Adapting Your Agency To AI and Modern WordPress Workflows

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Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the WP Minute. I'm your host, Eric Karkovac. So today's guest is Brad Williams, a longtime member of the WordPress community. He is also the partner and co-founder of WebDev Studios, which is one of the premier WordPress agencies out there. They have a very impressive client list and also a stable of very popular plugins. Brad, welcome to the WP Minute. Thanks, Eric. Happy to be here. Looking forward to talking about all things WordPress.

Well, before we get started on WordPress specific, I know you're like a Halloween fan, right? So like I got to ask, what did you do for Halloween this year? Anything special? Any like amazing costume? Yeah, I'm a big fan of Halloween, and my son's 10, so he's, you know, right at that perfect age. He's very much into Halloween, too. So, yeah, we have a lot of fun. We've always done family costumes, so he's into Fortnite, which...

If you play Fortnite, you know there's a lot of skins. And really, I mean, pretty much you could be anything and be a Fortnite character. But we got costumes that matched our skins and went around the neighborhood trick-or-treating. We actually toilet papered our own house.

which I think is a lost art form. Kids don't even know how to toilet paper anymore, so I'm trying to bring it back by toilet paper in my own house, which hasn't really caught on yet, but it's fun. The kids love it. It's always a good time around here.

I love that. Toiling papering your own house. Wow. So I hope no one called the police. That's all I can say. I get a lot of questions because people think I have a lot of enemies. And then I say, no, I actually, we did this ourselves. Kind of a little fun tradition. That's pretty cool.

Well, I think that's a cool way to celebrate. So I'm glad you guys had fun. Reading through your bio over the years, I know you started Web Dev Studios back in 2008. And I have to ask, I mean, have you ever just taken a moment? to like look back at all you've gone through and all you've achieved through all these years? Because I mean, starting an agency is kind of a big risk in the beginning and you obviously have found a lot of success with it.

Yeah. I mean, you know, 2008, so 17, almost 18 years, you know, we've been, we've been doing this. You're right. Like that's, it's a long time. And I do sometimes, you know, catch myself kind of reminiscing or reflecting and Honestly, just taking a step back and looking at like logos that are on the website and just, you know, the brands that we've worked with over the years, you know, when I first started web dev, you know, couldn't dream of the idea of working with.

you know, companies like Microsoft, you know, or AT&T or Cisco or, you know, these massive brands. And here we are doing it, you know, and we have a long history of doing it. So it's been a lot of fun, you know, working with bigger brands, working with smaller brands, you know, everything in between, really just in how different.

you know, size companies, different industries, how they use WordPress and what's important to them, you know, and what's important to their customers and their clients. Well, it's been a fun ride. It's been great. It's great to reflect and look. It's also interesting, too, from the technology standpoint, right? Looking at what we were building and how we were building in 2008, 2009, and what we're doing now. You know, it's absolutely night and day.

We were using WordPress before custom post types existed. So, you know, you just had posts and pages and that was it. And we were building, I remember building one of our early kind of what I would consider a CMS style website with WordPress was a four car dealership.

But there was no coast and post types, so we couldn't just register cars. And so we had to tweak it a bit. So we basically had a car category. And if you had a post and it was in the car category, then it knew this was a car. And we're going to look a little bit different on the display and everything.

Just thinking back how we got creative in our solutions and as developers and implementers of technology, that's the core of what we do, right? We get creative and we figure out what is the best solution forward. Also, just kind of seeing how technology has evolved and then thinking of those kind of clear points where it's really shifted has also been fun too. And, you know, here we are in 2000.

25 and, you know, who knows what's next, right? With AI, everything's changing. So there's, I will say it never gets boring working in technology and running an agency. You never know what you're going to walk into day to day. And we'll get into this too. I mean, but just, you know, the last few years alone have been like incredibly.

you know, transformative, I would think, just in the way I work. So I can imagine even, you know, working with some of these big brands, how things have changed for you. But I also look at, you know, your plugins that you've released. Most people probably know custom post type UI, which is a big one. I've been a longtime user of that. But you've also released Theme Switcher Pro, which is kind of an interesting plug-in recently.

Were plugins always kind of part of your plan when you started, or did that just sort of evolve as you found, you know, you're building things for client needs and you kind of need to repeat them a lot? A little bit of both. You know, always love the idea of selling products, you know, obviously making money when you sleep. When you're an agency, a client services business, you know, there's an algorithm based on how much you can, you know.

make based on how many hours in the day, right? And of course, hourly rates can go up and that can... you know, affect that, but you know, it's, you're based on, you work to get paid, right? Whereas products, you build a product, you build it once and you get paid over and over and over again. Of course you're, you know, I'm simplifying that, right? There's a lot of maintenance updates, support, all that stuff, but it's a vastly different world than agencies.

So many of our products stemmed from the work we've done on the agency side. Really now our focus is with Theme Switcher Pro and our Agolia one is really building and supporting products that our clients, our specific type of clients, it really resonates with.

So theme switcher pro, which is our newest product. And I think it's one of the, you know, has the most potential in the WordPress space because it's, there's really nothing else out there like it. And it opens up the door for so many different opportunities with how you build a site.

you know, how you implement a site, what themes you may or may not use. So to simplify it, Theme Switcher Pro allows you to run multiple themes on a single WordPress website. Traditionally, the way you would do that would be through maybe multi-site, have different sites in the network running different themes. Well, with Theme Switcher Pro...

You can activate the plugin and whatever themes are available in your themes directory are now available to use throughout your site. It could be one page that you switch the theme on. It could be all of your posts. It could be entire sections. And this stemmed from the...

really the requests over and over of people walking in the door and current clients of they're not on modern WordPress. They're not on the full block editor. A lot of them are on this kind of pseudo ACF block builder. Yeah. where it's like, you know, the ACF block builder, but it's not core Gutenberg. So while it works, it doesn't work in the dashboard the same way Gutenberg does, where really what you see is what you get, right, with the ACF.

Builder, you got to fill in a bunch of data points and then go view it on the front end side to see what it actually produces. So a lot of our clients were kind of in the in-between stage or people walk on the door that are just on the classic editor, right? They're not even on blocks, period. But they know they need to get there. They want to get there.

Well, how do you get there? Well, let's redesign your website. Let's relaunch it. That's what we've all been doing for how many years now, right? And that is absolutely still. Kind of the tried and true way. Let's redesign your website. Let's rebuild it using modern WordPress, using blocks, using all the core technology that WordPress comes with and relaunch it, right? That's a three to six plus month.

project, that's design, that's stakeholder involvement, that's at a much higher cost. Theme Switcher Pro allows us to swap out one section, right? One page. Maybe you just want your homepage to be blocks. Maybe you just want to launch some landing pages using a theme that's optimized and built for landing pages using blocks in WordPress. You can do that now. So now we have a way where we can chip away at replacing.

and old legacy themes. So what we've done is maybe over the course of six months or 12 months or 18 months, we build a new modern block theme at the start of the project. We mimic their header and footer. So it looks exactly the same as their current site, if that's what they want.

We bring in all their styles, style up all the blocks. So now they have, and then we launch their new modern theme that's on their site, but not being used, right? So they have their old theme, they have their new theme. And now when they produce new content, they can use the new theme.

And they can start producing content, replacing those old pages, those old sections, those old posts with the new theme. And then over time, if the goal is to sunset and retire your old classic theme, once you've replaced everything, you can get rid of your old theme.

You can get rid of theme switcher pro and you can just activate your new theme and done. Right. So it's just a very different approach and different way of getting people to modern WordPress versus that traditional rebuild it all and relaunch it, which to your point of the last couple of years being.

Interesting. You know, budgets are tight. Companies aren't spending what they were just a few years ago. So this was our solution to say, hey, I know you don't have six figures to relaunch your website, but can we. Can we do a few thousand a month and then over 18 months we'll relaunch it? And that is absolutely resonating. So agencies, freelancers, companies that are building and implementing.

You know, look at Theme Switcher Pro because this is a revenue generator for you. Someone passes on a big website rebuild, you have an alternative that is a much smaller price point, much smaller time commitment from your clients, but still works towards the same goal. And I promise you, they love it when you start bringing these solutions. solutions, hey, I got a cost saving that still gets you toward your goal, right? They love it.

Imagine replacing your homepage in a matter of weeks with a block-based homepage versus relaunching your whole website, right? It just changes the game significantly. So a lot of what we're doing now is educating, going on podcasts, talking with people like you, Eric, because it's just such a new...

product. There's nothing out there that does this at this level. And with performance, security, everything baked in that you'd expect is actually a very valuable tool and a good tool for production. I mean, just from a developer point of view, Even a relatively small site can be such a pain when you are making that transition from a classic theme to a block theme or even just a new theme in general.

You know, I've run into the issue over the years, like if it's a WooCommerce site, you've still got orders going in, so you don't want to... You know, you could just put it on a staging site, right, and do everything there. But then you've got these orders you have to mirror over to the staging site. And if you want to launch it, and that becomes a real problem. So, I mean, this seems like kind of that solution that...

allows you to stay where you're at. You don't have to necessarily mess with the data so much. And you can, you know, slowly but surely get that site redesign going, which I think, you know... I think that's going to help a lot of even solo freelancers like myself. I just think it could be a big help. You know, the point of WooCommerce, our latest version introduced a one-click.

theme switching for larger products. The first one we launched the integration with was WooCommerce. So as you know, and most people that work with WooCommerce know, when you install WooCommerce, it adds a lot of different things to your website, right? It creates a number of pages for WooCommerce. It has a whole checkout process. with WooCommerce. All of this can be switched within the theme, but to do it...

You have to do it manually. OK, I'm going to switch all these pages. I'm going to switch the products, custom post type. I'm going to switch to check out all that to my new theme. So what we've done is we implemented a one click for common products. So right now it supports WooCommerce. So it detects if you have WooCommerce.

installed and you can say, hey, I want to use this theme like storefront, which is, you know, automatics WooCommerce optimized theme. I want to use storefront across all of WooCommerce. One click save and done. It replaces everything that WooCommerce needs. And I should say it will run that new theme everywhere WooCommerce is running. So you don't have to try to figure out, is my account switched? Is order history switched?

The checkout page switch, it just does it all automatically. And we're starting to integrate more products. So LearnDash, Beaver Builder, and Easy Digital Downloads are all coming up probably within the next release or two. Again, to make it easy to give you more options. On the flip side, from the product builder and owner perspective, like WooCommerce, like LearnDash, like Lifter, they all have optimized themes that they either give out for free or sell.

that works really well with their products right out of the gate. So if I want to launch a WooCommerce store and I have my theme, I have my website's been out there for years and I want to introduce WooCommerce, how do I do that now? You know, I either turn on WooCommerce and hope it works well with my current theme, which...

It'll probably be okay, but you're definitely going to need to tweak and tighten some things up, right? Or I need to maybe launch multi-site and have my store on a separate site running all separate everything, right? And you get that point of like syncing data that gets tricky. So now you can just download storefront.

turn on theme switcher pro and say run storefront across my entire shopping experience. And it won't affect anything else except for WooCommerce. So again, more options. And now product owners can promote theme switcher pro because it gives them.

a way to sell more of their product or get more people using the product rather than saying, I can't redo my whole theme right now. Maybe I'll look at Shopify, do something over there. You don't have to redo your whole thing. I mean, that's no longer a requirement, right? Just pull storefront, pull whatever you want and use that instead.

So now, again, with this education, we're working with product owners so that they can also help promote it so that they can sell more product. Hey, if you don't want to switch your theme, here's a solution for you so you can still run Lifter.

without having to disrupt what you're currently doing right now or still run woo without disrupting what you're doing so again it's like a lot of wins with this product from products to agencies to builders implementers you know so a lot of it's just getting the word out there and showing people what we're doing

See, that's why I love when agencies come out with products because they're usually the ones who are best positioned to know what they're running into out in the wild and make something that resonates with their clients. you know, ripples out to the rest of us. So I think that's a really valuable item to have, you know, definitely worth checking out. So I also want to talk a little bit about just agency life these days because

You know, I've been thinking, you know, the last five years, just think about what's happened. We've had a pandemic. We've had, you know, the rise of AI tools and all this. I mean, how has that impacted WebDev Studios and, you know, what has it been like for you to kind of navigate all that? Yeah, I mean, that's the big year right now is AI, right? And how do we use it? What are people doing with it? You know, clients are asking us, clients are interested in it, you know.

We're all talking about it. We're all kind of learning in real time together because it's moving so fast. It's at brake speed movement in AI. So a lot of it is... A couple things. One is dedicating time, especially as an owner of an agency. I need to spend time understanding these tools and what my team may or may not.

be able to use? What could help them, you know, be more efficient? What could help our clients? Anything like that, right? So I've spent time obviously doing my own research, but also talking to other agency owners. I do a lot of, and I recommend this to anybody that owns a company, find other people, find peers. that have similar businesses. They might be bigger, they might be smaller, but similar space, similar challenges.

And have a one-on-one every month. I have about four or five agency owners that I talk to at least once a quarter, if not once a month. And it's just a touch base to share what's working. What do you see? Oh, we're using this new tool. Oh, have you ever come across this weird challenge? You know, open source in general.

Our community is very open to share and it's just the nature of what, you know, open source. Right. So WordPress has always been like that. Right. And especially in the agency space or product space, like we're all kind of helping each other. So a lot of it, I've been asking, Hey, what are you using with AI? What are you doing? And then based on what they tell me, I'll go out and spend more time.

time researching those tools. But a lot of it is just really, there's so much stuff out there, right? You can't just throw all these tools into your teams and think, okay, now we're going to make tons more money, right? Like that's just not how it works. So there's also a fine line of using too much. So again, like.

If every response I get from someone I can tell is AI generated, I'm going to start to eventually have a certain feeling about them and how they communicate, right? So there is a balance.

I will say it is absolutely something everyone should be utilizing in some capacity. You know, the more stuff I experience, the more things I'm playing with, the more it's just eye opening. Like, wow, it's kind of impresses how much it can do. So we're using a couple different.

tools we use so we're a google shop intern we use google workspace for all of our you know our team accounts google drive all that stuff so we have gemini as part of that so we've been pretty heavily in a gemini using gemini using Notebook LM, which is another Google product that I absolutely love.

Really, really going deep into that with a couple of our strategy projects where we're really mapping out these technical project builds that we're doing with clients. Notebook LM is one of the most, probably one of the most impactful tools I've come across that's directly helping us.

like day to day. And the reason I like notebook LM is because it is essentially you set up a project, set up whatever you want to call it, and then you just feed it data sources, right? So you're basically training this. this learning model all about whatever it is you want to feed it in our case a project right so we're feeding in

The transcripts, the phone calls, the proposals, any docs the clients send us, literally everything we can feed it in about this project. Every single call we have, we just feed the transcripts in immediately. And it is just continuing to get smarter and smarter and smarter about everything we're feeding it, right? So it's not like Gemini.

or chat GPT where it goes out there and tries to figure out the answers and fill in the blanks. It only knows what you're giving it. And so the more you give it, the smarter it's getting, you know. And so I'm doing a really technical strategy. process now or project with a client and it's we're talking apis we're talking different systems and workflows and it's absolutely unreal how it's helping me figure this all out

because it is super complex and there's workflows and things that have to happen and data and blah, blah, blah, and AIs. And it is absolutely helping us figure it out. So those type of tools really help accelerate and make your team more efficient, right? It doesn't mean they're replacing you. Right. You're using them to as another tool in your belt to help you become more of a superhuman in what you're trying to do. Right. Again, I'm not I'm not fully relying on it blindly.

I like to say that phrase, trust, but verify, right? Especially with AI, trust it, but verify it. The other reason I like notebook LM is it cites every single source and the sources are your sources. So everything it gives you, it cites a source and links directly to the source that you gave it and why it.

Came back with that answer. It also allows you to quickly validate what it's saying. Is that correct? Yep. Oh, here's the source. Here's where that, you know, our client said that on our call three weeks ago. Yes, that is absolutely correct. Those tools are amazing on the development side. Also really cool tools.

We're using cursor. So we've all of our developers have cursor license active account. It's a great AI coding tool. I'm a developer. I don't dev for clients, you know, and I haven't for a long, long time, but I like to dev and I like to scratch that itch just for stuff.

evening side projects so some of these developer tools um are pretty wild like cursor is cool because it's basically an ide you can fire it up and just point it to a directory and then start working with it so i've actually just fired up cursor pointed to the

You know, my local setup of my local plugin directory, I had one of our plugins that we've built already installed. And I basically told it, go look at that plugin, understand how we scaffold plugins as a company and scaffold a new plugin for me.

And it followed it to a T, exactly like my team would have done. And all I did is say, go look at what I've already done and now replicate this because I'm about to build another plugin and I want to follow the same scaffolding process. So those type of things like that are repetitive.

that are really lower level, right? Like you don't need your senior, you know, lead level engineers scaffolding a plugin, right? Like those things are huge time savers. So, and it's kind of neat just to interact with it, have conversations. Hey, this is what I'm thinking about doing here. Do you agree? Is there a better approach? Is there something I'm not thinking about? It's like a coding assistant sitting right next to you that's helping you along the way.

Cursor is awesome. The other one, I would say play with, and we don't use this really for work, but I think it starts to get people to understand how powerful some of this is, which is tools like Replit, R-E-P-L-I-T. Repless wild. Um, you can just get on there and basically have a conversation with it and it will build your whole app, whatever you want and deploy it publicly, whatever. Um, I mean, and you can churn through some money too. So be careful, set, set limits on that. But like.

I think it's interesting because when you hear vibe coding or, oh, I could build this, I could build that, get on Replit, set up an account, spend a few bucks and just have it try to build you something. And I'm not saying you're going to launch this. It'll be production ready. But I think it starts to connect the dots at how powerful some of this stuff is.

You know, I built a simple WordPress scanner with Replit. Basically, there's certain things I'm looking for when I look at a website. And I've built this app with Replit. To understand what I care about when we're scanning a WordPress website, like it has Gutenberg detection logic in it. So it tries to determine, are they using Gutenberg just by looking at the code on the front end?

And there's about 13 metrics he tries to figure out. Again, this isn't perfect, but it's starting to get us where we need to be. Most scanners online, they're great, but they don't tell you really WordPress-specific stuff. Like, are they running Gutenberg? I want to know that if we can determine that from the view source.

because that's valuable information for me to know as an agency owner when I'm talking to a prospective client. Hey, you're not on Gutenberg. Do you know what Gutenberg is? Let me show you because it's going to blow your mind when you see how cool it is. Things like that, looking for sitemaps and looking at the robots file, looking at REST API. Is it enabled? What endpoints is it exposing? Like very specific WordPress stuff and just kind of vibe coded some stuff for fun.

A lot of us just experimenting, seeing what works for you and your team and running with it. But I will say that clients are asking about these things. What are you doing as a company for AI to help me, you know, as the client? You need to be ready to answer that question.

Because if you haven't heard it yet, it is coming. And even if you're working on very small websites, it's coming. So it doesn't mean that answer needs to be the same when you're working on a $2,000 website versus a $200,000 website.

You need to be ready when a client says, what tools are you using? What AI are you using? Because they expect you to be using something to help them. And if you're not at this point, they're probably going to question why. Maybe. Maybe they're not super technical and have no idea, but.

So I threw out a lot there, but there's so many tools. I mean, use them to your advantage. ChatGPT, I feel like everyone's used in some capacity. Talk to it. Hey, what developer tools could I use? This is my agency. I'm a freelancer. These are the services I do. I work with WordPress. These are the verticals.

These tools can help you understand what you should be looking at, right? So there's a lot out there and you just got to kind of keep your nose to the ground and learn what you can and don't let it overwhelm you because there's also, it's so new, there's a lot of grift. There's a lot of just...

you know, nonsense. So stick to tried and true things you've heard of, stick to brands you've heard of or recognized, stick to ones that people are talking about and be cautious of the ones that maybe don't have a lot of followers or promise you to the moon and you've never heard of them, right? Those are the ones you want to be careful with.

Well, it almost reminds me of, like, we've sped up the entire SAS model in, like, two years to where, you know, it was...

You know, the last 20 years, we've had a new SaaS come out every other week or something that's promising you the world or it's, you know, some framework or something. And people blindly adopt it and then regret it later. AI is kind of... compressed all this into so much into so little time right so you have to be really careful about what you're trusting and with your data because you know you have to kind of know what you're using and

what it's going to do with your data and if it's going to have some accuracy. How do you deal with that? How do you vet a tool before you guys are going to use it? Yeah, I mean, one, we want to understand if it's going to be something that is going to, which it always will with the tool for us, right? If it's going to have client information in it, right, which, again, it probably always will.

then I need to understand around data privacy. I need to understand SLAs. I need to understand to make sure it's not going to train off of the information I'm giving it, right? Like Gemini, this all falls under our corporate workspace account. It's all part of our SLA.

They don't train off our data. It's all very, you know, so it's very clear what they do with it and what they don't do with it, which is what we need to understand. Right. I can't just be taking my client's sensitive information, shoving it into some AI model that's learning off of it and then using that information somewhere else. Right. That is.

a bad, bad, bad idea. So make sure you understand how any data you give it, what is it going to do with like chat GPT defaults to training off your data? You can turn it off, hit that switch, turn it off. You know, I think Gemini defaults to not doing that on a corporate account, but you can turn it on. Right. So just make sure you understand, you know, those type of things. Also costs. Right. It's one of those things like almost all these tools.

You know, you're getting paid based off of usage. Make sure you understand the cost and make sure you have clear limits set. If it is kind of an open-ended rep, it's a good example, right? You can have a monthly budget that it'll use. Then you can set an overage budget. Five bucks, 10 bucks, right? Because it also use your tokens if you're running a server. So if you have something live that you want to stay on live and you make sure there's some budget to keep it on live.

But then if it hits that, it will just stop everything and say, hey, you're out of like, it will just stop, which is what you want it to do if it hits your budget limit. Right. And send you a notice like, hey, you need to turn this back on. But be very careful about those things as well, because I'd hate to, you know.

well, you know, put something online and come back the next morning, you have like a $50,000 bill. Right. So, so be cautious with that. But yeah, there's the other thing I was going to mention too, is like these tools are not just specific to WordPress, right? Like there, I,

dabble in roblox gaming development with my son i had it build cursor build an entire game because i was very curious if it could and it did and i got it working and roblox so like you can experiment with all sorts of hey let's I built a Discord bot the other day using Cursor. And rather than deploying it with Replit, I wanted to figure out an easier way to deploy it on my own. And I found a great way to do that. So, again, using tools. Hey, what kind of cheap service is just a hobbyist?

bot I'm building can I use to keep this thing on 24-7? And it gave me some great recommendations and helped me implement those right into my code with the API keys and everything. But a real simple bot that works great, you know, using Python, which is not a language I am super familiar with. So it's also a great way to kind of onboard new languages, new things, and just experiment a bit. Yeah, I know our Matt Medeiros is...

The king of vibe coding here, creating plugins, creating all sorts of little apps that do all sorts of neat things. It's amazing what, you know, a weekend basically can get you a pretty good start on something. I mean.

When you're dealing with clients in AI now, are they asking for specific AI features in their sites these days, or is that something that hasn't come up much yet? A little bit. Yeah, they're kind of, and they don't know, generally speaking, they don't know what they want. They just say, hey, is there things we should be doing with AI, right? So within our website, within our tools. And that's definitely a newer area of what makes sense for many clients in that arena.

We found a lot of success that makes sense really for all clients, especially as like automating things like accessibility around content, right? Like a great use case for AI is to auto-generate alt text for images, right? Analyze an image. So this is a blue bicycle.

In the old text, this is a blue bicycle, right? So like those things that people can sometimes miss that can actually have a big impact on a company through accessibility standards, could even open them up to some liability. And many times.

Website launches fully accessible and what breaks accessibility is the new content that's produced, right? Because they don't add alt text or they don't add certain things in the content that is a requirement. So implementing AI to do those things automatically is a huge win. And I think everyone. It should be bringing those to their clients as recommendations. So like 10 up has a good or fueled, whatever it is. They have a good.

plug-in Classify. I don't know if it's Classify AI or Classify with AI at the end. I think it's Classify. Yeah, that can do a lot of those different... different tasks for the automation. Yeah, they have a lot of them built into that. I know Jetpack has some stuff going on. I know Parsley, which is like an automatic service. There's other plugins. So there's a lot of options out there. Obviously, you want to think about if there's costs or ongoing things like that, which sometimes they're...

would be because it's using a little bit of AI, right? But if it's, you know, if you're not producing a ton of content, it's probably minimal, but that's a great one, right? Search is another one. So we work a lot with Algolia. If you're not familiar with it, Elasticsearch.

Kind of competitors. Algolia has implemented, I'm sure, Elasticsearch too, a lot of AI and other search tools. So we've always loved Algolia because it offloads search into a system that's built for search, right? So we took over the Algolia plugin. Algolia wanted to sunset it. And we're like, well, we have some clients on it and we love open source and we're big proponents. So why don't we just fork it? Give them credit.

They were done with it anyways, and then we just took it and ran with it. For the last two or three years, we've been continuing to grow it and build it. We have a premium version as well. But basically, it takes all of your content from WordPress and sends it into Algolia, creates a nice index, search index as you produce new content.

automatically adds it, you know. And then as you're searching, you get the, you know, it's more of a Google experience, right? You get the fuzzy search, you get the did you means, you get the, it's got AI, like really trying to figure out what this user is looking for. It also looks like tools, like where are they located? What do you, if it's us.

You know, if it's a store, it's going to start saying, OK, it's sweater weather. Right. Let's start showing. You know what I mean? Like it's starting to learn what you have and surface more accurate search results beyond just. you know the various matches that they've had in the past so it's it's it's crazy smart so if you have a website with a lot of content and searches or a lot of products or both or whatever and searches a big is important things like algolia elastic search these are

these are the things you should be bringing to the table because, again, there's plugins that make it super easy to integrate, and just turning the thing on is a massive enhancement. Just without even configuring anything, just using Algolia or Elasticsearch, the results are better, way better than...

you know, of course, than WordPress, which is just a simple keyword match. So that's another area we've seen a lot of growth in is just around search, you know, especially AI around search too. So you're doing all this with AI now. I mean, how do you see this evolving for you the next?

couple of years? Do you see anything that's going to kind of take over what you're doing or drastically change what you're doing now? I think it'll just keep it growing, right? Again, I'm big...

My thoughts on AI, especially from a development standpoint, is it is a helper for you. It is not a replacement for you, right? Like we, especially the type of clients we work with, like there will never be, we will never auto deploy code that we did not review in some capacity, right? Clients come to us. They hire us for a certain level of expertise and care on their website. So we'll never blindly commit AI-generated code, right? It's always going to go through a lead.

engineer is going to review that code and make sure it's all up to snuff. And I think that's the important, at least from our perspective, our agency is, yes, we're going to use these tools so we can produce more for you. You get more bang for your buck. We're going to bring better ideas to the table, more interesting ideas in some.

cases, depending on what we're doing. And ultimately, we're going to be able to produce more, right? So that's how you phrase it. Like we're using this to your benefit. We're using this to get more bang for your buck. We're able to produce more with this. We don't have to spend time doing plug and scaffolding like we used to.

You know, one or two prompts, boom, it's done. And now we're focused on what we're actually building for you, right? So when clients hear this stuff, they know you're really thinking about their... money, their spend and what they're getting. And when clients hear that, that's what they want to hear, right? They want to know you're being protective of their investment and you're really thinking about how to move the needle for them and their business.

Yeah, you need to be looking at these things. You need to be having some answers. It doesn't mean you need to take over your entire business. I think a lot of people think, if I'm not doing everything AI, I'm failing. That's not true, right? We still do a ton of stuff where we're not using AI.

But man, I'll tell you, it definitely accelerates and improves areas, you know, in all areas, honestly. So figure out what works best for you as a freelancer, as an agency. Everybody's different. Your clients are different.

But there are some tried and true tools out there that a lot of us are starting to use more regularly, and those are the ones I would start with, like Cursor, you know, things like that. I mean, I kind of like to think of it as like a trusty intern that I can get to do some of the dirty work for me.

Occasionally we'll make a mistake, but that's okay because you can't expect perfection and you still need to be involved in every step of the process, right? I mean, you can't just... Yeah, I was going to just say that's a great point because the one thing I did when I first started getting into this and I would recommend if people were just...

Testing these tools out, this is a great way to test it, right? Especially the developer is have it build a plugin with a settings page. And that was how I generally will test AI code to see what it does. Because if you've done any development, WordPress and plugins and setting pages, there's about 50 different ways you can do this, right?

There is like one recommended way, which is use the settings API. And a lot of the responses and things that would come back from ChatGPT, from Gemini, other things would be the old way. It would be either. using the, you know, add settings, you know, update setting or update options. I think it is functions like the direct functions that work with settings, blah, blah, blah.

rather than the settings API, which does all the escaping, all the sanitizing, does all that for you, right? Where this other method does not. So if you're not including that extra stuff, now you're potentially compromised. So test it out. Give it something that you know what it should do. You know what the right answer is and tell it, like test these things out and see if it comes back wrong.

Maybe this isn't the tour. Maybe it's the prompt or the way that you set it, right? Like making sure that you're really instructing. That's the cool thing about cursor and some of these other platforms. You can kind of give it like a, I forget exactly what it's called, but it's like an instruction file.

And it's basically setting the stage for this bot so it understands what it is and how it needs to work. And it's like saying you're an expert level WordPress developer. You follow the WordPress coding standards linked to the standards. You follow these PHP standards linked to this. You give it these instructions so it knows.

who it is and how it needs to act, the standards it needs to follow. And then it really tightens up what it's doing right now. It knows I'm an expert level WordPress. I'm going to follow all these standards, right? Here's the whole documentation I can go off of, you know, so it gets super sharp once you start feeding it.

those those rules rather than just saying code me something and chat gpt and it's like okay and it spits out something completely wrong so always trust but verify but i like to challenge it sometimes and i know what the answer should be yeah it comes back with it's interesting

Yeah, I've taken to running anything I generate through plugin check, which is what the official plugin repository uses to search to check against security and best practices and things like that. And I'm always amazed at how many things. come out unescaped. So that's kind of like the process of kind of going through that and just verifying that, okay, now I can look at this and say, okay, this isn't secure. I've got to fix this.

Don't go straight to production, please. Just check it first, put it on the staging site, and then see what it does. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly it. Trust by Verify. You know, make sure what it's...

Producing. Always, yeah, never do a direct land product. Always dev, always staging, work in local environments. These systems are smart and they can learn, right? Like, so they can learn over time. They can understand your team's processes, your processes, your coding, your own coding standards, right? It doesn't just have to follow WordPress. You might have your own.

tweak on those standards and you just feed it all that right and train it to be your coding assistant your you know what we call the rubber duck right like you have that rubber duck when i got ai you can rubber duck with ai say something's not right here i'm not quite sure you know what's going on what do you think and

It's pretty wild. It's fun, though. It's just a new way of coding. Honestly, you need to get on board or you're going to get passed at this point from development. Again, it's not there to replace you, but if you're not using these tools to help accelerate what you're doing and do some more routine, monotonous stuff.

All your peers are, right? So it's going to catch up to you at some point. Yeah, and you're pretty happy with the time you save, I think, too. I mean, it has made my day a lot easier. I know that. So it's something that... Having said every level should probably be digging into this deeply now. Yeah. Yeah. I mean.

And we haven't talked about the marketing angle of it, right? Like all the emails we get now, like it's even more. And they're getting so specific, like, hey, I saw you work on this project, blah, blah, blah. Like it's just scraping your LinkedIn and auto-generate. But they're getting smarter, right? They're getting smarter in what they say to try to get you to interact.

did you know that you know it's all coming through these ai systems you know and that's that they're just getting smarter because they can figure out the data and what you want to read or what you want to see

Well, I don't want to take up too much more of your time, but I just want to ask, is there anything else on the horizon from you or from WebDev Studios we should be on the lookout for? I'm pushing more into products. So we have a few others internally that we're working on and pushing towards. Theme Switcher is really our baby right now. We love it. It's just such a cool product. And just being on the educational tour, it's only been out for a few months. We are running it for a number of years.

of our client sites. And like I've said, it's given us, it's a great product and I obviously want to get it in more hands of users, but it's also a product we're using, right? So it's generating more projects and more work for my team, which is... which is the goal. So that's why I'm such a big fan of it because I know it can do the same for other people. It's just, it's such a game changer. And I'm, another reason I'm pushing it, I feel strongly.

The more people we get to modern WordPress, the more people will stay around for WordPress, right? Like if you're stuck on classic mode, if you're stuck in some kind of weird hybrid, at some point you're going to get frustrated and be like, I'm going to go look at something else. And we're seeing it. We see people mention it. And it's because they're not. using the power of what WordPress comes with today.

They're using what WordPress came with 10 years ago and then saying, yeah, this feels dated. Well, yeah, it is dated because you're not running 100 WordPress. You're not running the block editor. You're not using patterns. Love patterns. Patterns are such an eye opener. When people see what you can do with patterns.

And one click, boom, create a new landing page from a pattern and just start modifying things. And I mean, one of our clients went from spending a week to create a new landing page because they had that developer support for, you know, tweeting.

tightening, aligning, all that stuff. They went from a week to make a landing page to two hours from start to publish. And that is using Team Switcher Pro on a landing page optimized theme. And all they're doing is pumping out landing pages. So like when clients, again,

We want them to stay on WordPress when they understand the efficiencies of the block editor, when they understand how much easier it is. You know, there is a bit of a learning hurdle, of course, but once you get into it, remember, we're comparing this to classic. Yes, there's a learning curve, but classic editor.

which is absolutely a learning curve. Even when you've used it for five years, they're still learning curve. So get them on modern WordPress. They're going to stick around for long and get that, you know, keep moving that number up on, on number of users of WordPress. So another big reason I'm pushing, I want to get more people in the block editor.

Because I feel strongly if they don't, they're going to look at alternatives. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, all these sites. And the thing is, WordPress has been around so long, right? So we know these sites. There have been sites out there that are 15 years old. And so, like, how do they evolve? How do they, you know, go to the... New experience. I mean, they probably, you know, some of these folks don't even know there is a new experience. So I think that's kind of the key is to get them.

interested in what's going on. And once they see what's happening, they probably are more likely to stay with the platform. Yeah. I mean, ultimately, you got to really listen to your clients and understand their pain points, right? And they usually will say them in conversation. They may not always call it a pain point or call it, but they will talk about it. So let them talk. And what are your challenges? Like, what are the biggest struggles with your website?

It's going to come down to that, right? Efficiency, time it takes to get new content produced, having to get developers involved every single time they want to launch a new piece of content. That's ridiculous, right? You should not have to do that.

And that's where we come in. Hey, we'll replace this. You won't have to use devs at all. So then it's like, okay, think about how much time you're spending with those devs or the course of a month, a course of a month, and then how much we're saying this is going to cost to build out. And then you can do the math. All right. After two months, we're saving money.

You know, so like it's all about how you position it to your clients, understand their challenges and bring these solutions in the terms of this is how we're going to make you more efficient as a company. We're going to get more time back for your team. You're going to be able to produce more. It's going to make more sales. Everyone's going to kill it.

We're all going to make lots of money together. Right. So that's, that's what you got to think of position is like, what are their pain points and how are we going to solve them? That's why they're walking in the door to talk to you, help them solve their problems. Great advice. Thank you, Brad. And I appreciate you being on here with me today.

So how can people connect with you online? Yeah, so webdevstudios.com. I'm on most of the social networks, Twitter, Williams VA. I'm on LinkedIn too. So yeah, hit me up, uh, reach out. If you're interested in theme switcher pro shoot me an email, Brad at web dev studios.com. Happy to talk to you about it. Get you a demo, give you a trial license, whatever he needs.

You know, themeswitcher.com is the website. We've got some cool videos up there. Real short, trying to make videos one to two minutes long that just show the power of what it can do. With the WooCommerce, one click, we've got a video.

You know, we even did a cool video for Halloween where you can switch your theme just on Halloween using code. So this doesn't just work through the UI. You can actually power it through codes. We wrote a little bit of code, basically said if it's October 31st, we're going to run a Halloween theme. And then at midnight, it switches back.

Like kind of a weird, probably not a use case people use, but it just starts to show how flexible this is. Like maybe there is a time you'd want to change the theme on one page just for Christmas or something. Right. You could do that. I've had clients who wanted that. Yes. Yeah.

And now you can do it. You can do it through code. It's great. So we've got a cool video up there again showing that off. So, again, a lot of, I mean, the sky's the limit with what you can do with this thing. So it's just getting it out in people's hands and seeing what they come up with. Awesome.

Well, thanks again for being here. I appreciate it. And so that's going to be a wrap for this episode of the WP Minute. We appreciate you watching and listening. Be sure to visit us at thewpminute.com slash subscribe where you can get our newsletter. You can also become a member and support the content we create here at the WP Minute. Thanks, everyone, and we'll see you next time.

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