The WPOCC will pay organizers after a third of past attendees quit events, plus WordPress site costs, unwritten open source rules, a business rethink and churn.
Hello WordPressers!
Welcome to this week’s WP More roundup. This is WP More newsletter issue 64, where you get curated news about WordPress and the WordPress community all in one place.
Hi5 to the 46 WordPressers who joined us in the last 7 days! We are now 1212! Hip Hip Hurray!!!
This issue starts with what a WordPress site costs to build and run in 2026, then looks at open source rules that exist but nobody can find. Remkus de Vries asks what your WordPress business needs from you now, WooCommerce explains how to read subscription churn, and The WPOCC commits to paying the people who organize its new local gatherings.
In this Issue:
- What a WordPress Site Costs in 2026
- When Open Source Rules Exist but Nobody Can Find Them
- Your WordPress Business Needs You to Change First
- Four Reasons Subscribers Leave Your WooCommerce Store
- The WPOCC Will Pay Local Organizers to Bring People Back Together
What a WordPress Site Costs in 2026
Hostinger’s WordPress pricing guide breaks down what you pay once you have the free core software. Hosting on its plans runs $1.99 to $29.99 a month, domains cost $0.99 to $39.99 a year, and premium plugins range from $2 to $1,000 a year each.
The guide prices four sample builds. A blog starts around $12 a month, a small business site around $28, a WooCommerce store around $41, and a custom build costs about $3,500 up front. Maintenance adds $5 to $25 a month for a personal site and $150 to $1,500 for a small or medium store. WordPress.com plans cost $4 to $45 a month, though the guide points to limits on how you can earn money there. Its advice is to start with free themes and plugins and add paid ones as your traffic grows.
Read the full blog on Hostinger →
Next, a longtime contributor looks at who decides in open source, and where those rules are written.
When Open Source Rules Exist but Nobody Can Find Them
Courtney Robertson opens her Merge Conflicts series with a story from December 2015. A project leader told her and her co-rep they could no longer call themselves Training Team leads, then walked her out of the meeting. Years later she found the rule had been published all along on make.wordpress.org/updates, a site the make.wordpress.org front page did not link to.
The series asks 12 projects, from Drupal to Joomla to WordPress, the same questions about who decides and who reviews it. For decisions about people, teams, access and the top role, she says the WordPress record shows no written process and no review outside leadership. She also notes that plugin review, release squads and security releases run on published rules. The post ends with four questions you can take to your own project, such as whether its roles page is linked from anywhere volunteers go.
Read the full blog on Courtney Robertson’s blog →
Next, Remkus de Vries asks what has to change in the person running the business.
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Your WordPress Business Needs You to Change First
Remkus de Vries turned his PressConf EU talk in Barcelona into a post about what to do when the approach that built your business stops getting results. For almost two decades, he writes, WordPress was forgiving enough that many people never had to ask why their business worked.
He has reinvented his own work twice in five years, moving from his agency toward consultancy, education and The Guild. Looking outward means asking clients what they hired you to solve and comparing that with how you describe your services. Looking inward means accepting that a business reflects the limits of the people running it. His advice is to pick one thing to learn or change and put it in your calendar next to client work. He shares five questions to start with, beginning with what made your current work successful.
Read the full blog on Remkus de Vries →
If your business runs on subscriptions, the next piece shows where to look first when customers cancel.
Four Reasons Subscribers Leave Your WooCommerce Store
Tim Crepeau of WooCommerce explains how to read subscription churn so you know where to act first. Track subscriber churn and revenue churn together. In his example, a store with 1,000 subscribers and $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue loses 50 people on its $99 plan, which is 5% of subscribers but 9.9% of revenue.
He sorts churn into four causes: failed payments, plan or product mismatch, subscription experience problems and natural cancellations. Each has its own fix, from automatic payment retries in WooCommerce Subscriptions to letting customers pause or change quantities. Start with the largest preventable cause, make one change, and check the results over the next renewal cycle. He also shares an AI prompt for sorting a CSV of ended subscriptions, with a reminder to remove customer data first.
Read the full blog on WooCommerce →
Finally, a community group is putting money behind the people who bring WordPress users together.
The WPOCC Will Pay Local Organizers to Bring People Back Together
The WP Open Community Collective has launched Voices of the Community, a series of small in-person gatherings about the future of WordPress and open source. Each event has a local organizer and a facilitator, and both will be paid as contractors. Neither the announcement nor the program page says how much.
CEO Sé Reed told The Repository that community organizing is labor and should be paid. The idea came from the group’s State of the Community 2026 survey, where a third of respondents who once attended WordPress events had stopped going. The first event was set for the Vancouver Art Gallery during WordCamp Canada 2026, with WPOCC President Chris Reynolds as emcee. The program is limited to North America for now and is meant to support WordCamps and meetups, not replace them.
Read the full report on The Repository →
WordPress Must Read
→ WooCommerce is growing. Just not in English. (barn2.com) – Barn2 measured WooCommerce market share by country and found it still beats Shopify in 14 of the 25 biggest markets, none of which have English as an official language. Shopify leads in all seven English-speaking countries on the list, so Barn2 recommends getting your multilingual and multi-currency setup right.
→ The Importance of the Abilities API in Building for the AI Era (keepwebsitesweird.pika.page)
→ They Carried the News on Election Night. WordPress VIP Carried Them. (wpvip.com) – WordPress VIP served 25.3 billion requests around election night 2026, absorbed two DDoS attacks and kept every customer site at 100% uptime. Parse.ly data showed 74% of the 359 million peak-hour views happened on publishers’ websites, with 20% on their own apps.
→ Imagining the (near) future of collaboration in WordPress (nomad.blog)
→ The State of the Woo Ecosystem, 2026 (reports.commercegurus.com) – The first report from the CommerceGurus community survey, run by the team behind Shoptimizer. Among its findings, 60% of respondents expect to use WooCommerce more next year and only 3% expect to use it less.
→ WooCommerce Checkout Study 2026: 12 of 201 Stores Failed (northduty.com)
→ Annual Survey 2026 Results (advancedcustomfields.com)
On Other WordPress News
→ WordPress 7.2 Beta 4 is ready for download and testing! (wordpress.org) – Beta 4 brings selective translation updates on the Updates screen and fixes a visual revisions bug. Beta 5 is set for November 10, RC1 for November 17 and the final release for December 8. Test it with the Beta Tester plugin, WP-CLI or Playground, not on a live site.
→ What’s new in Gutenberg 24.3? (28 October) (make.wordpress.org) – Gutenberg 24.3 lets you format text across several blocks at once, adds emoji reactions to notes and moves the Media inserter to a DataViews grid. Save and autosave failures now explain what went wrong, and the release includes the security fixes from WordPress 7.1.4.
→ A New Workspace for Building with WordPress (wordpress.com)
→ SVG icons in the admin bar and menu in WordPress 7.2 (make.wordpress.org) – Admin bar and menu icons in 7.2 are inline SVGs from @wordpress/icons instead of Dashicons font glyphs. Most plugins need no changes, but color schemes and CSS that style icons through ::before need a small update. A new API lets you pass registered icon names to add_menu_page() and admin bar nodes.
→ Automated PHP stubs for Woo extensions (developer.woocommerce.com) – WooCommerce introduced woocommerce/php-stubs, which generates PHP stubs for extensions so PHPStan can verify integrations instead of trusting unchecked class calls. Marketplace developers can opt in by adding a “Woo Stubs: public” line to their main plugin file header.
→ Security update for WooPayments (developer.woocommerce.com) – The update fixes a security issue in the subscriptions functionality bundled with WooPayments, extending a fix announced in August. Compare your installed version with the fixed versions listed, and if you manage client stores, check every site, staging sites included.
→ Your Content Is Going To Get More Random! (make.wordpress.org) – WordPress 7.2 adds a /random/ endpoint that sends visitors to a random published post, and it is on by default. It also works per category, tag, author or custom post type, and one filter, wp_enable_random_content_redirect, turns the whole feature off.
→ WordCamp Canada 2026 Contributor Day (make.wordpress.org)
→ WP Feature Notifications weekly update: 2026-10-30 (make.wordpress.org)
→ WooCommerce 11.2.2: Release notes (developer.woocommerce.com) – A security release that hardens Store API cart quantities, REST API key authentication and checkout tax for local pickup. It also stops an order that could not be saved from going on to payment, tightens CSV importer validation and includes a database update.
→ What’s new in AI 1.5.0 (29 OCTOBER 2026)? (make.wordpress.org) – AI 1.5.0 adds a Text to Speech experiment that generates audio for a post, an MCP Access experiment that controls which abilities AI agents can use, and a WebMCP experiment for agent browsers in the block editor. The Media Library now flags images with C2PA data, and Content Translation works on any block with rich text.
→ Clone your WordPress site in Playground with Reprint (make.wordpress.org)
→ Updates to the WordPress Marketing Repository (make.wordpress.org) – The marketing repo now holds AI marketing skills built on the WordPress Brand Writing Style Guide, the same skills used in a few automated workflows. They include wordpress-writer-news for WordPress.org/news posts and a version for event recaps.
→ Flagship WordCamps on WP.org/news (make.wordpress.org) – Nicholas Garofalo says WordPress.org/news helped double traffic to the WordCamp US 2026 site, and he proposes a set schedule for flagship WordCamp posts. Scholarship posts would go out 16 weeks before an event and the full schedule 8 weeks before.
→ Developers Push Back on WordPress 7.2’s New /random/ Endpoint Being On by Default (therepository.email) – The Repository rounds up developer reactions to the /random/ endpoint being on by default, from concerns about caching to Syed Balkhi saying he was glad it is coming to core. Beta 5 is due November 10 and the final release December 8.
→ Community Team Supporters: Q4 2026 check-in and a new cohort (make.wordpress.org)
→ Proposed Design for WordPress’s Long-Awaited Feature Notifications Project Takes Its Cues From WordPress.com (therepository.email) – Automattic designer Poli Gilad’s proposal draws on WordPress.com’s notification system, with WordPress, not individual plugins, controlling how notifications look and where they appear. Feedback is open on her post, GitHub issue #655 and the #feature-notifications Slack channel.
→ The WordPress Security Team Is Building AI Tools to Hunt Core Bugs Before Anyone Reports Them (therepository.email) – After cutting its backlog of unreviewed reports from 359 to double digits, the WordPress Security Team is testing AI tools that look for core bugs before anyone reports them.
→ WordPress AI 1.5.0 Adds Text to Speech, Image Provenance Checks, and Two AI Agent Experiments (therepository.email)
From WordPress Community
→ StaleWP – Know which WordPress plugins are becoming a risk (stalewp.com)
→ How I built NHR Core Contributions (nazmulrobin.com)
→ WordCamp Sylhet 2026: No Swag, All Heart (central.wordcamp.org) – WordCamp Sylhet 2026 ran October 2 and 3 at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology with a back-to-basics theme. Organizers and sponsors skipped swag entirely to keep attention on the sessions and the people in the room.
→ Support from Malaysia Convention & Exhibition Bureau (MyCEB) (asia.wordcamp.org)
→ Anchen le Roux (seriouslybud.com)
→ The Core Principles of the Open Web, Simplified (openchannels.fm)
→ Measuring impact: 4 years working at Automattic. (jonathanbossenger.com)
→ Building a Marketplace on WooCommerce (dothewoo.com)
Until Next Week
The WPOCC will pay both the organizer and the facilitator at every Voices of the Community event, after its survey found a third of past attendees had stopped going to WordPress events. Would a paid organizer bring a meetup back to your city?
And if you have stopped going to WordPress events, what would get you back?
Hit reply with your take. If this issue was useful, pass it along.
— Nishat, WP More
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Author:
Nishat Shahriyar
Curator & Writer
wpmore.net
I started building with WordPress in 2007 and never really looked back. What began as curiosity turned into a genuine love for the platform and the people behind it. Today I lead product marketing for three WordPress products at WPManageNinja, work closely with the WordPress community, and run WP More to share what I learn from living inside this ecosystem every day.
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