I Left WordPress (On One Site)

Coming to you this morning from my RV… in Fort Wilderness. It’s the RV campground at Disney. Cool place. But, heading back this morning.

So, last week, I re-built my website. By talking it into place. I’ll tell you about it. Let’s roll…

I Talked My Website Into Existence

Two weeks ago, I told you WordPress isn’t a dinosaur. It’s a harness. I also took a little swipe at folks who have AI build them a custom site from scratch. I said it was like hiring a robot to help you build your own car out of raw parts when you could just… go buy a car.

Well. 🤪

This past week, I rebuilt DavidRisley.com. Without WordPress. And I didn’t write a line of code to do it. I just talked it through with an AI agent.

So yeah… I need to eat a few of those words. Not all of them, though. I’ll get to why.

See, my personal site has been on WordPress forever. Because…. that’s just how I build websites. Even though it is a pretty simple site, I knew HOW to quickly and easily build the site on WordPress. So, it was my default. But it isn’t a BUSY site the way Blog Marketing Academy is. It has no client dashboards, no store, no CRM. It’s pages, blog posts, my Founder’s Memo videos, and some testimonials. It’s just…. content.

So I made it my sandbox. I wanted to know what it actually looks like to run a website by directing an AI instead of clicking around a dashboard. And I’d much rather find the potholes on my own site than on a client’s.

In one working session (about 3 hours, and part of that was me learning how it all works to begin with), Claude and I matched the existing design and replaced two custom WordPress plugins I’d had built for that site. We added a proper video section and a testimonials page, and took the whole thing live. New YouTube videos and new testimonials now show up on the site automatically. The homepage photo went from 274KB to 15KB without me even asking.

No page builder. No theme settings panel. No Gutenberg blocks or Kadence. No plugin updates, and a whole lot less to worry about security-wise. I described what I wanted, looked at what came back, and said what to change. Over and over.

That’s the part I keep thinking about.

For 20 years, the big question in websites was “how do humans edit a website?” WordPress won that one fair and square. Dashboard, visual editor, a plugin for everything.

In fact, when you get right down to it, a mouse and keyboard aren’t natural for us humans. Typing on little keys and clicking on buttons on screen and dragging and dropping…. that’s not what we humans naturally do. We learn the skill, but many find themselves confused and at a loss when sitting inside of the WordPress admin panel.

But, what do us humans do pretty naturally? We TALK. We can just…. say what we want. And, a website is just another output.

The new question is “how does an AI agent edit a website?” And the answer isn’t a dashboard. Agents don’t want to click through menus or drag blocks around. They work best with plain text files, and that’s all my new site is… a folder of files. (For the nerds, it’s built with Astro. For everybody else, it doesn’t matter.)

So the skill I was using wasn’t web design. It wasn’t coding either. It was direction. Deciding what I wanted. Reviewing what came back. Getting really specific about what was wrong with it. That’s the same shift I’ve been writing about with AI agents across the whole business. Less doing. More deciding.

Becoming an orchestrator…. not a web developer.

So, was I wrong two weeks ago?

Half wrong. I said a handful of pages that rarely changes doesn’t need WordPress, and DavidRisley.com just proved that. David Risley – a native of WordPress – is no longer using WordPress on his personal site. 🤯 What I underestimated was how fast “content site” is becoming its own category. It has a genuinely better way to run it now, if an AI is doing the hands-on work.

What I still believe is that once your site has to do things (memberships, a store, logins, email marketing), WordPress is still the engine. It’s a great harness for that. Blog Marketing Academy isn’t leaving WordPress. I’ll get into how I’m thinking about that split in the second article below.

But here’s what I really want you to take away…

The cost of changing your mind about your website just collapsed. You know that redesign you’ve put off for two years because it felt like a months-long project? It’s getting closer to an afternoon. Mine took about three hours. Don’t get me wrong…. there’s still skill needed for this. There’s still tech stuff to learn. But, it is fundamentally different. Because…. it is higher level. You’re being the orchestrator. The conductor of the orchestra. It’s a completely different job than knowing where every little button is.

So the real question isn’t “can I afford to rebuild this?” anymore. It’s “do I actually know what I want it to be?” That one’s still on you. 😇

WordPress News & Updates

A guy sold his internal linking plugin for $2.7 million. Spencer Haws built Link Whisper, grew it to roughly $90,000 a month in average revenue over its final year, and cashed out. No funding round, no 40-person team… just one unglamorous plugin that solved one annoying problem really well. Think about that if somebody’s ever talked you out of building something small. The numbers are here.

The Events Calendar has two critical holes and 600,000 sites to patch. Both rated 9.8, both triggered by a crafted comment on a public event page, and one is already being exploited in the wild. Fixed in 6.17.4.1. If you’ve got comments enabled on events, that’s the entire attack surface… update today, or turn event comments off until you do. Details here.

Everybody’s scared of getting hacked. Almost nobody has a plan. Melapress surveyed 319 people this year… concern about security averaged 7.85 out of 10, 67.7% had already lived through an incident, and only 27.9% had any kind of recovery plan. That gap is the whole problem. Knowing what you’d actually do at 2am when your site is serving pharma spam is a completely different skill than worrying about it. Survey results here.

Two numbers separate the profitable web businesses from everybody else. The Admin Bar surveyed 622 agency owners and freelancers, and GravityKit went digging in the raw data: charge $5,000 or more per project and keep at least a quarter of your revenue on retainer, and you’re profitable 60.3% of the time. Miss both and it drops to 22.6%. Recurring revenue isn’t the nice-to-have part of the model… it is the model. Full survey here.

That AI SEO checklist you’ve been meaning to get to? Mostly noise. Sybre Waaijer went through his own server logs and separated the training crawlers from the search crawlers from the fetches that only happen when a human asks a question. Not one request for llms.txt from ChatGPT, Claude, or Grok. One dataset isn’t the whole web, but it’s a lot more evidence than most of what’s being sold as AI SEO strategy right now. His breakdown.

AI-generated HTML that actually lands as real blocks. Human Made open-sourced Block Runner, a command-line tool (and agent skill) that converts HTML into native Gutenberg blocks and checks every result against headless Gutenberg, instead of dumping the whole thing into one giant Custom HTML block. Works with Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex. If you’ve ever asked an AI to “build a page” and gotten back an unusable lump of markup, this is the missing piece. On GitHub.

Try a new theme on your real site without anybody seeing it. WP Shipyard lets an admin preview another installed theme against your actual content while visitors keep seeing the live one… the switch lives in your browser until you activate it for everyone. Content edits still hit the live site, so mind that distinction. But for answering “what would this look like with our actual posts in it,” it beats spinning up a staging clone. Take a look.

FluentAuth got rewritten from scratch, and it’s still free. Passkeys, 2FA by role, brute-force limits per IP and per account, a security checklist that hunts down PHP files in your uploads folder and dormant admin accounts, plus a “Been Hacked?” screen that signs everyone out and reinstalls clean core files. No firewall by design… Jewel figures your host or Cloudflare does that better, and he’s right. Unlimited sites, nothing moving behind a paywall later. What’s in 3.0.

The next default WordPress theme is called Ipsum, ending 16 years of “Twenty-Something” names. It’s deliberately minimal… a blank canvas rather than a demo site you have to gut first, and Mullenweg is framing it as agent-friendly, which tells you plenty about where core’s head is at. Available to test now. Meet Ipsum.

FluentCommunity’s quizzes finally grew up. 2.11 adds six question types (true/false, written answer, fill in the blank, ordering, matching, image matching), grades everything server-side so the answers never sit in the student’s browser, and shows one question at a time with a progress bar instead of a wall. You can also attach an explanation to any question… a score tells them how they did, an explanation tells them what to fix. Space tabs are drag-to-reorder now too. Release notes.

Thrive Leads got a full rebuild. New dashboard, a 4-step wizard for building a form instead of the old scavenger hunt, all four form types living on one screen, and priorities for when multiple campaigns want the same spot on the page. Everything you already built migrated over on its own, and it’s free on existing licenses. What changed.

WordPress Is Becoming the Engine, Not the Car

So after reading the article above, you might be wondering… is David leaving WordPress?

Nope. Not even close. But my thinking about what WordPress is for has definitely shifted. So let me lay it out…

For most people reading this, WordPress is still the right answer. Full stop. If your site is working for you, there’s nothing here you need to act on. But for years, WordPress was the default for every kind of website, and that part is changing. It’s no longer the only game in town when it comes to content.

Look at what a website actually does, and it breaks into two jobs.

Job one is content. Pages, blog posts, videos, testimonials. Stuff people read and watch. It doesn’t change much, and it doesn’t need to do anything.

Job two is the dynamic stuff. Logins, memberships, a store, email marketing, forms, customer accounts. Where people actually interact with your business and things happen behind the scenes.

WordPress does both. That’s always been its superpower… one platform, one place, everything talking to everything.

But for the content job, there are real alternatives now. Astro is the one I’ve been playing with. It builds your site out of plain text files, with no database, no plugins, and no PHP. It has no admin panel. It is basically…. a framework. My pages and articles are literally markdown files (basically plain text). And the site is compiled and versions are stored on GitHub. Like I said…. very different than WordPress.

It is just files turned into a very fast website. And as I talked about above, that happens to be exactly the format AI agents work best with. So you can run a blog or a content site by directing an AI instead of clicking around a dashboard.

Think about this… by using an AI agent, you can change the layout. Move things around. It can look at your entire content library cohesively… help you update and maintain all of it. No plugins. No security crap. No performance optimizations needed because it is insanely fast right out of the box. No database. It is so different that it will be fundamentally confusing at first if you’re firmly used to a CMS like WordPress. I spent my first hour on this literally having Claude explain it to me like I’m a 5-year old. 😜

And you may be thinking… “But, you can use AI with WordPress”. And absolutely, you’re correct. But, there’s no doubt that WordPress brings additional layers to things. Plugins… themes…. caching…. performance tweaks…. plugin conflicts…. user account security…. etc. For a content site, you don’t need a lot of that. You can collapse the entire stack and remove the layers. And what you get is a streamlined site which is incredibly easy to manage directly using AI agents and…. talking to it.

For the dynamic job, though, it’s a different story…

You can’t install a plugin on an Astro site and suddenly have a full email marketing platform like you get with FluentCRM. You can’t drop in WooCommerce and have a store. You’d have to do those things differently… and in the “modern” web world, differently usually means renting them. One service for logins, another for payments, another for email, another for your community, another for courses. Five or six monthly bills from five or six companies, all stitched together, any of which can change their pricing or their terms whenever they please.

That’s rented land. And you know how I feel about that. 🤪

This is where WordPress shines. It’s not really a “website builder” anymore. It’s closer to a web application. The engine that runs the interactive parts of your business, on a server you control, where all the pieces already work together. Sure, you can use AI to custom build your own app if you want. But, WordPress is a great harness where you can just plug pieces into it that work.

So here’s what I’m chewing on for Blog Marketing Academy…

What I might do is move the front of the site (the public-facing pages and the blog) over to something like Astro. That’s the part I’d love to run by directing an AI. WordPress would keep running behind it as the application… handling client logins, FluentCRM, payments, and everything else it’s great at.

WordPress becomes the engine. The front end becomes the part I can reshape just by describing what I want.

To be clear, this is a “considering,” not a “doing.” DavidRisley.com was the test run, and I learned a lot. BMA is a much bigger animal with a lot more moving parts, and I’m not about to tear it apart on a whim. But, I am thinking about it holistically.

It’s a genuinely different way to think about a website. And the best part is you don’t have to choose sides. You don’t have to “leave WordPress” to take advantage of what’s new. You can use each tool for what it’s best at.

Own the core. Rent only the specialists. And increasingly… direct the rest.

I’ll keep you in the loop for how things evolve for me on this front.