I’m not going to WordCamp Europe in Krakow this year. It’ll be the first WCEU I’ve missed since Berlin in 2019, but the reason is a good one rather than a reluctant one. I’ve just come back from being away, and I also wanted other people on the team to have the chance to go in my place.
Stepping back this year is about making room for them; not about being put off the event.
So this isn’t a grumble dressed up as analysis. But two posts doing the rounds this week put words to something I’d been feeling for a while about WCEU more generally.
The first is Jean Galea’s piece on WCEU’s shrinking attendance (jeangalea.com/wordcamp-europe-shrinking-2026). The second is a post on Regionally Famous about the scope of WordCamp sessions and how heavily the content skews towards developers (regionallyfamous.com/wordpress-wordcamp-developer-content).
One’s about attendance, the other about session scope, so they’re not making the same argument. But between them they reinforced my view that what matters most for conferences is what’s actually on the schedule when you get there.
There isn’t enough on
If you put WCEU next to an event like BrightonSEO, the gap in content is pretty uncomfortable. They’re roughly equivalent-sized conferences in terms of their status in their industry and sector, but the April version of BrightonSEO had more than 180 sessions across two days and has an attendance of 4,000-6,000.
That’s something like three times the content WCEU offers over a similar stretch and around double the number of attendees. And this is an event that happens twice a year in the UK and also runs in San Diego.
Yes, BrightonSEO costs more to attend. But the value you get back is enormously higher, because there’s simply more to do. More tracks, more talks, more chances that whatever you came to learn about is actually on the schedule at some point during the day.
When I weigh up whether to attend an event, it often comes down to whether there’s enough on to justify the travel and the time away. If I’m going to lose two or three working days plus a flight, I want the programme to be full enough that I can’t get to everything I want to see. WCEU, for all its strengths, doesn’t give me that feeling at the moment.
The days don’t feel full. And I wonder if the lack of scheduling hits attendance.
The fix isn’t complicated
The frustrating part is that this is solvable, and the raw material is already there.
Every year a large number of speaking applications get turned down. I know people who’ve had to apply multiple times before they finally got on stage. So the problem isn’t a shortage of people with something worth saying. The problem is a shortage of slots to put them in.
So schedule more sessions. Run them shorter if that’s what it takes. Most talks genuinely don’t need to be 40 minutes. A tight 20 or 25 minutes often lands better than a padded 40, and it lets you fit far more onto the day. Add tracks, add slots, and start saying yes to more of the speakers who are already queuing up to contribute.
And while you’re at it, make sure there’s something for every kind of person who walks through the door.
This is the point the Regionally Famous post makes well: too much of the programme assumes you write code for a living. WordPress isn’t only developers. It’s plugin authors, sure, but also marketers, agency people, content admins, beginners taking their first proper look, and experts who want something at the deep end.
Each of those people should be able to map out a full day for themselves and walk away with something they couldn’t have got anywhere else.
Fill their days. Give them a reason to be there. Make it so the genuine question in people’s heads isn’t “should I go this year?” but “how could I possibly not?”
I’d like to be back
None of this is a swipe at the people who organise WCEU, which is a volunteer effort and takes a lot of time and effort. And as Marcus Burnette from The WP World rightly identifies, WordCamp Europe is more than the schedule.
However, it’s because I care about the event that the drop-off in attendance bothers me. WCEU has been a fixture of my year for a long time, and I’m sending colleagues in my place precisely because I want them to get out of it what I have.
If the conference wants to reverse the attendance figures and stay at the centre of the conversation, my view is that the lever to pull is content. Ramp the programme up by a factor of two or three. The speakers are ready and waiting, so let’s let them all take the stage.