AI Killing Your Traffic?

Hope you had a great weekend. 😎

I had my whole family over on Saturday for a nice day hang-out… and Saturday night we went to our local community theater to support my daughter who is playing a role there. She’s such a little artist. 😍

Time to kick off another productive week here…

Last week, I tested out a really cool option for connecting your site to Stripe to take payments. And it even supports subscriptions for free. 😍 I’ll tell you about it.

I also want to talk a bit about AI, your web traffic… and how to approach the problem of declining traffic. I’ve been hearing about reports of declining traffic across many different sectors. Truth is, AI has changed the landscape.

So, let’s roll straight into it….

A New Way To Do Subscriptions With WooCommerce (For Free)

Got a membership site or recurring subscription that your site is billing?

This last week, I did a quick test on another Stripe plugin for WooCommerce called StellarPay. This is a really nice plugin. In some ways, I wish I was already using it.

It is actually part of the same family of products as Kadence, Learndash, SolidWP and others. It has an absolutely gorgeous dashboard where you can see and manage all your Stripe transactions and subscriptions (more on that in a minute) right from inside of WordPress.

StellarPay is a beautiful way to set up your site to process payments through Stripe. It also has a deep usage of the Stripe API, making it so that you can see your Stripe balance, pay-outs, and a ton of information about your Stripe account right from within WordPress.

It is also completely free.

Interestingly, though, is that it also enables you to set up subscriptions. This is something that I typically install WooCommerce Subscriptions for. And WooCommerce Subscriptions is not a freebie. If you pay for a support license for it, the annual charge is actually rather ridiculous ($279/year). StellarPay can do it for free.

Transitioning from the normal WooCommerce Subscriptions to StellarPay would be an absolute torture session. I was tempted. I thought about it. 😇 But, it would be a ton of work and here’s why…

WooCommerce Subscriptions handles subscriptions “in house”. It controls the billing and the timing of subscriptions. The individual charges can be processed through Stripe, but those renewals are each their own individual transaction. In other words, there’s no subscription within Stripe itself.

With StellarPay, it is setting up the subscription within Stripe. Stripe handles it and reports back to your site. It uses Stripe’s own native ability to manage and control subscriptions.

There are absolutely pros and cons to both approaches.

By using Stripe to process subscriptions, you get the nice reporting within Stripe of your subscription revenue, subscriber MRR, etc. It also makes your subscriptions more portable. Your site could basically shut off and your subscriptions would still be working. Stripe is also free for this (except for transaction charges).

On the other hand, using Stripe subscriptions with StellarPay currently offers less flexibility. For instance, there are no variable subscriptions nor any subscription switching. When you go to set up a product, here are your options:

That’s simple and convenient, but not as flexible.

For many, that won’t matter. For some sites, it will. When using WooCommerce Subscriptions, you have more control. You can allow people to switch between subscriptions, for instance. You can also control individual subscriptions easily since it is all controlled in-house. Want to change the renewal date or make a quick change to their subscription? No problem with WooCommerce Subscriptions.

For now, I’m still going to be sticking with WooCommerce Subscriptions for most sites I build for people. But, there’s no doubt that StellarPay looks solid.

For a brand new business where you don’t have any existing subscriptions yet to worry about, I’d strongly consider using StellarPay.

One cool thing, through…

Even if you have an existing store and are already integrated with Stripe, you can still use Stellpay’s plugin to be able to see and manage your Stripe account from inside WordPress. You can just keep the gateway functionality disabled, but use StellarPay just for that reporting. You won’t have every feature, but still kinda cool. 😎

This Week In Concierge

As I mentioned last week, in addition to all of the ongoing client projects going on with my awesome Concierge clients, I’m also working on the first version of a core plugin for Concierge itself.

I have two main goals with this plugin:

• To make some of the core benefits of the Concierge program more easily accessible from within WordPress
• To enhance the value of Concierge even further with more effective communication to clients

Part of this is I’m creating a new client portal. It will be accessible directly from inside the plugin, but this portal is going to be a knowledge-base specific to Concierge clients. I have some cool things planned in there over time. 😇

I also want to have a communication system that will allow me to communicate to clients en mass. I know I can always email clients, but what I’d like is an announcement stream that will then show a notification on their Concierge dashboard (in WordPress) when there’s something new that apples to everyone.

For instance, to let clients know I’ve done updates. Or when there’s news about a plugin that many of my clients use.

Right now, I have private Basecamp projects with almost all of my clients. But, I’d also like a way to communicate to all Concierge clients at once…. right through their WordPress dashboards. 😎

I’ve even dabbled with the idea of having a private community for my Concierge clients. Not sure yet. For any of my clients reading this, got any thoughts on the matter? 😎

Concierge was always meant to be far more than just a WordPress maintenance program. I want it to fully live up to that word “concierge”.

WordPress Quick Bits

WordPress Trademark Failure. It looks like Matt tried to secure the trademarks for “hosted WordPress” and “managed WordPress. And, he failed. At least for now. The US Patent and Trademark Office basically said those terms “hosted” and “managed” just described services which use WordPress… and that the owner of the WordPress trademark can’t control the wording in which the mark is used. Of course, the government is correct on this one. And it would have been a bad precedent if suddenly “managed WordPress” was covered under his trademark. You know how many hosting companies offer that? 🤪 We’ll see how this progresses, but it would not be good if this application was ultimately approved.

WordCamp Asia. WordCamp Asia was going on last week and it looked like a who’s who in the WordPress world. If you’re curious, you can check out the live streams from the conference over on Youtube. Could be that the fact so many WordPress developers were at the conference is why last week was a bit of a slow news week for WordPress. 😜

WordPress Sentiment Remains High. Despite the drama with Mullenweg and WPEngine and the resulting pearl clutching, the overall sentiment in the world of WordPress remains very high… holding at 96% positive. Like I’ve said before, the Matt/WPEngine drama is just inside baseball for people who hang in the WordPress groups. For most of the world of people using WordPress, they don’t even know about it.

WordPress Getting More Secure. FWIW, the password algorithm in the upcoming WordPress 6.8 release will be changed. It will begin using bcrypt. This will make it much tougher to crack a password. This has been a recommendation in the WP world for many years

WordPress in 2025. A new (and nice looking) report was put out on WordPress.org called WordPress in 2025. The report is definitely self-serving to promote WordPress, which is as you’d expect. It even says that innovation is slowing down for closed-source CMSs… a “fact” that I don’t think survives a real look at the facts. Not saying closed-source is better (it isn’t), but one can’t say that platforms like WebFlow have been sitting still. But, whatever. 🤷‍♂️

WPFusion 2024 Review. Jack from WP Fusion releases an annual report every year… and he just released his 2024 report. 64 core updates to WP Fusion in 2024 and it now supports 60 different CRMs. But, the report also has some interesting metrics about the space. For instance, ActiveCampaign, Keap and Ontraport are on the decline while HighLevel, Hubspot and Mailchimp have increased. 83% of WP Fusion use WooCommerce as their store platform. Almost the same use Learndash as their course system. Interesting stuff.

Is AI Killing Your Traffic? Here’s How To Survive.

I’ve talked with a lot of site owners that have talked about their web traffic dipping over the last many months. Some more than others. Even on my own site, I’ve seen traffic dips over an extended timeframe. While my traffic has been fairly steady for the last year or more, truth is I get about half the traffic I used to a few years ago.

I don’t really care, though, because I make more money anyway. 😎 But, my revenue doesn’t depend on my traffic and that’s a good thing.

It comes down to search algorithm changes and artificial intelligence. And frankly, if you don’t adapt, the situation won’t get any better and your traffic will just dip off to zero.

See, companies like Google have long done algorithm changes to their search results in an effort to reduce the noise and surface the really good stuff. That’s the idea, anyway.

AI tools came along and made it super easy to create more noise. AI tools basically just pump out generic, basic content and you know a lot of people are using these tools to do just that. They’re “writing” articles using AI and mass producing a bunch of garbage.

Not only that, but search engines themselves are using AI to summarize things and provide AI answers right in the results. This makes it less likely people need to click over to the actual result.

So, basic content is dying. Generic content is all but dead already. There’s just SOOOO much of it already that it is just noise now. And it has gotten even worse because now AI can just write stuff like that and you don’t need even humans to do it.

So, where does this leave content marketers and bloggers? Just pack it in and go home and leave it to the computers? 😜

Nah. Things have just changed.

You just can’t publish surface-level, basic, generic content anymore and make a dent. You’ll just be another echo in the echo chamber. With so many people using AI to produce the same kinds of stuff, everybody just looks the same.

So, in my view, you have to now approach this in two ways. In short…

• Create content that connects at a human level that AI cannot. In other words, a personal brand and being more “out there” as a person. It is why a lot of my content these days focuses on video.
• Create content that gets deeper. Dives into your experience, your insights, etc.

Really, it comes down to being a true subject matter expert about whatever you’re doing… and also being willing to get out there and be truly personable about how you communicate that to your viewers.

You’ve gotta dive deeper these days. Because, the kids in the shallow end of the pool are all yelling at each other with AI now.

In my opinion, there are some reasons why my own traffic hasn’t decreased in the last year and I’m actually making more money anyway. In my opinion, it is because….

• I create my content in a way which isn’t easy to duplicate. My written stuff tends to be deeper and I inject a lot of personality into it. And I do a lot of videos.
• I derive from my experience. I have a pretty deep and practical working knowledge of what I do so I can deliver insights and judgement that AI could never do. Trust me, too…. AI tools talk about WordPress stuff all the time, but often the advice is just stupid. 😜 People with real experience still matter a lot.

When it comes to traffic today, you need to lean in with deeper content delivered in a personal way. Use that at the top of your marketing funnel. Get more specific.

Don’t put out old-school list posts or generic theoretical advice on stuff you’ve never actually done. You’re just an echo when you do that. It doesn’t work well anymore because AI can replace you pretty easily.

A lot of talk out there about AI replacing jobs, right? And the jobs AI will replace first are the generic jobs that don’t require very much skill.

Think of it exactly like that when it comes to your content. Basic content that doesn’t require much skill is being replaced by AI.

Go deeper and be more human and you’ll be fine.