appearance. 🔍

In this guide, I’ll show you how to do visual regression testing on your WordPress site. After testing numerous tools and methods, I’ve found the most reliable solution that won’t require any coding knowledge or technical expertise.

What Is Visual Regression Testing, and Why Is It Important? 🤔

Every time you update your site — whether it’s a WordPress core update, a new plugin, a theme change, or just a minor code tweak — there’s a chance that something on the front end might shift out of place.

For example, a button could disappear, your layout might break, or a product image could stop loading properly.

The problem? These visual bugs often go unnoticed until a visitor points them out through a contact form or design feedback survey.

By then, the damage to your site’s user experience might already be done.

That’s where visual regression testing comes in.

The process is simple: take snapshots of your pages before and after an update, then compare them to spot anything that’s changed.

And if you’re testing on a staging site (which we recommend), you can safely make updates and run comparisons to catch visual issues before anything goes live.

The good news? You don’t have to do it manually.

With visual regression testing tools like VRTs, Percy, or BackstopJS, you can automate screenshot comparisons and check how your site looks across different screen sizes — helping you catch layout issues on desktop, tablet, and mobile.

Why is this important for WordPress users?

If you’re managing a WordPress website, visual regression testing is a time-saving safety net. Instead of clicking through every page after an update, this tool gives you a visual report of what changed — and whether it’s something you need to fix.

It’s especially helpful in many scenarios, such as agencies running updates across multiple WordPress sites, freelancers managing client websites, or online store owners who want to make sure the product and checkout pages stay intact.

In short, visual regression testing helps you avoid frustrating surprises, save time, and keep your WordPress site running smoothly.

With that said, I’ll share how to easily do visual regression testing in WordPress. Here’s a quick overview of all the steps I’ll cover in this guide:

Step 1: Install and Activate the Visual Regression Testing Plugin

In this tutorial, I’ll use the VRTs plugin because it’s beginner-friendly and super easy to use for visual regression testing. Whether that is a shifted layout, a missing button, or a broken element after an update, VRTs helps you spot it early.

Here’s how it works: The plugin takes screenshots of the pages you select. You can then trigger comparisons manually or schedule them to run automatically after making changes to your site, such as updating a plugin or tweaking your theme.

The plugin then compares the ‘before’ and ‘after’ screenshots side-by-side and highlights any visual differences.

So, instead of manually checking every page, you get a quick visual report showing what changed, and whether anything looks off.

To install the plugin, you first need to visit the VRTs website and sign up for a plan by clicking on the ‘Get started for free’ button.

You can then choose one of the plans. The free plan will allow you to test up to 3 pages per day on one domain and schedule daily tests.

On the other hand, paid plans will allow you to test a higher number of pages, run manual tests, and automatically run visual regression tests after WordPress core, plugin, and theme updates.

Simply click on ‘Buy now’ or ‘Install now’ underneath the plan you want to use.

Then, follow the instructions to sign up for an account on the VRTs website and add your payment details.

Once you have completed the payment, you will land on your VRTs dashboard, where you can download the plugin as a .zip file.

Then, simply head to Plugins » Add Plugin and click on the ‘Upload Plugin’ button. From here, you can choose the VRTs plugin .zip file that you just downloaded.

Make sure to activate the plugin once it has been installed. For full details, you can see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Step 2: Configure the VRTs Plugin Settings

Once you’ve activated the plugin, it’s time to set up when your visual regression tests should run.

Head over to VRTs » Settings in your WordPress admin menu.

Once inside, you can scroll down to the ‘Triggers’ section — this is where you tell the plugin when to automatically take and compare snapshots.

Here are the available options:

• Run Tests every 24 hours (Free) – This is the default setting. VRTs will automatically check your selected posts or pages once per day for visual changes.
• Run Tests after WordPress and plugin updates (Pro) – Great for catching layout issues caused by updates, right when they happen.
• Run Tests with your favorite apps (Pro) – Connect VRTs with external tools or workflows using webhooks.
• Run Tests on demand (Pro) – Manually trigger tests whenever you need them, directly from your WordPress dashboard.

Once you’ve selected the trigger that fits your workflow (or your license), simply click the ‘Save Changes’ button at the bottom of the page.

Step 3: Add New Pages or Posts to Test

Once you’ve configured the plugin settings, it’s time to choose which pages or posts you’d like to include in your visual regression tests.

Let’s now switch to the ‘Tests’ tab, which is where you’ll manage and run your visual tests.

From here, you can click the ‘Add New’ button. This will let you choose posts or pages to test.

In the popup that appears, you need to choose the pages or posts you want to perform the visual regression testing on.

Then, click ‘Add New Test’ to confirm your selections.

The VRTs plugin will take an initial snapshot of each selected page. This acts as your baseline — basically a “before” version of how your posts or pages look right now.

After setting up your test, you’ll see an instruction to refresh the page to load the initial snapshot. Go ahead and do just that.

With that done, you’ll find a link to the page or post snapshot you added for testing.

You will also see that the ‘Test Status’ is automatically set to ‘Scheduled’ for the next day. This is because the free version of VRTs runs tests on a 24-hour schedule.

You can click the ‘View Snapshot’ link to check the initial screenshot.

It will open in a new tab like this:

Now, you can make any changes you need to your site. Then, come back tomorrow to review the comparison and spot any unexpected visual issues.

Step 4: Check for Visual Differences

Once the test is complete and any visual bugs are detected, you should see a notification alert in the VRTs » Runs tab.

Once inside, you can hover over the run with changes detected.

Then, click the ‘Show Details’ link when it appears.

On the next screen, you’ll see a side-by-side comparison of your page, showing the before and after versions.

The plugin automatically highlights visual differences, so you can quickly spot:

• Layout Shifts and Misaligned Elements: If your design changes after a plugin update or theme change, like buttons moving out of place or text jumping around, VRTs will flag it.
• Missing or Broken Elements: Whether it’s a missing image, CTA button, or embedded form, VRTs make it easy to spot anything that disappears unexpectedly, which is especially useful for eCommerce or landing pages.
• Unexpected Content Changes: The plugin will also alert you to changes in text, links, or images, so you can catch unauthorized edits or publishing errors before users do.

You can use the drag handle in the center of the screen to slide between the old and new versions and visually confirm the exact changes.

Step 5: Review and Take Action

After running a visual regression test, you can take action based on the results. Here’s what you can do next:

• Manually edit the page: If the changes are small, you can fix the issues directly by editing the page, such as adjusting the layout, moving elements, or adding back missing features.
• Revert to a backup: If the changes are bigger or harder to fix, you can restore the page to a previous version using your website backup or version history. This helps avoid leaving issues on your site.

FAQs for Running Visual Regression Testing in WordPress

If you’re just getting started with visual regression testing, you’re not alone. Here are some quick answers to common questions I often hear from WordPress users and developers.

What is the difference between snapshot testing and visual regression testing?

Snapshot testing checks if your website’s code or content stays the same, kind of like saving a backup of how things are supposed to be.

Visual regression testing, on the other hand, focuses on the appearance of your site. It compares screenshots before and after updates to catch layout changes, missing elements, or visual bugs you might not notice right away.

What is the best tool for visual regression testing in WordPress?

The easiest option is the VRTs – Visual Regression Tests plugin. It’s beginner-friendly, doesn’t require any coding, and runs directly from your dashboard. Plus, it has a free version that’s super easy to use.

How can I do regression testing manually?

Manual regression testing means going through your site and checking key pages after you make changes, like installing a new plugin or updating your theme.

You’ll want to visit your homepage, contact page, checkout process (if you have one), and any custom layouts to make sure everything still looks and works as it should. It works, but it can be time-consuming if you manage a large or busy site.

How do you speed up regression testing?

The best way to save time is to automate it. Using a plugin like VRTs – Visual Regression Tests lets you create snapshots of your important pages and quickly compare them after an update.

No need to manually click through every page — the plugin does the visual check for you.

You can also test updates on a staging site first, so you’re not fixing issues on a live site.

What are the best ways to test WordPress website design?

Here are a few tips to test your WordPress design:

• Use a visual regression tool like VRTs – Visual Regression Tests to spot design changes.
• Preview your theme and plugin updates on a staging site.
• Test on multiple screen sizes (desktop, tablet, and mobile).
• Use browser dev tools to check how your site looks in different viewports.
• Ask for feedback from users or clients — they often notice things you might miss.

I hope this article has helped you learn how to do visual regression testing in WordPress. Next, you might want to check our article on creating chat rooms in WordPress for your users and the best user experience feedback questions to ask site visitors.

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 Easily Do Visual Regression Testing in WordPress first appeared on WPBeginner.

Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) has been undergoing changes over the past several months in an effort to turn around its business and get back to growth. CEO Brian Niccol took over back in September and has been working on improving the in-store experience for customers. The company is still in the early stages of that turnaround, but Niccol is seeing progress.

Recently, Starbucks released its latest quarterly numbers, which showed positive growth. And Niccol is optimistic that better results are ahead for the business. With the coffee stock down around 30% from its 52-week high at the time of this writing, has it become a no-brainer buy?

Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Continue »

Starbucks shows some progress with Q2 results

On April 29, coffee giant Starbucks reported its second-quarter earnings numbers. For the period ending March 30, consolidated net revenue rose by 2% to $8.8 billion. And the company's global comparable-store sales were down by just 1% -- in the previous quarter, the decline was as much as 4%. While those aren't blowout numbers, they do show that, at least for now, things may be stabilizing.

Niccol was encouraged with the results and the company's turnaround thus far, stating, "We are on track and if anything, I see more opportunity than I imagined." The new CEO has been working on making the Starbucks experience better for customers, which has included simplifying the menu and working on improving wait times at stores.

Why the results may not look all that impressive

At first glance, it may appear as though Starbucks is generating good, modest growth, and could be making a solid turnaround. But don't forget that the company is coming off some poor quarters and lapping some underwhelming comparable numbers. Consider that the company's revenue two years ago, in the same quarter, totaled $8.7 billion -- nearly as much as it generated this past quarter.

The top line is effectively flat over a two-year window and puts into context the challenges that Starbucks has been enduring during that time frame. Meanwhile, the $384 million in profit it posted last quarter was just a fraction of the $908 million in earnings it reported two years ago.

And so while the lack of change in the top line may be underwhelming, what's even more concerning is the significant drop on the bottom line. When looking at the bigger picture, the results don't nearly look as impressive anymore.

Investors also shouldn't forget that given the macroeconomic uncertainty in the markets today, Starbucks' results may look even less impressive in the future. While the CEO is optimistic, investors often need to take such excitement from management with a grain of salt.

Is Starbucks stock a good buy?

As of Monday's close, shares of Starbucks have fallen by around 11% since the start of the year. And the stock trades at roughly 30 times its trailing earnings, which is high compared to the S&P 500 average of 23.

Given the risk and uncertainty facing Starbucks, it should arguably be trading for more of a discount. I wouldn't rush out to buy the stock, as its results weren't all that impressive when you compare to where it was just two years ago. And although Niccol is optimistic about the future, investors should brace for more challenges ahead, as Starbucks still has a long way to go in proving that it can turn things around, grow its business at a high rate, and improve upon its bottom line.

For now, this is a stock I'd put on a watch list and take a wait-and-see approach.

Should you invest $1,000 in Starbucks right now?

Before you buy stock in Starbucks, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Starbucks wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $623,103!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $717,471!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 909% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 162% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of May 5, 2025

David Jagielski has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Starbucks. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

In this podcast, Motley Fool analyst Asit Sharma and host Mary Long discuss:

• What to do with 2 extra minutes.
• Earnings from Starbucks.
• What's cooking at Wingstop.

Then, Motley Fool analyst Yasser el-Shimy joins Mary for a look at Warner Brothers Discovery, in the first of a two-part series about the entertainment conglomerate and its controversial CEO.

Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Continue »

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

A full transcript is below.

Should you invest $1,000 in Starbucks right now?

Before you buy stock in Starbucks, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Starbucks wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $623,685!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $701,781!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 906% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 164% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of May 5, 2025

This video was recorded on April 30, 2025

Mary Long: A dollar saved is a dollar earned, so a minute saved is what? You're listening to Motley Fool Money. I'm Mary Long joined today by Mr. Asit Sharma. Asit, good to see you. How are you doing?

Asit Sharma: I'm great, Mary. How are you doing? Good to see you.

Mary Long: I'm doing well. We got reports from Starbucks today, that's the coffee chain that most listeners are probably pretty familiar with. They're in the midst of a turnaround. They dropped earnings yesterday after the bell. I want to kick us off by focusing on Starbucks' measurement of a different currency, not dollars, but time, Asit. A big focus of Starbucks' turnaround is returning the chain to its golden age of being a neighborhood coffee house. But as a part of that, there's also a focus on efficiency. Management seems to think they're making good progress on that efficiency front. The company shaved two minutes off its in store wait times thanks to the help of a swinky ordering algorithm. If you had an extra two minutes in each of your days, what would you be doing with that time?

Asit Sharma: Well, I'm not giving it back to TikTok and YouTube shorts, I'm done with you guys. I'm grabbing the cast iron bookmark, breaking out of that house, and I'm getting two minutes extra to read Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which is my Middle Age men's book club read of the month, and I'm behind, I need it finished by Saturday.

Mary Long: It sounds like you're being very productive with those extra two minutes.

Asit Sharma: Living my best life.

Mary Long: There's a detail here that's very interesting to me because notably, this algorithm that's shaved off these two minutes of order times is not powered by artificial intelligence. Instead, it follows an if then structure. This is fascinating to me because it seems like every other company is going out of their way to highlight its AI capabilities, build themselves as an AI company, even if they don't really play in the tech space. What does it say about Starbucks that they seemingly have an opportunity to do that with the rollout of this algorithm and yet they're not?

Asit Sharma: Well, on the one hand, I think they would love to be able to float some great AI stuff to the market, but truthfully, everyone knows that it's going to take more than AI to solve Starbucks' problems, so let's get real here and go back to some very elementary type of algorithmic thinking to solve some of the throughput issues they have.

Mary Long: Again, Starbucks seems pretty proud of these shorter wait times, but that doesn't necessarily seem to be translating into great sales numbers quite yet. I'm going to call out some metrics from the report, including same store sales, which is closely watched here, and you tell me how you're interpreting these numbers. Do they spell to you, Asit Sharma, promise or peril for the coffee company? We'll kick things off with same store sales. In the US, that's down about 3% for the quarter. What do you say, Asit, promise, peril, something in between?

Asit Sharma: I think that's an easy peril. This is the trend at Starbucks. They're losing a little bit of traffic. They're trying to turn it around to get people to come back into the stores or come back to the drive throughs. They have a strategy for this, back to the good old days. We can chat about this. But this is emblematic of Starbucks larger problem, so this is a peril call, easy.

Mary Long: Two hundred and thirteen net new store openings in the second quarter, bringing the total store count to nearly 40,800 around the world. Promise, peril, something in between?

Asit Sharma: Promise. I like that. Brian Niccol, turnaround artist. Let's slow this puppy down. Why should we be expanding when we don't have the unit economics right? Why should we be expanding when CapEx, capital expenditure is one of the things dragging this company down? Most people don't realize Starbucks has a pretty big debt load because it has invested so much in its stores over the years. Why don't we try to figure out how we can solve some of our problems with operating expenses versus capital expenditure? Let's also try to renovate stores at a lower cost. All of this points to taking it very easy on that new store development, so I like that, it's promise.

Mary Long: Just to be clear, you're saying that that 213 net new store openings number sits right at the sweet spot of, Hey, you're still growing, but it's at a small enough clip that it's not distracting from the real focus, which is improving throughput at existing stores?

Asit Sharma: Yeah. It's also a signal that the new management isn't taking the easy way out. Conceivably, one way you could solve Starbucks' problems would be to take on a little bit more debt and to speed up new stores and to say, We're going to actually increase revenue, but traffic will take a bit of time to come back to the stores. We know people of our brand, so we're going to throw a bunch more stores out in places where we don't have this dense concentration and cannibalization. We're going to map this great real estate strategy out. They could have easily said that, but I don't think the market would have liked it too much, so they're doing the sensible thing, which is like, we're not really worried about adding new stores right now, that's not the problem that we have to solve today.

Mary Long: Our next quick hit metric, GAAP operating margin down about 7% compared to a year ago. How do you feel about that one?

Asit Sharma: It's a little bit of peril situation going on there, Mary. Starbucks is doing something which I think should help the business, which is to say, we've got a couple of pain points for customers. One is the time that it takes for customers to get through their order, average wait times of four minutes. You pointed out going this algorithmic route, so very old school. If a drink is very complex to make, don't make that the first thing you do, or in some cases, maybe you should if it has x number of ingredients, so that way it's ready and the stuff isn't melting on top when the customer gets it. Don't just do first come first serve. I think that is a really insightful way to start from scratch if you're a new CEO. Starbucks has these problems which they're thinking can be solved by labor. Then bring more people in so that we can satisfy customers, we can keep that throughput moving, but that increases your operating expenses, and they've got leftover depreciation from all of the investments they've made in technology.

Under the previous CEO, they were trying to solve their problems by having more components like the clover vertica which make things automatic, and they had a cool brew system, which was very expensive, so now we're seeing that work through the profit and loss statement. What we're seeing in the GAAP numbers is that net income is going to be pressured. Number 1, they still have a lot of depreciation that they have to account for, and Number 2, to keep customers happy, which should be the first order of business, they're going to have to hire more baristas, keep those shifts occupied. That is not a clear out type situation, it will take time to resolve. That's a peril.

Mary Long: Last but not least, we got GAAP earnings per share. That's down about 50% compared to a year ago. I think I know where you might land on this one. What do you say?

Asit Sharma: It's a peril. Something that was a little iffy in the earnings call is both Brian Niccol and his new CFO, who's actually a veteran of the retail business, Cathy Smith. They were like, don't worry about earnings per share too much. We really think you should focus on us taking care of the customer, us becoming that third place again, us becoming the brand that attracts people, us being the place where you can have these day parts like the afternoon where we're going to revive your desire to come into the store and maybe have a non alcoholic aperitif, mind you, I'm not sure that's what investors want to hear. Investors will give a long line to Brian Niccol because he has been successful in the past, and so has his new CFO. But I didn't like that, don't pay attention to this because we're investors, we want money. We give you money, you make money, you give us back money in terms of dividends and share price, so a little bit of peril there.

Mary Long: Another data point that I do think is relevant to the Starbucks story and just like the consumer story more broadly is GDP data, which we got out this morning. That showed a contraction of 0.3% down from 2.4% growth a quarter ago. This is the first decline since the start of 2022. Starbucks can improve wait times all they want, they can implement this back to Starbucks strategy, but if we are headed toward a recession and the company is already still struggling, how does that macro picture affect this chain that sells seven dollars drip coffees and $10 lattes to people?

Asit Sharma: Mary, the first thing I'm going to ask you is, I actually throw circumstance Kanata Starbucks once every two weeks, and I buy drip coffee and sometimes hot chocolate, and we'll buy a pastry here and there. Where are you getting these seven dollar drip coffees from? Is that some venti with adding some special milk? I don't get that. It is expensive, stop, but seven sounds excessive.

Mary Long: Okay, Asit. I was at a Marriott Hotel earlier this month for a latte.

Asit Sharma: Here we have the first qualification. Like, well, I was at the airport Starbucks. It's not the airport Starbucks, but everyone listen to Mary. It was at Marriott Hotel. Go ahead.

Mary Long: There are some asterisks attached to this example, but it fired me up, so I'm going to use this platform to share it. I'm at Marriott in Collierville Tennessee for a wedding earlier this month. There is no free coffee in the lobby at this hotel, which was my first red flag. I go down searching for coffee, and all that there is is a Starbucks Bistro, so I say, Okay, I'll go to the Starbucks Bistro, buy my coffee. It was a large, but it was a drip coffee. No fills, so easy, they turn around, pour the cup, and it cost me $7.50. I was so enraged, I was ready to throw that coffee across the lobby. I did not. I held it in, but I'm using this moment to share that. That is a real number. Though, again, perhaps that's not the price at every Starbucks.

Asit Sharma: Well, I want to extrapolate from that. Which is to say, if it's seven bucks at that Marriott, that tells us something about what's happened to the price over the last few years because in all honesty, that entry level drip coffee, a tall order with nothing on it has increased. I'm going to guess it's 30-40% more than it was just two years ago. Now, some may say that this is taking a little bit advantage of commodity inflation and inflation in general, that Starbucks took an opportunity to bump up those prices, even though it has tremendous purchasing power, and it should be one of the first places to say, Hey, we're going to hold your price steady because we're Starbucks, because we buy from I don't know how many coffee providers across the globe. It's interesting Brian Niccol is saying, We're not going to raise prices anymore this year. I think he's sensing the winds and maybe realizes that Starbucks took a little bit of advantage of its most loyal customers by bumping up these prices.

This is yet another thing that makes this very hard. But all in all, I do want to give the new team credit for leaning toward, again, OpEx people versus machines because under the previous management, Starbucks was really thinking that it could solve so many things by having automation. They could improve the rate at which people are going through the drive through lines and the wait times that you have even if you ordered in advance on your mobile order app, and it became something where they lost connection with the customer, and management, of course, is well aware of that. But it reminds me of something that Ray Kroc said years ago, the man who bought McDonald's when it was all of two restaurants, I think, and turned it into what it is today, he said, Hell, if I listened to the computers and did what they proposed with McDonald's, I'd have a store with a row of vending machines in it. Under the previous leadership, I almost felt like that's where they thought they could go, it's just a really automated format without this customer connection. Bringing that back, even though it sounds a little iffy, Mary, whoever is going to go back to Starbucks as a real third place when so many great community coffee shops have sprung up and our consumption preferences have changed? I still applaud management for getting that, that you've got to do right by your customers, price wise, ambience wise, connection wise, brand wise. Maybe there's something in there. Of course, this is a harder problem to solve than Brian Niccol had at Chipotle.

Mary Long: I want to close this out by getting another look at the fast casual business from a different company, one that really is leaning more into this digital landscape, and that's Wingstop. Not even a year ago, this chicken wing joint was flying very high, indeed. Shares have dropped significantly since then, down about 45% from their high in September 2024. We're going to get to their earnings that dropped this morning, which were more positive in just a moment, but before we get them, let's look at the past several months. Why that drop? What headwinds was this company up against?

Asit Sharma: Wingstop created its own headwinds in a way, Mary, because it had been so successful improving same store sales. The company has a really light real estate footprint, stores are incredibly small compared to some of their wing competitors, and they're meant for just going in, maybe sitting down, but mostly picking up and taking away. They really started to get a deeper concentration, some good metropolitan markets, not huge ones, but decent markets. They saw such an increase in traffic that their comparable stores went through the roof on what's called a two year stack. You compare what you sold today versus not just one year, but two years ago. When you lap great results, it becomes really hard. You can't keep increasing those results exponentially. This year, it turns out what they're doing is holding the gains over the past two years, but it's not like they're having another year where you're seeing same store sales increase by 25%. The projections were, this year we're going to grow those same store sales by mid digits to single high digits, and with this latest report, they're saying, Well, they could be flat this year. The market like the report for different reasons. But that's what happened to the stock because investors were like, Wait a minute. You're spending more on marketing. Yeah, because we're getting to the NBA. We're the official wing of the NBA. But I want those profits. Well, you're not going to get them because we're scaling, and people are just lining up to develop new franchises, and we're going to build this business out globally.

Investors were a little bit confused last quarter. We're not getting profits that we want or as much profit as we want. We're not getting the growth that we want to see. But in the grand scheme of things, those were very understandable pauses in the business model and the economic model, and I think over time, it's destined to pick up. But you had some questions about the earnings today.

Mary Long: Help us make sense of this most recent quarter because, OK, we saw a teeny tiny improvement in same-store sales. That number only ticked up by 0.5%. But there are some other numbers that seemed pretty impressive. You've got systemwide sales increasing almost 16%, hitting $1.3 billion, total revenue up almost 17.5%, net income increasing, wait for it, 221%. That's all in spite of what's obviously a very tricky, very uncertain macro environment. We've already seen that impact trickle down to other fast-casual chains. Domino's, for instance, reported a decline in same-store sales earlier this week, which is pretty rare for them. What's working and what's not in the Wingstop model, as we've just seen it reported today?

Asit Sharma: Wingstop has been a company that's invested a lot in its technology. They've moved digital orders to some, I think, 70% now of their sales. That helps them with a leaner cost structure. Also, Mary, the company has its tremendous cash on cash returns. If you're an investor, let's say, a franchisee in a Wingstop business, you can make 70% cash on cash returns, 50% if you use financing, and that's just a stellar type of return in the QSR, quick service restaurant industry. What they have is tremendous demand in their development pipeline. Their franchise groups are like, we love this, we want more, and that's propelling a really fast store growth count. With Starbucks, they're slowing down. Wingstop is trying to build out new units as fast as possible, and that's where the growth is coming from. What investors are seeing is, I can live with this equation. You have a lean operation. You don't really own your own supply chain. You work with partners, so you've got less exposure to that. You seem to be able to manage all-important bone-in chicken price really well and not pass those increases on to customers for the most part, so I want in and I want to develop more stores.

I will note that the company, one of the things that investors did like earlier this year, is the company keeps increasing its total advertising spend based on systemwide sales. It used to be 3%. Then it was 4% of systemwide sales was advertising budget for local markets. Now it's something like 5.5%. But look, with these big brand partnerships, like I mentioned with the NBA, and a lot more advertising in local markets, that's only increasing the flywheel of returns for the franchisees. This is a company that just looks destined to grow, almost like Dunkin' Donuts did in the early days. That's. A powerful equation for investors who can withstand the volatility of angst over same-store sales in any given quarter. Think of this as like, I'm going to buy this business for 10 years, and I'm going to watch it expand into Europe, into the Middle East, here in the States, and I'm going to watch you take market share from some of the bigger competitors who have larger store footprints. Of course, there's a lot that can go wrong in that. They have to keep executing and they have to make sure that they do manage those all-important bone-in chicken cost over time. But I like their chances in this environment.

Mary Long: Asit Sharma, always a pleasure to have you on the show. Thanks so much for giving us some insight into coffee and bone-in chicken wings today.

Asit Sharma: Thanks a lot, Mary. I had a lot of fun.

Mary Long: Two of the biggest movies of the year, a Minecraft movie and Sinners, both came out of Warner Brothers Studios. But there's a lot more to this company than its movie-baking business. Despite the success of those two films, the stock WBD has been far from a winner for its shareholders. Up next, I talk to Fool analyst Yasser El-Shimy about Warner Brothers Discovery. This is the first in a two-part series. Today, we talk about the business. Tomorrow, we shine the spotlight on David Zaslav; the character charged with leading this conglomerate into the future.

Warner Brothers Discovery came to be as a result of a 2022 merger between Warner Media, which is the film and television studio that was spun off from AT&T, and Discovery, another television studio. Together, today, this is a massive entertainment conglomerate, and it owns the likes of HBO, Max, CNN, Discovery Plus, the Discovery Channel; a mix of streaming services and traditional cable networks. One of the reasons, Yasser, why I find this company so interesting is because you can't really talk too much about it without hearing all these different names, all these different services, a fascinating history of mergers and acquisitions and spin-offs, etc. I want to focus today mostly on the person who has been tasked with leading this massive conglomerate into the shaky future of media. But before we get to David Zaslav, let's talk first about the company. Again, WBD is a big conglomerate. What are the most important things about this business as it exists today that investors need to know?

Yasser El-Shimy: Well, thanks, Mary. To tell the story of WBD is to almost tell the story of entertainment itself in the United States. We're talking about structural challenges that are afflicting almost all television and film studios across the board, as well as TVs on TV networks. On the one hand, you have a structural decline of linear TV viewership. That is your basic cable, basically people, paying a monthly fee for whatever provider there might be to get a whole host of channels that they flip through at home. We've heard of the phenomena of cord-cutting. It has almost become a cliche at this point. It has been going on for years, at least over a decade at this point, but recently, it seems to have accelerated even further as people migrate more and more toward streaming options, subscribing to such channels as Netflix and Disney+ and Max and others. This has created quite a dilemma for a lot of studios like Warner Brothers Discovery, where much of the profits and the free cash flow has traditionally come from those very lucrative linear TV deals that they have had with the likes of Charter Communications and others. They have had to effectively wage a war on two fronts. They are being disrupted by the likes of Netflix, they're losing subscribers on the linear TV site, but at the same time, they can't go all in on streaming, at least not just yet, because so much of their profit and so much of their sales actually come from that linear TV side that is declining.

What do you do? You try and just be everything to all people, and that has become a challenge. Warner Brothers is no different here. We're talking about a company that started off in 2022, as a result of that merger. You talked about between Discovery and Warner Brothers. Since then, they have focused on two main objectives. The first one is to pay down as much of the debt on the balance sheet as possible, and we can get to that later, and the second goal has been to try and effectively promote and develop their streaming business. Initially, it was HBO Plus, now it's called Max, and try and actively compete with the likes of Netflix and Disney. They've actually done rather OK on that front, as well.

Mary Long: Let's talk about the debt before we move on because this is a big gripe with the business as it exists today. Warner Brothers Discovery carries $34.6 billion in net debt. That's as of the end of fiscal 2024. You get to that number because there's $40 billion gross debt minus $5.5 billion of cash on hand. How did they end up with so much debt? $34.6 billion is a lot of debt. How did they end up with so much of that in the first place?

Yasser El-Shimy: That is a lot of debt. Let's just say that David Zaslav who was the head of Discovery, he was very enthusiastic about putting his hands on those assets from Warner Brothers. As a result, he actually saw that merger with the Warner Brothers assets from AT&T. AT&T took a huge loss on the price it had originally paid to acquire Time Warner, a 40% loss. However, what they did do is that they effectively put all the debt that they had from that business, as well as some of their own debt, into this new entity that was to merge with Discovery. Warner Brothers Discovery just was born with a massive debt load of $55 billion or so. That was nearly five times net debt to EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, which was very high leverage for this new company. From the very beginning, Warner Brothers Discovery had to deal with paying down that huge debt load. Luckily, a lot of that debt was in long-term debt effectively that most of it will mature around 2035. Can be easily rolled over. It has an average interest rate of about 4.7%. It's not the worst in the world. Considering how much cash flow per year that Warner Brothers Discovery is able to produce around, again, the $5 billion range or more, you can see that the company has been able to effectively navigate this and pay down that debt. David Zaslav has paid down over around $12 billion since that merger took place. That leaves them with the $40 billion you're talking about. Still more to go, but at least you can see that they are able to accomplish that feat.

Mary Long: Let's also hit on the streaming service because that's an essential part WBD and where it wants to go in the future. Max, which is the streaming service that's basically HBO plus others allegedly has a clear path to hitting, this is per their most recent earnings, at least 150 million global subscribers by the end of 2026. At 150 million global subscribers, that would make it about half of Netflix's current size. What metrics and what numbers does Max have to post in order to be considered a success?

Yasser El-Shimy: I would say that Max has to, again, focus on growing that subscriber base, and they have done an excellent job at that. They've almost doubled subscribers year over year, reaching around 117 million subscribers currently. They accomplished that through a strategy that had two wings to it. The first is that they effectively bundled a lot of content into the Max service. The previous HBO Plus service, it merely had some TV and film IP that the studios produced from the namesake HBO, but also from the Warner Brothers Studios. But then they decided to expand that to include also shows and other content from the reality TV side of the Discovery side of the business. Think of your home network, HGTV, or Food Network, and so on. They accommodate a lot of that content in there. They also introduced live sports and live news into the Max. That made it a lot more appealing to be a place where you can have almost all of your viewing needs met. That has been a successful strategy for them. They have also struck a partnership with Disney to bundle Disney+, Hulu, and Max together for a reduced price, but that has definitely also helped with the increase in their subscription numbers. But I would also be remiss to say that they have successfully and actively sought to expand their presence in international markets.

They are still at less than half the markets where Netflix is, so the opportunity is still pretty vast on there. However, as you started your question with asking about the metrics that we need to be watching out for, obviously, we need to be watching out, as I said, for subscriber numbers, as well as the EBITDA operating margins that will come from the streaming side. They are targeting around 20%, which would actually very good if that turns out to be the case, long term. But also we need to look at things like average revenue per user or ARPU. How much are these subscribers contributing, both to the top and bottom line for Max? I think on this metric, there might be a little less confidence because especially when you expand internationally, you're going to get a lot of subscribers who are not paying as much as a US subscriber might, so you might be looking at a decline there. On the bright side, they've introduced advertising as part of the package, but the basic package that you get. That strategy we have seen it successfully play out with Netflix, and I think that they may be able to increase or ad revenue on Max, and that can be a big contributor for their profits as well.

Mary Long: As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. For the Motley Fool Money Team, I'm Mary Long. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.

Asit Sharma has positions in Marriott International, McDonald's, Walt Disney, and Wingstop. Mary Long has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Yasser El-Shimy has positions in Warner Bros. Discovery and Wingstop. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Netflix, Starbucks, Walt Disney, and Warner Bros. Discovery. The Motley Fool recommends Marriott International and Wingstop. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Some stocks are extremely recession-resistant, like Waste Management (NYSE: WM). Some consumer discretionary stocks are also likely to hold up better than most, and beaten-down stocks Walt Disney (NYSE: DIS) and Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) definitely fit into this category.

*Stock prices used were the morning prices of April 22, 2025. The video was published on April 23, 2025.

Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Continue »

Should you invest $1,000 in Waste Management right now?

Before you buy stock in Waste Management, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Waste Management wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $566,035!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $629,519!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 829% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 155% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of April 21, 2025

Matt Frankel has positions in Starbucks and Walt Disney. Tyler Crowe has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Starbucks and Walt Disney. The Motley Fool recommends Waste Management. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Matthew Frankel is an affiliate of The Motley Fool and may be compensated for promoting its services. If you choose to subscribe through their link, they will earn some extra money that supports their channel. Their opinions remain their own and are unaffected by The Motley Fool.

Ever since President Donald Trump announced his tariff plan, there's been no shortage of stocks that are trading for a big discount to their previous highs. This includes some of the most rock-solid brands in the world.

I've been gradually taking advantage of opportunities to add to my favorite long-term investments during this turbulent time. Although it's entirely possible for the stock market to remain volatile for a while, it looks like an excellent time to add shares of industry-leading companies like Walt Disney (NYSE: DIS) and Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX), and that's exactly what I did recently.

Start Your Mornings Smarter! Wake up with Breakfast news in your inbox every market day. Sign Up For Free »

An incredible brand that isn't going anywhere

Walt Disney struggled in the post-pandemic years to bring its streaming business to profitability and also may have priced its theme parks and related add-ons a bit too aggressively, without investing nearly enough in improving the customer experience. However, returning CEO Bob Iger has done a great job of setting Disney on the right path, focusing on efficiency and prioritizing investment in the cash-machine theme parks.

In the most recent quarter, Disney's revenue climbed by 5% against a tough comparable with the previous holiday season. Operating income and adjusted earnings per share grew by 31% and 44%, respectively, due to management's focus on efficiency, and the streaming business is now nicely profitable.

After the recent market declines, Disney is trading for its lowest price-to-sales multiple (P/S) since the financial crisis and is nearly 30% below its recent high. While it isn't immune to the tariff concerns (more on that in a bit), this could be a great entry point in this amazing business for long-term investors.

For the current fiscal year, management foresees about $15 billion in operating cash flow and $3 billion in buybacks. If the company's plan to invest $60 billion in its parks over a decade pays off, there could be significant growth in the years to come.

A second chance to get "Back to Starbucks"

Starbucks rallied sharply in August 2024 when Brian Niccol was announced as the coffee brand's new CEO. However, the stock has now fallen by 30% in just over a month and trades for its lowest share price since before Niccol's hiring.

Niccol has made some big moves to set Starbucks on the path to turning around its sluggish growth, a plan he has called "Back to Starbucks." Just to name a few, the company has simplified its menu, focused on dramatically cutting wait times, and taken steps to improve the in-café experience. So far, the results have been promising.

The company's latest earnings surpassed analyst expectations, although comparable sales fell slightly year over year. However -- and this is a very important point -- virtually all key customer-related metrics improved on a sequential (quarter-over-quarter) basis.

In the near term, margins have been pressured by some of the investments Niccol and his team have been making. But there's also a lot the company has done that isn't reflected in the results just yet, and this is still the relatively early stages of the turnaround.

SBUX PS Ratio data by YCharts.

After the recent decline, Starbucks trades for a historically low price-to-sales ratio. If the company's turnaround efforts reinvigorate growth (and margins improve), the current price could be a bargain for long-term investors.

Not immune to tariff risks

To be perfectly clear, both of these stocks are down for good reasons. Both have significant exposure to China, and if the trade war due to the tariffs escalates between the U.S. and China, it could certainly weigh on their results. This is especially true with Starbucks, which has nearly 7,600 stores in China -- about 19% of the company's total.

They are also both cyclical businesses, for the most part, and depend on the ability and willingness of consumers to spend money. If the tariffs trigger inflation and/or a recession, both companies could see consumers pull back on discretionary purchases.

As a long-term investor, I think both of these companies are looking very attractive. I plan to hold both stocks for years (maybe decades). During that period, recessions will come and go. But both are excellent businesses that should be able to steadily grow over the years, and investors who buy at the current depressed prices could do quite well.

Don’t miss this second chance at a potentially lucrative opportunity

Ever feel like you missed the boat in buying the most successful stocks? Then you’ll want to hear this.

On rare occasions, our expert team of analysts issues a “Double Down” stock recommendation for companies that they think are about to pop. If you’re worried you’ve already missed your chance to invest, now is the best time to buy before it’s too late. And the numbers speak for themselves:

• Nvidia: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2009, you’d have $244,570!*
• Apple: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2008, you’d have $35,715!*
• Netflix: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2004, you’d have $461,558!*

Right now, we’re issuing “Double Down” alerts for three incredible companies, and there may not be another chance like this anytime soon.

Continue »

*Stock Advisor returns as of April 5, 2025

Matt Frankel has positions in Starbucks and Walt Disney. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Starbucks and Walt Disney. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

A technique that hostile nation-states and financially motivated ransomware groups are using to hide their operations poses a threat to critical infrastructure and national security, the National Security Agency has warned.

The technique is known as fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that would otherwise succeed. Fast flux works by cycling through a range of IP addresses and domain names that these botnets use to connect to the Internet. In some cases, IPs and domain names change every day or two; in other cases, they change almost hourly. The constant flux complicates the task of isolating the true origin of the infrastructure. It also provides redundancy. By the time defenders block one address or domain, new ones have already been assigned.

A significant threat

“This technique poses a significant threat to national security, enabling malicious cyber actors to consistently evade detection,” the NSA, FBI, and their counterparts from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand warned Thursday. “Malicious cyber actors, including cybercriminals and nation-state actors, use fast flux to obfuscate the locations of malicious servers by rapidly changing Domain Name System (DNS) records. Additionally, they can create resilient, highly available command and control (C2) infrastructure, concealing their subsequent malicious operations.”

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images

Transcript

[00:00:00] 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, trying to figure out a way through the tech world.

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 wp tavern.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 Anthony Jackson.

Anthony is a true technophile whose journey has been shaped by a constant pursuit of understanding new technologies.

From a young age, Anthony’s curiosity about technology laid the foundation for a lifetime of exploration. Starting from modest beginnings in computer repair, he steadily transitioned into the world of WordPress, and the complexities of server management.

This episode really is a story, the story of trying new things, being creative, and always following curiosity wherever it may lead.

Anthony talks about his early experiences describing the moment computers first sparked his interest, and the subsequent path he charted in the technology space. Despite hurdles and frustrations, particularly with initial web development and WordPress hosting, his story is a testament to determination and resilience.

As you’ll hear, Anthony learned the ropes of many technologies from grappling with CSS for website customization, to exploring cloud computing, and the command line in Linux.

His journey took a big turn when he discovered automated Bash scripts that facilitate the deployment of open source applications like WordPress. This is what Anthony is doing right now, but you’re going to hear many stories of different pathways that led to this situation.

Throughout the episode, Anthony sheds light on his philosophy of embracing technology. He speaks about the numerous technologies he’s explored, the trials he faced along the way, and the value of cultivating his technical skills. With his Bash scripts ready to streamline server setups and deployments, Anthony envisions a future where technology is not just a tool, but a powerful ally for businesses and personal projects alike.

If you’re keen to hear some inspirational stories about overcoming tech challenges, resilience and learning, 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 wp tavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Anthony Jackson.

I am joined on the podcast today by Anthony Jackson. Hello.

[00:03:32] Anthony Jackson: Hello, Nathan. How are you?

[00:03:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, great. I’m very, very pleased to chat with you today, not only because you’ve got some really nice audio equipment, which makes you sound amazing, but also it’s very nice to meet new faces, new people for the first time ever. That’s what’s happening here. I’ve never met Anthony before.

But in order that both you, dear listener and I, the interviewer, get to know a bit about Anthony, would you mind giving us your little potted bio. I guess it would be best to keep that in the sphere of technology, perhaps WordPress. But just tell us a little bit about yourself, but not too many spoilers about the episode to come.

[00:04:03] Anthony Jackson: Yeah, so my name is Anthony Jackson. I’m a technical person by nature. I’ve always loved technology, always had a thing for it. Went to school for computer technology. I have my own computer repair business. So I do that on the side, part-time, while I work a full-time job, as well as grow the business that you’re going to learn about here in a little bit.

So I stay pretty busy, obviously. I love technology, I feel that it can help a lot of people. I don’t think you should ever be afraid of it. I think you should always embrace it. It’s one of those things, if you don’t get on the bandwagon now, you kind of get punished for it later.

So I’m just really excited to share with your audience my journey because it hasn’t been easy, and I’m really glad I took the leap of faith because if I didn’t I certainly wouldn’t be where I am now. So I’m just really excited to get started and talk about it and share it with you guys.

[00:04:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s great. Thank you so much. Can I just ask, I don’t know your age, but when I was at school, so I’m now in my very, very early fifties, but when I was at school, a child at school, computers were just starting to be something that was in the market, it wasn’t the domain of universities occupying an entire room. It was something which you could hold in both arms, but they weren’t ubiquitous.

You know, maybe the school had one. It was very rare for an individual to own a computer. And so it wasn’t really until I was much older and had left school that computers became a bit of a thing which people could tinker with.

What was the experience for you? Again, I’m not trying to wrangle your age out of you, but just give us an insight into how much computing had progressed by the time you were sort of at school?

[00:05:28] Anthony Jackson: Oh my gosh, Nathan, I’ll tell you a little backstory. So my mom left me when I was younger. My dad had passed away. It was kind of just me and I lived with my aunt. She had given me a computer to go live with my mom. She had found my mom is what happened.

I turned it on and it was just an old compact, it booted up so slowly. I had no idea what it was, how it worked, what the purpose of it was. All I knew was I wanted to be on the internet. At that time it was AOL, that was the place to be.

I remember turning it on and I pressed the button on the DVD player and the tray opened, and I was like, wait, what is the sorcery? Like, and I’m like, oh, that’s cool. Okay, we’ll go with that. And the neighbor knocked on the door and said, hey, you’ve got some mail, and she gave me this disk, remember the AOL 3.0 Running Man disk? And I was like, what is this? Like, 30 minutes of the free internet. I’m like, what is the internet, right?

And I put it in this tray and I ended up setting up my account and the first words I heard were, welcome, you’ve got mail. And I’m like, no I don’t, I just checked it. And I got totally hooked immediately on this whole email thing. And I just, it blossomed, man, and I’ve been doing computers for, God, 20 years now.

So I love the backstory on it because it really changed my life. Like, I discovered the internet, email. I spent five years homeless without the internet. I never would’ve known like who to ask for help, how to get help. It truly changed my life, Nathan. It really did.

[00:06:40] Nathan Wrigley: I think there’s something quite addictive about it, but also I think, and this is from personal experience, I have no reference to psychology of the human race in general, but it would seem that some people really from a very, very early age are drawn to it on a level which is indescribable. You just have this desire to be in close proximity to a computer that’s switched on, and to be tinkering with it.

I have that, but I know people who are very dear to me that if you put them near a computer, the first thing they want to do is get out the chair and walk away. You know, there’s just no interest in it whatsoever. But I think it is something that you can be passionate about in a heartbeat.

So in your case, you know, you press the DVD button, something happened, you did it on a keyboard and something happened elsewhere over there. It’s like, ooh, these two things are connected. There’s something clever going on there.

And all of a sudden alarm bells are ringing. Like, wow, I’ve got to dig deeper into this. I know already though that you are younger than I am because you joined the computer world at a time when the internet existed. When I was playing with the first computers, basically, you switched it on and a cursor blinked, and that was it. That was the fun that you had, you had to type things in.

[00:07:45] Anthony Jackson: My first experience was Windows 3.1, back when the briefcase was around.

[00:07:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so as a child leaving school, you’ve got this interest in computers and what have you. So where did the journey go from there? What were the next steps from Windows 3.1? What are some of the things that began early on? What were the dominoes that fell?

[00:08:00] Anthony Jackson: Well, I discovered Windows XP, it was the hottest thing since sliced bread. I loved XP. Vista was a hot mess. Fast forward, seven was good, eight was terrible. And then Windows 10, and now Windows 11. I figured if I learned Windows 3.1, I kind of had to follow the journey. So I started Googling the different features of Windows, realised quickly that an operating system is an operating system, it’s just where you find stuff, right?

I love the fact that I could see it progress, that I could be a part of that and help people. And that’s what really turned me onto it. So the technology thing is what really kind of gets me. I love technology. I love the fact that we can use it to have a good time, to leverage it, to grow our businesses, to do a lot of things, like podcasting and other things.

[00:08:40] Nathan Wrigley: Are you the kind of person that upon receiving a computer, desktop computer, do you like to take it apart and see what the bits are inside there, or assemble your own? Or are you purchase it from the store and let the dust gather on the inside and then dispose of it at some point, 5, 10 years later whatever it may be?

[00:08:55] Anthony Jackson: The thing that I love the most, Nathan, this is going to sound so crazy, I don’t enjoy building them. I actually don’t know how to build them. I tried once and failed miserably. But what I love nothing more in my computer repair business is when somebody comes to me and says, Tony, I need to buy a new one, I don’t know what to do, where do I start?

I love that conversation because it’s so overwhelming for a lot of people, and I have a unique way. I took a Tony Robbins class a long time ago for personal development, and they did this whole assessment on me and the results yielded that I had a way of breaking down technical information into a manner that someone can understand.

So when someone comes to me and says, I need a new computer, I’m like, okay, I got you, it’s okay. What do you need? What are you looking for? What are your concerns? And I can have a nice conversation and ease them into making a confident purchase instead of buyer’s remorse. It makes such a difference.

[00:09:43] Nathan Wrigley: I’m firmly on the Mac side of things, and when you purchase a Mac, you really only have three or four decisions to make, one of which is color. What color do you want the computer to be? But beyond that, it’s things like how much memory, how much ram, there’s very few components that you really get to choose about that.

But on the Windows side of things, for a family member, I have recently built a computer and I was actually fairly alarmed at how many choices there were for every single thing. And it really did make me realise that there’s a whole career in just being able to understand what range of graphics cards there are, what range of CPUs there are, what kind of panel could you have as a display, what the keyboards are, what the mouse are.

And that was really interesting to me. Is that something that you nerd out on then? Do you know all of the kind of serial numbers of the different graphics cards which are available?

[00:10:32] Anthony Jackson: I’m not that big of a nerd. My nerd comes out when I started Learn WordPress, that’s when the nerd came out.

[00:10:38] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Well, we’ve established your nerd credentials. That’s lovely. Let’s move on to WordPress then. When did you, firstly, when was the first time you came across WordPress, and in what context? What did you need it for?

[00:10:48] Anthony Jackson: So a long time ago I started my computer repair business, probably about eight or nine years ago. And the first thing that came to mind was a website. I was like, I have to have a website. I have a business, it’s a known fact you have to have a website, right?

Well, I didn’t know WordPress had never heard of WordPress, so I went where any other person would go, and that was to the internet to find web hosting, and I found godaddy.com. And I was like, GoDaddy it is.

I had a budget of around $3,000, and what happened was they ended up coding me a really nice HTML, CSS, web development website. But I realised quickly that I’m a picky person. I wanted things changed. I didn’t like how things aligned. OCD, like the CSS and stuff wasn’t aligning. And I wanted more control. I wanted to be able to control that.

And I remember Googling how to control your website and it said WordPress, the number one platform. I’m like, what the hell is WordPress? Okay. And I clicked, best decision of my life. I ended up going back to GoDaddy to get hosting, WordPress hosting. I didn’t know what it was, I had to kind of figure it out. And I realised quickly about shared hosting, and what it was, and how it acted, and I didn’t like the fact that I was being shared with people, it made me very angry.

I went through seven different hosting providers, 15 different WordPress for Dummies books, trying to figure things out. Was very, very hard. One day I ended up going to like, I think it was Namecheap or something, and getting a little bit better WordPress hosting with more resources because I thought that would help. And I was sitting there so frustrated because I saw a template but had no idea what to do.

And all of a sudden after tinkering with WordPress in the back end, I put the word home in what we call the primary menu. And at that point it clicked. I was like, oh my God, I can build a fully fledged website with content that’s branded to me without having to pay extra to add revisions and stuff like that.

And so for like two weeks straight, I learned how to install WordPress. I learned the art of the primary menu. I had so much fun just adding the same buttons every time, home, about, services, contact. And then I discovered page builders. That’s when things really turned. Divi was my first love, and always will be.

[00:12:50] Nathan Wrigley: Did you have to really persevere then, because it sounds like you’ve got all of the equipment in your head for dealing with technical problems. You’ve got that sort of passion to see it through to the end. I think I get quite frustrated with certain tasks and give up fairly quickly, but it sounds like you’ve got all of the bits and pieces.

10 years ago when you installed WordPress, I’m guessing it was a much more difficult enterprise than it is now. You know, you’ve got these hosting companies that you basically click one button and not only will they set your WordPress website up, they’ll send you the login links, you can probably just click a button to log in on the backend and what have you. Was it fairly frustrating, and do you think that, if you’d had a different personality type, you would’ve just thrown the baby out the bathwater and gone, nope?

[00:13:29] Anthony Jackson: A hundred percent. If I did not have my technical background, I would’ve gave up years ago. I called GoDaddy so many times for support. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I called them. And I enjoyed calling them because when I did call them, I got to give them some great feedback because they understood completely what I was trying to do. So it was really cool. I got to see them improve and I got to see myself improve. But it was also nice to be able to call them and get it fixed because I didn’t have to explain what I was trying to do. I knew what I was trying to do.

And the design element stuff did not come until later. I spent so much time tinkering with WordPress, buying plugins. Nathan, I’ve got a repository on themeforest.net of plugins and themes that I haven’t even touched. I bought anything from caching plugins, to improve performance, to membership plugins, not knowing any idea what they’ve been. I just went on as spending spree and just bought everything. And now I’m like, what do I do with it all? Like, I don’t even know what I want to build.

[00:14:27] Nathan Wrigley: There’s a definite learning curve there. Just dealing with the nature of the internet. I don’t know quite how to put this. When I talk to people about how interesting I think the internet is, I can very often sense that people’s eyes are glazing over. You know, oh Nathan, dear Nathan, what’s the matter with you?

But I think on a very profound level that it is amazing that we live in a time where you can download free software, and with a few dollars invested in hosting, and it doesn’t have to be a lot, you can have something that the entire world, well, by that I mean people who have access to the internet, the entire world can see.

And conceptually, I just think that’s utterly remarkable. And I don’t know if it ever sort of hits you in the same way that it hits me. But you said, you know, you put the word home on your webpage, or you put something for your home screen and you have that moment of, I can do the internet. I can be on the internet.

I think that is something which gets lost so quick. But occasionally I stare at what I’m doing and think, I just click publish and there it is, and everybody can see it. And I think that’s phenomenal.

[00:15:35] Anthony Jackson: That hit me when I discovered the actual blog portion of WordPress. When I discovered that my content could go out to anybody and everybody with a click of a button. I was a little blown away. I was a little overwhelmed because I was like, this is really cool. I’ve created a piece of content for somebody that might need my help. They can just click a button and within a few seconds potentially see it. Like that is, you’re right, it’s remarkable. But it’s also really overwhelming for somebody who’s never experienced it.

[00:16:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and I guess, you’ve got to be a little bit careful about what you publish and what have you. But I still think we are in an age where I think it’s easy to forget how privileged we are that we have access. Well, you and I, for example, we’ve never met. We’ve only communicated on the internet via a social network. I messaged to say would anybody enjoy coming on this podcast? You contacted me. Here we are. We’re using a browser based application to communicate with each other. And this is just totally normal now. And yet my 14-year-old self staring at the computer in the school, what we’re doing now was the realm of Star Trek.

This was the kind of thing that people in spaceships did, and yet now it’s totally normal. And sometimes I try to sort of impress upon my children how remarkable it is, but for them it’s just, no, no, no, this is what all humans have had for all time. And it just gets lost.

[00:16:49] Anthony Jackson: It is remarkable.

[00:16:50] Nathan Wrigley: Where from there then? So we’ve reached the point where you’ve discovered WordPress. What’s happened subsequently since then? It sounds like you’ve got your business all pivoted around WordPress as well. What’s the next step in the story?

[00:17:01] Anthony Jackson: Well, I went through multiple page builders, never really learned another one because I got so comfortable with Divi. I tried Elementor, didn’t really like it all that much. Tried every block builder. Discovered Gutenberg was the worst thing known to mankind. Tried buying Astra, some other, I forget the other company that has the block builder.

[00:17:20] Nathan Wrigley: Kadence maybe.

[00:17:21] Anthony Jackson: Kadence, yes, I tried them. But the thing that I didn’t like about WordPress, I loved the page builders, they made things easy, but the one thing that I hated the most is I never really had control of where to put stuff. It always was just like, this is your block, this is where it goes. I didn’t know CSS. I didn’t know HTML. I did not know how to move things, and I hated that.

Because the whole point of me going to WordPress was to have control. And when I lost control, it turned me off. I was the person who built the entire website and canceled my hosting because I wanted more control. That’s how I learned. I canceled, and bought, and canceled, and bought and thought it would get better and it didn’t, and I just pushed, and pushed, and pushed and learned.

So I started to just Google how to move things with CSS. I taught myself the basics of CSS and HTML, and a little bit of JavaScript. Not a lot, just enough to be dangerous. But I wanted control, Nathan. I wanted to be able to do things, and when I discovered that I could do that, that put me in another whole new rabbit hole. Then I discovered plugins that control CSS, selectors and all of that, so it gave me an opportunity.

[00:18:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I always think that WordPress kind of has been pitched at me by other human beings as this kind of catchall, easy to use solution. I think maybe you’ll get lucky and you’ll be satisfied in a way that you clearly are not, you know, if you want every pixel to be mapped perfectly from your head onto the screen, that’s not going to be the case. But maybe for many people it’s enough.

Okay, I’ve got this templated layout, it’s fine, I’m happy with that. I’ll click publish and whatever’s there is fine. But if you do want to move things around, and you do want to have a particular layout, and you want to show only these posts here and these posts here, but you want it to look entirely different from the theme that you’re using, I think it’s still very confusing.

And I think the underlying languages of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which really these days are the underpinnings of certainly the front end of web development, they’re fairly difficult to acquire if it’s not your job. If you’re just doing this evening, weekend, it’s a bit of a hobby, I still think those things are really difficult to acquire and they’re not slowing down. You know, in the year 2025 when we’re recording this, CSS is really on a clip, it’s really modifying itself quickly. All these different sort of layout systems, flex, grid to learn and what have you.

So I think the promise of the page builders in WordPress is probably why it’s as successful as it is. If you rewind the clock 10 years, when they just started to come about, you mentioned Divi and there was Beaver Builder and, oh, all sorts of other ones. I would imagine that if you could chart the growth of WordPress, it would’ve been the novice user wanting a sort of what you see as what you get, point, click, drag, save solution that meant that WordPress grew. And it sounds like you fitted into that niche quite nicely.

[00:19:56] Anthony Jackson: Yeah, I wanted to know why. Why it wasn’t working. Why the block couldn’t move. I was very irritated by that because I had certain expectations for my logo to be correct. And what really got me into WordPress was the fact that it was drag and drop. And I love the word drag and drop, because if you don’t know how to code, well, drag and drop is the alternative, and it’s your best friend. But it’s not a true, genuine, drag and drop experience.

Because to me, drag and drop genuine experience means to put things where I want to put them. I don’t want to be limited by the block builder, you know, the blocks that you’re provided. I want to be able to move it, control it, customise it. Because at the end of the day, people buy into you and not your products and services. But at the same time, your website never gets built because you spend way too much time customising, Googling the 20 best page builders of 2025, and buying a whole bunch of stuff you never needed in the first place, right?

[00:20:45] Nathan Wrigley: So have you doubled down on your page builder of choice and your website building experience is based upon the UI, and becoming an expert and having the perfect muscle memory for doing things in that? Is that how you build your pages, and themes, and structures for web pages now?

[00:21:00] Anthony Jackson: So, ironically enough, Nathan, I’ve actually got away from doing WordPress. I transitioned into something different, which we’re going to get to here in a minute. I learned everything about WordPress. I wanted to learn. The only thing I didn’t learn was WooCommerce. I understand what it is, I just didn’t want to learn it. I didn’t have a need for, my business didn’t sell digital products.

I got out of it because it just became frustrating because I just couldn’t do what I wanted to do, and I didn’t have the budget to pay someone to fix it. I knew if I did, I would probably just cancel anyways because I wanted it to look even better. So I just stopped because I didn’t want to do it. I discovered that I wanted to learn how to actually deploy WordPress for myself instead of using a hosting provider because that’s the easy way.

So one day I was Googling and I came across the word Linux. I was like, Linux, okay, that sounds like a fun rabbit hole. Let’s check it out. I discovered my first cloud computing company, which was Linode. I called them up and, you know, I got to be honest with you, I wasn’t super impressed with them, because the one thing that I realised quickly is that there’s no support at all. It is all community driven. If you think about WordPress, the open source, there’s no support. It’s all just learning community based forums, podcast episodes, wherever you can get content. Thank God WordPress, the audience is so big that you can get help. But to this day, there’s still things that I still want to know the answers to about WordPress, but I just can’t find anymore.

But I discovered Linux and I had a very, very difficult time of spinning up a server. I struggled so badly with the command line, so badly. And then I discovered that Linode had one click apps and one of them was WordPress. I was like, here we go again. I installed WordPress. I grew a little bit of a fascination with trying to find my credentials inside the terminal, realised quickly that shared hosting was not the only option to deploy WordPress.

My biggest problem with the server stuff was there was no support. I struggled very badly. Everything I Googled said, copy this, copy that. I’d copy and paste, I wouldn’t get the result. I was throwing things around, spinning up servers left and right, getting so frustrated. I’m like, what do I need to do?

So I ended up buying a course on Udemy, and went through this very, very great course for absolute beginners and discovered quickly what I was doing wrong. Completely stopped the course and started learning again, because I’m not that type of person who takes the course. I find my fix, and then I go back to like tinkering with things. I spun up, I don’t know, probably 300 little VPSs trying to figure things out. Needless to say, I’m a master of installing WordPress with Linode now.

[00:23:24] Nathan Wrigley: Have you got into Linux server admin, sort of sys admin as a way, well, that was just the fun that you were having at the time, and then discovered that, okay, WordPress can bolt on top of that. And so now the two things have combined and you are back to WordPress, or have you entirely stopped with WordPress?

[00:23:40] Anthony Jackson: I never got into the sys admin stuff, but the next journey for me was, I Googled Linux and I had WordPress. I hated the command line, Nathan. The commands, the black and white was so overwhelming. As it turns out now it’s like my best friend. I can’t live without it because it’s so much easier if you know what you’re doing.

But I discovered something called cPanel, and when I got into cPanel I was like, okay, this is cool. I got a GUI, I can look at something, and lo and behold, guess what I found first? Install WordPress. I’m like, it’s back again, right? Everywhere I turn, WordPress kept coming back.

So I learned how to install cPanel on my own server, trials galore, WordPress. Ended up getting super frustrated with cPanel, because cPanel is extremely technical, if you are not in a shared hosting environment where it’s managed. It’s extremely technical. They started giving me questions, I started asking for commands. I started taking notes of those commands, so when I broke something, I would know what to do.

And I learned cPanel pretty proficiently, but got overwhelmed with it just because the technical. There’s a difference between documentation and technical documentation. Documentation is, click here, do this. Technical documentation is, before you get started, make sure that cPanel’s installed properly on your server. It’s like, okay, first of all, what is cPanel and how do you install it properly? Is there such a thing?

Like it feels so overwhelming and you couldn’t contact Linode, you had no support. The only thing you had was cPanel. So I went through hundreds of cPanel trials trying to figure things out. Grew a fascination with the command line and installing cPanel. And I discovered pretty quickly that, even though I didn’t want to learn WordPress anymore, I wanted to provide hosting for WordPress.

I wanted my own hosting provider. I wanted to be the guy who said, you know what you need, WordPress hosting, I got you. But as it turns out, hosting WordPress on your own server is difficult because you don’t have that system admin background to fix things. Makes it extremely challenging and it, your confidence goes way, way, way down, because you cannot provide that quality of hosting that you want to provide.

So upon Googling more, I discovered something called WHMCS, Web Host Master Complete Solution. Loved this concept. This was a dark rabbit hole. I went down this rabbit hole, and discovered quickly that I would have to install it on my own server, which I lacked knowledge of. Biggest problem was the file manager, figuring out the file structure, how to navigate to the path, trying to figure all that out.

And I finally got that installed and I learned about WHMCS. And through some Googling and YouTube, I hooked up my first server and I click install and it provisioned an instance of WordPress inside of WHMCS. I saw a button that said, log into WordPress. And I was like, oh my God. There’s a button.

And I clicked this button and I was like, oh my God, it just launched WordPress. I was blown away, so I was like, let’s get a business going. So I started writing documentation and yeah, it wasn’t that easy.

[00:26:26] Nathan Wrigley: Boy, I mean, you get the prize for commitment though. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve got just bucket loads of time on your hand, or if you are just the kind of person that, once you’ve set yourself a task, it’s going to annoy you until you finally cross that Rubicon. But you’ve got a lot stickability.

[00:26:42] Anthony Jackson: I’m a determined individual. I went through multiple attempts at WordPress hosting, but I discovered that I was going to need help. I was going to have to find a way to provide this because I didn’t have the system admin background. So I discovered reseller hosting. And this is kind of where things blossomed.

Reseller hosting was great, because they not only provided the WHMCS license free, they provided a cPanel license and I didn’t have to manage it. It was the perfect setup. I was like, oh my God, this is perfect. So I really started to dig into my business then. But then I discovered really quickly that without customers, this is going to be really difficult.

[00:27:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s the crucial bit that you have to have somebody to resell it to.

[00:27:17] Anthony Jackson: So after three, four months of messing with tech and mastering the art of cPanel, WHM and WHMCS, I stopped because I didn’t have any customers. Why pay 40 bucks a month if you’re not making any money, right? Didn’t make sense. So I was like, well, I need to figure out a different way to provide hosting. I came across something in Linode called Bash. Bash scripting.

I did a little Googling, looked at some images, and I’m like, okay, it’s coded. I’m not a coder. How am I going to do this? And I went back and looked at cPanel, because I had installed it one day and I noticed that the word Bash was in their installation command. And I was like, what the hell is Bash? And what is it doing in this command?

So Google, Google, Google. I discovered some commands, curl, Wget in Linux, all the stuff, and realised that I could pull a file down from the internet and run it as Bash. I was like, this is wicked cool. And I wanted to be able to deploy WordPress, but I wanted to be able to provide it to somebody else so that I didn’t have to deal with the server side. I wanted to be able to give them a script and say, you can download this script, click a button, add your domain, make sure your DNS is set up and you’re golden. And I was like, this is cool.

But then I realised like, I need a way to deploy WordPress because I can’t use Linode because then I’m doing it. I don’t want to help them get to where they need to be because I don’t know how. So how do I offer WordPress hosting in a manner that they can do it in a session that they can understand? So what I ended up doing was I discovered Docker.

[00:28:35] Nathan Wrigley: You have been everywhere.

[00:28:36] Anthony Jackson: I discovered Docker, and I was like, okay, this is overwhelming, right? Docker Hub, command line. I installed my first WordPress image and I saw the welcome screen. So what we know as WordPress, when we log in, we just log in with our credentials and we’re good. This brought me to the actual installation screen of WordPress. Pick your language. And I was like, oh, this is where it really begins, right?

So when I discovered Docker, I found the first image and I launched my first instance of WordPress using Docker, and it was local. And I went to go do everything and it said, error, database not found. I was like, this isn’t good, because I knew that the database was the core, right?

So I learned in Docker how to set up a database with my SQL. And after some serious frustration around coding YAML files, I got with a guy on Fiverr and I said, listen, I said, I need you to make me a script.

I need a Docker install that can install WordPress, have a database, and also be able to get an SSL on the domain, because adding SSLs in Linux is a pain in the butt. I don’t know if you’ve ever been down this road. One of the biggest things about cPanel and the shared hosting is the automatic SSL feature is flipping amazing. It’s one of the things you’ll fall in love with, because your site has to be secure for multiple reasons.

But regardless, he ended up using something called Caddy server. Reverse proxies, all that stuff. He ended up just creating the script. And he goes, just run it. I’m like, how do I run it? I have no idea. He’s like, just make a file, do this. And I put the code in and all of a sudden I hit enter and this thing started running. It started updating packages, and servers, installing Docker, Docker Engine, Docker Compose, running and running and running and running. And I’m just watching it running. My eyes are just lighting up the whole time. I’m like, oh my God, what is doing?

[00:30:14] Nathan Wrigley: It’s like watching the Matrix or something, isn’t it?

[00:30:17] Anthony Jackson: It would pause, it would extract, it would unzip files. I thought it was broke. I restarted like seven times. And all of a sudden it stopped, Nathan, and said, your WordPress instance is ready, go here. And I was like, no way. No way. And I’ll be damned, man. I clicked the link and there it was on my own domain secure, and I was blown away.

I didn’t even log in because I knew it right then and there that I could deploy WordPress and everything would be fine, right? And so I saw this WordPress and I was like, oh my God, I just deployed WordPress in minutes, not hours, on my own server with nearly no technical knowledge.

[00:30:51] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t know, I think you’ve acquired quite a lot of technical knowledge on the way.

[00:30:55] Anthony Jackson: Well, thank God, right? Because running that script was extremely challenging, but I was just, you know that moment when you discover something and you’re clapping and you’re smiling and you’re putting your hands over the air? I was clapping away. That’s where my mind was at. And when I did that, that’s when the business really started, because I wanted to be able to offer WordPress hosting without having to worry about the sys admin stuff. So I figured if I just provided a script.

So now I have a script that’s made in Bash that you just copy and paste a command and the script runs and does what it needs to do. All you need to do is just add your A record for the DNS and your SSL and you’re good to go.

[00:31:28] Nathan Wrigley: So is that, dare I ask, is that where you’re at now? Or is there another sort of, I don’t know, you just sort of, quick, pivot left? Is there something else coming?

[00:31:36] Anthony Jackson: No, there’s more. So Bash is kind of where I stopped. I didn’t really learn Bash, but as you know there’s a lot of drama in the WordPress community, and it seems to shine on X. And I made a decision that it’s going to be really hard to market because of all the competition with WordPress. And I kind of stopped.

And so the business now, this is where I’m at, I’m creating Bash scripts for popular open source applications. Because if there’s one thing that I’ve learned through my journey with WordPress and learning servers and Linux, it’s that the open source community is so powerful. Your privacy, your focus, your respect, your content, your everything is so important. So I’m actually creating Bash scripts that automate the process of those popular open source applications like WordPress, Plausible Analytics, Nextcloud, all those popular ones.

I’m in the process of making scripts for all those, and it makes the process easy because when I first started deploying open source applications, my biggest challenge was the documentation. Trying to understand it, trying to read it, trying to make sense of it. And when I saw that WordPress script run, man, I was like, oh my God, I can make anything run, and now I’ve got five scripts.

[00:32:46] Nathan Wrigley: And so is that going to be the business in the future there? Where you come along and you, I don’t know, you want Moodle or something, or you want Joomla or WordPress or whatever it may be, and you’ve got a script which you basically just put it on your server, run it, find the path to it, run it, and you’re off to the races.

That’s an interesting business model and not one, well, I mean, obviously, that business model is encapsulated in many, many, many hosting companies and hosting solutions like cPanel and what have you, but yours is going to be just, buy the script, off me, run the script, and then you’re on your own.

[00:33:16] Anthony Jackson: Because the biggest issue that I’m finding with people, it’s not so much the command line, it’s tying the SSL into it. And a lot of people are hosting these open source applications locally, but there’s a problem with that. There’s a big problem. We talked about at the very beginning of this podcast episode, it’s not on the internet. It’s local to your computer, nobody can see it.

What Caddy does is creates that reverse proxy and puts it on your own domain so that the world can see it. It solves a big problem. Because Linux is so big, you not only have to learn the operating system. You not only have to learn the command line. You’ve got to learn the commands itself. You’ve got to have serious patience. You’ve got to be able to do a lot of things to get to where you need to be with Linux to be comfortable.

These scripts make it super easy. Literally, like you point your A record, you let it propagate, you press a button and it goes. And I went as so far to this, this is really cool, I had someone else create a script that secures your server as well. So when you run this WordPress script it disables root login, it does all the security best practices, uses public key authentication, the whole nine yards. Then it installs Docker, Docker Compose, Docker Engine, runs the file, runs Caddy, installs WordPress, and you have a secure server set up in 10 minutes with your own WordPress instance on the internet ready to go.

[00:34:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I remember the famous five minute install for WordPress, but this is more like five minute install for all the stack. Click the button, go off, make yourself a coffee, and by the time you’ve come back everything is done. That’s so interesting.

[00:34:40] Anthony Jackson: There’s a couple of manual processes because of the way the script is built. But if you have a technical background, you’re good to go. And one of the reasons I did this, Nathan, was because I realised there was no support as we discussed, right? Well, I didn’t know everything about Linux. There’s no way I could be a system admin, no way in hell.

So I wanted to make a way to where I could give it to someone and say, hey, here it is. Heads up, we’re not responsible. This is your server. You break it, you fix it. I’m here to give you the script, I’m here to troubleshoot why it’s not working and that’s it.

[00:35:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’re just the beginning. You are the first step on the journey, and then it’s hands off from your perspective, and then it’s over to you. I’ve got it.

[00:35:17] Anthony Jackson: The scripts are all one-time fees. So you own it, do whatever you want with it. Remodify it, I don’t care. Make it better, improve it.

[00:35:22] Nathan Wrigley: Where do you sell them then? How has that as a business idea gone down? Have you managed to find customers for that?

[00:35:28] Anthony Jackson: I have not found customers yet. That’s part of the reason I’m on here, to help get exposure. I’m still trying to kind of validate the business idea. Anybody that knows anything about Bash scripts knows that they’re not sold. They’re free. I’ve put a lot of money into having these things created for me, so I want to get a little bit of return on them.

And they’re not, I mean, the WordPress one is 27. It’s nothing crazy. You can deploy WordPress as many times as you want, SSLs, et cetera. It’s a slow process. I’m very much, my business in a phase where I’m building my audience. I’m trying to find out who that audience is, what their pain points are, what their problems are. And things will probably progress from there. So right now my biggest challenge is just trying not to learn anything else because I’ve learnt so much.

[00:36:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it would seem that your history is littered with, well, not dead ends, but kind of temporary dead ends where it leads you to the next thing, and it leads you to the next thing. But actually the thread running through your story that I’m picking up is that each time you drop a piece of technology and move on to another one, it’s kind of elevating you towards something a bit more difficult.

The technologies that we’re using at the beginning, the next one was a little bit more difficult to manage, and the next one, and the next one, and the next one. And it was that inexorable kind of rise to now where you are doing the full nine yards in this one script. That’s really interesting. What a fascinating story.

I tell you what, you have more patience than I have. And I don’t know how many times you’ve thrown things at walls, but I suspect if it was me, it would’ve been quite a few. When those moments of clarity that I don’t really know what’s going on here, but I’m going to persevere. Remarkable.

We kind of hit the sweet spot in terms of time. So we’ll sort of wrap it up. What a fascinating journey. I love that story. Tell me, Anthony, where would people find what it is that you are mentioning here, these Bash scripts? Where would we find those? And then another question, very much the same really is, where would we find you? Where do you hang out online, and where could people discover you?

[00:37:19] Anthony Jackson: So my primary home is x.com. I really like X. You can visit my bio, there is a link to the website. Please note the website is being updated from what it is to something else. I was going to do the whole WordPress thing, but things changed a little bit. So I’ll leave you a link, Nathan, with a link to the shop and you can take a look at the scripts and decide if you want to purchase one. If you do, just know that I truly appreciate your support. Running a small business is extremely challenging on a very tight budget.

I really feel that this is something that can help a lot of people get where they need to be because there’s a lot of digital scams in the world. And the one script that I love that I have is the Nextcloud script. And I love the fact that I can store my data securely and not have to worry about privacy and my data being sold. So if you’re looking for an alternative to keep your stuff safe, definitely a robust option.

So I’ll send you a link, Nathan, to the scripts. I’m still in the middle of updating links and things like that. I’m just excited to finally have it off the ground and finally have a business after learning nine different technologies in a matter of two years.

[00:38:17] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like a lot. So what I’ll say is, when Anthony sends me the link, I will embed it into the show notes. So if you head to wptavern.com/podcast, if you search for Anthony Jackson, then you’ll be able to find that episode and I will make sure that all of the links that he sends me finally end up on the show notes over there.

What a fantastic and interesting story. Anthony Jackson, I really hope that your endeavor, all of that hard work pays off. Good luck for the future. Thanks for joining me on the podcast today.

[00:38:46] Anthony Jackson: It was great to meet you, Nathan. Thank you everyone for listening. I hope you enjoyed this story. I hope that it inspires somebody. Technology is an amazing thing. Remember, never fear it, always, always embrace it. It can take you places you’ve never imagined.

On the podcast today we have Anthony Jackson.

Anthony is a true technophile whose journey has been shaped by a constant pursuit of understanding new technologies. From a young age, Anthony’s curiosity about technology laid the foundation for a lifetime of exploration. Starting from modest beginnings in computer repair, he steadily transitioned into the world of WordPress, and the complexities of server management.

This episode really is a story, the story of trying new things, being creative and always following curiosity, wherever it may lead.

Anthony talks about his early experiences, describing the moment computers first sparked his interest, and the subsequent path he charted in the technology space. Despite hurdles and frustrations, particularly with initial web development and WordPress hosting, his story is a testament to determination and resilience. As you’ll hear Anthony learned the ropes of many technologies, from grappling with CSS for website customisation, to exploring cloud computing and the command line in Linux.

His journey took a big turn when he discovered automated Bash scripts that facilitate the deployment of open-source applications like WordPress. This is what Anthony is doing right now, but you’re going to hear many stories of different pathways that led to this situation.

Throughout the episode, Anthony sheds light on his philosophy of embracing technology. He speaks about the numerous technologies he’s explored, the trials he faced along the way, and the value of cultivating his technical skills. With his Bash scripts ready to streamline server setups and deployments, Anthony envisions a future where technology is not just a tool, but a powerful ally for businesses and personal projects alike.

If you’re keen to hear some inspirational stories about overcoming tech challenges, resilience and learning, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Anthony’s website

Divi

Beaver Builder

Elementor

cPanel

Linode

WHMCS

Docker

Docker Hub

YAML

Caddy Server

Plausible Analytics

Nextcloud