For about ten years of my life, my alarm clock went off at 4:00am.
Not because I hate mornings. In fact, I rather like them. The world is quiet, the coffee tastes better, and nobody has started sending Slack messages yet. But even if you enjoy mornings, 4:00am is still objectively ridiculous.
It was because I had a train or plane to catch.
Sometimes London. Sometimes Manchester. Sometimes Scotland, which from where I live requires roughly the same logistics as a small lunar mission.
All so I could stand in front of twenty people in a room and teach them how to build a WordPress website.
Over the years I did this thousands of times.
Guardian Masterclasses in their offices in Kings Cross.
Corporate teams. Agencies. Freelancers. Small business owners. Photographers. Therapists. Restaurants. Charities.
In total I’ve taught more than 5,000 people.
And here is the thing I learned.
Almost none of them actually wanted to build a website.
The Secret Nobody in the Website Industry Likes to Admit
When someone signs up for WordPress, what they want is a website.
They do not want:
- an editor
- a theme system
- blocks
- plugin compatibility issues
- a discussion about CSS margins
What they want is something more like this:
“I run a bakery.
Please make me a beautiful website so people can buy my cakes.”
That’s it.
That’s the whole brief.
But historically the answer we’ve given them is:
“Fantastic! First you need to understand this interface with 47 buttons, choose a theme, configure plugins, design layouts, optimise images, and occasionally Google why something has exploded.”
And to be clear, WordPress made this dramatically easier than the era that came before.
But the core friction never fully disappeared.
Because the interface was still… software.
What People Actually Wanted
After teaching thousands of beginners, agencies, and corporate teams, I can say with some confidence that 99% of people wanted the same thing.
They wanted:
A magical way to create a website.
Something that:
- understood what they were trying to do
- made sensible decisions for them
- required no technical knowledge
- didn’t require hiring developers
- didn’t cost a fortune
In other words, they wanted something that just worked.
For twenty years, we couldn’t build that.
So we built editors instead.
Then AI Showed Up
And suddenly the impossible thing became possible.
You can now type:
“Make a website for my bakery with online ordering and a gallery.”
And a system can actually do it.
Layout. Copy. Images. Structure. Navigation.
It’s not magic.
But to a small business owner at 11:30pm on a Tuesday, trying to launch their website after putting the kids to bed, it certainly feels like magic.
Which raises an uncomfortable question for the WordPress ecosystem.
Are We Asking the Right Question?
A lot of products in our space are asking:
“How do we add AI to our existing tools?”
Which often results in something like:
- an AI button in the editor
- an AI sidebar
- an AI assistant that helps write block content
But that question might be backwards.
Because the real question might be:
What do our customers actually want today?
And even more importantly:
What will they want in a year?
If my experience teaching thousands of users tells me anything, it's this:
They don’t want AI inside the editor.
They want AI instead of the editor.
The Interface People Always Wanted
For decades the natural interface humans have used for complex systems is…
conversation.
You don’t open a bakery and say:
“Let me adjust the pastry layout settings.”
You say:
“Can you add more croissants to the front display?”
That’s how humans think.
That’s how humans work.
And now, finally, that’s how software can work too.
AI chat is not a feature.
It’s the interface people always wanted.
A Friendly Warning to the WordPress Ecosystem
I love WordPress.
It changed my life.
It created an open ecosystem that enabled millions of businesses and creators.
But we need to be careful not to make a classic technology mistake.
Which is this:
Improving the tools we built for yesterday’s constraints.
Instead of building the tools for today’s possibilities.
The opportunity in front of us isn’t:
“How do we add AI to blocks?”
It’s:
“What would WordPress look like if it were invented today?”
Skate to Where the Users Already Are
If you spend enough time teaching beginners, you start to notice something.
They’ve been telling us what they wanted for years.
They wanted:
- something simple
- something guided
- something intelligent
- something that just works
They wanted to talk to their website.
We just didn’t have the technology yet.
Now we do.
So my advice to anyone building in the WordPress ecosystem is simple.
Build AI-first interfaces.
Make them beautiful.
Add guardrails.
Make them safe.
Make them trustworthy.
But most importantly:
Skate to where the users already are.
Because they’ve been there all along.
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