WCUS 2026

Track: Technical WordPress

  • Beyond Plugins: When to Move Workflows Outside WordPress

    Plugins are how most WordPress users solve problems, and for good reason. But there’s a point where adding another one starts to hurt. Performance gets shaky, updates break things, and your site ends up depending on a chain of small tools nobody fully understands. This talk is about recognizing that point. How do you tell…

  • Surviving the Plugin Stack: A Practical Playbook for Auditing and Simplifying Complex WordPress Sites

    Every mature WordPress site accumulates plugins the way a garage accumulates boxes… one at a time, each for a reasonable purpose, until the whole thing is load-bearing and nobody wants to touch it. The problem is not that plugins exist. The problem is that most teams have no repeatable method for evaluating what they actually…

  • Migrating to Blocks (With Artisanal Care, at Industrial Scale)

    Whether we’re modernizing an old personal blog or migrating hundreds of thousands of existing posts from another CMS, using WordPress in 2026 means converting our content to Blocks. The “Convert to Blocks” button in the editor works well enough for one post, but if we have dozens or hundreds, what can we do to make…

  • Beyond Vibe-Coding: Build an AI Pipeline That Ships Production-Ready Plugins

    Anyone can vibe-code a plugin in an afternoon. Most of those plugins can’t go anywhere near a business-critical site (and you know it the moment you read the code). Learn how to build your own AI pipeline that ships plugins you can actually deploy: secure, performant, and built to the standards your senior engineers enforce…

  • Staying Relevant as a WordPress Developer in 2026

    AI is rapidly changing the WordPress industry, automating repetitive tasks and reshaping what companies expect from developers. In this session, the presenter explores the skills that continue to create long-term value in modern WordPress careers — from performance, accessibility, and problem-solving to communication, systems thinking, and business awareness. Drawing from experience leading teams and working…

  • Your Client Wants AI. Their Lawyer Just Said No.

    Two clients showed up with the same UX problem: visitors land on a complex site and can’t find the right path forward. One project ended up shipping a GPT-powered search block. The other shipped a deterministic, persona-driven block on rails, no AI at all. Both worked. Neither was wrong. This talk walks through both production…