The Challenges WordPress Professionals Face in 2025

We've got AI seeping into all angles of development and marketing people looking at this is going to replace us and we have the natural temperature of a competitive landscape with so many more, people coming online, building services, businesses, becoming freelancers. There's alternative content management systems. We want to talk about some of that stuff today. But last time, let's just introduce who you are and what you do. Last time you and I chatted was on a Twitter space.

I looked at you as this guy who freelances in the enterprise space. Did I get that correct, or what do you do these days?

They, you know, issues, bugs, et cetera, but it takes so much effort to get them to even sign a piece of paper to let me speak at a conference that it's just better that I do my own thing. I was previously at News Corp, Wall Street Journal, and I helped build the enterprise WordPress system. there with like five VIP agencies. After that I was at, the not worldwide, which is if you have anyone got married, what, weddingwire. com. Cassimiertos, hitched Mariajo it's like global organization.

and then now I'm at Sotheby's, which is Sotheby's art if anyone has auctioned a pair of Michael Jordan sneakers. But throughout that I do freelance because. From the journal that got me WordPress work, people would hear about the work I was doing, and then I would be on Upwork or I'd be, you know, on LinkedIn and people would say, Hey, I need help with WordPress. And then from WordPress, that's actually how I got the job.

At the Knot. at the Journal, I had to learn a lot about APIs and data architecture. And at The Knot Worldwide, we went from 160 websites to one unified architecture and that, and it was in analytics. And then at Sotheby's, that's what I do right now, where I work in enterprise analytics and it's our analytic systems across Sotheby's dot com is eight different applications in a website suit. That's what I like to joke.

It's Python, it's Ruby, it's a mobile application, but we have to have a unified analytics architecture and that's what I manage. And so, you know, throughout the pandemic, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was like, everyone was laying everyone off in 2021. And then those people were coming to me and saying, Hey, A marketing team that used WordPress was like, we lost five engineers. Can you pick up and keep the site maintained for this event coming up? And that did really well in 2021.

And then it kind of dried out and now I'm doing mostly data analytics stuff related to what I'm doing right now.

But when I try to explain to him how to install an NPM package that lets him use Google Tag Manager, they get so frustrated and they won't give me a staging environment because you know, I'm not there. I'm not the application engineer. I'm the analytics engineer, so I don't get a staging environment. That's unique to me because of resourcing issues. I don't get my own GitHub repo. I don't get my own branch. I don't get my own keys. So I will spin up a WordPress environment and I'll make a mock.

Website of our own products using WooCommerce and I will install Google Tag Manager from WooCommerce.

I'll install a CMP I'll install all the things the same that we would do in our enterprise organization and I demo with WordPress And so WordPress is kind of like my laboratory And so and then the same thing at the not worldwide we were using WordPress in some of our e commerce applications But as we move towards a monolithic architecture, it was migrating from WordPress Into the monolithic architecture.

And that was driven by a big commerce API, but knowing WordPress in the end, I tell people, I kind of see, you know, I heard someone say when learning to code, it's like learning how to cook. Like whether a person knows how to fry an egg in a wok or fryer or egg in a. Cast iron skillet or do it on a flat grill, you know, how to cook an egg, you know, how to make the yolk the right way, whatever.

So I see WordPress as like, Hey, it's a griddle and it's like, you know, and I, and then sometimes I have to cook at a walk. Sometimes I cook on a flat top, but WordPress really is my tried and true system. and I can teach a marketing person to use it. I can teach an engineer to use it for all its warts and whatever, you know.

Essentially, they were like, you're the only person based in New York who's willing to take a job. We need a wordpress subject matter expert, and I actually ran to someone the other day who worked for the Washington Post and had the same job, and I had to compare.

Arc, which was owned by Amazon and used by the Washington Post, Chorus, which is now gone, by the way, good thing we didn't bet on that, owned by Vox, and WordPress won out at News Corp, and the reason WordPress won out is what I said was, we've got a great community, and I didn't even say we, I was look, if I have to drop WordPress and that's what keeps me my job, I understand because that's business and News Corp had to say, like, and I said, look, in the end, News Corp, WordPress is not owned

by one individual organization. If any organization were to fall down, like if automatic were to leave and funny to say that now, if automatic were to quit, everyone else still has access to the repos. Everyone still has access to the org. We could fork and move on. If we don't like it, we just. Lock, freeze our version because we use GitHub version control. We freeze our version. We decide what plugins we want to maintain. We decide what plugins to replace with a third party API, et cetera.

And we move on. But I think the issue now, if I were in that same job and I am having that now where I'm working with certain marketing teams and they're saying to me, and this is outside of Sotheby's, like I've worked with some enterprise, I'm one of the 1 percent of enterprise certified. WordPress developers on Upwork. So if you go on Upwork and you see my badge, I had an interview. I worked for Databricks. I actually built Databricks WordPress website, which is now a headless website.

And it's funny cause Databricks was not big three years ago. Now they're huge in the AI space. and. They're coming, not Databricks, but other companies are coming to me and saying, should we even bother investing in this WordPress website anymore? Should we just focus on moving to Webflow? And luckily where I sit, I'm like, listen, that's not really a conversation with me. We're going to use Google tag manager.

So whether you use Webflow, a custom react application or WordPress, there's a module that lets us inject Google tag manager with Google analytics, Fathom, whatever you're using. So we're abstracting away our analytics and that's kind of what I sell. Like I'm very good at abstracting things out, but now I think more and more people are going to have to say, how do I abstract this particular need?

If it's a, if it's a video website and you would never do video in the WordPress media manager, but now it's like, Hey, if I use something like Cloudinary, it's actually injecting the Cloudinary media manager into WordPress so that if we ever move away from WordPress. it's, there's no lag in the user interface. It's just gonna be cloud nary, but in different, in, in craft cloud, near and sat. I dunno if I'm even saying that right.

Static sta sta and I think that's how people are gonna have to think. And you can sell more, but it's not helping because people are saying, do I wanna spend any more money on WordPress? And I'm like, and that's like, that's with clients all the time. they always wanna change horses. And I'm like, listen, don't change horses while riding. Let's just continue on the GTM work.

But you're not wrong to think that way, keep an eye on it, and I'm going to build it in such a way that you don't have to worry about it. We're going to make it so it's abstracted, but you should worry about it.

It's there's there can't be a guy like Victor on Upwork That's just I just think of it as like smaller little gig type projects, but Upwork is good for you Can you help that break that down for the listener? Who's thinking I want to find work like Victor Maybe I should try Upwork

So let's say globally, it's 20. You're competing against big agencies that have big dollars sales teams. Can you answer the phone? The minute someone clicks the thing? Can you make a call? Can you take an enterprise call? So I saw it as a channel. And what happened was I got lucky at the time in 2020. Upwork was looking to professionalize their services. So I was on there and I put that I had worked with the Wall Street Journal. I put that I had worked with like, you know, certain organizations.

And then, when Databricks was looking for someone, Upwork was like, Hey, you have enterprise experience. We're going to put you in front of Databricks. So that's what got me to work. But I would say for most people, if you can be on Upwork, this is another way to think about it. If you're, and I don't know, cause SEO is. Customized by localization. AI is changing SEO now, but if someone goes and types in WordPress developer. St. Paul, Minnesota, right?

Your Upwork profile is going to rank higher than a LinkedIn profile. It's going to rank higher than your own website because Upwork does its own SEO and it's prioritized. So I would argue it's good. and, but the thing is to not undercut yourself. You're not, and I wrote an article. If you check my website, you do is victorious Upwork. I wrote and talked about, you're don't think of yourself competing against people.

You know, charging 5 an hour, or I think the limit's like 10 an hour over in India or Vietnam, think of yourself as like, they want to hire someone who has the cultural nuance and I would argue for like legal reasons, you know, like you have to hire within certain regions. and the other thing too, on Upwork is you're competing from, do you understand the U S market? And that was with Databricks. Databricks was running a U S based event.

And what was happening was, you know, these, some of these companies, they go and hire a developer from abroad and that developer. Doesn't have the eye to see like, Hey, you're doing this RTL. This is a very confusing interface. This interface is actually for that side of the hemisphere. You want your sidebar on the left. And it's little things like that, that add up to a client. And so that's what I did well on Upwork.

I'm getting back on there now because I kind of took a break from it because like what happened was, and this was another flux in the WordPress soup, so to speak, Gutenberg and the editor, because.

So many block editor tools are coming out with all these crazy block interface changes That I didn't know how to put my foot down with clients and say we're not doing that Now I can because of two things accessibility and analytics So now if a client wants all these woozhings all across the street like we can do that You're gonna lose hotspot tracking. You're gonna be not GDPR compliant. You're not gonna be accessible compliant. So We can do that visually, but you lose all this other stuff.

And that's kind of where, again, you get the clients. It's really about you're going to kiss a hundred frogs. You might get one good client at Upwork, but it's just part of your regular marketing and sales cycle.

So that is a completely different team when you're working in the engineering team, building the application that is used for content entry or, you know, e commerce, et cetera. When you're working with a small business or marketing, it is a huge thorn in the side because a lot of the times most of the clients you're getting are not actually engineering professional clients. They are clients who were sold blocks or, you know, whatever these, they were sold. which I like some of these cadence.

They're pretty slick. I use cadence. I use 20 for my own websites, which I haven't updated a long time, but I'm working on, I have three weeks off this coming benefit enterprise of three weeks off this coming month, to work and update my own websites and I'll use them, but I would hate for a client to have them because the client then it's not the client going to you. Hey, we want to implement this feature. It's the client saying, I broke my site by putting three different builders on it.

Can you make it look like this? And that's the crux of Gutenberg. Gutenberg is kind of sold as this Swiss army knife. And I don't listen. There's some great people out there in the Gutenberg space. I'm not going to name specific ones, but they're like, the web should be free. Let me design the way I want to design. Let it be free. I hate when people say that nothing should be free. You don't go to cars in a highway and say, let me be free on the road. Let me veer into traffic the way I want.

No, this is a utilitarian system that should be. Composed in a particular way. So if you're someone who needs to run a business, I think Gutenberg is terrible because it's too much. It's like, just think about it as a highway. And that's like a lot of the Gutenberg people and I, Richard Tabor, he is, and I love Richie's on Rich, Rich's stuff. 'cause he writes great stuff.

He worked, I think he's still, I dunno if he's still automatic, he has some of the best stuff out there, but he's one of those, let's call it like very. Free person about Gutenberg like let people do what they want.

No, that's we don't let them do with cars We don't let them do it with you know in the United States with guns and maybe we do I don't know But you got to control things and so that's where I think Gutenberg if you have the controls is beautiful But if you just let Gutenberg be free if you do free range Gutenberg, you're running for trouble.

And I think that's the thing you get the free range WordPress people who are like, well, maybe I want to, because in the end you get, and you know, engineers have had this conversation. You have a lot of engineers. In PHP space, you say it as well. They're like best practices and design patterns were just thought up by some guy. Yes, you're right, but they've been adopted by the world and the internet is no longer a free range place.

It is controlled by the walled gardens of SEO and Facebook and Google and Bing and all these other things. So in reality, we're no longer making free range websites. We're making a website that has to fit into an ecosystem. So I think we should make core. Build the best tools for end users to fit into the ecosystem. And if you're letting people have multiple H ones and you're letting people put the header and the footer in the header, you're not doing them any favors.

How do I look up an item? How do I look at whatever that's SEO. So as long as you're, but I think the SEO of 10 ways to use WordPress and one you never thought of, I hope that dies because that is the frustrating thing. When I'm someone like, I just want to Google, Gutenberg, disable, 2H1s. I'm going to stick with that one to keep it simple. Disable 2H1s. It's like 10 things you must clean up in your Gutenberg editor. 10 things. It's like, and it's, that drives me nuts.

Whereas now I can go to chat GPT or, you know, in any of these systems or, you know, I can use a download. I actually use a dash, which is a local, downloads the WordPress codecs. I use dash with my own LLM and I connect anthropic to dash and I use, and I type in a command and I type in. Remove H1 and it generates it automatically. And now I don't use Google anymore for that reason. I have my own local internet.

And so, that is hugely beneficial, but SEO is not dead because, and again, I think it's that also selling it in that way. Like I sell like a lot of user portals where like we'll have a client and they'll have like an internal user portal and I'm like, Hey.

They're like, Oh, why can't my subscribers find the course they're looking for because you didn't add the proper metadata to all of your videos and that metadata you need to use search WP or relevancy and we're going to make it now and we're going to reduce the churn of the subscribers to your user site and that's, you know, and that's something that is still SEO, but it's not the, you know, Air, you know, SEO that marketers are doing to rank websites.

It still is semantic usage cases, use cases for AI LMS, or, you know, bots.

So I've seen a lot of people select WordPress because They can control the slug, the server side of things. They have Yoast SEO and all these other various plugins. And for, you know, a little bit of core WordPress has that essence of SEO in it. And I'm really curious on how the SEO market shifts to how that impacts the adoption of WordPress, at least for a certain silo of user, you know, 2025 and the future.

Yeah, so that's always something that I'm always thinking of is like what that world of SEO impact has on WordPress as a publishing platform No direct question, but I don't know if you have a

She brought up an old, on Mac, that, you know, there used to be these database systems that you could have in your computer or like, what's the thing key was something in Microsoft. There used to be these kind of one note or like these things where you store a database. Right. But what I

We're creating our custom post type of artwork and that artwork, we were able to add all this metadata, the dates, the characters in the art, the type of painting, the type of a medium, the colors, all these things. And of course we use a little AI to go and read the colors from the painting to auto fill the metadata. That was pretty neat. and.

And that benefited her because if all of a sudden she were to move away from WordPress, she could put it into a digital asset management system like Cloudinary. But now also what I told her was you adding all this rich metadata means that now if anyone searches for your artwork or your images, they're gonna be able to find it easier. And when I was, cause I did go and look at other things and I was like, well, she can't.

I would have to do two things at once, because again, I'm building a digital asset management system using WordPress for her art, and I'm also building her a website so her art can be found. Well, and she doesn't need to be found. Her art is at the level where it's sold by auctioneers, etc. But just, you know, for her friends to go and find art or for like her to network with other artists. But I was saying to her, like, I would have to maintain two systems. I would have to go and build.

A system that stores this data and then I have to build a three systems, a connector to your CMS, whether it be Webflow, whatever, and Webflow isn't easy to do it. Squarespace is not easy to do it. Nothing else is easy. So in the end, WordPress has the ubiquity, and that's one of the things WordPress still does have the ubiquity of throw rock in Brooklyn. You're gonna find a librarian. A editor, or a kid who was in a rock band who's used it before. Right.

And so I think the ubiquity of the interface of WordPress still is great. because it's a lot of learning curve to learn, to use a lot of other systems. And that's why I think WordPress still shines in from an SEO perspective. Think of it that way. These SEO tools, if I were working in the SEO space and I was working with a publisher, I would say, look, all the work that you do updating this content.

And getting really rich metadata using something like a Yoast SE or Rank Math, that metadata is going to then make your API richer when you're doing your own custom LLM and serving that as a RAG, which Retrieval Access Generative System. because in the end, rags, they're not as smart as everyone thinks. They need to be trained. They need the data. The better that the data is, met, you know, the metadata is the better that data can be chunked and then served into the LLM system.

And that's where, again, that's SEO and SEO teams need to get better at spinning that and communicating that.

If you installed a bootstrap library, you could type in xs. 3 and it would give you three extra small columns and then you just fill it in, right? The LLM is only accelerating that. Right. So I think those people are cooked. People who generated, Hey, you know, I have clients, who do a video. Now all they do is make a YouTube video and think about the YouTube pipeline. They make a YouTube video. The transcription is AI. The description is AI. The thumbnail is AI.

They now turn that into a blog post. That's AI. that blog post has 10. Pull quotes that they could turn into 10 tweets. That's AI. They need to make 10 TikTok videos off of the video. That's AI They need to add captions. That's AI in the end. It's one person overseeing that AI pipeline But all those jobs have been deleted because there's no video editor going, finding clips. There's no video editor going and adding all the translation. There's no person listening and writing the transcription.

I mean, you get better quality, but the quality, the difference between 95 percent accuracy versus 99 percent accuracy is not as great as just having someone go and QA it for an hour. You have to kind of sit down and think about the cost. Those jobs are cooked. Whereas I think, and I, you know, in Upwork, the higher end jobs, they're willing to pay more money because It's where they're saying like, Hey, we cooked up this application with a developer and got to the MVP with AI.

Now we want to deploy it. We keep getting rejected from the app store. We keep getting rejected on this. Oh, by the way, our developer put the API keys in the GitHub repo because the AI didn't tell them not to. And so we got hacked. And I think that on the higher end, that's where the money's going to be. Cause it's going to be you as a developer. And I think it was like this guy, he's great. Santiago something. He's on Twitter. He's a Cuban guy.

And you said, your job is not getting, and I disagree with him. Your job is taken by AI. If you're a video editor, everyone I know in video editing, they're like, they're doing terribly. And again, because all these AI tools are coming out, but he's talking to developers and he says, your job is not going to be taken by AI. Your job is going to be taken by the person who knows how to use AI. And that really is for someone like myself. Like you're right. Like I used to have to go and go, okay.

Okay. I hadn't done a react application in a while. I'm like, let me go. Okay. I have to go get, create react app, go to the documentation, not anthropic. I need to create a basic react application that tells me this, it's going to go into this API, generate this, and then this. But then as a developer, I had to know, you know, it came back and I was like, you made that call, but you didn't ask for API key. Where are you getting this data? It's like, Oh, we use mock data. And I'm like, okay.

So like. use the API key, use the API key, but in the API key failed, and I said, I'm running on a local host without SSH. It's not going to work. You need to use a fallback for the mock data so that when it falls back, it uses the mock data and it should display a warning at the top to say mock data being used so that I know that when I'm running the application, it's not and you have to know that stuff. If you're as a developer, if you've been working long enough.

You know, those things like you're the one who has to think like that. So it's that's the high level developers are going to do really well with AI, in my opinion. But the low level ones, again, if you were doing anything that it was you just repeating yourself over and over again, that job is going to be gone soon.

I'm just dragging and dropping in WordPress Allah. I don't know, 15, 18 years ago, whenever that was. so I'm building these little apps and what I have found is a new found respect, for this monolithic app. If I can call it that a monolithic WordPress app, because while I can build these little ad hoc things, every single one is different. The way that this AI is generating it, it's recommending. Database structure to me differently. It's recommending frameworks differently.

It's recommending icons differently, right? Like, and what icons it's going to use to, to make these apps. What that has done to me is like, wow, I can build these things really quick, but there is a inconsistency across the board and a real heavy sustainability.

factor like you were just saying there, you might lose these little tasks to AI, but there still needs to be this human oversight to make sure it's working correctly because, okay, great, I can build these little apps, but they're all different and they're all going to be maintained differently. Whereas that newfound respect to the monolithic app of WordPress to me is like, oh, I could. I could just use WordPress for my user management, for my database structure, for my posts and my pages.

and I'll just use AI to augment that. Don't try to use AI to replace it because there's thousands of people overseeing WordPress. but use it and then build it with WordPress and then accelerate it potentially with AI. That's a thinking I have for the next few years, a couple of years, two to three years with AI and WordPress. because. Yeah, I mean, I can just see that as extending WordPress instead of replacing WordPress. That's my sort of perception of this

WordPress builder and then the WordPress builder goes installs another page builder and then all of a sudden when they go install and this is I find it is why I like accessibility and analytics every single time it all of a sudden gets to the, AI and analytics, AI, the analytics and accessibility part, they go and install an accessibility plugin or an AI, an analytics plugin and they're like, why isn't it seeing that?

Oh, because The analytics plugin can't tell whether you're using Bloxy or this and you have three page builders installed and one made the header and one made this and so when you tick the box in the analytics tool that says I use Bloxy. It's going to only write all the analytics for block C, but then all of a sudden you're using cadence for this and this, for that, then that's what AI does.

Like you were saying before, like I had AI bringing in like three or four different libraries and I was like, Hey, please use this library instead because I'm building it for this application stack and I need to use the library. And then it tried to argue with me and it's like, well, this library is better. And I'm like, get out of junior developer. Like I don't like we're using this library, you know. And so, yeah, the AI, it backtalks sometimes and you got to like, you know, correct it.

So, yeah.

you can go and find my Twitter if you type Victor Ramirez WordPress.