WordCamp US 2026 had 60+ sessions. Most of them I won’t remember in a week.
These six stayed with me.
They covered migration, creator economy, agency positioning, plugin audits, Substack exits, and the agentic web. But what connected all of them was the same underlying question: what does it actually take to build something that lasts on WordPress in 2026?
If you missed the conference, or sat in different rooms, here are the ones I think are worth 30 minutes of your time. I’ve linked each video below and added my take on why it stuck with me.
1. When the platform belongs to its users: migrating Daily Kos at scale
Daily Kos is a 23-year-old progressive political platform with 1.5 million posts, 2.7 million users, and 88 million comments. In early 2026, they moved the whole thing off a crumbling custom Ruby/Pearl CMS onto WordPress. XWP’s Ben Greeley and Daily Kos CTO Allison McHenry walked through how they pulled it off.
The technical side is genuinely interesting. Parallelizing the migration with Action Scheduler cut weeks of processing down to days. They moved 1.4 million images by having WordPress VIP upload them in bulk rather than migrating one by one. They ran daily delta migrations in the final stretch so there would be no massive last-minute content dump at launch.
But the technical work was the easy part. The harder problem was that 85% of Daily Kos’s revenue comes directly from its readers. These are people who log in daily, write their own posts, and fund the platform. Losing their trust would have ended the business.
“The community that uses the site also supports the site. They pay my salary. We have to care about the community’s experience.”
– Allison McHenry, CTO at Daily Kos
The thing that stood out to me was the community advisory panel. Before the migration started, the team brought in fewer than 10 high-profile community members and gave them a real seat at the table, not a feedback form or a newsletter update. These people sat in vendor meetings, read the RFP responses, and helped explain decisions to the wider community in a way that didn’t sound like it was coming from staff.
My take: Most agencies treat migration as a technical handoff. Daily Kos treated it as a community management problem that happened to have a technical component. That order of priority is what made the difference. If you are planning a big WordPress migration, the groundwork you do with your users before a single line of code moves matters more than the migration script itself.
2. How The Ankler outgrew Substack and built an independent platform on WordPress
The Ankler covers Hollywood. 15 newsletters, around $10 million in annual revenue, 150,000 subscribers. In April 2026 they moved off Substack onto WordPress. XWP’s Nikki Catlin delivered this one, and it is the clearest counter-argument to the “publishers are fleeing WordPress” narrative you will hear anywhere.
The Ankler didn’t leave Substack because Substack failed them. They left because they outgrew it. One paid tier works when you’re a solo creator. It does not work when you have a dozen columnists who are brands in their own right, direct ad deals with studios, and plans for events and video. The move came down to three things: ownership of subscriber data, control of ad inventory, and pricing flexibility.
The Substack export situation is a mess worth knowing about if you ever plan to migrate a publication off the platform. You get words and almost nothing else. No images (24,000 of them were missing), no author data, no SEO titles, no canonicals, no comments. Two of their three export attempts hung for 28 hours each. They ended up building a custom JSON API to scrape the relational metadata that the export didn’t include.
“An inbox is almost a one-way rented channel. Everything that publishing and media industries are chasing right now, retention, loyalty, trust, engagement, two-way interaction, you need a destination that you own. A newsletter is an incredible front door.”
– Nikki Catlin, Chief Delivery Officer at XWP (on The Ankler)
One detail that impressed me: the previous Substack editor let editors hand-place the paywall inside each post at the exact moment most likely to convert a reader. 2,000 posts had these custom paywall positions. Rather than wiping them and defaulting to “cut after paragraph two,” the team wrapped the content below each marker into a password-restricted block and preserved every one of those editorial decisions.
My take: I run nishishere.com and I moved content off Substack myself. The missing images and the metadata gap frustrated me exactly the way Nikki described. What I didn’t appreciate until watching this session was how much editorial value can be quietly destroyed in a migration if you aren’t looking for it. Also: WordPress is not the platform people are leaving. It is the platform growing businesses move to when they need to own something.
3. The WordPress agency is becoming invisible: why that is a good thing
Vivek Jain is the Chief Business Officer at Rtcamp. He has spent 15 years as the first point of contact for enterprise clients, and over the last few years he has watched four things change simultaneously.
RFPs used to start with platform requirements. Now they start with business outcomes. The people in the room used to be IT heads. Now they are CMOs, Directors of Content Operations, and CROs. The agencies Rtcamp competes against are no longer other WordPress shops. They are digital experience firms and marketing agencies that don’t mention WordPress at all. Clients no longer open with “we want to move to WordPress” either. They open with “we want to modernize our marketing operations.”
Vivek’s car-buying story landed well. He walked into Volkswagen and got a full brief on engine torque and top speed. He walked into Suzuki and got asked where he drives, how big his family is, and what he wants the experience to feel like. He bought the Suzuki. His point: customers move toward whoever mirrors their problem back to them, not whoever has the most impressive technical answer.
“We don’t lead with WordPress. We mention WordPress at the end of the document. We lead with the solution we can give to them. We always want to come across as WordPress experts, but as an outcome-solving company who can do things for you with WordPress.”
– Vivek Jain, Chief Business Officer at Rtcamp
His practical shift at Rtcamp: they now mention WordPress at the end of proposals, not the beginning. They lead with what problem they can solve, and then show how WordPress is the answer to that specific question. They also don’t stop at site delivery. They track whether clients hit the conversion or editorial velocity goals they articulated at the start of the engagement.
My take: I’m not an agency owner but this session taught me something about how the whole ecosystem is maturing. When enterprises stop asking for “WordPress work” and start asking for outcomes, it means the platform has become trusted infrastructure, not a differentiator. That’s actually a good position for WordPress to be in. For agencies: if your clients describe you as their WordPress partner, you’re still being seen through the wrong lens.
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4. A practical playbook for auditing and simplifying complex WordPress sites
Matt Dorman has inherited a lot of messy WordPress sites. This session was built around two real audits he ran before the conference, two sites with a combined 100 plugins.
How does a site end up with 100 plugins? One at a time, always for a reason. A campaign needs a popup. A new developer prefers a different form builder and adds it without removing the old one. An SEO tool gets swapped and nobody deletes the previous one. People leave, institutional knowledge walks out with them, and nobody touches the plugins because they are afraid of breaking something.
The audit across those two sites found three in ten plugins doing nothing useful at all. Twenty deactivated plugins still deployed. A plugin discontinued by its vendor in 2019. A helper plugin for a calendar plugin that no longer existed. An empty plugin directory. And one active plugin with a readme that described it as a “temporary fix.” Last updated 11 years ago, last tested on WordPress 4.2.
“None of this is solved by trying harder. It really needs a method.”
– Matt Dorman
His sequencing advice is the practical part: start with the easy wins (inactive and clearly unused plugins), move to security vulnerabilities, then work on consolidation where you need someone else’s sign-off, and save custom plugin rewrites for last. The performance gains from cleaning up options bloat alone moved some pages from hundreds-of-milliseconds improvements to full seconds.
He also shipped a GitHub plugin specifically designed to scan plugin files for what they actually do rather than what their readme claims, which is the only honest way to evaluate custom plugins.
My take: I manage marketing for three WordPress products, so I spend a lot of time on WordPress sites. Plugin bloat is real and it slows everything down in ways that compound slowly until they’re suddenly obvious. The part that resonated most is that nobody cleans this up because nobody wants to be responsible for breaking production. Matt’s method gives you the confidence to act because you understand what you’re removing before you remove it.
5. The future of creator commerce: building a business beyond ads
Chandice Probst runs Tastemaker Conference, which brings together 500 of the biggest food creators in the world. She’s also been a creator herself for 18 years, since a celiac disease diagnosis sent her into gluten-free cooking and never looked back.
She opened with three questions: if Google disappeared, would your business survive? If Instagram disappeared? If AI answered your audience’s questions before they clicked? The last one was the point. Generic information is now abundant and free. What AI cannot replace is 18 years of specific trust with a specific audience about a specific thing.
Her framework puts audience first, then community, then trust, then products. Skip trust and jump to selling and conversion drops. She had a live example from that week: Alex Cooper, host of Call Her Daddy with millions of followers, launched a wellness drink called Unwell. It failed. Reach without a relevant product for that audience is not a business. Chandice’s own test was the same. She tried sharing fashion content to her gluten-free food audience. Nothing converted. When she shares gluten-free bread recommendations, people buy immediately.
“Your content is the vehicle for everything you’re going to build, but trust is the asset. I want you to remember that.”
– Chandice Probst
The commercial model she described is a natural extension of this: brands are shifting budgets away from celebrities and toward micro-influencers with genuine conversion. They’re paying for the relationship, not the follower count. And for creators building their own products, she is blunt: never too soon to prime your audience to buy. Give value three times, then make the ask. And what you sell has to solve the problem your audience actually has, not a random opportunity you spotted.
My take: This is the session I connected with most personally because I care about the creator economy. Chandice was the most engaging speaker at the whole conference. Her point about trust as the real asset cuts across everything. For WP founders especially: your users do not buy your plugin because it exists. They buy it because they trust that you understand their problem. That trust is built long before the sale, the same way Chandice builds it before she ever asks her audience to buy anything.
6. The agentic web is coming: is WordPress ready?
Miriam Schwab delivered the most technically substantive session of the conference. She is also the most honest person I’ve seen talk about this topic, because she spent real time testing her own assumptions and reporting back when they didn’t hold up.
The framing: 50% of web traffic is already non-human. 68% of US Google searches end without a click. AI agents don’t browse the web the way humans do. They read it, query it, and will eventually act on it. WordPress runs 40.7% of the web, so what happens to agents and what happens to WordPress are connected.
She walked through what “agent ready” actually means technically: stable URLs, structured data, semantic HTML, markdown versions of pages for cleaner agent consumption, and eventually MCP endpoints that let agents take actions directly on your site. Since WordPress 7, the infrastructure is there: the WP AI Client, the MCP Adapter plugin (free), and the Abilities API that defines what an agent can do on a site.
She built a Claude Code routine that reads the website specification checklist from specification.website (maintained by Joost de Valk of Yoast), connects to her WordPress site through the MCP adapter, and generates a report on what to fix. She got her “Is It Agent Ready” score from 51 to 86.
“Being agent ready doesn’t mean it’s open season. It means you can be the one setting the terms. In this AI world, it’s either that or being invisible.”
– Miriam Schwab
Then she tested whether any of it mattered and found that Claude just used web fetch to read her pages directly, completely ignoring her markdown files, her LLMs.txt, and every agent-ready signal she’d added. The agents don’t need your fancy setup. They figured out their own way to read the web.
Her conclusion: the agent readiness score is mostly a vanity metric right now. The one thing actually required in the 21-point checklist is stable URLs, which you should have anyway. Keep building for humans first. The more accessible a site is to people, the more readable it is to machines.
My take: This is the session most WordPress founders are still sleeping on. The shift to agentic web access is real and moving fast, and the gap between people who understand the infrastructure and people who don’t is going to matter. Miriam’s core message: understand what’s being built and start paying attention now. If you’re not sure where your site stands, run the technical audit she described. And if you don’t have time to figure it out yourself, get help from someone who does before this shift accelerates.
A few threads that ran through all six
Migration always has a human layer that’s harder than the technical one. Daily Kos and The Ankler both figured this out. The sites that struggle in migration are the ones that treat users, subscribers, or communities as a data problem rather than a trust problem.
Owning your platform is not a nice-to-have. It’s the foundation everything else is built on. The Ankler couldn’t control their ad sizes on Substack. Daily Kos couldn’t add a login button. Miriam can’t configure how agents interact with her site unless she owns the infrastructure. WordPress keeps coming up as the answer to this question for a reason.
Chandice said it most directly but it ran through every session: trust is the actual asset. Agencies that lead with WordPress lose to agencies that lead with outcomes. Creators with millions of followers can’t sell a product their audience doesn’t trust them on. Platforms with active, invested communities survive migrations that would kill a site built on anonymous traffic.
If you watched different sessions at WordCamp US 2026, I’d genuinely like to know which ones stuck with you. Drop it in the comments.
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