Welcome back to the WordPress.com changelog!

Some helpful editor updates headline today’s changelog: two brand-new blocks, a gallery that fills itself, and a much better way to leave notes on a draft. You can also now change your plan yourself, without contacting support.

Editor

Two new blocks: Tabs and Playlist

The Tabs block organizes content, like FAQs and feature comparisons, into tabbed sections. Each panel accepts blocks, and the tab buttons have their own color, typography, border, and spacing controls so they match your theme.

The Playlist block showcases a list of audio tracks with artwork, track metadata, and a waveform. You can set the play order and toggle artwork, artist names, track numbers, and track length individually. If you publish podcast episodes or music, you can do it without pasting in an embed from somewhere else.

Type /tabs or /playlist in the editor to use these blocks on your posts or pages.

Galleries that build themselves

The new Dynamic Gallery option in the Gallery block automatically shows every image attached to your post instead of making you hand-pick each one to create a gallery from scratch.

Add a Gallery block in your post or page by typing /gallery, then click “Use attached images.”

Leave more granular feedback in notes

If anyone else touches your posts before they go out — a client, a business partner, a contractor, or the one friend who always catches your typos — you may be gathering feedback from a few different places.

Notes keep all of it on the draft inside WordPress. A note now attaches to a specific phrase rather than the whole block, and you can @mention someone to pull them directly into the conversation.

Nobody has to be in the editor at the same time. You leave a note, they answer when they get to it.

Manage your plan

Change your plan yourself, any time

Moving to a lower-tier plan used to mean contacting support. Now there’s a “View plans” button on any active plan’s settings page that will take you to the plans page where eligible lower tiers show a “Downgrade” option alongside the usual upgrades.

Once you’ve requested a downgrade, it’s scheduled for your next renewal date. This means that you keep everything you’ve already paid for until the term ends, and then you’re charged the lower price.

Fixes and improvements

We also shipped some reliability and polish updates across WordPress.com:

• Buy a paid plugin from the marketplace, and you’ll land on your plugins page with it switched on instead of waiting on a progress bar that sometimes stalled.
• Your traffic numbers show up reliably on the hourly view instead of constantly loading.
• Video stats now show thumbnails so you can tell which video is which at a glance.
• Help is a click away while you’re picking a domain during signup. Click the “Need help?” button to search our docs or connect with one of our Happiness Engineers.
• We’re retiring Feature Clips, our experimental tool for turning a post into a short vertical video. If you were using it, our guide to working with video walks through the other ways to add video to a post.

WordCamp US lands in Phoenix on August 16–19, and this is your chance to connect with the WordPress community. 

If you’ve never heard of WordCamp, here’s the TLDR: it’s a conference built entirely around WordPress, run by the same open-source community that builds the platform you’re using right now. 

And at the WordPress.com booth, we’re championing the theme: WordPress for the future. This year, we’re offering a sponsor code WordPress.com-friend20 for 20% off general admission.

Take a look at the full WordCamp US 2026 schedule to see what’s on the horizon this year.

1. Showcase Day: See how far WordPress can go
2. Get unstuck, on the spot, for free
3. Turn your WordPress experience into your next job opportunity
4. Figure out what AI actually means for your site, beyond the hype
5. Learn WordPress without feeling like the only beginner in the room
6. Contribute to WordPress itself, no experience required
7. Make Phoenix worth the trip

What is WordCamp US?

WordCamp is four days of practical sessions, workshops, and conversations with people who build, use, and improve WordPress

The two main conference days run across four tracks: AI, Technical WordPress, Honing Your Skills, and Beginner WordPress. They cover everything from AI guardrails and agency pricing to modern dev workflows and your first WordCamp. Every track mixes talks with hands-on workshops, so you leave with something you can actually use, not just notes.

But the sessions are only part of the value. WordCamp US also puts you in the same rooms, lunch lines, and hallway conversations as people working through the same publishing, business, and technical questions you are.

Take a look at our WordCamp 2025 wrap-up to see how it went: The 5 Best Things About WordCamp US 2025.

7 Reasons To Attend WordCamp US 2026

WordCamp US gives you four days to solve problems, build skills, make useful connections, and see where WordPress is heading. 

Here are seven reasons to make the trip to Phoenix:

1. Showcase Day: See how far WordPress can go

On August 17, teams running some of the internet’s biggest, highest-traffic sites walk through exactly how they build features, manage publishing, and keep things up and running when millions of people show up at once.

Think of it as the WordPress Showcase pulled off the page and put on a stage. Previously featuring platforms behind Disney, NASA, and major publishers, explained by the people who actually build and maintain it.

Past Showcase Days have brought out teams from Wikimedia and CANCOM. Expect sessions on catching bugs before they ship with automated testing and running the Block Editor inside a fully custom app. This is the kind of detail you only get from people who’ve actually shipped it, not talked about shipping it.

2. Get unstuck, on the spot, for free

The Happiness Bar is a free, drop-in help desk where you sit down with a real WordPress expert and get help with whatever has you stuck. Bring your laptop, your WordPress.com site, and the problem.

Code review, plugin questions, a site doing something weird, or the classic “I don’t even know where to start” – it all counts. There’s no ticket queue, appointment, or charge. 

If you’ve ever spent an hour searching forums for an answer that was two sentences long, this is the in-person version of skipping straight to those two sentences.

3. Turn your WordPress experience into your next job opportunity

Career Corner, inside the Sponsor Hall, is a low-key place to explore what comes next. Browse the job board, meet sponsors that are hiring, and talk directly with company representatives. 

There are no appointments and no formal pitch, just people open to a useful conversation.

A separate hands-on workshop gives you half a day to build a complete site, whether it’s for your portfolio, business, ecommerce store, or personal brand. 

Bring the project you keep pushing to next week, then use the focused time, accountability, and support from experienced WordPress people to finally get it moving.

4. Figure out what AI actually means for your site, beyond the hype

AI runs through the heart of this year’s program, with practical sessions on content, search, development, automation, and the legal questions site owners need to understand.

If you’ve felt behind on this topic, this is a chance to catch up with people working directly on these problems.

Sessions cover guardrails for using AI tools responsibly, what it means to prepare your site for AI agents as a new category of visitor, and the legal and ethical questions that come up when you start handing AI tools to clients.

5. Learn WordPress without feeling like the only beginner in the room

You don’t need to arrive fluent in PHP or WordPress terminology. 

WordCamp US is designed to welcome first-time attendees, with guides, sessions, mentors, and spaces to help you find your footing.

All conference sessions are recorded and posted to WordCamp US YouTube afterward, so you can prioritize live workshops and questions without losing every overlapping talk.

Check out: A First-Timer’s Guide to WordCamp US

6. Contribute to WordPress itself, no experience required

Contributor Day on August 16 opens the event, and it’s open to anyone – you don’t need to have contributed before or know how to code. 

Join a team working on WordPress core, documentation, design, training, accessibility, or translation, and spend a day helping build the software instead of just using it.

For a WordPress.com user, it’s also a chance to see how the open-source software underneath your site gets made – and help improve it. You can contribute in person or remotely through the Slack #contributor-day channel. 

Help teams covering everything from Core AI and accessibility to documentation, photos, marketing, support, and training.

7. Make Phoenix worth the trip

WordCamp US is a compact downtown trip: the airport is less than five miles away, the official hotel is a five-minute walk from the air-conditioned convention center, and the light rail from the airport costs less than $5.

Why not spend an evening or extra day checking out these events:

• The Van Buren has a different concert each night of WordCamp.
• Sports fans can see the Phoenix Mercury play the Portland Fire on August 16.
• For a slower evening, Desert Oasis Garden After Dark runs illuminated trails daily, with a quiet night on Sunday and jazz along the trails on Wednesday. 
• Phoenix Art Museum also has ‘pay what you wish’ Wednesday and a Phoenix Symphony gallery performance on August 19.

Keep the middle of the day for WordCamp, then use mornings and evenings for Roosevelt Row: local coffee, tacos, pizza, cocktails, and desert scenery you cannot get anywhere else. 

Don’t miss out on WordCamp US 2026

WordCamp US 2026 runs on August 16–19 at the Phoenix Convention Center. 

General admission is $100, while student tickets are just $25. Use sponsor code WordPress.com-friend20 for 20% off general admission.

Your ticket covers:

• Two conference days with more than 50 talks and workshops
• Contributor Day
• Showcase Day
• Lunch and all-day coffee
• Sponsor Hall access
• Closing social

From the team at WordPress.com, we can’t wait to see you there in person, either at our booth or the many social events!

This vibrant community has global IRL touchpoints as well as virtual ones that include local meetups, WordCamps, and opportunities surfaced using the WordPress Events and News widget in WP Admin.

Start with a local WordPress meetup

A local meetup is the lowest-commitment way to start. Meetups are smaller and more informal than conferences and typically last only a few hours.

At a WordPress meetup, you’ll find a gathering of like-minded people who get together to share their WordPress experiences. 

There’s no required format, so in practice, that might be a talk at a coworking space, a hands-on workshop, a help desk where you can get one-on-one help with your site, or a table in a coffee shop. 

Groups commonly meet about once a month, and where an event charges for attendance, the fee only covers costs.

Expect a wide mix of people, including bloggers, freelancers, ecommerce shop owners, agency developers, and at least one person still partway through building their first site. Everybody’s welcome, and nobody checks credentials at the door.

The official WordPress events directory is the place to look for a local event: it lists upcoming meetups and WordCamps by location, plus online meetups if you’d rather attend remotely or there’s nothing in person nearby. 

Many groups organize their RSVPs on Meetup.com, so it’s worth searching for ‘WordPress’ on there as well. 

If there is no group nearby, you could be the one who starts one. Once a meetup group is active, WordPress.com offers its organizers a free website.

Get involved at WordCamp

For something bigger, look no further than WordCamp. They’re community-organized WordPress conferences and cater to all abilities.

Most WordCamps run for a few days, with talks and workshops across several tracks, a sponsor hall where you can meet the people behind your favorite themes and plugins (and pick up some swag), and hallway conversations that make memorable moments.

WordCamp US and WordCamp Europe run every spring and summer at different locations across these continents. Many other WordCamp events are happening all over the world year-round. 

Despite their size, WordCamps are less intimidating than they sound. You can read about a first-timer’s experience at WordCamp Europe 2026 in Kraków.

You can also get a feel for a WordCamp before committing to one. Session recordings on WordPress.tv show you what the talks are like, and the WordCamp US 2025 recap describes what attending a full event feels like, from someone who went.

Find events in WP Admin

On WordPress.com, open WP Admin and look for the WordPress Events and News widget. It lists upcoming meetups and WordCamps for your area, along with community news.

Select your nearest city once to see nearby events. If the widget is hidden, open “Screen Options” and enable “WordPress Events and News.”

The widget is part of WordPress core, so it is available whether your site runs on WordPress.com or another WordPress host.

Make your first event easier

These events are designed for all experience levels, including total beginners. 

First-timers tend to wonder the same things: Will everyone know more than me? Do I have to talk? Can I come along if I only run a blog?

Some people will know more than you about parts of WordPress, and you’ll know more than them about others. Running a blog is more than enough reason to come. 

A few small steps make the first visit smoother:

• Pick an event that’s right for you: The description tells you the format, the venue, and whether it’s aimed at a specific audience, such as developers or bloggers.
• Bring something to talk about: A question, a problem you’re stuck on, or the thing you’re building gives every “so, how do you use WordPress?” conversation an icebreaker.
• Tell the organizer it’s your first time: Organizers are volunteers who want people to come back, and they’re used to helping first-timers get settled.
• It’s okay to just listen: Attending without saying much is a perfectly good way to spend a first meetup.

Even one or two of these can take the edge off at your first event.

Connect with the WordPress community

While WordCamp events offer a lot, you don’t need to travel to a flagship event to get started.

Open WP Admin to see what the WordPress Events and News widget shows for your area.

Alternatively, check the events directory for a meetup near you or find the next WordCamp and add it to your calendar.

If you use WordPress, you’re already part of the community. The only step left is connecting with your people.

But search has changed. Today, when someone has a question, they might ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude. They might also get a summarized answer from Google’s AI Overview before deciding whether to click through to a website.

But your site still needs to be visible in traditional search. And the same qualities that have always mattered – like clear, useful, and trustworthy content – also determine whether AI tools will reference you.

Our free text-based course, Master SEO & AIO, teaches you how to do both. The beginner-friendly course combines proven SEO fundamentals with practical ways to make your content easier for AI tools to find, understand, and reference.

This self-guided course is text-based and includes 15 lessons, taking about 90 minutes to complete.

Search engines and AI, in one strategy

AI-powered tools now answer many questions directly, often by summarizing information from websites. Optimizing your content so those tools can find, understand, and reference it is called AI Optimization, or AIO.

The good news is that AIO does not require a completely separate strategy.

It builds on the same foundations as good search optimization: clear writing, helpful answers, strong structure, relevant links, and trust signals that show who is behind your content.

In other words, if you are doing SEO well, you are already doing much of the work AI tools need too.

That is why this course teaches SEO and AIO together. You are not learning “SEO” on one side and “AI search” on the other. You’re learning a practical strategy to help your content get discovered, understood, and referenced wherever people search.

What you’ll learn

By the end of the course, you’ll be able to:

• Understand how search engines and AI tools find, rank, and cite content.
• Identify what people are actually looking for when they search.
• Research keywords and use them naturally, without stuffing.
• Fix headings, media, metadata, and internal links so both readers and AI tools can follow your content.
• Build trust through clear authorship and well-structured pages.
• Apply local and global search practices, structured data, redirects, and long-term SEO habits.
• Run any page on your site through an AI Optimization checklist.

Start the course, free

You don’t need to overhaul your entire site this afternoon. Take the course, choose one page that matters, and improve it step by step.

That is how durable search visibility grows: not through tricks, but by making your work easier to find, understand, and trust.

The Master SEO & AIO course is free, and there’s no sign-up wall. Just click below and get started right away.

Welcome back to the WordPress.com changelog! You’ll find some helpful updates to the editing experience in this stretch: you can now size the editor to any screen width, crop images more precisely, and flip and rotate icons — plus the usual round of reliability fixes.

Create and publish

Size your editor to any screen, not just three presets

When you’re working on a post or a page on your site, it’s helpful to see how the content looks at different screen sizes. The latest WordPress editor update helps you do exactly that.

Drag the edge of the editor to any width and watch your page adjust as you go — so you can see exactly how your content will look on a phone, a tablet, or anything in between before you publish.

More precise image cropping — now in the Cover block too

Cropping an image is now more precise. A zoomed-in view lets you line up your crop just right, and it works on those big full-width banner images in a Cover block too.

Flip and rotate icons

The Icon block (which allows you to quickly add icons to your content from a built-in icon library) now has flip-horizontal, flip-vertical, and rotate controls right in the toolbar, so you can more easily orient an icon exactly how you want.

Fixes and improvements

We also shipped some reliability and polish updates across WordPress.com to keep your site running smoothly. We:

• Fixed a crash in the Help Center that was preventing some support articles from loading.
• Fixed a blank screen and an accidental duplicate site when returning to a checkout screen after backing out.
• Added a clear error when adding a domain to your cart fails, instead of the option quietly disappearing.
• Stopped showing upgrade prompts in Stats for products your site already has.
• Added a warning when a Form block isn’t set up to collect responses, so submissions don’t silently go nowhere.
• Resolved an issue where paid subscribers could lose access to members-only content in a Paid Content block after a renewal.
• Kept WordPress core up to date with the latest maintenance update.

1. Every WordPress Studio site is faster. Just open the Studio app to feel the difference.
2. If you’ve been curious about the Studio CLI but didn’t want to install Node.js just to try it, you’re in luck. We’ve updated the install command to one dependency-free line. Run it in your terminal, and you’re in.
3. Studio Code is now running Anthropic’s most agentic Sonnet model by default.

As a reminder, WordPress Studio is our agentic local development tool for WordPress. It’s free, open source, and improving every month.

A faster building experience

Page loads are now 30–50% faster, and your local Studio sites use less than a third of the memory than they did before. You’ll notice it most on sites carrying a lot of plugins, exactly where things used to feel slower.

That speed comes from a new default Native PHP runtime that runs your site with fewer abstractions.

If you’d rather keep a site’s code strictly contained — say, you’re testing an untrusted third-party plugin or theme — you can switch that site to the Sandbox runtime option anytime under Site Settings → Edit site → PHP runtime. Sandbox, which is powered by WordPress Playground, keeps a site’s code from running other programs on your machine or reaching outside its own folder. 

This faster runtime is live now for all Studio users on version 1.12.0 or later. Check to see if your existing Studio sites are automatically running this new Native runtime under Site Settings → Edit site → PHP runtime.

Try the Studio CLI without touching npm

We’ve also made Studio CLI better and easier to use. Studio CLI now installs with a single, dependency-free command. No need to install Node.js and npm first. Just run the right command for your operating system in your terminal to install:

# macOS and Linux
curl -fsSL https://wordpress.studio/install.sh | bash

# Windows
irm https://wordpress.studio/install.ps1 | iex

Once installed, you get the full power of Studio from your terminal: manage and create local sites, push and pull sites, run WP-CLI commands, push to production or staging, and tap into Studio Code, the purpose-built AI coding agent for WordPress.

And if you’ve already installed Studio CLI via the npm command, don’t worry. It’s still available and will keep receiving updates.

Sonnet 5 is Studio Code’s new default model

Speaking of Studio Code, it now runs Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5 model by default. That means it’s better at multi-step, hands-on work: tracing a bug across several files, reading your logs, reasoning about your theme and plugin code, and carrying out a fix rather than just describing one.

Because Studio Code works directly inside your local Studio environment, it has the full context of your site. Point it at something that’s broken and it can check the logs, find the relevant code, explain what’s going wrong, and propose a change you can review before applying. Or start from scratch: build a plugin, create a custom block, spin up a custom post type, or tweak your theme all in plain language.

You don’t need to change anything to use Sonnet 5; it’s already the default model in Studio Code if you’re on Studio 1.14.0 or later. That said, you can always change to any supported model by selecting it in the drop-down menu in the desktop app or running the /model command in your terminal.

Try it today

Update to Studio 1.12.0 or later to automatically start using the faster Native PHP runtime, and learn more about the CLI in the docs. Plus, give Sonnet 5 a spin in Studio Code during your next build.

There’s plenty more coming to WordPress Studio over the next few weeks and months. Keep an eye on our release notes, and tell us what you think on GitHub.

Ask your AI helper to “find a coffee grinder that fits a 14-inch counter,” and it can pull up options, compare them against that constraint, and send you to the store to finish the purchase.

If your product details are vague, difficult to find, or missing, the agent may never include your store in the comparison.

Shoppers are already moving this way. Reuters, citing May 2026 Adobe Analytics data, reported that US shoppers referred from LLMs generated 53% more revenue per visit than non-AI traffic.

Earlier Adobe holiday data also showed a sharp rise in traffic from AI-powered shopping assistants and chatbots. So this isn’t a far-off ecommerce trend. It’s already changing.

Whether you’re launching a new site, growing an audience, or optimizing for AI search, we’ll run through it all in this guide.

TLDR: Agentic commerce is when an AI assistant finds, compares, and buys products on a shopper’s behalf, and it can only do that for stores it can reach and read.

What is agentic commerce?

Agentic commerce is online shopping where an AI agent does the work for the buyer. 

The shopper gives the agent a goal, a budget, a few must-haves, maybe a deadline. The agent finds products, compares options, and either starts the checkout process or sends them to the store to finish.

This behavior is not yet fully mainstream, but it is moving from research into the purchase path. 

A 2025 Omnisend survey reported by TechRadar found that 34% of US consumers would allow AI tools to make purchases on their behalf, while most still preferred to make purchase decisions themselves. 

How an AI agent shops

In practice, the flow is simple:

1. AI discovers products that match the request.
2. It compares them to the criteria set by the shopper.
3. It either buys the item or directs the shopper to the store to complete the transaction.

Take this coffee grinder for example. The agent reads the product details and stock status across the stores it can see, rules out anything that won’t fit a 14-inch counter, and surfaces the best match, often with a reason for the selection. 

So why would an agent choose your store over another that sells the same product? OpenAI has published how ChatGPT weighs product results: the products it recommends are ranked on relevance to what the shopper asked for. 

When more than one store sells the same product, the pick comes down to availability, price, quality, and whether you’re the primary seller (the source of a product, rather than a reseller). 

Those signals decide how often agents put your products in front of shoppers.

Where agentic commerce stands today

Right now, agentic commerce is a mix of product discovery, cart-building, and, in some cases, checkout inside the assistant. 

The details are changing quickly, and most programs are only available in the US or with selected merchants.

ChatGPT

OpenAI’s current merchant page focuses on product discovery, comparison, and merchant-owned checkout. Shoppers can discover and evaluate products in ChatGPT, but OpenAI says purchases are completed on the merchant’s website or app. The older Instant Checkout launch still matters as context for agentic commerce, but it shouldn’t be treated as the current default.

Google

Google has also expanded AI shopping through Gemini and Universal Cart. AP reported that Google was teaming with Walmart, Shopify, Wayfair, and others to support product discovery and instant checkout in Gemini. At I/O 2026, Google announced Universal Cart for Search and Gemini, with integrations for YouTube and Gmail to follow. It can help track prices, availability, compatibility, and checkout options, though the exact checkout path depends on the merchant and product. 

Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot 

Both platforms support in-chat checkout with participating merchants. Perplexity first introduced “Buy with Pro” for US Pro users and later added PayPal-powered Instant Buy for supported merchants. Microsoft Copilot Checkout lets shoppers complete purchases within Copilot, with PayPal, Shopify, and Stripe powering payments. Claude is also moving into shopping-adjacent workflows through app connectors such as Instacart, but Anthropic says Claude asks users to confirm the selection before it makes purchases or reservations. 

These details will keep changing, but the basic merchant requirement won’t: agents need enough information to recommend a product and route a purchase.

Payments still need the shopper’s approval

In the major checkout programs covered here, the shopper confirms the purchase, and your store remains the merchant of record, so the sale and the customer relationship stay yours. 

The payment networks are still working through some key questions, such as how refunds and chargebacks work when an AI agent places the order. 

Shoppers are cautious, too. In the same Omnisend survey reported by TechRadar, more than half of respondents said they were worried about data mishandling, and 66% still preferred making purchasing decisions themselves. 

Accurate product data, clear checkout confirmation, and reliable fulfillment are what earn trust from both the agent and the person behind it. 

What this means for small, independent stores

For small, independent stores, agentic commerce can be an advantage rather than a threat. 

Big brands may show up first, but agents also reward facts they can verify: accurate stock, clear specs, and reliable fulfillment. A small store can often do that better than a household name with a huge, messy catalog.

Adobe’s 2026 data coverage report emphasized that retailers need to make pages compatible with AI systems, and its travel-site analysis found that roughly a third of the content on some product pages was not readable by AI. 

This is where your platform matters. Open, well-structured stores tend to make product pages, schema, feeds, APIs, and checkout integrations easier to access. Closed marketplaces and app-first catalogs may still participate through partnerships, but merchants have less control over which agents can see or transact with their products.

The infrastructure is moving toward shared protocols, but participation still depends on each platform, merchant, and checkout partner. OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, built with Stripe — WooCommerce is a launch partner — is designed to let agents and businesses complete purchases while merchants retain control of payments, fulfillment, returns, support, and customer relationships. Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol is also emerging as a route for agent-led checkout. 

How to get your store ready for agentic commerce

Getting ready mostly means making your catalog easier for agents to understand. 

A shopper might be choosing between refill sizes, matching a spare part to a specific product model, or finding a gift under budget that can arrive by Friday. Use that specificity as your checklist: Can your store answer size, fit, stock, price, delivery, and checkout questions clearly?

Focus on three things, none of which require code:

1. Clear product information: Write titles, descriptions, and attributes that say plainly what a product is, what it does, and who it suits. This is the copy you’d write anyway, just clearer. Vague or thin descriptions make it easier for an agent to skip over you.
2. Structured product data: Give agents clean, consistent details (known as schema markup) they can read without guessing, such as price, availability, dimensions, sizes, materials, and categories, each in its proper place rather than buried in a paragraph. That turns your catalog into something an assistant can compare cleanly. 
3. Being reachable: Make sure the agents and shopping channels you care about can actually get to your store. Your robots.txt file tells visiting crawlers what they can access, so check that yours isn’t blocking the AI crawlers you want. Beyond that, being reachable is the one thing on the list that your platform largely decides for you.

Think of your catalog as part of the storefront now. It still powers the back end, but it also helps agents decide whether to recommend you. For the practical next step, see WooCommerce’s guide on how to prepare your store for AI-driven commerce.

Turn AI discovery into direct sales with WordPress.com

WooCommerce, the ecommerce platform behind many independent stores, gives merchants direct control over the product details AI agents need. 

Our WordPress.com Commerce plan runs managed WooCommerce, so your catalog can stay structured, accessible, and under your control while hosting, security, backups, and support are handled for you. 

The work does double duty: the same structured data that earns you AI search for ecommerce visibility is what helps you show up when someone asks an assistant to shop. 

The next shopper might arrive through search, social, email, or an AI assistant. Wherever they start, your store will be ready to be found, understood, and bought from.

Already selling online? See how to set up ecommerce on WordPress.com.

A great hosting provider helps your site thrive, so you can spend less time troubleshooting and more time building.

When you’re weighing what to consider when choosing a web host, start by matching your site’s needs with the performance, maintenance, support, and cost you’re comfortable managing. A personal blog, a growing business site, and an online store need different things — and the right host should give you room to grow without making you pay for complexity you do not need.

1. Determine your needs as a website owner

The first step in how to choose web hosting is getting clear on what you’re looking for:

What kind of website are you building?

Get clear on your website’s category — is it a portfolio, blog, or online store? 

Your choice of website builder or content management system (CMS) also shapes your hosting needs. If you’re still deciding between the two, see web hosting vs. website builder. Some hosts are general-purpose, while others are tailored to a specific CMS like WordPress. A specialized host can give you support that understands your platform, plus automated updates and CMS-specific security.

How much website traffic do you expect?

It’s important to choose a hosting provider that can handle your visitor numbers and scale as you grow.

What’s your technical skill level?

If you can (and want to) configure everything yourself, your web hosting needs differ from those of someone who prefers not to handle things like website security, performance, or maintenance themselves.

How much support do you need?

Completely new to building websites? Your support requirements will differ from someone who is setting up their third online shop this year.

What’s your budget (now and in the future)?

Your web host provider should be able to grow with you as your website’s needs evolve, without straining your budget.

These questions help you avoid overpaying for features you don’t need or choosing a provider that can’t meet your site’s requirements. Answer them even if you’re migrating from one host to another — they’ll help you pinpoint what your next provider needs to do differently.

2. Get clear on existing hosting options

Part of how to choose a hosting provider is understanding the types of hosting available. They mainly differ in computing resources, upkeep, management, and cost.

First, there’s shared hosting. It’s when your site lives on a single server with other websites, all sharing the same resources (processing power, RAM, hard drive space, etc.). This makes it affordable, but often slows performance.

The next step up is Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting. VPS gives your site a dedicated slice of server resources and fewer neighbors. It’s more reliable and scalable, but also costs more and requires technical know-how to set up and maintain.

Dedicated hosting means you have a server all to yourself. Your website is fast and reliable and you have complete control over its environment. On the other hand, it costs more and you have to manage everything yourself (or pay someone to do it).

Finally, cloud hosting runs your site across multiple servers. It’s reliable and fast, can scale automatically, but may require setup and monitoring. Price varies depending on usage.

Another important distinction is managed vs unmanaged hosting. Unmanaged hosts provide a barebones server that you take care of yourself. This means you have to handle software updates, firewalls, backups, etc. It’s more cost-effective, but requires technical skills to administer it.

Managed hosts handle many technical tasks, such as server setup, security, and backups. They usually cost more than unmanaged hosting, but the time and peace of mind can make them worthwhile.

In shared hosting, the provider manages the underlying server, but that does not mean it automatically helps with performance optimization or website security. Other hosting types can be fully managed or unmanaged.

There’s also WordPress hosting. It isn’t a separate type of infrastructure, but falls under one of the categories (shared, VPS, or cloud hosting) above. However, it’s fine-tuned to run WordPress, with a tailored performance architecture, WordPress-specific security, automated updates, and tiered options to scale as your site grows.

Learn more about the differences between web hosting and WordPress hosting. Or see how to choose WordPress hosting specifically if you already know WordPress is your platform.

3. Consider the type of website you’re building

Different website categories have different needs. A simple one-page website requires less computing power than a complex online store or major news outlet.

Personal site, blog, or portfolio → Prioritize simplicity and cost

You’re just getting started. You want to build a blog, a portfolio, or maybe a small site to practice, share your work, or document a hobby. Complexity, traffic, and stakes are all low.

Shared hosting can be a good fit. It’s affordable, setup is simple, and the performance limitations won’t matter at your traffic levels. If you want to skip the technical side entirely, look for a low-cost managed plan — you’ll pay a little more but won’t have to think about updates, backups, or security.

Business brochure site → Favor performance and uptime

The next step up is a simple business or freelancer website — a few pages with images, content that doesn’t change much, maybe a blog. Yet, you want it to be fast and reliable. After all, it’s your company’s business card online and any negative experience will reflect back on you.

If this is you, you may want to consider a quality managed shared plan or entry-level managed WordPress hosting. Price shouldn’t be your main consideration; what you get for it is more important. Look for hosts with a high uptime guarantee and solid performance features (e.g. built-in caching or a CDN).

Ecommerce website → Prioritize security and scalability

Online shops tend to be complex. Their database needs to maintain complex relationships among product types, variations, inventory levels, customer accounts, purchase histories, and more.

Security and performance matter most here. Your site handles sensitive payment information and how fast it loads directly impacts conversion rates. An ecommerce site that loads within one second converts 2.5 times better than a shop that loads in five seconds. 

In short, don’t shortchange yourself when it comes to hosting. Choose a provider that can accommodate the demanding requirements. A managed ecommerce plan is a particularly good choice if you want performance and security without being directly involved. It allows you to focus on selling and growing your shop instead.  

High-traffic or scaling business site → Emphasize reliability and performance at scale

At the far end of the scale, you have sites that receive thousands of visitors an hour. They have the same performance, security, and reliability needs as a complex online shop, but turned up a notch.

This calls for the best hosting your budget allows, and many organizations choose a dedicated or cloud hosting solution. Cloud offers greater flexibility, both in computing resources and pricing. It also often spans multiple data centers, delivering strong global performance.

The central question here is maintenance. Maintaining that level of infrastructure is a full-time job. You need either someone in-house or go with a hosting provider that includes server management as part of the plan, preferably including backups, security, and performance optimization.

4. Account for future growth

If you expect a steady increase in visitors, pick a hosting plan that can support your site now and scale smoothly as you grow. Choose a plan that offers:

• Room to grow without surprise bills: Look for a host with no traffic limits and no overage fees. That way, a sudden spike — a post that takes off or a product that goes viral — never means a scramble or an unexpected charge. Your costs should stay predictable no matter how many visitors show up.
• Scaling that happens for you: The best hosts add resources automatically when traffic surges. It means your site stays fast during your biggest moments instead of slowing down exactly when it matters most. You shouldn’t have to think about it, let alone reconfigure anything.
• Storage that keeps up: This matters especially for image-heavy sites like photography portfolios. Check that you can easily expand storage without downtime as your library grows.
• A staging environment: A safe copy of your site where you can test changes, updates, and new designs before they go live. You should never have to experiment on the site your visitors actually see.
• A built-in content delivery network (CDN): Serves your content from locations close to each visitor, keeping your site fast for audiences anywhere in the world.

5. Factor in your technical skills

Choose hosting that matches how much security, performance, and maintenance work you want to handle yourself.

What website management actually involves

Most website management work falls into three buckets: security, performance, and maintenance.

• Website backups and updates: Backups protect you if something breaks; updates keep your site software current.
• SSL certificates: SSL helps protect data moving between your site and visitors.
• Firewalls and malware protection: These block known threats and flag suspicious files.
• Two-factor authentication and brute-force protection: These make account takeovers harder.
• DDoS protection and mitigation: These help keep your site online during traffic-based attacks.
• Spam protection: This keeps junk comments and form submissions under control.

Performance usually comes down to:

• Uptime: Your site should stay available when people need it.
• Page loading speed: Your pages should load quickly for visitors, wherever they are.

Maintenance includes:

• Server updates: The server environment needs regular updates.
• Keeping your website platform (e.g. WordPress) and its components up to date: Your CMS, plugins, and themes should stay current.
• Database management: Your site’s database needs to stay stable as your content grows.
• Uptime and error monitoring: Monitoring helps catch issues before they become bigger problems.

Choose DIY or done-for-you?

Every host you consider should offer these at a minimum:

• 99.9% uptime or higher: 99.9% is the industry standard; don’t settle for anything less.
• Fundamental security: SSL certificates, automated daily backups, malware scanning, and DDoS protection are standard across most web hosting providers. Avoid hosts that charge extra for them.

Beyond that, decide how hands-on you want to be. If you like technical systems and the host keeps day-to-day management in one place, unmanaged hosting may be fine.

Then weigh your time against the cost of something going wrong. A personal blog going down is annoying but recoverable; a business site losing sales or customer data has much higher stakes. If that sounds like your situation, managed hosting is probably the right call.

6. Pick hosting that serves your support needs

Pick a hosting provider that offers the support, availability, channels, quality, and expertise you need.

Can you reach support at any hour? If not, is it at least available in a time zone that works for you? Do they speak your language? Limited availability may be fine for a hobby site, but it can be a serious problem for a revenue-generating website.

Email and ticket support work well for low-urgency requests. But when you have a pressing issue, you want to reach a real person via live chat or phone. Also look at response and resolution times. A quick reply is not the same as a solved problem.

General hosting support can help with server issues. WordPress-specific support can also help with problems inside your site. Check for developer-level support if you need it.

Review the support documentation. See if it answers frequently asked questions thoroughly and is updated regularly. Ask yourself whether you could resolve most issues independently.

Check how easy it is to migrate

Switching hosts is a common reason people evaluate web hosting, so check the migration process before you need it. Does the provider offer free migration, and can you move your site without rebuilding it or doing the technical work yourself? Ask how long a move normally takes, what data is included, and what safeguards reduce the risk of data loss or downtime.

As a rule of thumb:

• For personal sites with low stakes, value support quality over constant availability.
• If your site generates revenue or handles customer data, 24/7 live chat or phone support is the baseline and non-negotiable.
• When using WordPress, lean toward hosts with expert knowledge rather than generalist support.
• If you’re more technical, deep documentation and a solid knowledge base matter more than channel availability.

Don’t just believe hosting providers’ claims — verify them. Check reviews from third-party sites like Trustpilot or G2 to see whether a web host lives up to its promises. Reach out to support with a pre-sale question, then decide based on the response.

7. Be aware of common pricing pitfalls

Low introductory prices, high renewal rates, bandwidth limits, and add-on fees can make web hosting more expensive than it first seems.

Many hosting providers offer steep discounts for first-time customers, but prices can rise sharply after the first year. A bundled domain name, professional email, or SSL certificate may be free to start, then cost extra at renewal. Bundling can save money and cut down on admin, but confirm what is included, how long it lasts, and what each extra will cost later.

A low introductory price can be useful, but it is only part of the cost. Before you commit, check what happens at renewal and what is included: backups, security, staging, migration help, and the level of support you will get when something goes wrong. A cheaper plan can cost more once essential extras are added.

Exceeding bandwidth or visitor limits often means extra costs. And even though most hosts offer money-back guarantees, extra services, such as setup, migration, or domain registration, are frequently excluded from reimbursement.

To make the right long-term choice, read the fine print. Choose a plan that can comfortably handle your traffic, and confirm what is included in its backup service — how often it runs, how long backups are kept, and whether restores cost extra.

Here’s what matters most when choosing a hosting provider:

WordPress hosting, without the complexity

Your hosting provider is your website’s foundation – choose it carefully. A reliable host makes running your website easier.

If you want to make things easy for yourself, choose managed hosting via WordPress.com. 

Your site benefits from a server environment optimized for WordPress, unmetered bandwidth and traffic, and 99.9% uptime. You also get a free SSL certificate, DDoS mitigation, and brute-force protection.

Welcome back to the WordPress.com changelog! During the last two weeks, we focused on giving you more control: a subscription signup you can tailor to your readers, a support assistant that can now sort out your domain settings right in the chat, and more.

Create and publish

Customize your newsletter signup

Your subscription form no longer has to be one-size-fits-all. You can now add a welcome message to the signup box to tell readers why they should join, write descriptions for your free and paid tiers so people know what they’re getting, and optionally hide the free tier to point readers straight to your paid plans.

Available now for any newsletter, on any plan — including free. Look under Newsletter Settings to set it up.

For stores

Faster product discovery in your WooCommerce store

Search on WordPress.com Commerce stores got a big upgrade. 

Shoppers can now filter products by size, color or other product options, plus price range, rating, availability, category, tag, and brand — and see rich product cards with images, prices, ratings, and review counts right in the results. They can sort by price or rating and see active filter chips as they refine. 

It’s all included on our Commerce plan, with nothing extra to install or connect.

Support

The support assistant can now handle domain tasks for you

Reach out to WordPress.com support, and the assistant can now take care of common domain jobs right in the chat — no back-and-forth, no handoff. 

Ask it to set up email for your domain (through services like Google Workspace or iCloud), update your domain records, check whether a domain is available, or set your primary domain, and it makes the change on the spot. The assistant confirms the changes with you before executing, so nothing happens without your approval.

When logged in, click the question mark icon in the top navigation bar, click “Get help,” and ask away.

Fixes and improvements

We also shipped a handful of smaller improvements and fixes to smooth out your day-to-day:

• Fixed missing images on the Reader feed, so the posts you follow show up with their pictures again.
• Added a Write button to the top of your Reader, so when a post sparks an idea, you’re one click from writing in the full editor.
• Added a settings tab to your Reader profile, so you can control whether or not your achievements are public.
• Fixed the password reset flow to show a clear message when it fails, instead of a dead end.
• Fixed the Help Center so it loads right away, even if you’re still partway through setting up your account. 
• Updated plan-change confirmations, so downgrading to another annual plan shows you exactly what changed.

Fortunately, there’s a popular AI coding editor called Cursor that offers a free tier you can try out. It’s been around since 2023, was pivotal in the explosion of the “vibe-coding” movement, and is still one of the most popular AI coding tools.

This guide will walk you through installing Cursor and WordPress Studio to build your first AI-generated plugin.

Why build WordPress plugins with AI

AI coding tools let you describe a plugin in plain language and have a working version generated in minutes — no need to write PHP from scratch or learn the WordPress plugin API first. 

Paired with a free local WordPress environment, you can build, test, and refine a plugin entirely on your own machine before it ever touches a live site. This guide uses Cursor, a popular AI code editor, alongside WordPress Studio.

What you’ll need

• Cursor (free Hobby plan)
• WordPress Studio (free, open source)
• About 15 minutes
• No prior coding experience required

1. Install Cursor

Installing Cursor requires navigating to the downloads page and downloading the right installer for your operating system. Once downloaded, run the installer and follow the installation instructions.

The first time you open Cursor, you’ll be asked to sign up for a Cursor account to access the AI Agent features. Cursor offers a free Hobby plan which you can use to try it out for your first build. 

After you’ve signed up for an account, you’ll be redirected back to the Cursor application. Cursor might suggest some plugins to install, based on common requirements. You can skip this step and you’ll be taken to the screen where you can open your first project.

2. Install WordPress Studio

Next, you’ll need a local WordPress installation. You can download WordPress Studio, which is completely free and open source, and it runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

As with Cursor, download the WordPress Studio installer, run it, and follow the on-screen instructions.

With Studio running, you can create a new local WordPress site by clicking on the “Add site” button. Select “Build a new site” and then “Empty site”. In the Add a site screen, you can give it a custom name, but the default “My WordPress Website” is fine for your first site.

After the site is created, click the Settings tab and note the Local Path value. This is the location of the WordPress files on your computer that you’ll need to open in Cursor.

3. Open the local WordPress Studio in Cursor

In Cursor, click on the “Open project” button, and navigate to the location of the WordPress files from the above step.

You’ll end up with the WordPress files in one pane, and the Agent chat in the other. 

Since Cursor is a fork of the VS Code editor, if you have VS Code installed, you might find the Cursor layout inherits any specific layout settings from VS Code. 

4. Build your plugin with the Cursor agent

In the Agent chat window, prompt your Cursor agent to build your first plugin. Give it some context and what you need:

We are in the root of the WordPress site folder. Create a plugin that adds a Welcome dashboard widget. The widget should only show the heading “Welcome!”.

Hit Enter or click the Submit button, and Cursor will check the environment, create the required plugin folder, and generate the complete plugin file. 

To review the generated code, click Review, or to accept the new plugin files, click Keep all.

5. Activate the plugin and test it

Go back to WordPress Studio and click WP Admin to open your WordPress admin. Navigate to Plugins, find your new plugin, and activate it.

Once activated, navigate to the dashboard, and you’ll see the blank widget with the “Welcome!” heading. You can move it to a different placeholder if you prefer.

6. Build your next big plugin idea

From here, you can add more features. For this widget, you should display a different welcome message to each user, depending on their user role.

Go back to Cursor, and ask it to create this for you.

Update the Select Welcome Dashboard Widget plugin so that it displays a welcome message to the user based on their user role. Describe what activities the user can do on the site. 

As with any AI tool, experimenting with prompting will help you achieve better results.

Connect Cursor to the WordPress.com MCP server

You might be building this Welcome widget to install on your WordPress.com hosted sites. While each of these sites will have the default WordPress user roles (administrator, editor, author, contributor, and subscriber), you might have sites that have different roles. For example, a WooCommerce store will also have a Customer and Shop Manager role.

Fortunately, you can use the WordPress.com MCP server to connect your Cursor agent to WordPress.com, and ask it to check which roles it needs to be aware of.

If you haven’t already, enable MCP access for your WordPress.com account.

You can connect your Cursor agent to WordPress.com by navigating to the Cursor plugin directory and searching for “WordPress.com”. 

Once you find the connector, click it, then click the “Add to Cursor” button. 

This will open the Cursor Settings screen with a prompt to install the MCP Server. Click Install, and the connector will be installed and configured.

A new browser window will open to ask you to authorize the connection. Once you accept, the MCP server connection will be enabled.

Now, you can ask your agent to interact with your WordPress.com account.

For example:

Check my WordPress.com sites and see if there are any custom roles that I will need to consider to update this plugin so that it works on any of my WordPress.com sites.

The Cursor agent will use the WordPress.com MCP connection to check your sites. It may ask clarifying questions like which site environments should be included or which ownership types. 

You can respond to the agent to give it more data:

Only production sites and only sites I own

Cursor will then use the connection to query all your sites, determine if any custom roles are in place, and update the plugin as needed.

What plugin will you build next?

Cursor + WordPress Studio + WordPress MCP is a powerful combination of tools for building your next plugin idea. 

Here are some tips when using AI to build plugins:

• It’s always better to test the plugin out on a local WordPress installation first.
• Give the agent specific context about what you want and what features you want to work on
• Break complex features into smaller steps with specific prompts
• If you’re not sure of something, you can ask the agent to explain it to you.
• Learn to use code quality tools and linters to help the agent check for coding errors.
• Start simple, then tackle more complex projects as you get comfortable.

If you build something fun, share it with us in the comments!