Stick a CDN in front of it, cache the pages, make enough of the site static and you can serve a frankly silly amount of traffic without WordPress having to break much of a sweat.

Which is great. We like caching. Cache is king, after all.

But it doesn’t tell you all that much about what happens when WordPress actually has to, you know… generate a page… or do something dynamic (like every single ecommerce site in the world).

So, we decided to test that instead.

What happens when you bypass the page cache?

We ran a load test against an uncached WordPress homepage and gradually increased the number of simulated clients hitting it.

With no cached page ready to hand back, WordPress had to process the requests as they came in.

Here’s what we found out:

We tested two WPMU DEV hosting plans. Dedicated Bronze Plus reached 120 simulated clients under load, while Unlimited Alpha MU reached 100.

For comparison, Bluehost, Flywheel and HostGator reached 50, Cloudways reached 40, WP Engine reached 25 and GoDaddy reached 18. For each competing host, we selected the plan closest to the WPMU DEV price point being tested.

Now, before anyone reads “100 clients” and assumes we’ve built hosting for exactly 100 people and the 101st gets launched into the sun, that’s not what the number means.

These are simulated clients used to increase the load during the test. The useful bit is how the different hosting plans performed under the same kind of uncached traffic.

And once caching was out of the picture, the gap was pretty hard to miss:

While Unlimited is the main focus here, it wasn’t the highest-performing WPMU DEV option in the test. Dedicated Bronze Plus handled 120 simulated clients, the strongest result in the comparison.

That extra headroom makes Dedicated worth considering for sites with heavier or more consistently dynamic workloads. Unlimited Alpha MU still reached an impressive 100, while offering agencies the flexibility to host multiple sites on one server.

Why bother testing uncached pages?

Because, my friends, not everything happening on a real WordPress site can be served from cache.

Sites have logged-in users, membership areas, dashboards, personalized content, WooCommerce carts and checkouts, and all sorts of requests that need WordPress and the database to get involved.

This becomes particularly relevant if you run an agency and have a pile of client sites to look after.

You’re probably not losing sleep over how quickly one cached homepage can be served in isolation. You’re trying to work out where the next client site is going, how much it’s going to cost you, and whether adding more sites to the same platform is eventually going to come back and bite you.

That’s the bit we’re interested in.

Hosting more sites is great, provided they still work

Unlimited Hosting is designed for agencies who want to host multiple WordPress sites on a single server, rather than paying for hosting one site at a time.

Although this test measures uncached traffic against one site running on the Unlimited server, it does show the amount of dynamic processing headroom that server has under the test conditions.

That headroom is important when you’re managing a growing collection of client sites. After all, logged-in sessions, personalized pages, and other requests that bypass the page cache all draw on the server’s resources. The number of sites a server can support will still depend on traffic, themes, plugins and workloads.

That’s why we wanted to look beyond cached traffic.

And yeah, in our uncached test, Unlimited handled:

• 2x the uncached load of Bluehost, Flywheel and HostGator
• 2.5x Cloudways
• 4x WP Engine
• 5.6x GoDaddy

Dedicated Bronze Plus went further still, reaching 120 simulated clients.

So, that means you’re not just getting a hosting model that makes it easier to consolidate client sites without adding another per-site bill every time.

You’ve also got some pretty solid evidence of what happens when the cache can’t do all the work for you.

A quick note about the test:

Keep in mind, this was a controlled load test, not a prediction of exactly how every WordPress site will behave.

Themes, plugins, databases and whatever weird and wonderful things you’ve bolted onto WordPress will all, of course, affect real-world performance.

And again, the “clients” here are simulated load-test clients. They’re not total visitors, monthly visits or a hard limit on how many people can use a site.

The point of the test is the comparison: same type of uncached load, different hosting plans, and a veeery noticeable difference in how far they got.

We hate to toot our own horn… but when Unlimited gives us a trumpet solo like this, we can’t help it.

Cached WordPress can make everyone look fast

And that’s fine. Cache your sites. Use a CDN. Do all the usual, sensible, performance stuff.

But take that away for a moment and you get a much more interesting look at what the hosting underneath can actually handle.

Unlimited gives agencies a flexible way to consolidate client sites, while this test provides a useful indication of the server’s ability to handle dynamic, uncached requests.

It doesn’t tell us exactly how many sites a server can support, but it does show that Unlimited Alpha MU had substantial dynamic headroom under the test conditions.

If you’re looking after a growing collection of client sites and want to bring more of them into one place without paying for hosting site by site, that’s a result worth knowing about.

See how Unlimited Hosting works.

Before you clock off and lie in a rectangle of sunlight, let’s see what’s been happening in WordPress.

Stick around to the end to see the hamster who’ll absolutely annihilate your fitness goals.

In today’s edition:

• How 1,100+ WordPressers got into the zone in Arizona.
• Responsive styling! Better collaboration! Less media-processing misery! WordPress 7.1 has arrived.
• WordPress starts asking the important questions: “Should we actually let AI do that?”

Hot Off The Presses: What’s New?

 
Sometimes the only valid debugging technique is stretching out on the floor in a patch of sunlight, am I right?

This pup knows what’s up. I’m jealous.

While this very good doggo works on its background-color, here’s what’s been happening in WordPress this month.

WordCamp US was Arizona-nother Level

More than 1,100 sunscreen-ed and well-hydrated folks braved the 111ºF (44ºC) Arizona heat and gathered in Phoenix to talk all things WordPress, and from all accounts the four-day event was a great success.

To honor the occasion, August 19th has been officially proclaimed “Phoenix WordPress Day”, according to the city’s Chief Innovation Officer, Michael Hammett.

So, what did you miss if you didn’t make it to Arizona?

• Contributor Day, with 425 participants and more shipping than a Tumblr fanfic.
• A fireside chat (with no actual fire, thankfully. I’m sweating just thinking about it) where the Big M and Robert Jacobi discuss how the web is changing, where open source stands today and how WordPress is evolving alongside AI.
• The chance to get your hands messy at Paint-a-Wapuu classes with local Phoenix artist Dina Murphy.
• Official screenings of Code for the People, a short documentary by Bao Nguyen, which you can watch here.

Oh, not to mention the childlike joy of collectively building a massive WordPress logo out of Lego bricks. (If that isn’t a metaphor for Open Source, I don’t know what is!)

Were you there? What was it like? We’d love to hear about your favorite part.

WordPress 7.1: Mary Lou

WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou” has landed, named after jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams.

And unlike my attempts at learning piano, there’s quite a lot here worth paying attention to:

• Responsive styling is now baked further into the Site Editor, so you can change how blocks look across different screen sizes without reaching straight for custom CSS.
• Block themes can also define their own mobile and tablet breakpoints in theme.json.
• Notes got a collaboration upgrade too. You can format them, @mention people, attach a note to a specific bit of text, and keep multiple conversations going on the same block. Basically, fewer “which paragraph did you mean?” messages in Slack.
• Media is getting lighter on your server. Image compression, resizing, and thumbnail generation can now happen in the browser, helping dodge the PHP memory limits and timeouts that tend to appear precisely when you’re uploading something enormous five minutes before launch.
• There are also two new blocks, Tabs and Playlist, plus interactive Button styles for hover, focus, and active states, custom icon registration, and an admin bar that now follows you across every editor.

These are all pretty small changes individually. But when you add them all up, 7.1 feels like another sizeable step toward doing more of the stuff we used to reach for CSS, plugins, or mild profanity to accomplish.

Check out the official release announcement here.

P.S. WordPress 7.0.4 also landed with a security fix, so make sure to update!

The Big Question: How Do We Keep the AI in Check?

Consumes an alarming amount of water, remembers every stupid thing you’ve said, and is confidently wrong all the time.

But enough about my ex. Let’s talk about AI.

AI 1.3.0 was released on August 18th and the canonical plugin that powers AI features in WordPress now has even more controls and abilities, including content translation, slug generation and category and tag suggestions.

As AI agents become increasingly integrated into how we use WordPress, an important conversation has begun about designing systems to prevent as many HAL 9000 moments as possible.

Writing about Defensive Data Design on the Make WordPress Core blog, Matt asks, “How can we make the defaults as safe (and secure) as possible?” and suggests settings that make deleting things more difficult, and changes always visible and reversible.

The comments add some interesting ideas too, like:

• Adding a “last edit date” on all content, so it’s easier to see when something was updated.
• Flagging certain tasks as sensitive, ensuring they can only be completed by a human.
• A copy-to-clipboard option on error messages, so users can quickly look up the problem.

Where the human belongs in the loop isn’t a new debate, it’s been part of the conversation for a while. For example, WordPress has already designed its support assistant so that it recognizes the moments when it can’t help and offers to connect the user to a human instead.

The question of where AI should end and human oversight should begin is a complicated one, so you can bet this will be one of many discussions we’ll have about this in the coming years as AI and WordPress continue to integrate.

Mind Bloggling Facts & Stats

• Sometimes the little things really add up. Ella van Durpe made a list of 48 “papercuts” that annoy her about the Block Editor, from writing-flow improvements to drag & drop fails to stuck scrolling. If any of these papercuts are driving you up the wall, why not jump in to see if you can help? (Source)
• Matt Cromwell from Roots & Fruit analyzed 3,354 plugin reviews and found out monetization headaches (surprise paywalls, crippled free tiers, nagging upgrade pop-ups) made up 29% of one star reviews. Turns out people get annoyed when they think they’re downloading a free fix, only to find out the real limits after they’ve built on top of it. (Source)
• What’s the hardest thing about contributing to WordPress? 31% of WP Credits students say unclear instructions is what tripped them up in the beginning. (Source)

Blogs & Resources You Shouldn’t Miss

86 comments & counting on “What UX mistake do you notice even on polished websites?” Is your site guilty of any of these?

So your site is a masterpiece on desktop, but a hot mess on mobile? Here’s how to hide certain blocks based on device.

Adrian Sticea used to get nearly all his freelance WordPress leads via Upwork. In 2026 that number hit zero. What’s changed?

Before you write another 2,000 word blog post, maybe try rescuing one that used to rank. Here’s a guide to salvaging URL equity you already earned.

Jared Rethman makes the case for real-time technology and why WordPress becoming more like Google Docs is the future.

Nothing takes the shine off a juicy impressions graph quite like finding out your biggest fans are bots.

Jonathan Bossenger makes the case for websites you can actually, you know, own.

Coffee Break Distractions

Did you know the last time the entire human race was on earth was November 2nd, 2000? Right now, there’s 10 of us in space.

If you need someone who knows a song so well he can play it backwards, this guy won’t let you down.

What’s your WPM? ReadnType is a free “typing & speed-reading gym” – with a leaderboard so you can challenge your friends.

Centering a div stressing you out? Take a tranquil ride on a scenic tram driven by a cat.

I’ve seen some bad takes on the internet… but this one is just so wrong it actually hurts.

Was Frutiger Aero the Vaporwave of the early 2000s? (Remember when every website and OS looked like this?)

And finally…

I felt pretty good about my Strava stats, until Mollie the Hamster absolutely left me in the dust.

Love this mix of nerdery and nonsense? Share it with your favorite WordPress weirdo.

The secret to a successful WordPress blog is creating content that’s highly useful and relevant to your readers.

But how do you know what your readers really want to know? (After all, you’re not a mind reader!)

Your website can tell you which pages people visited, but it can’t tell you what people came looking for and failed to find.

What if a visitor with an unanswered question could be the starting point for a useful new article, a better page or a smarter internal link?

As we mentioned in our OpenClaw announcement, we’ve been playing around with creative ways for WordPress site owners to use this always-on AI agent.

So, we tried a simple idea: Could an AI assistant help visitors find what they need from your content, and also help you improve your website?

The result was a working WordPress experiment we called Site Brain.

It’s a practical example of what you can build with OpenClaw by combining it with WordPress and a few supporting services. We’ll show you how the pieces come together, so you can experiment with building something similar yourself.

What is Site Brain? How Does it Work?

In our experiment, Site Brain took the form of a simple, user-friendly AI chatbot in the corner of a WordPress site, ready to help visitors explore its content.

In a nutshell:

1. First, Site Brain answers questions by directing visitors to relevant content.
2. Then, unanswered questions become blog post ideas.
3. Blog post ideas could become your next editorial plan.
4. Site Brain could also spot your orphan posts…
5. And create a plan for rescuing them.

Easy-to-use and intuitive, the experiment shows how an assistant like this could turn a static site into an interactive resource your visitors will want to come back to again and again.

First, Site Brain answers questions by directing visitors to relevant content.

We tested the prototype on a food blog. You can explore the demo here to see the concept in action.

The chat became a “Recipe Helper,” where the user could ask questions naturally, just like they would interact with any chatbot.

For example:

• What can I cook with okra?
• Show me some quick vegetarian dinners.
• What are ideas for breakfast recipes that use bananas?
• I’m craving something spicy. What should I cook tonight?

The assistant then searches the existing recipes and returns relevant suggestions, with links to real posts.

Rather than being a replacement for your content, the assistant directs readers to the exact blog posts they need, helping your site visitors discover and benefit from as many of your posts as possible.

Then, unanswered questions become blog post ideas.

Behind the scenes, the agent reviewed the questions visitors asked and checked how well the site’s content answered them. It reported common questions, the overall answered rate and any questions the site’s content didn’t answer particularly well.

Before Site Brain, visitors would simply bounce if your content didn’t answer their question – and you’d never know why.

With an assistant like this, you could have a source of possible content ideas based on something a real visitor wanted to know when they came to your site.

When it comes to content creation, that knowledge is absolute gold.

Blog post ideas could become your next editorial plan.

In the demo, visitors asked about quick vegetarian dinners, Indian food, potatoes, tiramisu and diet-friendly suggestions.

The agent compared these questions with the site’s existing recipes and suggested five possible articles. Each idea is connected to actual visitor demand, fills a gap in your content and connects with relevant content already on the site.

Now, rather than starting from scratch every time or guessing what to publish next, this could give a site owner an editorial calendar full of ideas based on real visitor demand.

Site Brain could also spot your orphan posts…

When a website page has no other pages linking to it, it’s known as an “orphan.”

The page might have really valuable or useful content, but visitors are unlikely to discover it and search engines receive very few signals about how it fits into the rest of the site. The searchable memory created by Site Brain could help to address this problem.

The private agent builds a picture of the site’s internal links and identifies pages with no inbound links, so you can build a path to them from the rest of your content.

In the demo, for example, the agent found that the Baingan Bharta recipe had nothing else on the site pointing to it.

And create a plan for rescuing them.

Identifying the orphan post was only the first step. In our demo, the agent then offered to create an internal link plan to connect this post with other relevant content.

Rather than inventing anchor text, the agent looked for words that already appeared in related recipes and quoted the exact sentence where each link would be a good fit.

This makes every suggestion super easy for you to review. The prototype can preview a proposed fix and wait for confirmation before applying it. It even saves a snapshot first, allowing the change to be reversed.

At every stage of the process, you’re still in control. In our prototype, the agent wasn’t set up to write or publish blog posts on the user’s behalf. Instead, it took care of the repetitive discovery work behind the scenes, while leaving every proposed change for the site owner to review and approve.

In our prototype, the index was deliberately configured to read only public posts, not drafts, private posts or password-protected content.

How the Site Brain prototype works

Our prototype has three pieces that work together:

• A WordPress plugin reads your site’s public content and keeps a searchable index up to date.
• A visitor-facing OpenClaw assistant uses that index to answer questions and link to the site’s real pages.
• A private team agent uses the same information to find content gaps, orphan pages and internal-link opportunities.

OpenAI embeddings make the content searchable, while Qdrant stores the index. The search understands meaning, so it’ll connect a visitor’s question with relevant pages even if they use different wording.

But don’t worry, you don’t need to understand all the technical details to see why this idea is so exciting!

Site Brain brings together OpenClaw, WordPress, OpenAI embeddings, and Qdrant to create the experience you’ve seen above.

There are a few moving parts to configure, so we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to help you set it up and experiment with building your own version.

Think of Site Brain as a working experiment and a starting point. You can adapt it to your own site, change how it works, or take the idea in completely different directions, all with OpenClaw.

Site Brain helps both you and your visitors get more out of your content

The experiment demonstrates a potentially powerful loop:

1. A visitor asks a question.
2. The assistant helps them using your site’s existing content.
3. The private agent learns where the content was useful and where it fell short.
4. As the site owner, you get practical ideas for what to write, update, or link next.

Instead of a chat widget ending when the conversation ends, it becomes the beginning of a better content plan.

The experiment was tested on a food blog in this example, but the same idea works well for any content-heavy website. For example, this could be used for a database of technical tutorials, a travel blog with practical destination guides, or a library of educational resources.

The Site Brain experiment shows how an OpenClaw-powered assistant could help you build a stronger connection with your readers and a deeper understanding of what they’re looking for when they arrive on your site. With this, you can answer their questions better today, and create even more helpful content for the next time they visit.

This is just one of the many cool things that are possible when you run OpenClaw on WPMU DEV hosting!

What do you think? Could you imagine building or using something like this on your site? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

My problem was that installing it on my Mac was a nightmare. There were a couple of problems actually. First of all, I don’t do Terminal (which is my secret shame, and is almost as embarrassing as when people see my “code” lol). Secondly, whatever my machine is locked down with just repeatedly said, “Nope!”.

But then, it occurred to me that this was a bit like WordPress back in the day. So far away from my technical competence, and I needed cPanel, Fantastico and eventually MU to get it going.

So, I asked my team, “Could we make installing and using OpenClaw easy for me and, I dunno, our members and their clients?”

And guess what? They made it happen! Today I’d like to introduce OpenClaw hosting.

 
If you’re a WPMU DEV Premium member, then this is available for you right now on your Unlimited Hosting server at no extra cost, for as many installs as you want.

Roll it out for yourself or your clients and use it alongside all the tools you know and love. Easy.

It’s a one-click install, of course. Just add your favoured API and then SSO in.

It’s so easy even I can do it… without asking for help

 
Naturally we’ve been testing and playing around with this a bunch over the last few weeks, so we’ll share some of the things we’ve done with you shortly.

But in the interim, go and spin up OpenClaw (next to EmDash in your Unlimited Hosting server) and let us know what you think and how you reckon we could improve the experience for you and your clients.

Is it really almost August already? Or are Julying to me?! Well, let’s not waste any more time and get right into it.

Stick around to the end to see a toddler who’s well on her way to a comedy career.

In today’s edition:

• The Classic Block is back in, Unicode emails are out, and Beta 3 is ready for a test drive.
• The only thing hotter than the Arizona sun is the newly-live WCUS schedule.
• Plus, superb specs, a competition crusher, a Canva-inspired creation and more dev-flavored distractions.

Hot Off The Presses: What’s New?

 
Call me old-fashioned, but remember the days when “the team” was just a rubber duck on your desk?

The average rubber duck:

• Costs less than you spend on tokens.
• Is surprisingly helpful when it comes to solving dev problems.
• Doesn’t hallucinate and leave you vulnerable to slopsquatting.
• Doubles as a cute, nostalgic bath toy.

I mean… you could bring Claude into the bath with you I guess… but well, that’s when things start to get weird.

Anyway, here’s what’s been happening in the world of WordPress this month!

Testing 1, 2, Beta 3…

WordPress 7.1 Beta 3 is now ready to be poked, prodded and played around with.

Official blog post, with a link to download Beta 3

Go ahead, get in there! Test the core features you use the most, or try to push it to its breaking point and see what it can do. Helping out with testing means you’re contributing to making the next release as stable and powerful as possible.

Interesting things to note about 7.1 Beta 3:

• This release has ditched Unicode email support, which would have allowed users to register and log in with non-ASCII addresses. Apparently, it was shelved after flagging security concerns.
• The Classic Block is not going anywhere. It was almost hidden from the inserter by default, but it was brought back by popular demand.
• Beta 3 also contains fixes for more than 71 issues that have popped up since Beta 1. This includes several problems with media uploads, such as GIFs taking forever to upload and photos with EXIF rotation data showing up in the wrong orientation.

Note: Test all you like, but remember this is still a Beta. So, don’t install it on any site that, you know, actually matters.

Wake Up Babe, WordCamp US Schedule Just Dropped

The schedule for WordCamp US 2026 has finally been announced, so it’s time to start planning which sessions you’re keen to attend, which parties you’ll definitely stay up late for, and where you’re most likely to “accidently” bump into your WordPress hero post-talk. (There they are! Omg. Play it cool! Play it cool!)

The event will take place at the Phoenix Convention Center from August 16th-19th, and sessions are spread across four tracks: AI, Honing Your Skills, Technical WordPress and the new WP101, designed to give noobs a friendly introduction to the basics. There’s more AI-focused sessions this year than ever before, including workshops on AI-assisted coding, AI-powered plugins, agentic development and the legal side of AI adoption.

Some talks that look intriguing include:

• WordPress for the Public Good: Modernizing Civic Websites for Accessibility, Services, and the Open Web by Manny Costa: Who doesn’t love a chance to be able to use their nerdy powers for the benefit of society?
• You’re the Only One at Your Company Who Understands WordPress. Now What? by Jeremy Jones: If you’re the sole WP-wrangler at your organization, you’ll feel seen here, and get some great ideas on how to explain the value of what you do to stakeholders who don’t get it.
• Everything is Fine and Nothing is Good: Design Systems in the Age of AI by Michelle Hunt: Besides having a title that sounds like a song by The Smiths, this talk promises thought-provoking insight into how we approach design in an AI world.

Check out the rest of the schedule here

The event will conclude on August 19th with the release of WordPress 7.1, so get the champagne bottles ready.

For those of you bold enough to brave the convection oven that is Arizona in August, we salute you. “You’ll be fine! It’s a dry heat!” the locals say. Pack breathable fabrics, stay hydrated, and you’re sure to have a fabulous time.

The Toys of Summer

By “toys” we mean really clever, fun, and sometimes even useful tools that smart folks in the WordPress world have been building recently.

Here’s a roundup of some of the cool stuff we’ve spotted:

• A comprehensive website audit you can run (or ask your agent to run) against your site to see if it checks all the boxes.
• A tool that keeps an eye on your competition, and comes up with ways you can stay one step ahead.
• A drag-and-drop page builder that makes designing pages as easy as making a birthday invite in Canva.
• A very silly game that parodies the plugin building experience… and is pretty addictive.
• And speaking of silly games, there’s also Super Beaver World, built using Beaver Builder AI.

What nifty side projects have you been working on? We’d love to hear about them.

Mind Bloggling Facts & Stats

• WordPress Studio has been souped up with a shiny new Native PHP runtime that makes pages load 30-50% faster. Vroom vroooooommmmmm! (Source)
• When Patchstack says “update immediately,” they mean it. In the days after they disclosed a critical, unauthenticated pre-auth chain in WordPress core, they blocked more than 65,000 exploitation attempts from attackers who weren’t messing around. (Source)
• Pavel Ciorici has noticed a mysterious group of themes that somehow get 5k-20k “active installs” in days, while being downloaded around 20 times per day. Suspicious? He certainly thinks so. (Source)

Blogs & Resources You Shouldn’t Miss

Your plugin launched. Then it just… sat there. Here’s what to do to make sure it continues to get attention.

Lights, Camera, Admin: Find out how being a theatre kid helped Allie Nimmons become a better WordPress teacher.

“Anyone can generate (AI slop), in infinite quantities, which makes it worth exactly nothing.” – Joost on the future of websites.

The “You Shall Not Pass” period for Protect The Shire’s AI reviewer Gandalf was dropped from 24 hours, to just 6.

Making connections who understand your 3am debugging pain just got easier: The WP World now has a “Friends” feature.

What makes a block theme a block theme? The answer hinges on just one small detail.

Making a WordPress theme accessible is actually more… accessible than you might think. Jessica Lyschik explains.

Coffee Break Distractions

From half-time browsing to sports betting site spikes: here’s how the World Cup impacted internet traffic.

Duck, Goose, Duck!

In our algorithmic, AI-crazed world, an analog-media-obsessed grassroots music scene feels more punk than ever.

Did this stick enthusiast find Gandalf’s staff while hiking in the French Alps?!

What is loop engineering? Kirupa explains with a helpful dirty dishes analogy.

It’s been 10 years since the infamous Pantheon branded elevator incident. Event sponsorship really has it’s… ups & downs.

Amelia Wattenberger’s piece (with beautiful visuals) on why coding is a proxy for thinking, and what happens when we lose it.

And finally…

Some people are just born with a sense of humor, apparently.

Love this mix of nerdery and nonsense? Share it with your favorite WordPress weirdo.

Client requests start in your inbox. Then they spread to contact forms, DMs, WhatsApp, team inboxes, old threads, and that one ancient spreadsheet nobody wants to talk about.

So you start looking at helpdesk software.

HelpScout. Zendesk. Freshdesk. Groove. Gorgias. HelpDesk.
They all promise a cleaner way to manage support: shared inboxes, team assignments, conversation history, branded replies, and fewer client requests disappearing into the void.

Lovely stuff.

But wait a second…

Do you really need to pay for a separate helpdesk platform when Hub Tickets are already included with WPMU DEV Premium?

Especially now that your clients can open tickets by email?

Yup. Your clients simply send an email. The Hub turns it into a ticket.

With Tickets, you can now set up a branded support address like support@youragency.com or help@youragency.com.

Your clients just email that address from the app they already use.

Then, The Hub automatically turns each email into an organized ticket your team can assign, track, manage and reply to. Clients will receive updates from your branded support address, while the full conversation stays organized within the ticket.

In other words:

Clients get the ease of email. Your team gets the structure of a helpdesk.

Very civilized.

Our email channel for Hub Tickets lets you replace separate helpdesk software

Dedicated helpdesk platforms can be great. We’re not here to dramatically flip a table at Zendesk.

But most standalone helpdesks live outside the rest of your agency workflow.

So even if the support request is neatly organized, the actual work often happens somewhere else.

You still need to check the client’s site. Look at hosting. Review backups. Confirm billing. Check plugins. See who on your team owns the work. Maybe look at uptime, domains, or previous service history.

Hub Tickets is already connected to your site management workflows, and with email-ticket conversion you can bring support, hosting, updates, backups and client sites all together into your all-in-one dashboard.

If you’re already paying for HelpScout, Zendesk, FreshDesk, Groove, Gorgias or another helpdesk software, or trying to duct-tape Gmail and labels together, this is going to change how you run your business.

What separate helpdesk platforms usually charge for

Most dedicated support platforms charge in one or more of the usual ways:

• Per user or agent
• Per inbox
• Per contact
• Per feature tier
• Per ticket, conversation, or usage volume

At the time of writing this, entry-level paid plans for popular helpdesk software look like this:

• HelpScout starts at $25 per user, per month.
• Zendesk starts at $19 per agent, per month.
• Freshdesk starts at $29 per agent, per month.
• Gorgias starts at $10 per month, limited to only 50 tickets
• HelpDesk starts at $29 per user, per month

Nothing wrong with paying for tools that earn their keep.

But if you’re already a WPMU DEV Premium member, it’s worth asking:

Why add another monthly subscription if the support workflow you need is already included?

A standalone helpdesk may help you manage support conversations.

Hub Tickets helps you manage support conversations inside the same ecosystem where the client work actually happens.

You can:

• Let clients create tickets by email
• Use your own branded support address
• Reply from The Hub
• Send clients branded email updates
• Assign tickets to team members
• Track progress from a shared workspace
• Keep the full support history organized
• Offer a white-labeled client portal
• Manage support alongside clients, sites, billing, hosting, backups, plugins, uptime, and team workflows

Email support or client portal? Yes.

Hub Tickets does not force you into one client support style.

Some clients just want to email you. Great. Give them a branded support address and let Email Tickets handle the organization.

Other clients prefer a dedicated place to log in, submit requests, view ticket history, and track progress. Also great. Use the white-labeled client portal.

And some clients may use both.

Because clients, as you may have noticed, do enjoy having preferences.

Either way, your team manages the work from The Hub.

Ready to replace another tool in your stack?

Hub Tickets, including the option to integrate with your branded email address, is available to Premium members as part of your WPMU DEV membership.

So before you add another paid helpdesk platform to your stack, take a look at what’s already waiting for you inside The Hub.

You may already have what you need to run branded email support, organize client requests, assign work to your team, keep full conversation history, offer a white-labeled portal, and connect support with the rest of your client management workflow.

Very neat. Very tidy. Very Premium.

Set up Email Tickets

Not Premium yet?

Get Premium

The July issue is packed with Core chatter, support workflow wins, EmDash updates, and just enough nonsense to justify another 12 open tabs.

Stick around to the end to see Boomer, whose bark is way more adorable (and hilarious) than his bite.

In today’s edition:

• Hub Tickets turns client emails into actual tickets, because “I saw it somewhere” is not a workflow.
• WordPress 7.1 is already warming up, with collaboration tools, responsive styling, and a release date that lands during WordCamp US.
• Plus: plugin empire stats, AI burnout, dad mullets and some extremely charming handmade WCEU Wapuus.

Hot Off The Presses: What’s New?

 
If you’re the “Dave” of your team, you can feel this image. You solve ONE issue in a single night and instead of being rewarded with a nap in the sun, you’ve been promoted directly into the blast radius of the next one.

It’s a very dev life. Do something well once and suddenly it’s your specialty.

Fix a WooCommerce checkout issue? Congrats, you’re the payments department. Untangle a DNS mess? You are now the domain whisperer. Reply quickly to one client email? Wonderful, they now expect live chat energy forever.

Anyway, while Dave stares into the middle distance and Googles “how much sleep deprivation until the hallucinations start,” let’s see what’s new, weird, useful, and mildly alarming in WordPress this month.

Work Has Begun on 7.1

WordPress 7.0 is barely out of its release party outfit, and 7.1 is already queuing up its walk-on music.

Anne McCarthy has been named release lead for WordPress 7.1, her first time in the role, with work now underway on what’s expected to be the second major WordPress release of 2026.

The official release squad has also been announced, with Benjamin Zekavica and Krupa Nanda on release coordination, Aki Hamano and Joe Dolson as tech leads, plus triage and test leads ready to help keep everything on track and on target.

Some quick updates on what’s happening so far with this release:

• This release will be focused on how people work together in WordPress and will bring in features like suggestion mode, emoji reactions and interactive asynchronous feedback.
• Plus, we’ll be getting new options for responsive styling and pseudo-state styling, which means more possibilities for having fun directly in the Site Editor without reaching for custom CSS.
• One of the big storylines to watch is real-time collaboration. It was pulled from 7.0 before release, and there are still questions about whether it belongs in Core, how it should be tested, and what kind of performance tradeoffs come with letting multiple collaborators (both human and AI) work together in real-time. You can join the discussion on that particular feature here.
• There’s also debate over whether a proposed Knowledge Custom Post Type in Core would help actual humans, or just make WordPress more legible to the robots currently reading over our shoulders.

The current release date is August 19, 2026, which coincides with the final day of WordCamp US. So yes, your staging sites may get another summer workout.

Here’s the official Roadmap to 7.1!

NEW: Tickets Now Integrates With Your Branded Email Address!

You can build the slickest client portal in the world, but there will always be someone who replies to a six-month-old thread with, “Also, can we change the button to blue?”

Unfortunately, “I swear I saw that email somewhere…” is not a scalable business model.

Which is why the new feature we’ve added to Hub Tickets is pretty darn cool. Instead of trying to train every client into a new workflow, you can meet them where they already live: their inbox.

Premium members can now connect a branded support email, like support@youragency.com, and turn incoming client emails into organized Hub tickets automatically. Your team gets assignments, replies, status tracking, and conversation history in The Hub.

Meanwhile, your clients just get to send an email like normal humans who have never once thought about ticket taxonomy.

Give clients the ease of email, while your team gets the structure of a helpdesk.

EmDash Hosting So Far: The Rough Edges Are Getting Sanded

Every shiny new thing has a crunchy phase.

You know the one. The idea is great, the potential is obvious, and the first wave of users immediately finds the exact three edge cases nobody invited to the party.

It’s been over a month since EmDash arrived on WPMU DEV Unlimited Hosting, the team has been busy responding to real-world usage, fixing rough edges, improving performance, and making the hosting experience feel more polished for anyone experimenting with EmDash alongside their WordPress sites.

Some wins so far:

• Newly published EmDash pages and projects now behave like pages and projects, rather than launching themselves directly into the 404 abyss.
• Email is also pre-configured on new EmDash sites, transactional messages now work out of the box, and a tasty little dev-bypass endpoint has been blocked at the server level so bots can go bother someone else.
• Media delivery also got snappier, with uploads now served directly by nginx instead of being routed through Node every time.

Meanwhile, Mark Zahra over at WP Mayor took our EmDash Hosting for a spin, calling out the big practical win for WordPress builders: you can experiment with EmDash without spinning up separate infrastructure, juggling new hosting tools, or turning your dev workflow into a second job.

EmDash can sit alongside your WordPress sites in The Hub, with the same backups, security, support, and dashboard muscle memory you already use.

EmDash itself is still moving fast, so expect more template support and Hub improvements next. For now, though, it’s nice to see the Wild West getting a few paved roads, better signage, and slightly fewer tumbleweeds.

Read the full EmDash hosting update here.

Mind Bloggling Facts & Stats

• WCEU was a massive success, with 2,458 attendees from 81 countries nerding out at the ICE Kraków Congress Centre on June 4 to 6. Stats on the number of pierogi enjoyed have yet to be released. (Source)
• According to WP Beacon, Syed Balkhi is the ultimate champion of plugins, creating an impressive 95 of the things, with a total of 23.5 million installs! (Source)
• According to WP Trends, WordPress now powers 33% of the web, down from a 36% peak in 2022. Still a massive slice of the internet pie, but with one less forkfull. (Source)

Blogs & Resources You Shouldn’t Miss

AI promised less busywork. Turns out managing five assistants still counts as work.

Client hired someone else? Set boundaries before you become free tech support.

AI search is changing plugin discovery. Here’s how to make sure your plugin is recommended by the robots.

Pour one out for the Classic Block.

WCEU Wapuus: Come for the cute handmade swag, stay for the genuinely lovely community story.

Remembering Om Malik, through 200+ heartfelt notes from a community that loved him.

Oh, a “Distraction-Free Writer” plugin? Joke’s on you, Jamie… the distractions are coming from INSIDE MY OWN BRAIN. (Editing existing posts from the front end is cool, though!)

Coffee Break Distractions

A helpful gym bro.

A very entertaining date night idea.

Some delightful LOTR behind-the-scenes footage: All hail, Queen Gandalf!

These guys otter be careful!

Self-conscious about using AI in public? Now there’s an extension for that.

The Dad Mullet: The ultimate haircut for childhood-ruining levels of second-hand embarrassment.

If the first computer you owned is in Steve’s Old Computer Museum, your knees make the startup sound when you stand up.

And finally…

The cutest “bark” ever.

Love this mix of nerdery and nonsense? Share it with your favorite WordPress weirdo.

When we shipped this, I openly said it was going to be a bit Wild West. EmDash is bleeding edge, Cloudflare are pushing new releases at a pretty serious clip, and we wanted to get you hands-on quickly, rough edges and all.

So, in true WPMU DEV style, we’ve been sanding those edges down. Here’s a quick run-through of what we’ve already fixed.

1. New pages and projects don’t 404 anymore

Yeah, this one was a doozy.

In the default EmDash template, creating a new page or project, publishing it, then visiting the URL would land you on a glorious 404. Not exactly the thrilling first impression we were going for.

Why does this happen? Unlike WordPress, EmDash templates handle their own routing (it’s built on Astro under the hood). The official template wasn’t accounting for newly created content, so pages and projects existed in the editor but had no public route to live on.

We’ve patched the official template on our end so new pages and projects show up the moment you hit publish.

2. Email, configured out of the box

EmDash handles email differently to WordPress, so we wanted to make sure all the usual transactional bits (passkey login links, user invites, that kind of thing) just work the moment your site spins up.

We’ve built a small plugin that pre-configures email on every new EmDash site on Unlimited Hosting. It sends everything through noreply@yourwpsite.email, exactly like our WordPress hosting does. So, if email works on your WP sites, it works here too. Bundled by default, nothing for you to set up.

3. Tightened up security

A bit of routine hardening, but worth doing.

EmDash ships with a /_emdash/api/setup/dev-bypass endpoint that’s handy during local development. Unfortunately, it’s a delicious target for opportunistic bots once a site is in production. We’ve blocked it at the server level on Unlimited Hosting. You’d never notice it was gone unless you went looking for it. Bots, however, are going to have a less interesting time.

4. Snappier media delivery

A nice little performance win, too.

Media files on your EmDash sites are now served directly by nginx straight from your uploads, instead of routing through Node for every request. Fewer hops, faster images, less load on your site’s runtime. You don’t have to do anything, it’s just quicker now.

5. Hub polish

We’re making the Hub even more responsive and improving the UI/UX behind the scenes. For example, actions like Reset and Rebuild are getting clearer, real-time progress feedback so you’ll see exactly where things are at and know the moment a job’s done. Small touches like these make the whole experience feel that bit slicker.

In case you missed it: we also bundle a contact form with every new EmDash site, pre-wired to the default template’s contact page. There’s nothing to install and nothing to configure. It just works.

So what’s next?

The big one: broader template support.

Right now, new EmDash sites spin up on a single default template. We’re working on extending support to a wider range of official EmDash templates so you’ll be able to pick whichever one suits your project and still get everything above (the 404 fix, the email plugin, and the rest) humming out of the box from day one.

Beyond that, everything is still very much guided by you. Keep spinning up sites and telling us what you’d like to see, and we’ll keep shipping fixes and bundled improvements as the EmDash ecosystem matures.

(And yes, I am still very much hoping someone, somewhere, is secretly working on a DooCommerce. A man can dream.)

Happy Dashing

One client emails you directly. Another fills out your contact form. Someone sends a WhatsApp message. A teammate gets a “quick question” in their own inbox. And, somehow, a client has replied to a three-month-old email thread with something urgent buried under 14 quoted replies.

Soon your “simple” support process has become a bit of a scavenger hunt.

The problem isn’t that your clients need help. Of course they do. It’s that all these requests are scattered everywhere, and keeping track of who said what, who replied, and what still needs doing can turn into a full-time job.

So, good news: Tickets now integrates with your branded email address!

Now, Premium members can give clients a branded support email and have every request automatically become a Hub ticket. Your team can manage, assign, and reply to the request from The Hub and clients receive updates from your branded email address.

Your clients get the ease of email. Your team gets the structure of a proper helpdesk inside The Hub.

So… how does this email-to-ticket wizardry work?

Glad you asked.

1. Set up your branded support email

Create a dedicated support address like support@youragency.com or help@youragency.com.

Instantly, your clients have one clear, professional place to send requests, questions, site updates, “can you just quickly…” jobs, and everything else that usually lands in five different places.

2. Clients send requests by email

They use the email app they already know. No extra password to forget. No mini onboarding session required.

3. The Hub creates the ticket automatically

The client’s email becomes a Hub ticket, ready for your team to assign, prioritize, and manage.

So instead of requests disappearing into inbox spaghetti, everything gets its own tidy little home.

4. Your team handles it from The Hub

Assign it to the right person, reply to the client, track progress, and keep the full conversation history attached to the ticket.

5. Clients receive branded updates by email

When your team replies from The Hub, clients receive the update from your super-profesh branded support address.

Look like you have an entire support department. Even if it’s just you and your cat.

Being able to give your clients a support email like support@youragency.com instead of telling them to log into a portal or submit a form instantly makes your client experience feel more polished.

It signals that your agency has a real support process, and makes your business come across as organized, reliable and scalable. For smaller agencies, it helps you deliver the kind of support experience clients expect from a much larger team.

Your clients don’t need to know what’s happening behind the scenes. They just see a clean, branded support channel and receive helpful updates from your agency, without bolting on a separate helpdesk platform or adding another subscription to the pile.

Behind the scenes, The Hub is doing the heavy lifting: creating the ticket, organizing the conversation, keeping the history, and helping your team stay on top of every request.

Built to be easy to hand off to your growing team

As your agency grows, support gets harder to manage. Hub Tickets helps your team stay aligned by giving everyone one place to manage client requests.

You can assign tickets to team members, track progress from a shared workspace, and keep conversations connected to the request instead of scattered across individual inboxes.

This makes it easier to hand off work between team members, keep client communication consistent, build repeatable support processes and onboard additional support staff as you grow.

Support should live alongside the rest of your client work

Email Tickets is powerful on its own, but the real value comes from the fact that your support now becomes connected to the rest of The Hub.

Now, your support workflow will live alongside the tools you already use to manage your clients and their websites. Instead of adding another standalone helpdesk, your support and the services you sell, the team members doing the work, and the invoices or recurring plans behind it all will be in one place.

Email support? Client portal? Use either, or both!

Email Tickets also works alongside the existing white-labeled client portal option in The Hub. That means you can choose the client support experience that works best for your agency.

• Branded Email Support: The best option for when you want the fastest, easiest way for your clients to ask for help. All they need to do is send an email, and The Hub will turn it into an organized ticket.
• The White-Label Client Portal: The ideal option for when you want clients to log in, submit requests, view their ticket history, and track progress on issues from a professional-looking, branded portal.

By the way, you don’t have to choose one and stick to it forever. You can use one, then switch to another, or even offer both depending on how your clients prefer to work.

Oh, and yes, it’s included with Premium!

No need to go shopping for another monthly helpdesk bill. Email Tickets are included with your membership!

Which means you can give clients a branded support email, turn requests into organized tickets, collaborate with your team, and keep support connected to your clients, sites, billing, hosting, backups, plugins, and all the other Hub goodies you already use.

Just one more way Premium helps you run a sharper, more efficient, more delightfully organized WordPress business from one place.

Ready to start using Email Tickets?

Give your clients an easier way to ask for help, and your team one organized place to manage every request.

Integrate your branded email with Tickets, so you can level up your client support.

As we roll on into June, here’s the low-down on new releases, fancy features and community calls to action. Let’s get into it!

Oh, and stick around to the end to see “rolling on the floor with laughter,” personified.

In today’s edition:

• WordPress 7.0 lands, finally giving Louis Armstrong his WordPress debut after 23 years of jazz names.
• The WP Community Collective wants to know how WordPress folks are really doing. (Anonymous hot takes welcome.)
• WooCommerce 10.8 drops, with a cartload of improvements including faster storefronts, review request emails and Armstrong-friendly admin.

Hot Off The Presses: What’s New?

 
Sure, this meme is funny, but in the age of AI there’s a bigger question starting to loom:

When we stop asking and answering in public, what happens to the shared knowledge base future developers (and future AI tools) rely on?

Stack Overflow may have been famously, uh, “character-building” for anyone brave enough to ask a question, but it also gave us something incredibly valuable: public debugging, weird edge cases, battle-tested answers, and comment threads where the real fix was always hiding three replies down.

It’s worth remembering that the robots learned a lot of that ancient magic from humans posting, correcting, arguing and documenting with their real, flesh-and-blood, Cheeto-dust-encrusted, human typing fingers.

So don’t forget to answer a question in public sometimes! Write up that weird fix you found. Leave a breadcrumb for the next dev Googling in a cold sweat at 11:47pm.

In the meantime, let’s scroll on and see what’s new in the wonderful, weird world of WordPress.

Armstrong Has Landed

I see trees of green, red roses too

I see them bloom, for me and you

And I think to myself…

It’s time to update WordPress!

WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong” has officially shipped, named for jazz legend Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong.

Which is wild when you think about it. After 23 years of WordPress releases named after jazz greats, we’re only just now getting to Louis Armstrong?

The big headline is that WordPress 7.0 lays the foundation for AI across the WordPress experience, with an AI Client in Core, the Abilities API, a central place to manage AI connections, plus new creative and workflow tools waiting in the wings. There’s also a refreshed dashboard, new blocks, design controls, block-level custom CSS, and a beefier developer toolbox.

The WordPress AI plugin 1.0.0 was also released on May 19th, adding request logging, connector approvals, improved media and alt text workflows, editorial tools, and early content provenance work.

Of course, with great prompts comes great responsibility. Patchstack founder Oliver Sild has already raised concerns that WordPress 7.0’s AI infrastructure could kick off a gold rush for stolen AI API keys.

Keep the Field Guide handy when you start poking around under the hood. WordPress is hitting some big new notes here, and your job is to make sure none of them turn into an ear-splitting support-ticket squeak.

The State of the Community Survey Wants YOU

In the WordPress world, community is everything. But how IS the community actually feeling right now?

The WP Community Collective aims to find out. They’ve launched their State of the Community Survey, to get an official “vibe check” about where things are headed and the forces shaping our favourite open source project.

Why? “Change needs context,” explains the official press release.

WordPress folks aren’t just usernames on a screen, WP Community Collective CEO Sé Reed explains. We’re people in the real world, navigating very real challenges. To effectively support the community and have productive conversations about the future of WordPress, the first step is to listen to what people have to say.

The survey takes about 10-20 minutes to complete and covers hot-button topics like AI, contributor participation, events and open source sustainability. It’s open to anyone who works with, builds on, contributes to or simply cares about WordPress.

So, whether you’re a freelancer, agency owner, plugin builder, core contributor or theme designer, if WordPress matters to your business you’re welcome to take part.

All responses are anonymous, so you can spill all your controversial takes without worrying about drawing the ire of a digital pitchfork mob. Responses are being collected until June 28, 2026 at 11:00am UTC.

Go ahead, throw in your 2 cents here.

WooCommerce 10.8 is Ready for Checkout

WooCommerce 10.8 brings a shopping basket full of handy improvements for store owners and devs alike.

The newest release landed on May 26th, bringing compatibility updates, performance improvements and plenty of fancy little quality-of-life tweaks designed to make your Woo store run a little smoother.

Some of the improvements include:

• Customer review request emails: Gives stores an easier way to nudge customers to leave feedback, before their retail therapy buzz wears off and they move onto the next shiny new purchase.
• Faster storefronts: Reducing friction from the “Add to Cart” journey so stores feel less “loading spinner of doom” and more “yes, please take my money!”
• Armstrong ready: 10.8 includes about 15 pull requests that align this version with WordPress 7.0 styling, so you can update both together and the admin stays seamless.

Plus, there’s a bunch of other handy behind-the-scenes developer goodies in there, like custom shipping providers, coupon-related workflows and email blocks, that’ll help you build better sites for your clients.

Check out the release notes to see what’s new.

Mind Bloggling Facts & Stats

• Within one week of Armstrong taking the stage, 46% of all WordPresses had already updated to the new version. But what’s really wild is that there are 0.36% of sites that are still on Version 4.7? Hello? Anyone home? (Source)
• There’s more than one way to center an element. 100 ways, apparently. Although, about 60 of those are “hacky” and “not recommended.” (Source)
• The WooCommerce Design Team decided to reward merchants with the cutest interactive piñata to celebrate their 1st, 100th and 1,000th sales. Who doesn’t love a playful Easter egg? (Source)

Blogs & Resources You Shouldn’t Miss

WordPress just turned 23, which in internet years makes it approximately 417. Happy B-Day, WP!

If an AI reads your blog in the forest and nobody clicks through, did you really get a visitor?

Are volunteers needed for WP Suomi in Finland? Oulu betcha.

WP Canada is looking for speakers. Apologizing before your talk is optional.

WordPress.com launched Lately, for when your blog wants to be a group chat with better formatting.

Finally, Jetpack Search now speaks Woo.

We all know the real ultimate AI use case: Making a Wapuu that looks like you.

Coffee Break Distractions

Ok, this is a truly original app idea. It’s like Google Maps for your Mind Palace.

I was proud of myself for my mediocre chopstick skills until THIS made me feel inadequate.

Sometimes you stumble on a website that’s actually a work of art. This is one of those times.

Or, for a work-of-art website that’s equal parts beautiful, simple and calming, check this out.

Iceberg. Canyon. Pineapple. Lighthouse. Research says visualizing random words can help you sleep.

May you be as happy about anything as this dude is about visiting the aquarium.

In an alternative universe where this sax-hating time traveler was successful, jazz music would be very different indeed.

And finally…

Sometimes the very best physical comedy moments take you by surprise.

Love this mix of nerdery and nonsense? Share it with your favorite WordPress weirdo.