WordCamp Asia is in Taipei in a few weeks. The agenda includes sessions on personalisation and AI and WordPress’s role in both. I’m not speaking, but I’ve been asked what I’d say if I were. Here’s what’s on my mind.
One. Personalisation isn’t a future feature. It’s table stakes.
Five years ago, personalisation was a nice-to-have. If you could show different content to different visitor segments, that was advanced. It’s not anymore. Enterprise and mid-market businesses expect it now. Not a complex ML system, not a CDP, just: can I show my returning customers something different to first-time visitors? Can I detect their geography and speak to them in their context? Can I measure what works?
WordPress can do this. The tooling has gotten better. But most WordPress sites don’t. And most WordPress agencies aren’t pitching it as a default. That’s the gap. Not between WordPress and enterprise systems. Between WordPress’s capability and how WordPress is actually being sold and used.
The conversation in Taipei should be: how do you make personalisation the default expectation, not the premium feature? What does the WordPress project need to do, and what do agencies need to do, to make “personalisation-first” sites the norm instead of the exception?
Two. AI isn’t replacing the WordPress ecosystem. It’s expanding it.
I’ve heard the line a thousand times: AI is going to kill the CMS market. Large language models understand content structure, you don’t need a CMS anymore. That’s not what I’m seeing. I’m seeing AI as a tool that makes WordPress better. Content generation, SEO optimisation, code scaffolding, accessibility auditing. All of those are things WordPress sites can do now, inside WordPress, using language models.
The thing that AI isn’t doing is replacing the need for a system that organises, secures, and publishes content. If anything, the more AI there is in the content creation process, the more you need a robust CMS to govern what actually goes live. GDPR compliance, brand consistency, audit trails. Those are CMS problems that get more important as AI in the production line gets more important.
WordPress agencies should be thinking about: where does AI fit into my delivery? Not “will AI replace me” but “what can I build for my clients using AI as an ingredient?” The money is in the second question.
Three. Boring fundamentals are where the real leverage is.
The three things I see agencies struggling with are: performance, security, and maintenance. Not personalisation, not AI, not the shiny stuff. Slow sites. Plugins that don’t update. Hosting that doesn’t scale. Sites that get hacked and nobody notices for a month.
If you want to differentiate as an agency, fix the boring stuff first. A site that loads in 2 seconds beats a site with clever personalisation that loads in 6 seconds. A maintenance plan that actually works beats a custom integration that breaks when something updates. Security audits and backups beat new features.
Personalisation is interesting. AI is interesting. But I’ve seen more client satisfaction from “we fixed your performance” than from “we built you a custom personalisation engine”. The fundamentals are where the trust is.
What ties them together.
The WordPress Asia moment is that WordPress has everything it needs to compete at an enterprise level. Not by becoming something else. By being really good at what it does. A stable publishing platform that can handle personalisation, integrates with AI, and doesn’t require an army of engineers to maintain.
That’s not where the industry conversation is. The conversation is all about headless, composable architectures, the latest frameworks, AI as the next platform. That’s all valid. But someone needs to stand up in Taipei and say: WordPress is boring and that’s why WordPress wins.
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