Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #206 of Loop WP!

Last week, I explained why I was pressing pause on the normal Loop WP format, so if you missed it or you are new to this newsletter, make sure you read last week’s issue.

This week is the first week of our new format for the next six weeks or so. We’ve got an expanded “News & Tips” section, as well as a more conversational style on WooCommerce’s radical experiments and more.

Let’s go! 👇

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Radical Speed Month Experiments

Automattic is currently in the midst of “radical speed month,” a one-month initiative in which two-person teams are given full autonomy to build and ship projects without the usual approval processes.

I want to take a look at two of those, below.

1) WooCommerce Admin Menu Overhaul

Beau Lebens has been working on a project concept as part of Automattic’s Radical Speed Month.

He's looking into overhauling the WordPress admin menu for WooCommerce. It's a dramatic improvement, much, much, much better than the current admin menu, and I loved the consolidated and nested elements.

The GitHub pull request for it is currently a draft, and he's got some before-and-after screenshots; there's also a Playground demo link you can check out.

❤️ I would absolutely love to see this included with WooCommerce.

2) Improve Product Catalogue Management Experience

Luigi Teschio has been working to improve the product catalogue and management experience, and to scale it, especially for larger stores.

You can view the progress on GitHub, and there’s also a Playground demo.

Speaking personally, when working with clients with smaller catalogues, the current setup is not perfect, but it's fine. For larger stores, it is definitely a pain. What Luigi has developed so far is a dramatic improvement.

🤔 For larger stores, in the past, I would have used spreadsheets and import/export or Setary (which is wonderful). I don’t know if this experience would replace it as the default, but for smaller stores… it looks very good!

I don’t want always to compare everything to Shopify, but, in my opinion, the Shopify Product Catalogue Experience is currently much better than WooCommerce (FluentCart’s product management is also excellent).

💡 Whilst Luigi’s approach is different, it also feels familiar, and I think a lot of us who work with WooCommerce also work with Shopify or have experience with it (or certainly have test stores to keep up with what's going on) will find this new approach intuitive.

🤩 I think you'll be as pleasantly surprised as I am; it’s not only visually a breath of fresh air, but it’s relatively frictionless to work with.

Bonus - WooCommerce Variations

It would be remiss of me not to mention the work of James Kemp and Poli Gilad on improving WooCommerce variations.

• Test the interactive demo for yourself.

• Watch a 5-minute walkthrough with James.

🎉 Working with variations can be an absolute pain in my experience, so anything to improve the experience is welcome, and this looks good!

Before You Go

🚨 Shopify have released this must-read (seriously) report on Store Speed and Conversion. Some of the action points at the end are Shopify-specific, but can be translated to WooCommerce.

The “Performance in context” section is worth highlighting, too.

💡 Something I love about this, and I wish WooCommerce had something similar, is actual RUM data built in to make more accurate performance decisions.

I know external tools exist, but something internal would be lovely.

That’s it for this week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

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Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• Setary Extends Capabilities - beyond WooCommerce products to bulk edit any WordPress post type. You can edit posts, pages, custom post types, tags and taxonomies from a single spreadsheet view. (Setary)

• WooCommerce 10.9 - Introducing canonical WooCommerce abilities for products and orders. (WooCommerce Dev Blog)

• Sales Tax Across State Lines - What Every Growing E-Commerce Store Needs to Know. (WooCommerce)

• WooCommerce 10.8 - What’s Coming for Developers? (WooCommerce Dev Blog)

• Using Claude Code - The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML. (Thariq Shihipar)

• WooCommerce for Claude - An experiment from Radical Speed Month. (WooCommerce Dev Blog)

• Why Now? - Gutenberg 23.1 Ships Custom Taxonomies UI. (The Repository)

• Experimental Custom Post Types - The Case for Content Modelling Without Code. (Brian Coords)

• Share Your Feedback - Woo Design team joins X/Twitter. (WooCommerce Dev Blog)

• A Better Home - WooCommerce REST API docs have a new home. (WooCommerce Dev Blog)

• What’s New? - AI 0.9.0 - Content Moderation, Content Resizing, Controls, and more! (WordPress AI Team)

• Beau at Stripe - Woo’s Artistic Director talks agentic commerce at Stripe Sessions. (WooCommerce Dev Blog)

• First Time in 14 Years! - WordPress Accessibility Team Overhauls Theme Guidelines. (The Repository)

• Validation - Order update API endpoint now rejects non-order IDs in WooCommerce 10.8. (WooCommerce Dev Blog)

• Feature Release - Rocket[dot]net Launches a New Developer Hub With Full MCP Integration. (Rocket[dot]net)

• 🚀 Bricks Accelerator - A 6-week live cohort program. Go from uncertain to confidently building fully dynamic Bricks websites, with dedicated support every step of the way. (Dave Foy)

• A Chat with Matt Telfer - Finding AI’s Place in Web Hosting. (The WP Minute)

• Up to 75% Off - Celebrating 15 years of building with WPBakery. (WPBakery)

• Uncanny Agent - An AI assistant for WordPress that can create content, build automations, provide business insights, complete tasks, and troubleshoot problems, all through plain-language conversation. (Uncanny Automator)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #205 of Loop WP!

Last week was all about Ollie for WooCommerce! Another beautiful triumph from Mike Alister and Patrick Posner.

This week is about pressing pause on Loop WP…

Let me explain! 👇

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Some Quick Highlights

Before we get stuck into this week’s topic, there are four things I’d like to highlight:

1. Since last week’s newsletter, Ollie AI has been launched with AI-Powered Patterns and MCP.

2. Checkout Summit {Reloaded} is happening tomorrow, and this code will get you 50% off: cw8aw4zy

3. James Kemp and Poli Gilad have been working on a prototype to rethink how merchants manage product variations in WooCommerce, and it’s ready for viewing, testing, or feedback.

4. Metorik has launched an MCP. If you run a WooCommerce or Shopify store, check it out (more information is available in the docs).

💡 If you’re not sure what Checkout Summit is, I shared a dedicated section at the bottom of last week’s newsletter.

Pressing Pause

🚨 TLDR - For the next six weeks or so, I’ll be pressing pause on the regular format for Loop WP. And then things should get back to normal. 🤞

The “Weekly News & Tips” will stay, but the main topic will be more relaxed and conversational, still mostly about WooCommerce and some WordPress stuff.

Why The Pause?

If you want to know more about why I’m doing this {{first_name|friend}}, and I think that’s important, then read on.

Issue 200 is a must-read that explains the highs and lows of this newsletter and how it has changed over the years.

However, if you want the bullet points:

• I have a lot of client work on at the moment, and that takes priority.

• Running this newsletter costs time and money. The sponsorships are greatly appreciated, but they do not cover either of these.

• Growing a newsletter organically (no Paid Ads or Acquisition) is tough, but doing it in the context of WooCommerce and WordPress is even harder.

  • Over the last 12 months, despite all the changes I’ve made and my audience becoming more engaged, my audience is 6.3% smaller.

• I’ve been here twice before:

  • Pausing the newsletter for 6 months

  • Multiple rebrands (not as dramatic as you think) and a full replatform, as you know, for the newsletter today.

  • In Issue 175, I changed the focus of this newsletter from “WordPress-first” to “WooCommerce and AI-first” and set myself a six-month target to turn things around, but I haven't done so. 😔

❤️ I’ve not lost my passion for writing (that’s happened before with this newsletter). In fact, I’ve never been more excited about WooCommerce, but sometimes I need to actually “do the work” rather than write about it.

As always, feel free to reply and let me know your thoughts, {{first_name|friend}}. I love hearing from my subscribers.

That's It For This Week

Hopefully, you will be sticking around for the next six weeks or so until things get back to normal, but I’ll understand if you don’t.

🤞 It takes a lot to write an average of 1,229 words per newsletter, and I’m hoping this temporary conversational style will make that easier.

That’s it for this week. 👋

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Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• Subscriptions Healthcheck Tool - Giving merchants better visibility into the health of their subscriptions. (Woo Dev Blog)

• WooCommerce Telemetry - What’s Collected, What’s Default, and How to Turn It Off. (Roots)

• Build agent-friendly websites - Google Tells Developers To Build For AI Agents, Not Just Humans. (Search Engine Journal)

• Cloudflare Workers - Contact Form 7 Creator Reveals Contactable.io Will Launch as RESTful API. (The Repository)

• Wow! 😬 - Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale, the climate costs are insane. (The Privacy Guy)

• Testing from Different Angles - Getting started writing WordPress E2E Tests with Playwright. (WordPress Dev Blog)

• AI Isn’t Coming for WordPress - It’s Moving Into the Business Model. (Remkus de Vries)

• ☠️ 🤯 Terrifying - The old WordPress Security Model is dead! The Great Security Reset of 2026 (Anchor & Austin Ginder)

• Extra Early Bird on Sale! - The premier event for developers and engineers who build with WordPress returns. (LoopConf)

• What’s new in WordPress 7.0 - AI integration, real-time collaboration, and much more. (Kinsta)

• Architecture Problem - AI Can Design a WordPress Site. It Still Doesn't Know Where the Design Should Live. (Chris Lema)

• Cool! 😎 - Scanfully 1.9 introduces Email Deliverability Monitoring for WordPress. (Scanfully)

• WP Beacon - Watching the WordPress plugin supply chain. (Austin Ginder)

• Pathways Initiative - New Contributor Onboarding Project Rallies Make Teams Ahead of WordCamp Europe Launch. (The Repository)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #204 of Loop WP!

Last week was about major bugs in WooCommerce Subscriptions that have cost users potentially millions, “if” not more (depending on what you read), in lost revenue.

This week is all about Ollie for WooCommerce! Another beautiful triumph from Mike Alister and Patrick Posner (there are no Ollie affiliate links used in this issue).

Let’s go! 👇

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Supercharge your WooCommerce shop with Ollie

🎉 If you're a regular reader, you'll know Ollie WP is no stranger to this newsletter.

• Back in Issue #155, I tested Ollie 2.0 before it was publicly released and called it "easily the best theme onboarding experience for WordPress that I've tried."

• Then, in Issue #165, I covered Ollie Pro's first anniversary and noted that the theme had already appeared in this newsletter six times.
  A reflection of how consistently good the work coming out of Mike McAlister and Patrick Posner has been.

So when Mike announced that Ollie now fully supports WooCommerce, it immediately caught my attention (even though it took me a little while to write about it).

🧠 The WooCommerce support has been in development since the beginning of 2026, and the launch includes a complete suite of designs, templates, blocks, and tools built specifically for store building, all inside the block editor.

The Setup Experience

One of the first things that stood out to me in the launch video was how Ollie approaches getting you from zero to a working store.

The Setup Wizard, which I already praised in Issue #155, has been extended to cover WooCommerce-specific setup: installing plugins, creating pages, setting up branding, and generating a colour palette.

The whole process is designed to skip a dozen tedious steps and save you hours before you've even made a design decision.

Starter Sites

🔥 Then there are Starter Sites.

Rather than stepping through setup manually, you pick a pre-designed WooCommerce store, click import, and within a few seconds, your site is completely transformed, with new styles, pages, and templates all applied at once.

🚀 The result is a complete, ready-to-customise WooCommerce store that looks like it took days to build.

What blew me away was the number of dedicated WooCommerce Patterns available…36 beautiful patterns to get you started!

😎 You check out a demo of all the patterns on the Ollie website.

WooCommerce Templates (Built With Blocks, Properly)

Every WooCommerce template in Ollie is built with blocks, which means you can visually edit your product page, cart, checkout, and shop grid directly inside the site editor.

Change the product title size, change buttons, swap the related products section for a different pattern, all without touching code.

Some templates even come with built-in design variations. The product archive template, for example, lets you toggle between a standard grid and a grid-with-sidebar layout in one click.

❤️ As usual, Mike has put so much effort and thought into these designs. They are simply beautiful out of the box!

The Product Collection Block

The Product Collection block is the engine behind how products appear across your site: main shop grids, featured items, sale collections, curated picks, and more.

Ollie adds some beautiful things on top of the native WordPress/WooCommerce blocks:

• Multiple card designs to choose from.

• A slide-up hover effect on product cards (it looks great).

• A horizontal scrolling carousel you can drop anywhere on the site.

🛒 That last one is particularly handy for landing pages and campaign sections, places where most WooCommerce stores tend to feel rigid and templated.

Patterns, Menus, and Pro Extensions

🔥 The Ollie Pro pattern library now includes a dedicated WooCommerce collection:

• Featured product blocks

• Promotional banners

• Pricing tables

• Hero headers

• And video cards with a built-in modal overlay for product demos or brand content.

❤️ The Menu Designer gets a WooCommerce-specific header design, full mega menu support with product categories and featured items, and mobile menus that actually work properly across devices.

🔥 And for Ollie Pro users, the extensions suite (Animation Designer, Class Manager, SmartSync, Advanced Grid Controls) adds a layer of toolkit-style power that you'd otherwise piece together from separate plugins.

Final Thoughts

Ollie has always done setup and onboarding well, as we saw in Issue #155.

What this WooCommerce launch does is extend that same philosophy into the one area of WordPress where friction has historically been highest.

💡 I still struggle with the Block Editor, but with every iteration, Ollie is breaking down those barriers, especially for clients. If you've been sitting on the fence about moving a WooCommerce store to the block editor, Ollie is worth a serious look.

The Ollie theme is free on WordPress[dot]org. Ollie Pro, which unlocks everything covered above, starts at $89/year and includes a 14-day money-back guarantee.

✅ If you are using the Block Editor and WooCommerce, you won’t need to look anywhere else when using Ollie Pro, the Ollie Menu Designer and Ollie Extensions.

That's It For This Week

💡 I’ve got a big announcement for next week’s newsletter, so make sure you tune in.

If you want some context, it’s related to Issue #175.

🎉 Also, a huge congratulations to Rodolfo Melogli for organising the inaugural Checkout Summit.

Make sure you check out Rodolfo’s official roundup.

The buzz online was amazing, and attendees within the community have been sharing their thoughts and recaps:

• Katie Keith, and more Katie Keith.

• Rémi Corson

• James Kemp

• Xaver Br

• WP Funnels

• Photos of Day 1 and Day 2 from Roan de Vries.

• ⏰ There’s also an upcoming live webinar from the Doo The Woo Podcast “Checkout Summit Recap: Reflections from the Organizer and Attendees”

  • The webinar features Rodolfo Melogli, Remkus de Vries, Patrick Rauland, Katie Keith, and James Kemp.

🚨 If you missed Checkout Summit (like I did ), there’s an online version, Checkout Summit {Reloaded}, coming very soon!

That’s it for this week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

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Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• Make Sites More Accessible - WP Accessibility Knowledge Base. (WP Accessibility)

• An Open Letter - To WooCommerce and the Woo Community. (Business Bloomer)

• Call for Testing - WordPress 7.0 Gets a New May 20 Release Date. (The Repository)

• 2026 Community Survey Results - What You Told Us, and What’s Coming Next. (GeneratePress)

• Pathways & Good First Ideas - Help us help others contribute to WordPress. (WordPress)

• What’s New? - AI 0.8.0 is out now: Refine from Notes, Dashboard Widgets and more! (WordPress AI Team)

• Radical Speed Month - Are WooCommerce variations finally going to improve? (James Kemp)

• 🔥 Wow! - The new DataViews-powered Product Catalog Management in WooCommerce is a big UX win. (Luigi Teschio)

• Clients Don’t Actually Care - This week in WordPress 371. (WP Builds)

• AI in WordPress Just Levelled Up - Novamira Pro + Codex Live Demo. (WPTuts)

• A Chat with Matt Telfer - Finding AI’s Place in Web Hosting. (The WP Minute)

• A Complete Guide - Core Web Vitals for WordPress. (Rocket[dot]net)

• Pressable Launches MCP - Letting Customers Manage WordPress Hosting From Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. (The Repository)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #203 of Loop WP!

Last week, we looked at Maarten Belmans’ (Studio Wombat) updated report on block vs classic checkout adoption across 15,000 WooCommerce stores.

This week was meant to be about Ollie WP and WooCommerce, but some very big news came up about major bugs in WooCommerce Subscriptions that have cost users potentially millions, “if” not more (depending on what you read), in lost revenue.

Let’s go! 👇

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Four bugs in WooCommerce Subscriptions silently killed automatic payments for years

😬 Some WooCommerce store owners are only just discovering they've been missing subscription renewal payments.

Not because their payment gateway failed or customers churned, but because a series of bugs deep inside the official WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin quietly flipped their subscriptions from automatic to manual billing, without a single notification.

✅ Woo has now confirmed the bugs, is shipping a patch and a diagnostic tool this week, and plans to notify affected customers.

The Bugs

At the heart of this story is a database flag called _requires_manual_renewal.

When it's set to true on a subscription, WooCommerce treats that subscription as requiring a manual payment instead of automatically charging the customer's saved card on renewal day, it sends them an invoice and waits.

Their subscription goes on hold until they log in and pay, or it lapses.

That flag is supposed to be set intentionally. The problem is that four bugs in WooCommerce Subscriptions were silently setting _requires_manual_renewal = true on subscriptions that had perfectly valid payment methods.

🚨 The subscriptions looked fine in the dashboard. No failure emails went out. Payments weren't failing; they just weren't happening automatically.

James Kemp clarifies that affected subscriptions were effectively reclassified as manual, so customers would have received a renewal invoice email asking them to log in and pay.

Many likely ignored it, assumed it was an error, or simply churned. The merchant, meanwhile, had no alert that automatic billing had been disabled.

Sybre Waaijer, founder of The SEO Framework, surfaced the issue publicly on X after reporting one bug to Woo and then discovering three more during a full audit of his own store.

He found 121 of his subscriptions had been affected and estimated he'd lost $43,274 in potential revenue.

The four bugs all share the same failure mode but trigger at different points:

Bugs 1 - 3

Could break subscriptions from the moment of checkout, including one traced to a stale cache bug in which, after saving subscription dates, the order cache was never cleared, allowing subsequent saves to serve a stale object with the flag still set.

According to Waaijer, these collectively accounted for roughly 7% of subscriptions being broken from day one. Customers paid successfully, but automatic renewals never fired.

Bug 4

Is a subscription switching bug. When a customer upgrades or downgrades their plan, a function should reset the manual renewal flag.

But it contains a logical short-circuit: if the payment gateway after the switch is the same as before, the code bails out early without ever clearing the flag.

Waaijer discovered this one two days before going public, when a customer he'd helped upgrade was put on hold for a missed payment despite having valid payment methods on file.

💡 Three of the four bugs had been patched in earlier versions of WooCommerce Subscriptions. But Waaijer says the changelog entries were vague and no advisory was ever published.

🚨 Merchants had no way to know they were affected or that existing broken subscriptions needed to be fixed manually.

"For 7+ years (we have data from 2017–2024). Automatic payments NEVER fired for these subscriptions," Waaijer wrote. "The only way to know they were broken was if the customer noticed they lost access and contacted support, or if the merchant audited their database manually."

Who's affected

🚨 Woo's Director of Communications, Jay Walsh, told The Repository that only stores running WooCommerce Subscriptions with HPOS (High-Performance Order Storage) enabled between approximately August 2023 and May 2024 are known to be affected by the four bugs.

No new subscriptions have been affected since May 2024.

But stores that were running HPOS during that window may have subscriptions sitting in a broken state right now, with automatic payments silently disabled and no indication that anything is wrong.

💡 Importantly, upgrading to a patched version of the plugin does not automatically fix historic subscription records. Those need to be found and remediated separately.

Walsh confirmed: "These bugs could have silently set subscriptions to 'manual renewal' during checkout — stopping automatic payments without notifying merchants or customers."

How to check if you are affected

Two diagnostic options are available:

Woo's own Health Check tool is shipping this week.

It will let merchants scan their store, identify affected subscriptions, and decide how to handle them, without making any automatic changes to customer accounts.

Watch the WooCommerce Status Tracker and the Woo Developer Blog for the rollout.

🚨 Sybre Waaijer's SQL diagnostic is available now.

The queries cover both HPOS and the older CPT storage. Section 1 is a quick-check query that returns the count of affected subscriptions. If it returns 0, you're likely fine.

Section 5 estimates revenue loss by comparing expected renewals against renewals actually collected. Section 6 contains the remediation UPDATE queries.

💡 If you go the SQL route: back up your database before running anything in Section 6, read each query before running it, and ideally test on a staging copy first.

A few things the fix does not do:

• It won't retroactively charge missed renewals,

• It won't reactivate cancelled subscriptions,

• It won't touch subscriptions where a customer deliberately turned off automatic renewals.

How bad is the damage?

🧠 The truth is nobody knows yet. The incoming Health Check tool will help the ecosystem get a clearer picture.

Waaijer's own store is relatively small. His $43,274 estimate prompted other store owners to check their numbers.

Adam Preiser, co-founder of competing subscription plugin SureCart, reposted Waaijer's thread and said a quick check of one of his smallest WooCommerce stores showed $37,000 in lost annual subscription revenue and an estimated $100,000 in total.

In a follow-up post, he suggested the collective merchant impact could run into "hundreds of millions of dollars."

💡 Woo pushed back on that framing. "The revenue loss estimates in the public discussion assume subscriptions would have renewed indefinitely, which overstates the actual impact," Walsh said. "Right now, we're focused on giving merchants accurate data for their own stores rather than debating aggregate estimates."

Waaijer's own extrapolation sits somewhere in the middle: "Our store is small. WooCommerce Subscriptions powers hundreds of thousands of stores. If 7% of subscriptions were silently broken across even a fraction of them, we're looking at potentially millions of dollars in spoiled revenue industry-wide that could have been prevented. Perhaps even billions."

What Woo is doing

Beau Lebens, Woo's Artistic Director/Lead, responded to Waaijer on X, confirming the issue had leadership attention and that Woo was "determining how best to provide folks with remediation."

Since then, Woo has moved quickly:

• A patch is shipping within 24 hours of The Repository's reporting (April 22nd)

• A Subscriptions Health Check tool is scheduled to follow shortly, and Woo plans to reach out directly to WooCommerce Subscriptions customers.

• A full write-up is coming on the Woo Developer Blog, and an initial update is already live on the WooCommerce Status Tracker.

So who's liable for the lost revenue?

🚨 None of these points is legal advice (I am not a legal or licensing expert), and it is a point of confusion.

Almost certainly nobody, in any legally actionable sense, though the picture is slightly more nuanced than a flat "no."

The GPL is explicit

💡 WooCommerce Subscriptions is GPL-licensed software. Provided "AS IS" without warranty, no liability for lost profits.

Automattic's Terms of Service reinforce this, capping liability in most cases at the greater of $50 or fees paid in the prior twelve months. You're paying for access to updates and support, not a warranty.

The one real caveat

Automattic's terms include carve-outs where local law doesn't allow full exclusion of liability, notably relevant for merchants in the UK and EU, and for cases involving gross negligence or wilful misconduct.

💡 Those exceptions aren't a clear path to compensation, but they mean the blanket "no liability" picture isn't universal. If you're in those jurisdictions and your losses are material, it's worth getting specific legal advice rather than assuming the ToS is the final word.

The moral argument is a different matter. Merchants affected by this bug may have lost thousands in missed recurring revenue over months or years, with no warning, through no fault of their own.

That harm is real, and Waaijer's point about vague changelogs and the lack of an advisory is well taken.

If you know you've shipped a bug that could be silently draining merchant revenue, there's a reasonable case that customers deserve more than a quiet patch note.

✋ Remember, Woo, is working on this. The Woo Developer Blog post and the Health Check tool are coming "this week" and could arrive very shortly after this newsletter is published.

What can you actually do if you've been affected?

🚨 None of these points is legal advice (I am not a legal expert):

• If you're within your annual subscription period, contact Woo support and document the impact. Financial compensation is unlikely but worth trying.

• More practically, some subscribers who stopped receiving automatic charges may have assumed their subscription had expired or that you had cancelled them.

• A targeted re-engagement campaign that acknowledges a billing issue on your end may help recover some of them.

• And whatever you do, don't retroactively charge customers for missed periods without their knowledge.

That’s it for this week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

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Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• WooCommerce 10.7 - Performance, Analytics, and a better Store API (WooCommerce)

• 😎 WooCommerce Block Visualizer - A developer tool that makes it easy to visually identify and target the right CSS selectors when styling Woo blocks. (Brian Coords)

• Can’t Make It to Palermo? - Checkout Summit Is Going Online in May. (The Repository)

• A Conversation with James Collins - Scaling WooCommerce Operations with Automation. (Do The Woo)

• WooCommerce 10.8.0 - Better command palette support across WooCommerce admin screens. (Luigi Teschio)

• WooCommerce is Next - Introducing One-Click Migration from EDD to FluentCart. (FluentCart)

• Running the Site is the Hard Part - Why WordPress Still Wins After the AI Demo Wears Off. (The WP World)

• Stop Being A WordPress Plugin - Solve Customer Pain Points instead. (Matt Cromwell)

• 🚀 Introducing WellPlayed - Get instant access to all 20 WellPlayed plugins for one simple membership. (Marcus Burnette)

• Be Left Behind - If You Are Not Better, Faster, and Yes, Cheaper! (Jake Goldman & The Repository)

• AI Animated Hero Sections - The Easiest Way to Make Any Website Look More Expensive. (WPTuts)

• No More Hiding - It’s Time to Level Up in WordPress. (Remkus de Vries)

• 🤯 Alpha Prototype - How we should bring modern, AI-native content modelling to WordPress. (Brian Coords)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #202 of Loop WP!

Last week was all about Miles, which I took for a spin whilst in beta. Miles is your AI Design Partner for WordPress. It was my most popular newsletter of the last 10 weeks, so check it out.

This week, I'm revisiting a story I first covered in Issue #196, when Maarten Belmans (Studio Wombat) shared early data on block vs classic checkout adoption across 10,000 WooCommerce stores.

Let’s go! 👇

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Same Checkout Story, Bigger Dataset

In Issue #196, the number that stood out most was how low block adoption looked compared with social media sentiment.

💡 Back then, the big takeaway was simple: despite all the focus on Blocks, most stores were sticking with classic checkout.

Maarten has now published a fully updated report based on 15,000 stores (up from 10,000). While it confirms the original point, it also tells a much bigger story about WooCommerce in 2026:

• Block cart usage comes in at 12% overall, rising to 18% when filtered to stores created after Blocks became the default experience in WooCommerce 8.3.

• The year-on-year chart shows it's clearly climbing, with 20%+ adoption among stores created in 2025. (But it's still nowhere near a full transition.)

🚨 “Store owners” aren't necessarily “anti-block”. They're pro-stability. When you're running a business, "new" often looks like "risk", and nothing feels riskier than touching a checkout that's already converting.

🤔 One question Maarten raises that I'd also love data on: how many stores switch “back” to classic after trying blocks?

The Bigger Story Isn't Just Shopify

The most interesting part of the updated report might not actually be Blocks.

It's that 32% of the 15,000 sampled stores were unreachable, returning 404s, 5xx errors, or stuck in maintenance mode.

🚨 Some highlights:

• Grouping by creation year, 36% of stores active in 2022 are already offline.

• Then, of the sites still reachable, 14% had moved away from WooCommerce.

• Shopify was the biggest named destination, but only at 4.6% (down 0.4% from the original report).

• The rest scattered to unknown platforms, lightweight WordPress alternatives, Wix, and Squarespace.

• Just one site moved to SureCart, which surprised Maarten, and honestly surprised me too. I’m also surprised no one moved to FluentCart.

The story here is not simply "everyone is leaving WooCommerce for Shopify." The bigger story is that e-commerce is hard, many stores disappear entirely, and the ones that survive are careful about risk.

💡 That also helps explain why adoption of new WooCommerce experiences can be slow. If a checkout works, most merchants are not in a hurry to rip it out and replace it.

WooCommerce Still Has a Performance Problem

🚨 Whilst it didn’t surprise me, another part of the report that is worth discussing was “site speed” (this is not necessarily all Woo’s fault, and they have been working hard on performance over the last 18 months or so).

Maarten measured homepage Time to Last Byte and found WooCommerce sites averaging 1,782ms, compared with 848ms for non-WooCommerce sites. That's a 110% difference.

💡 The metric needs nuance; it's server response only, no assets downloaded, and the WooCommerce sample is ten times larger. But the direction is hard to ignore.

Many WooCommerce stores are still carrying too much weight: heavy themes, page builders, too many plugins, average hosting, or all of the above. And merchants don't always separate "performance", "complexity", and "maintenance burden" into neat categories.

🤔 A small but telling ~1% of migrating stores moved to NextJS-powered platforms. Maarten noted they "honestly feel snappy." It's a tiny trickle for now, but for the dev-leaning part of this audience, is it a signal worth watching?

The Typical Woo Store Still Looks Very WordPress

The install figures paint a picture of an ecosystem that is flexible, messy, extensible, and often carrying years of accumulated decisions (and I can relate to a lot of this with my clients 🫠):

• Elementor (free or paid) is on 48% of WooCommerce sites.

• Yoast SEO on 39%, WP Mail SMTP on 28%, Contact Form 7 on 26%.

• Most popular themes: Hello Elementor (15%), Astra (9.5%), Divi (5.22%), WoodMart (5.19%).

• The average site runs 30 plugins.

• Most common PHP version: 8.2 (34%), followed by 8.3 (32%).

• Only 53% of sites are on the latest WordPress version.

🚨 Interestingly, a lot of this data is comparable to the Metorik 2026 Insights Report (which covers 65 million WooCommerce orders), but with some differences, the biggest being that the average site runs 58 plugins according to Metorik.

If you're running 30 plugins and a legacy page builder, you don't "test out" a new block checkout. You stay on classic because you're not willing to risk your conversion rate on an experiment.

Also, if you’re running 30 - 58 plugins (yes, I know there’s the quality over quantity argument…and the hosting argument), your WooCommerce site is more likely than not going to be slow!

💡 Low block adoption isn't really about Blocks. It's about the reality of how these stores are actually built and maintained.

Final Thoughts

Issue #196 asked “why” classic checkout was still winning.

💡 This updated report gives a fuller answer: because compatibility matters, performance matters, existing stacks matter, and most merchants care more about reliability than platform philosophy.

Blocks may keep growing, and they will. But for now, the clearer takeaway is that WooCommerce still has work to do if it wants more stores to embrace the block future it's building.

What do you think, {{first_name|friend}}?

• Have you moved to the block cart or checkout yet?

• Does the 32% site mortality rate surprise you, or is that just the reality of e-commerce?

• Are you seeing clients ask about more performant, modern alternatives?

Reply and let me know.

🚨 I will leave you with this quote from the report:

I couldn’t agree more with Maarten, and it’s a question worth asking, especially in light of Shopify’s recent MCP announcements, native B2B features and other platform improvements in the last four months (and that’s not even including their marketing campaigns).

All of my inherited or new e-Commerce clients (except one) over the last two years have been on Shopify.

That’s it for this week. 👋

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Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• Getting Caught Up - How to prepare your store for AI-driven commerce. (WooCommerce)

• WooCommerce 10.7 - What’s coming for developers. (Woo Dev Blog)

• Call for Speakers - Share your knowledge and experiences at WordPress Accessibility Day! (WP Accessibility Day)

• WordPress Agent Bot - Run your WordPress site from Telegram. (WordPress[do]com)

• It’s About Trust - Don’t Let AI Grade Its Own Homework. (Chris Reynolds)

• Docu-Guide - Adding an MCP Server to the WordPress Core Development Environment. (Weston Ruter)

• Four Patterns, Four Stacks - There are only four sensible ways to build a website. (Jono Alderson)

• Bug Blitz - How Woo’s happiness team crushed 150+ backlogged bugs. (Job Thomas & Woo Dev Blog)

• Zero Requests - While Yoast SEO and Rank Math claim llms.txt helps AI bots find your content, we checked. (The SEO Framework)

• No Spending Limit in Core - WordPress 7.0 Lets Any Plugin Use AI Through Your API Key. (The WordPress Company)

• Announcing Acorn AI - Acorn AI lets you define abilities as Laravel-style classes, resolved through Acorn’s service container. (Roots)

• EmDash - New Plugin Opportunity or Threat? (WP Product Talk)

• Annual Survey Results - State of the WordPress Agency 2026. (The Admin Bar)

• Valuable Infrastructure - AI Across The WP Ecosystem. (James LePage)

• AI Experiments - What’s new in AI 0.7.0. (WordPress AI Team)

• Compliance - You Aren’t Responsible for Your Client’s Privacy Policy. (The WP Minute)

• April 2026 - What’s new for developers? (WordPress Dev Blog)

• WordCamp Asia 2026 - Celebrating Community. (WordPress)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #201 of Loop WP!

Last week was a bit of self-indulgence as I look back on 200 issues and 4+ years of Loop WP and reveal my most popular newsletter of all time.

This week is all about Miles, which I took for a spin whilst it is in beta. Miles is your AI Design Partner for WordPress.

Let’s go! 👇

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Miles AI

Miles was created by Andy Peatling (formerly Engineering Lead at Automattic).

Miles is described on its home page as “your AI design partner for WordPress. Build a custom design with blocks in minutes, then refine it together. No templates, no page builders, no shortcuts.”

💡 Whilst Miles currently claims to get you to your first design in less than 10 minutes, it took a few minutes longer for me.

Onboarding and Testing

🎉 Miles does have an excellent conversational, guided build process, and the conversation begins with “Hello! What site should we build together?”, which is wonderful.

I tested both:

1. Designing by conversation with Miles, but providing either basic answers or skipping answers altogether.

2. Providing a detailed brief, a logo and answering all of Miles’ questions.

I’m sure you can guess which had the better outcome. 😊

🚨 I’ve always had very mixed experiences with WordPress Playground, which powers part of the Miles platform, and the same goes for how long it takes to preview shareable URLs.

(However, this is a Playground issue, not Miles.)

After the initial brief process, you get four concepts to choose from, and then Miles gets to work refining the design. 👇

⛑️ For me, this next step added a good few minutes to the process (especially in the first test that contained no brief), and I encountered a few bugs in my testing, and I don’t know if it was my VPN on public WiFi, but:

• Test One, “Design 3”, took an eternity despite Designs 1, 2 and 4 being ready.

• Frequent disconnect and reconnect issues with the AI (although these were on-screen notifications, and they didn’t appear to have a real impact).

• In my first test, I asked Miles to make the header sticky, which it was unable to do so, despite confidently stating that he had (interestingly, in my second design test, the header was sticky without me asking).

• I did get a random message in my first test after I had chosen my first design, and Miles moved to iterate on the design “Sorry, an error occurred. Please try again.”

However, in the second test, which contained the brief, assets, and I answered all of Miles’ questions, the process was much faster:

🚀 Andy recently announced that the latest beta of Miles (launched after my tests) reduces generation time by 40% and CSS by 85%, which is great to hear!

What Miles Actually Builds

💡 You don’t get a full website with Miles (yet); instead, you get something very close:

• A vanilla WordPress install, with default content for the Sample Page and Privacy Policy page.

• Plugins installed Miles and Hello Dolly (I would love to see the latter removed).

• Themes installed are Twenty Twenty Five and whatever Miles has just created for you.

🚨 And that designed theme that Miles creates for you includes:

• A home page with full content.

• Styles - although not elements populated (some of which should be).

• Navigation (this will not be linked up)

• Templates:

  • All Archives

  • Blog Home

  • Front Page

  • Index

  • Page 404

  • Pages

  • Search Results

  • Single Posts

• Some patterns (variable-based on design brief, etc.).

😎 So whilst you initially don’t get a multi-page website with fully populated content, the template designs are there for you to create pages and posts and populate them with content quickly.

Pricing

For the beta, I am currently on the Free plan and burned through my 1,500 credits in one sitting (two designs). 🔥

There are pay-as-you-go Top Up Plans, and credits never expire:

• 2,000 for $19

• 5,000 for $45

• 12,000 for $99

There are also monthly subscription options:

• Pro: 5,000 for $39p/m

• Business: 18,000 for $129p/m

• Agency: 65,000 for $449p/m

Closing Thoughts

Whilst the Free Plan has enough credits to test the platform at a basic level, you will need to purchase credits or a monthly subscription to test more extensively and iterate on your designs.

Based on looking at real design examples on the Miles home page and my own experiences creating two sites, the designs in both my tests share similar layouts and look.

As the saying goes, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, and you may have different opinions from me {{first_name|friend}}.

Still, while there are some very nice designs on the Miles home page, looking at everything holistically (rather than in isolation), it feels a bit “samey” at this point; however, there is a lot of potential.

I really like the home page of my softball website and some of the template parts Miles created ❤️.

🚀 Miles is still in beta, and I know a lot of these features will be coming in the future, and Andy is shipping updates fast, but I would love to see:

• More pages designed than just the Home page.

• More design options (currently four).

• The ability to influence the style of alternate design options.

• Documentation on how to maximise use of the platform (although it’s mostly apparent).

🚨 One cool feature I didn’t get to try during my initial testing, and something I think is an awesome idea for workflow, is using AI Agents to work with Miles to create and manage sites on your behalf.

The current supported agents are:

• Claude Code

• Codex

• OpenClaw

• Open Code

If you use a Pagebuilder, then Miles is not for you, but it’s a great showcase of what can be achieved with Blocks, and it’s great to get the design cogs turning and the foundations set for you to build on.

💡 Have you tried Miles yet, {{first_name|friend}}? I would love to hear your thoughts.

That’s it for this week. 👋

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Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• 2026 Edition - Metorik Insights for WooCommerce. (Metorik)

• Introducing EmDash - The spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security. (Cloudflare)

• The CMS is dead - Long live the CMS. (Chris Reynolds)

• OpenClaw? - EmDash Feedback. (Matt Mullenweg)

• Reality Check - WordPress is NOT cooked. (WPTuts)

• EmDash - First thoughts and takeaways for WordPress. (Brian Coords)

• Just Another CMS - New projects like EmDash are a reminder that complexity has a cost. (Rich Tabor)

• @wordpress/build - The next generation of WordPress plugin build tooling. (WordPress)

• A Debrief - Payment gateways have always been enabled. (WooCommerce)

• 3 - 4 Weeks - WordPress 7.0 Release Team Pauses Schedule to Finalize Real-Time Collaboration Database Table Design. (The Repository)

• With Examples - High-converting landing page design for ecommerce. (WooCommerce)

• WordCamp Asia 2026 - From AI to Open Source. (WordPress)

• 2026 Edition - WooCommerce Data Insights. (Studio Wombat)

• More Than A Year - It turns out Google has been accidentally inflating impressions in Search Console reports. (Chris Long)

• Don’t Redecorate - WordPress needs to refactor. (Joost de Valk)

• 🔥 Announcing - Fathom V4. (Fathom Analytics)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #200 of Loop WP!

Last week was about something big coming on April 9th, WordPress 7.0! The foundations for the future of WooCommerce and AI will be laid.

This week is a little bit of self-indulgence as I look back on 200 issues and 4+ years of Loop WP and I reveal my most popular newsletter of all time.

Let’s go! 👇

88% resolved. 22% stayed loyal. What went wrong?

That's the AI paradox hiding in your CX stack. Tickets close. Customers leave. And most teams don't see it coming because they're measuring the wrong things.

Efficiency metrics look great on paper. Handle time down. Containment rate up. But customer loyalty? That's a different story — and it's one your current dashboards probably aren't telling you.

Gladly's 2026 Customer Expectations Report surveyed thousands of real consumers to find out exactly where AI-powered service breaks trust, and what separates the platforms that drive retention from the ones that quietly erode it.

If you're architecting the CX stack, this is the data you need to build it right. Not just fast. Not just cheap. Built to last.

See the data

Looking Back on 200 Issues of Loop WP

🎉 I never thought I would make it to Issue 200, but here we are!

As well as feeling like an imposter, failure and other negative feelings, this newsletter has brought me so much goodness:

• Wonderful friendships.

• Opportunities to test, break and help improve software.

• Give me a voice in the community.

• Helped me sharpen my writing and push the boundaries of my comfort zone.

On June 21st, 2023, we reached the 100th issue milestone.

Not only did Loop WP look very different then (I was using Mailchimp), but:

• It had a different name, “WP Wednesdays” (I announced the rebrand back in Issue 114). **

• A different focus; WordPress first, with a sprinkling of WooCommerce second. All that changed in Issue 175 as Loop WP became WooCommerce first (and of course, the odd issue about WordPress from time to time).

• The newsletter finally had a website, and I started monetising with Ads and Sponsorships to try and sustain my writing.

** “Loop WP” is actually the third different name for this newsletter. The first change was back in Issue 27, due to potential trademark infringement.

The First Struggle

💡 Loop WP is a weekly newsletter, so if you do the math, things don’t quite add up. If, like me, you aren’t great at math, that’s 145 weeks between issues 100 and 200; it should only be about 104 weeks (give or take).

💔 For a while, I had found the WordPress community a struggle and writing the newsletter very hard; I had completely fallen out of love with writing it and took a hiatus.

😮‍💨 When the new newsletter finally returned after an almost 6-month hiatus (give or take a few random issues), it would be with a four-part mini-series on WooCommerce and AI.

🔮 In retrospect, it was a sign of things to come and something that should have happened much quicker than Issue 175.

Reflection (The Second Struggle)

To mention Issue 175 a third time (seriously, go and read it, LOL), I discussed the difficulty of running a newsletter about WooCommerce or WordPress (even if you love doing it).

💡 I make practically nothing from Ads.

Sponsorships have been a big help (thank you so much to all my sponsors); however, they still don’t cover the time/costs of this newsletter and the six-month target I set myself to change this has just passed.

🧠 I have some different thoughts now on how to change things up, and more will be revealed in the coming weeks, when we will also be looking at Miles and the new release of Ollie Pro’s WooCommerce elements, so stay tuned!

Most Popular Issue to Date 🎉

🚨 Since I rebranded the Loop WP newsletter and moved it to Beehiiv, engagement and subscribers have dwarfed its time on Mailchimp, and I can now reveal my best-performing newsletter ever.👇

• Issue 179 - FluentCart - A New Era in WordPress Commerce?

Some of the stats for this, especially CTR, are wild!

• Open Rate: 63.07%

• Unique Clicks: 62 (highest in dataset)

• CTR: 32.12% (highest)

• Verified CTR: 27.98% (highest)

• Verified Clicks: 54 (highest)

• Unsubscribes: 0

So if you haven’t read Issue 179 or need a refresher, give it a read now.

That’s it for this week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Are you tracking agent views on your docs?

AI agents already outnumber human visitors to your docs — now you can track them.

See your AI traffic!

Classifieds

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DebugBear offers comprehensive website performance monitoring to help you deliver a great user experience and pass Google’s Core Web Vitals assessment.

Kinsta, a reliable hosting partner for your WordPress sites. Everything you need: edge caching, CDN, WAF, 24/7 support, free migrations and much more.

Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• Open Makers - How AI and Cloud Tools Are Transforming WooCommerce Development and Testing. (Open Channels FM)

• Dot Release - WooCommerce 10.6.2. (WooCommerce)

• The Brutal Truth - WordPress Page Builders and Performance. (Remkus de Vries)

• Studio CLI - Local WordPress in Seconds. (Rich Tabor)

• Delayed - Matt Mullenweg Calls for WordPress 7.0 Delay to Introduce Database Table for Real-Time Collaboration. (The Repository)

• WordPress in Your Browser - How my[dot]WordPress[dot]net Makes the CMS Personal. (The WP Minute)

• Debating AI’s Impact - With Jamie Marsland; Content, creativity, slop and the future of WordPress. (WP Builds)

• Improving Collaboration and Contribution - Fostering Healthy Conversations around Contribution ft. Nik McLaughlin. (Webmasters FM)

• This Changes Everything? - Fix ANY AI Website Visually in VS Code. (WPTuts)

• Breaking Plugins - WordPress Plugins That Assume Your Directory Structure. (Roots)

• Socket for GitHub - Secure every GitHub PR from vulnerable and malicious dependencies. (Socket)

• Review, Momentum and Direction - The Future of WordPress With Mary Hubbard. (The WP Minute)

• Already On It - WordPress AI Connectors Lack Plugin-Level Controls. (The Repository)

• Future Revisions - Why ‘Future Revisions’ Should be the Next Priority Feature for WordPress. (Brian Coords)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #199 of Loop WP!

Last time, we looked at the next steps for Merchants and Developers in light of James’s, Beau Lebens's, and Matt Mullenweg’s interviews to better prepare for Agentic Commerce.

This week is about something big coming on April 9th, WordPress 7.0! The foundations for the future of WooCommerce and AI will be laid.

Let’s go! 👇

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What's Shipping in WordPress 7.0?

WordPress 7.0 launches Phase 3 of Gutenberg, and with it ships the foundational AI infrastructure layer, specifically the building blocks of:

• Abilities API - Introduced in WordPress 6.9 (learn more).

• MCP Adapter - Automattic has already launched, and Mark Westguard created a working example back in September 2025, and Jonathan Bossenger gave us a detailed introduction a couple of months back.

• WP AI Client - Read the announcement post for more information.

Some of these features have been in development for a while, and some have already been implemented (we discussed these in Issue 167).

🚨 There are also some hosting requirements worth flagging before April 9th:

• PHP 8.2 or higher is recommended if you want AI features (specifically the WP AI Client and MCP Adapter).

• WebSocket or Server-Sent Events support will be needed, depending on your setup.

• WordPress 7.0 drops support for PHP 7.2 and 7.3 entirely. The minimum is now PHP 7.4, but the core team recommends PHP 8.3 for best performance.

Important Infrastructure

WordPress 7.0 is infrastructure, not a finished product.

James LePage (Automattic AI lead, WordPress Core AI co-lead) was clear about this in his Do The Woo interview, which we covered in Issues 197 and 198.

A Shopify Sidekick-style AI assistant for WooCommerce is extension territory for now (those of you who read Loop WP know I’m a big Sidekick fan).

The reasoning makes sense: a shallow core version would be underwhelming. 

The great version needs deep integrations:

• Analytics,

• Bulk catalogue operations,

• Orchestration across plugins and services.

What WordPress 7.0 does is lay the foundations so those extensions created for WooCommerce can exist and actually work well.

Why This Goes Beyond WooCommerce

If you've been following the last few issues, you know we've been tracking three competing standards for how AI agents buy things on the internet:

• ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) - from OpenAI and Stripe. Agent-driven checkout via ChatGPT.

• UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) - from Shopify and Google. Buy buttons are embedded across Google's AI ecosystem.

• MCP (Model Context Protocol) - the open standard. The one WordPress and WooCommerce are building on.

By shipping the MCP Adapter on April 9th, WordPress are betting on the open standard, but support for the others will be provided via adapters as they mature.

🚨 WooCommerce has confirmed plans to support both ACP and UCP so merchants can benefit as those markets shift. Although OpenAI have already changed plans for ACP, more on that later.

I covered UCP back in Issue #190 and ACP in Issue #192 if you want to go deeper on either.

Is The WooCommerce AI Era Actually Here?

🤔 Honestly? Not quite, but the door is opening.

When WooCommerce 10.7 launches on April 14th, it doesn't deliver a polished AI assistant that merchants can use on day one (in fact, it won’t ship one of those at all).

What it delivers is something arguably more important: a stable, open foundation that the ecosystem can build on because it is built on WordPress core.

The Abilities API. The MCP Adapter. The WP AI Client. These are the primitives that make everything else possible.

👀 Watch out for the WooCommerce extension releases in the weeks after April 14th.

That's when things start to get really interesting for WooCommerce and AI.

I'd love to hear your thoughts {{first_name|friend}}.

That’s it for this week. 👋

Before You Go

Paul Charlton of WPTuts has released a video called: “Web Design Isn’t Dead—You’re Just Watching Surface-Level AI Demos“.

In the video, Paul calls out the massive gap in reality between what we are being shown by AI bros and influencers and the important implementation, infrastructure steps, and more that are being missed.

You should watch the video below. 👇

Coming Up…

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be digging into Miles and the new release of Ollie Pro’s WooCommerce elements, so stay tuned!

🚨 Next week is a very special issue of Loop WP as we reach Issue 200. 🎉

That’s about 4 years of writing, and for Loop WP, it’s actually longer.

Next week’s issue will be a little bit more self-indulgent as I look back on Loop WP.

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Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• 🤖 Call for Testing - Community AI Connector Plugins. (WordPress)

• Independent & Community Funded - Roots Launches WP Packages as Open Source Alternative to WPackagist. (The Repository)

• Introducing Dynamic Workers - Sandboxing AI agents, 100x faster. (Cloudflare)

• AI Agents - WordPress.com now lets AI agents write and publish posts, and more. (TechCrunch)

• Novamira - A free AI MCP server for WordPress. (WPTuts)

• 🚨 That didn’t last long - OpenAI’s big ChatGPT Instant Checkout plan just changed. (Search Engine Land)

• Live Event - Building Ecommerce Community. (WooCommerce)

• SynthID - How much do you know about Google's invisible watermarking they put on images, text, video, and audio files that Gemini / Vertex AI generates? (Geoff Kenyon)

• Introducing Angie - Agentic AI for WordPress. (Elementor)

• 💡 Ask Yourself - Do you need a CMS? (Joost de Valk)

• Testing - WordPress 7.0 Release Candidate 1. (WordPress)

• ✅ Site-Wide Standards - Gutenberg 22.7 Ships New Guidelines Feature for Site. (The Repository)

• PRESS RELEASE: The WPCC publishes Open Source Contributor Compensation Standard. (The WPCC)

• 😎 Tools & Submission - Plugin Directory MCP Server. (WordPress)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #198 of Loop WP!

Last week, we broke down the James LePage (Automattic AI lead, WordPress Core AI co-lead) interview on the Do The Woo Podcast on the role of AI in WooCommerce.

This week is about the next steps for Merchants and Developers in light of James’s, Beau Lebens's, and Matt Mullenweg’s interviews to better prepare for Agentic Commerce.

Let’s go! 👇

Merchant Checklist: "Agentic Readiness" & Data Hygiene

💡 Over the past eight weeks, we have covered a lot about AI and WooCommerce. There is a lot to think about and reflect upon.

We’ve talked about AI Agents and Agentic Commerce before in more detail in Issue 190 and Issue 192. In Issue 194, Beau Lebens explained a bit more about adoption rates and why little has happened in the last year.

🤔 One of my thoughts is that, in 2026, “AI Agents” (a new customer type) will become mainstream in many stores.

In the Doo The Woo interview with James LePage, both McKinsey and Morgan Stanley were cited to support the claim that agent-mediated commerce could become massive by 2030, and that 2026–2030 is the acceleration window.

AI agent scanning for clarity. If your data is fragmented, you are invisible.

This list isn’t exhaustive, but use this checklist to audit your store to get you started on optimising your data for the AI checkout:

1. Technical Health (The Foundation)

🚨 Again, the last point is interesting as Google Merchant Centre has been advising for some time, and it’s very important for Google UCP.

• Activate the Abilities API: Ensure your theme and plugins are 2026-compliant so their features are "advertised" to AI.

• Enable MCP Server: Update to WooCommerce 7.0+ to allow external AI clients to provide business insights.

• Schema Markup Audit: Use JSON-LD for all products to ensure shipping windows and return policies are machine-readable.

2. Catalogue Hygiene (The "Selection" Layer)

🚨 The last point is particularly important, and many SEOs are discussing it.

• Attribute Completeness: Reach 95%+ completion for critical fields like “material”, “colour”, and “size_type”. Agents skip products with ambiguous specs.

• Universal Identifiers: Ensure every product has a valid GTIN, MPN, or SKU. These are the only ways an AI agent can compare your price against a competitor.

• Predictive Q&A: Add "Usage Scenario" attributes (e.g., "Best for hiking in 10°C weather"). AI agents search for outcomes, not just features.

3. Operational Precision (The "Execution" Layer)

💡 To an AI agent, your website is a black box until you expose operational data. These three points ensure that when an agent asks, "Can I buy this right now for exactly $X?" the answer is a verifiable "Yes."

• Real-Time Inventory Sync: Move to high-velocity updates (every 15–30 mins) for top sellers. Stale data causes agent-led checkout failures.

• Dimensional Weight: Provide precise “length x width x height” and “weight”. Agents calculate shipping costs before selecting your product.

• Agentic Trust Score: Audit your reviews. Agents analyse the sentiment of your last 3 months of feedback to determine "buyability."

In many ways, the above examples of “Operational Precision” expand on and link to the first part of the checklist, “Technical Health”, and it’s an opportunity to surface additional data to AI, such as:

• Inventory data on “hold” periods.

• Logistics data beyond dimensions, e.g., package sizing in relation to courier cut-off times.

Practical Recommendations for Merchants and Developers

At the end of James LePage’s interview with the Do The Woo Podcast (which we covered last week), he gave some tips for what everyone should be doing now. 👇

Developers/Agencies:

• Explore and Experiment now (learn the building blocks, prototype, test).

• Use the new primitives (Abilities API, MCP, upcoming WP AI Client) to build real features.

Merchants:

• Track Trends (Agentic commerce, Protocols, Woo’s roadmap).

• Focus on data quality and completeness: product fields, FAQs, structured attributes, and clean catalogues.

• Use AI to audit your store (“what’s missing?”) and scale that review across the catalogue.

💡 (On their own, some of those tips might not make sense if you have not listened to the interview.)

I’d love to hear your thoughts {{first_name|friend}}, reply or leave a comment and let me know.

Don’t forget to check out the last eight issues of Loop WP to dig deeper and learn how to optimise your WooCommerce store.

That’s it for this week. 👋

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Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• 🚨 Founding Contributor - Contribute to the first-ever Checkout Summit edition, even if you can’t attend. As a Founding Contributor, your Gravatar and dofollow link will appear on our sponsors section. (Checkout Summit)

• Clean Output - WordPress[dot]org Now Serves Markdown Output for AI Agents and Developers. (The Repository)

• What’s Next? - The Contributor Dashboard Pilot is now Live! (WordPress)

• Costing You Money - Speed is the first competency test. (Jono Alderson)

• WooCommerce is Changing Fast - 2 Powerful Trends Shaping WooCommerce in 2026. (Blocksy)

• API - Create your own MCP Server to control WordPress hosting with AI. (Kinsta)

• Vibe Coding for 100k Users - & WordPress’s AI Roadmap ft. Matt Medeiros. (Brian Coords)

• Response Headers - Everything You Should Know About Them. (Remkus de Vries)

• Brand Tracking - Ad Agencies Are Embracing ‘Vibe Coding’ to Build GEO Products for Clients. (Adweek)

• Call Dibs on a Name - Check availability across domains, social media, package registries, and trademarks in one command. (Avi Goldman)

• SEO Pulse - AIO Citations Diverge From Rankings, Bing Rewrites Rules. (Search Engine Journal)

• Tutorial - PHP-only block registration in WordPress 7.0. (Ryan Welcher)

• Step-By-Step - The Complete Guide to Building Skills for Claude. (Claude)

• Curated List - The WordPress Featured Plugins Tab Is Now Rotating “Hidden Gems” Every Two Weeks. (The Repository)

• The Wrong Starting Place - Stop trying to rank for keywords. (Jono Alderson)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #197 of Loop WP!

Last week was about the block and classic checkouts in WooCommerce. The results of 10,000 websites may surprise you.

This week, we catch up with the James LePage (Automattic AI lead, WordPress Core AI co-lead) interview on the Do The Woo Podcast on the role of AI in WooCommerce.

Let’s go! 👇

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The Future of eCommerce is Already Here?

Automattic is positioning WooCommerce as a central hub for AI "enablement" by building foundational protocols like MCP (Model Context Protocol).

While current tools are developer-centric, the roadmap includes native AI features for merchants, predictive analytics, and a transition toward an "agentic web" where AI agents can browse and purchase on behalf of users.

✅ James Kemp (Core Product Manager for WooCommerce) and Katie Keith (Founder & CEO of Barn2 Plugins) did some wonderful work hosting the interview; it’s more than worth the listen.

Katie often brought a perspective from store owners, which was refreshing and important. We (devs, builders and designers) can often get stuck in a bubble.

So let’s take a look at the key points (in my opinion) from the interview with James LePage (Automattic AI lead, WordPress Core AI co-lead).

💡 = My thoughts and comments.

I’ll be keeping things a little more succinct after spending three issues on Beau’s interview and two issues on Matt’s. 👇

1) The core strategy: “Enablement” over “one perfect AI feature”

Enablement is the repeatedly emphasised:

• WooCommerce should remain “in the middle” of whatever AI tooling merchants use (best chatbot, best analytics AI, etc.).

• Build foundational primitives once, keep them stable, and adapt to whichever protocol wins next.

💡 Why that matters: the AI ecosystem is moving too quickly for one hard-baked approach.

2) What’s available in WooCommerce today

WooCommerce MCP is positioned as the headline “shipped” capability:

• Built on WordPress’s Abilities API.

• Adds Model Context Protocol support so AI clients can connect to Woo and “do things” conversationally.

• Early/experimental vibe today (more for excited builders), but expected to become more accessible (“glow up”) in future.

Also mentioned:

• Marketplace AI plugins bundle features like product title generation, image generation, and early bulk operations.

• Jetpack AI improvements coming (notably image/background manipulation, mockups).

🚨 And a “sneaky announcement”:

• More WooCommerce AI features aimed directly at merchants are coming soon (from Automattic/Woo).

💡 I don’t know what these AI features are, but if they are aimed at Merchants, I wonder whether they will impact the bottom line or the services of agencies and freelancers?

3) Protocols and standards: MCP now, but don’t marry it

James LePage and James Kemp discussed the “standards” chaos:

• MCP is “young” and evolving fast, but it has mass adoption and includes important solved bits (notably authentication).

• Other protocols exist or are emerging (they mention Agentic Commerce Protocol and Universal Commerce Protocol).

• Woo/WordPress design goal: keep core primitives stable, so support can be added/updated as protocols shift.

🚨 Woo doesn’t want to bet everything on MCP’s permanence, just on adapters + primitives.

4) Developer-first right now, but the barrier is dropping

Katie’s observation (confirmed by James LePage): most of what’s landing in core is developer tooling, not merchant UX.

However, they argue that “developer” is broadening:

• AI-assisted development and better docs/tutorials reduce friction.

• Experimentation is easier (they cite “Cloud Code” as a way to explore/build quickly).

• Expect wrappers and standardisation around setup, so MCP-like integrations aren’t so technical over time.

💡 I think how quickly this barrier falls is vital, as Shopify is already leaps and bounds ahead in terms of merchant AI features.

5) “Sidekick-like” AI inside Woo/WordPress

Katie Keith brought up the Shopify Sidekick comparison directly.

The responses are summarised as follows:

• A merchant-facing, action-taking assistant is likely to be a plugin/extension territory first, mainly from Automattic.

• Reason: a shallow core version is limited; the “great” version requires deep integrations (Analytics, orchestration, bulk catalogue ops, etc.).

• Longer-term: agencies may routinely ship custom agents for clients.

James LePage predicts an almost surreal near future with merchants asking for “a little agent on my Woo site”, the way they ask for other standard store features today.

💡 If you’ve been reading my newsletter for a while, you will know I am a big fan of Shopify’s Sidekick. Woo is behind on this, and I hope we get something soon.

6) A Front-end Future

They predict the web won’t flip overnight, but a new class of “actors” appears: AI agents browsing and transacting.

Front-end implications:

• More structured data, schema, and machine-readable markup.

• More emphasis on open data: discoverable and programmatically accessible store info.

• Mention of web MCP (front-end MCP) and a Chrome early developer preview, implying browser-level agent/store interactions.

They also expect growth of:

• On-site AI chat is becoming standard (order status, product fit, recommendations).

• Possible “agent that represents the site” as part of a broader agentic internet.

7) Personalisation

They discuss personalisation from two angles:

• Off-site personalisation inside AI clients (ChatGPT/Claude knowing preferences and shopping history).

• On-site personalisation (historically under-adopted in WP), which AI may unlock.

They also point out that catalogues are often messy and fragmented, and AI can help clean/normalise data and fill missing fields.

💡 James Kemp highlights the potential of hyper-personalised AI-created landing pages to increase conversions and deliver a truly individual shopping experience.

This greatly intrigues me. Google has announced something similar for search results pages and already has a patent.

8) AI Purchase Journey recommendations vs checkout vs full purchase

The interview breaks down the “AI purchase journey” into stages:

1. Discovery/recommendation (already happening in AI search tools).

2. Click-through to cart/checkout (payment links, handoff flows).

3. Full agent purchase (hard part).

🚨 For Stage 3, it’s further discussed:

• Need for protocols because many AI clients + many merchant systems.

• Two big protocol directions mentioned: ACP and UCP, both trying to standardise how an AI uses stored payment preferences to buy through merchant checkout.

• Woo plans to support both of these so merchants can benefit early as the market shifts.

💡 If you had asked me back in October 2025 whether I was confident with WooCommerce, AI and the Agentic future, I would have been hesitant.

However, a lot has happened in the last four months, and there’s a lot more to come. It’s a very exciting time of rapid development.

9) Community Contributions

Nik McLaughlin (Skyverge) asked where extensions/community should contribute, beyond just exposing existing functionality.

James LePage’s answer focuses on building new AI-native capabilities atop core primitives:

• WordPress: build on Core AI efforts (Abilities API → “workflows” chaining abilities).

• WooCommerce: open PRs/issues for “quality of life” hooks/filters/features that unblock real AI implementations.

• Encourage extension authors (membership plugins, LMS, CRMs, etc.) to define abilities so agents can manage their domain consistently.

🤔 At the moment, it’s about “building blocks” and a “glue” future:

Multiple plugins + abilities = unified AI interaction layer that makes complexity invisible to merchants.

It’s also noted that even if the hosts are early adopters, once both sides (supply + demand) are addressed, “there will be a flood” of investment, tools, and adoption.

💡 It’s worth listening to the answer in full to understand where both Jameses are coming from, and it’s an interesting concept (particularly using the membership example).

I’d love to hear your thoughts {{first_name|friend}}, reply or leave a comment and let me know.

That’s it for this week. 👋

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Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• 🚨 What You Need To Do - Store API Vulnerability Patched in WooCommerce 5.4+ (WooCommerce Dev Blog)

• Schema Aggregation - Futureproof your website for the agentic web with Yoast SEO. (Yoast)

• New Google Help Document - On Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) Checkout. (SEO Roundtable)

• Fourth Attempt - Automattic Again Seeks to Dismiss WP Engine’s Latest Complaint, Moves to Drop WooCommerce From Case. (The Repository)

• ChatGPT Hack - Optimise WooCommerce for Google Shopping. (Rocket[dot]net)

•  Agent Skills - The Markdown files I’ve been waiting for. (Brian Coords)

• 🚀 MilliCache - In-memory caching powered by Redis or ValKey. Built for scaling WordPress sites and networks, driven by Rules and Flags. (MilliPress)

• Open Source - Thank you for everything you ship. Claude Max is on us for 6 months. (Claude)

• Turning Terminal Into… - A toolkit for coding agents like Claude Code, Amp, Cursor, OpenCode, and Codex to help you build UIs that don't suck. (UI.ish)

• Raising the Bar - Fueled Leads the Continued Advancement of Applied AI in WordPress. (Fueled)

• Practical Example - How to Use the WordPress AI Client. (Rich Tabor)

• wp-blockmarkup-mcp - Give your AI assistant a verified block markup database instead of letting it guess Gutenberg HTML. (Marcel Schmitz)

• 🤯 Your Landing Page Suck - This patent empowers Google to automatically create AI-landing pages that replace brand results. (Chris Long)

• Project Pivots to TYPO3 - Joost de Valk and Karim Marucchi Step Away from FAIR. (The Repository)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #196 of Loop WP!

Last week was the final part in our series as we compared and contrasted Beau’s answers with Matt Mullenweg’s and a dash of my thoughts sprinkled in, too.

This week is about the block and classic checkouts in WooCommerce. The results may surprise you.

Let’s go! 👇

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It Started With A Poll

Last week, Rodolfo Melogli (Business Bloomer & Checkout Summit) asked in a Twitter (X) poll: “Do you use the new block, or are you still on legacy/classic/shortcode?”

Based on 64 votes:

• Block checkout 32.8%

• Classic checkout 67.2%

The Block checkout adoption surprised me (even though it’s the default for new stores).

It seemed too high 🤔.

Then Maarten Belmans (Studio Wombat) took things a step further. 👇

10,000 Websites

Maarten was able to analyse a subset of 10,000 of his customers. The custom script checked for two things:

• Is the website still built on WooCommerce?

• Does the site use the Cart/Checkout blocks?

The Results

Maarten published the results:

• 5% moved to Shopify.

• 87% of sites are on Classic layouts.

• 13% of sites are on Block layouts.

💡 To me, this is a good data set to work with and large enough to show that the block adoption rate for the cart/checkout is much lower than that in Rodolfo’s poll.

🚨 Interestingly, Maerten also provided additional data taking into consideration the adoption rate since the block checkout/cart became the default, in which case 13% > 18%.

The scraper couldn't determine the layout of 3k sites for various reasons:

• 404 errors due to misconfiguration,

• 403 errors due to maintenance mode, password protection, etc.

(Maarten did say he could catch more sites, but would need to look into the errors more closely for ways to do that.)

Maarten’s Thoughts

I asked Maarten, “Did you have a hypothesis or assumptions before the research, and were they reinforced?” He answered as follows:

I am also surprised more sites have not moved to Shopify, but sadly, not surprised by the number of sites that no longer exist (eCommerce is not easy).

Why Do Most People Still Use Classic?

Like Maarten, I expected fewer sites to be using blocks for the checkout/cart, but James Kemp (Core Product Manager for WooCommerce) noted these numbers align with what Woo is seeing.

🤔 So, based on James’ comment and Maarten’s data, if 87% of WooCommerce users don’t use the block cart/checkout, why is that?

The truth is, there are many reasons:

• “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it” A lot of store owners (especially those without a Dev) won’t want to switch if everything is working now (switching a checkout is a big deal).

• Feature parity or lack thereof. Many things were possible with the classic checkout that are not possible in the new block checkout.

• James Kemp said the “biggest issue I'm seeing for adoption is many plugins aren't compatible with the blocks checkout, so Classic is the only option.“

• Ian Misner (General Manager Kestrel) added further to James’s comment that “it's not possible to 'catch up'. It's [block checkout/cart] not extensible ‘by design’” and draws attention to Woo’s Extensibility Principles.

💡 I echo both James and Ian’s comments, based on first-hand experience building an Address Autocomplete plugin. I documented the comparative ease of building for the classic checkout compared to the block checkout (which I eventually got working with some help).

However, a quick Google search shows stories over the years, and still now, with plugin compatibility issues using the block cart/checkout.

Increased Conversions

💡 The classic checkout is not perfect, and there are lots of plugins and themes which exist to improve the classic checkout experience and increase conversions, whether that be:

• A single-page, clean checkout

• A stepped checkout process

However, James Kemp argues: “We do see a 27% increase in checkout conversions when using the block checkout vs classic!”

I asked James more about this number:

• Any thoughts on why that is for the increased conversions?

• And is that in comparison to the Classic Checkout with no modifications?

James said:

💡 I agree, the block checkout/cart is much cleaner and better than the default classic cart without any modifications, and it’s fast too, so it’s understandable that the conversion rate is considerably higher.

Best of Both Worlds

I am still not a massive fan of the block editor, though the likes of Brian Coords and Mike McAlister show what’s possible, and there are solutions that would allow the best of both worlds.

ThemeSwitcher would allow you to have a block them for your site and a classic cart/checkout experience, if you wanted to investigate that option.

Final Thoughts

💡James Kemp feels that, over time, as it [block checkout/cart] becomes more extensible, we should see greater adoption, and while that’s a logical presumption, I think the adoption of the block editor and FSE as a whole will have a determining impact.

What are your thoughts, {{first_name|friend}}?

• Have you switched to the block checkout/cart?

• Do you have plans to switch anytime soon?

• When (if) will the point come when we are all forced to switch?

Reply and let me know.

That’s it for this week. 👋

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Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• Personal Negotiation - Automattic, Mullenweg Asks Court to Keep Details of WordPress.org Hosting Negotiations Private. (The Repository)

• ACP Optimisation - A Technical Guide To Prepare For Google’s UCP. (Search Engine Journal)

• WooCommerce 10.6 - What’s coming for developers. (Woo Dev Blog)

• AI Search - 14 GEO Conferences to Attend in 2026. (ahrefs)

• Credits Program - How WordPress Is Reaching the Next Generation of Contributors. (The WP Minute)

• Press Release - The WP Community Collective Expands Board of Directors. (The WPCC)

• Accessibility Education - Support WP Accessibility Day at WordCamp Europe. (WP Accessibility Day)

• Intervention - WordPress 7.0 Beta 1 Ships After Delay as Project Leadership Realigns Release Around AI and Milestone Story. (The Repository)

• wp-devdocs-mcp - A tool that stops AI coding assistants from hallucinating WordPress hook names. (Marcel Schmitz)

• Homepage Schema - There are two types that I gravitate towards and recommend (especially for eCommerce stores). (Brodie Clark)

• Code Mode - Give agents an entire API in 1,000 tokens. (Cloudflare)

• WP:26 - Discover where WordPress is heading in 2026. (Human Made)

• The Wrong Starting Place - Stop trying to rank for keywords. (Jono Alderson)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #195 of Loop WP!

Last week was part two of our mini-series on the Beau Lebens interview, as we discussed the remaining interview questions, from Agentic Commerce and fees, a decoupled WooCommerce, “Commerce Mode”, and more.

This week is the final part in our series as we compare and contrast Beau’s answers with Matt Mullenweg’s and a dash of my thoughts sprinkled in, too.

Let’s go! 👇

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Strategy vs. Reality

This week’s issue contrasts Matt Mullenweg’s high-level vision from Issue 191 with the implementation-level, the “day-to-day” perspectives of Beau Lebens and James Kemp from Issues 193 and 194.

These are summaries/themes that have developed in the three previously mentioned newsletters. (You can find more details in those newsletters if you need.)

As usual in this series 💡 = My comments.

Freedom or “Control”

• Matt’s Vision: Open source and "freedom" are the ultimate selling points that set WooCommerce apart from proprietary giants.

• Beau Lebens: Acknowledges that "freedom" is too abstract for most store owners. The pivot is toward ”Control”. In an era of sudden deplatforming, WooCommerce isn't just "free software"; it’s an insurance policy. It’s the only platform where the merchant truly owns the keys to the shop.

The "Agentic Commerce" Gap

• Matt’s Vision: AI shopping is overhyped right now; data shows almost zero autonomous transactions.

• Beau Lebens & James Kemp: While Matt is right about autonomous purchases, James Kemp and Beau point out that AI referrals are already a massive force. The goal isn't just to wait for AI agents to buy things; it's to ensure WooCommerce's unstructured data is "AI-readable" so stores don't lose out on recommendations from LLMs.

💡 Shopify has just announced its native integration with Claude (and their own AI, “Sidekick” is already very good), and while the markdown debate continues, things are moving quickly.

Automattic has been busy in this area with MCP Adapters, APIs, Skills and more. They just dropped:

• agent skills for Claude, which allows Claude to build a WordPress website.

• AI Assistant for WordPress[dot]com (their version of Sidekick), but it only works with Block Themes.

This leads me to a number of questions about WooCommerce and WordPress: 👇

• Will store owners be left behind in terms of AI if they don’t use the Block Editor and a Block Theme?

• Will a “potential“ slightly modified version (even if it’s just onboarding initially) of WooCommerce installed on WordPress[dot]com have an advantage over self-hosted stores?

• Are we going to see a growing disparity (and more confusion) between dotcom and dotorg?

• Will third-party plugin developers have new opportunities with AI to plug the gaps that Automattic “might” leave for self-hosted WooCommerce websites?

The Fourth Stakeholder

Agencies and Builders have long been the loudest voices in the Woo community. But is that changing?

• Beau identified the "Shopper" as a primary stakeholder in every product decision. If the end-user experience isn't frictionless, the merchant leaves, and the agency loses the client. Expect future core updates to prioritise the "buy flow" over "tweak-ability."

💡 It’s a good point and one that I prioritise for my clients. However, if I were being honest, sometimes the merchant needs to take priority.

I’m not saying it’s wrong for a merchant to take priority, but will we start to see more core decisions judged on “does this improve the buy flow?” rather than “does this make it easier to tweak every last thing?”

WooConf

Matt was fairly noncommittal about the return of WooConf, but if there was appetite, it would happen.

✅ Clearly, the appetite is there as the inaugural Checkout Summit is happening (massive congratulations again to Rodolfo and all his hard work).

⚒️ Beau outlined the practical, financial and logistical implications, and both he and James outlined some complications tagging on to WordCamps brings.

💡 I’m going to keep pushing back on this one…it’s Automattic’s responsibility to lead. I do get where Beau is coming from, I do, and I am glad Woo is looking at it internally.

I’ve organised a WordCamp, and I know the complexities events bring, but sometimes you need to go through some pain and “just do it” 😉.

Concluding Thoughts

While I personally found some of Matt Mullenweg’s answers a bit awkward at times, they seemed like honest answers. Answers that lacked a bit of clarity at times, and I think Beau and James did a great job in a follow-up to Matt’s interview.

🔮 Whilst Beau couldn’t reveal every area of strategy and goals, WooCommerce has a clear direction, and one of the areas of development I am most excited about is some form of hosted WooCommerce (even though that’s most likely on WordPress[dot]com).

💡 Woo Express was short-lived, and whilst Matt argued it wasn’t needed because of how WordPress[dot]com has evolved (I disagree), it’s pleasing to hear Beau, James, and the team are working on something as the need is there.

It’s been a mammoth few weeks on this topic, and there’s more I could say, I’m sure you could too {first_name|friend}}, but that’s it for this week. 👋

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Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

•  😬 Automattic Planned - to “Steal Every Single WP Site” From Hosts That Refused Trademark Deals, WP Engine Alleges in Latest Complaint. (The Repository)

• Binate Thoughts - Creating Art with a Crustacean. (Tammie Lister)

• Does It Still Matter? - My WP/Woo Plugin Scaffolding in 2026. (Brian Coords)

• 🚨 What You Should Do - HPOS sync on read to be disabled by default in WooCommerce 10.7. (WooDev Blog)

• Great minds think alike? - My WordPress take on Markdown for Agents. (Joost de Valk)

• WordPress 7.0 - Inside the AI Team’s Big Plans. (The WP Minute)

• WordPress AI Theme Creation - How Automattic’s New Claude Cowork Plugin Builds Block Themes from a Prompt. (Elliot Richmond)

• Northbound - A New Direction for My Agency. (Remkus de Vries)

• AI is the UI - The fastest-growing users of our products are agents. And agents don’t need interfaces. (Rich Tabor)

• February 2026 - What’s new for developers? (WordPress Dev Blog)

• Web OS Vision - Mullenweg Calls for Markdown Endpoints on WordPress[dot]org (The Repository)

• WordPress Is Done? - Let's Talk About WordPress and AI. (Rafal Tomal)

• 😎 Huge Launch - Google Search Console Integration. (Fathom Analytics)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #194 of Loop WP!

Last week was part one of a three-part mini-series based on Beau Lebens interview on the Do The Woo Podcast.

This week, it’s part two as we discuss the remaining interview questions, from Agentic Commerce and fees, a decoupled WooCommerce, “Commerce Mode” and more.

Let’s go! 👇

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Before We Start

So you can easily follow along, and know who is saying what, here’s a key:

• Q = Question,

• A = Answer from Beau (unless otherwise stated).

• 💡 = My comments.

Now on to the remaining questions.

4) Agentic Commerce Adoption and Data Sources: UCP/ACP are “beta-ish”

Beau highlighted that “data visibility” is strongest through WooPayments and opt-in data sharing:

• “If people are using WooPayments, we have pretty good visibility…”

• “We also have folks who opt into sharing data…”

Woo is working with major partners (Google/OpenAI/Stripe), but its openness makes implementation more challenging than with controlled platforms.

5) The 4% agentic commerce fee: How could Woo handle it?

💡 This was exactly my thinking when I discussed this question in detail and Woo’s options back in Issue 192.

🚨 James framed it as active work, with technical uncertainty remaining:

“We don’t know exactly what that looks like right now… [but] the team is working… heavily on [it].”

6) Woo Express and the “decoupled” hosted Woo idea (Shopify-like)

🚨 I added a clarification point later in the live interview, defining what I meant by “decoupled”: a separately maintained Woo version or modules, with a more controlled/managed, and optimised approach, like Shopify.

The answer and additional points below are based on the original question and my clarification point (which James did a good job deciphering, sorry, James!)

💡Beau agreed with the spirit: offer something beyond “normal Woo” through restrictions, curated extensions, controlled environments, and improved onboarding:

“Offering something that’s not your normal Woo… apply some extra restrictions… build some custom stuff on top… totally valid.”

Beau identified complexities:

1. Starting with hosting/domains/setup (solvable, and many hosts already do this).

2. Then the harder layer, controlled flexibility without breaking sites.

3. “Every business is different” and has different needs from WooCommerce.

🚨 🔮 The big news is that Beau said something that answers issues 2 and 3 (51:04) is “most likely in our [Woo’s] future!

James points out that a subset of merchants don’t want maximum flexibility; they want a fast launch and a professional store. Whilst it’s complex, there’s definitely demand for something that is not the standard Woo.

7) Enterprise-Level Admin Experience: Notices, Banners and Scattered Settings

💡 I think we all feel this pain as WordPress users, and I love both Beau and James’ openness and investigative work to date.

I agree that this is not necessarily a WooCommerce problem, but I appreciate that WooCommerce would consider addressing it at the WooCommerce level.

🧠 Beau frames it as a platform/framework issue requiring better APIs (e.g., a centralised notification system). “If… there was a better, easier-to-use API… they would do that.”

Woo may tackle it at the Woo layer, but WordPress plugins still affect the overall experience. Beau highlighted the positive momentum in the WordPress design system/admin redesign, but notes that developer buy-in is essential.

🚨 James Kemp added that UI improvements are constrained by backwards compatibility and integration with extensions; full redesigns can break ecosystems.

🧠 Katie Keith added (from a developer perspective) that a clear, complete design library and clearer timelines (not “consult then never ship”) would greatly help when developers are building for Woo.

8) “Commerce mode” Admin: A merchant-first mental model

💡 I agree with Beau here: in my experience with WooCommerce merchants, WordPress is secondary; they don’t care about it.

🧠 Beau goes on to explain that Woo is exploring menu and settings changes (e.g., moving Orders to the top level). He proposes an optional commerce mode to align with plugin ecosystem expectations and to support different user types (commerce-only vs. blended).

“Given what we’re looking at… we end up with some sort of option. A Default [new stores]… toggle… flip back to the old menu for existing users…”

🧠 James really liked the idea of a Commerce mode, added some important additional points:

• Menu moves are more complex than they sound because WordPress menu placement changes the page IDs that plugins hook into.

• A JS “faux menu” redirect can work, but feels hacky and depends on reliable JS execution.

• He also suggests tying commerce mode to user roles (e.g., store managers).

9) Smart defaults vs being “overly opinionated”

💡 I strongly favour opinionated defaults, so what Beau said next pleased me. Beau stated that Woo should go further with defaults because merchants request them, but always keep the ability to change them:

“Merchants… want us to be more opinionated with defaults… but… still have the option to change…”

🚨 Beau then extended this to default functionality: more should be in core, but done via layered architecture (capability → core UI → optional advanced services), he said:

“We haven’t done enough… people don’t expect to have to go get separate extensions…”

🧠 Beau used the recent changes to shipment tracking as a good example. Core capability standardises data storage/access; advanced features can remain extensible.

10) Official Woo FSE theme: Status and Purpose

🧠 James went on to add: “It’s about time we kind of replace Storefront,” and that this new theme could do that, improve demos and block quality across the ecosystem.

🧠 Beau Lebens reinforced this by noting that a standard theme helps Woo test performance, mobile-friendliness, and visual consistency.

It would be particularly useful if demos defaulted to the new block theme to improve consistency and potentially reduce fragmentation across the ecosystem.

11) Blockified widgets and missing settings: what’s next?

🧠 Beau added that feedback should include concrete goals, what you’re trying to achieve, so that the team can reverse-engineer necessary settings and controls.

Before You Go

Don’t forget, if you missed Part One in this series, you can catch up now.

💡 Next week is the final part of our series, as we compare and contrast Matt and Beau’s answers with my thoughts.

🏝️ I’m on holiday this week, and this email has been scheduled so the News & Tips section is smaller than usual.

That’s it for this week, {first_name|friend}}. 👋

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Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• Readiness & Scope - WordPress AI Client Proposal Prompts Debate Ahead of Planned Core Merge in 7.0. (The Repository)

• From Abilities to AI Agents - Introducing the WordPress MCP Adapter. (WordPress Dev Blog)

• WooCommerce 10.5 - Improving analytics and admin performance. (WooCommerce)

• New Claude Connector - It just got easier for Claude to check in on your WordPress site. (TechCrunch)

• Within WordPress - Jono Alderson on Why He Hates JavaScript-Only Sites and Loves Technical SEO & AI. (Remkus de Vries)

• Let’s Talk Limitations - Can You Trust Elementor Editor v4 in Production? (WPTuts)

• Call for Testing - Exploring New AI Experiments. (WordPress AI Team)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #193 of Loop WP!

Last week, we learned more about Shopify Merchant fees for OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce and their implications for WooCommerce.

This week is part one of a three-part mini-series based on Beau Lebens interview on the Do The Woo Podcast.

Let’s go! 👇

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Some Important Context

🎉 This week’s newsletter is a follow-up to Issue 191, which has not only been my most popular newsletter of this year, but of the last 15 months!

Issue 191 was “The Future of WooCommerce - A Conversation with Matt Mullenweg” and was based on Matt’s interview with the Do The Woo Podcast.

💡 If I had known how successful Issue 191 would be, I wouldn’t have cut it short (it was a long email), and I won’t be doing that with this week’s newsletter, which is why it’s spread over three weeks.

Matt’s interview left many gaps, and I had questions and pushback, which led to Issue 191 of this newsletter. Do The Woo picked up on this and featured many of my questions in their follow-up interview with Beau Lebens (Artistic Director and Lead at Woo).

🎉 It was a superb interview, really, really good. Beau answered my questions (and everyone else’s) very honestly and transparently.

• This week, we will look at the first three questions from the interview.

• Next week, it’s the remaining questions, and some very important ones.

• In two weeks, we’ll compare and contrast Matt and Beau’s answers with some of my thoughts mixed in.

So, let’s get cracking with Beau’s answers! 👇

• Q = Question,

• A = Answer from Beau (unless otherwise stated).

• 💡 = My comments.

1) Woo’s competitive advantage for merchants: “Freedom” vs “control”

Beau reframes “open source/ownership” as something merchants care about when they lose it, and says the community hasn’t explained it well.

He positions Woo’s benefit as control (enabled by open source and flexibility), especially for merchants who need customisation or operate in regulated markets.

Beau describes this as: “…the way we talk about that is actually more about control than freedom - control in their hands.”

💡 Semantics are important, and I like Beau’s positioning of “control”. I agree with Beau that merchants care about open-source/ownership when they lose it. I also agree that the community hasn’t explained this well.

I personally explain the open source benefits to clients, but does everyone (community), and do we do it well? I don’t think WooCommerce does this well at all, itself, its messaging.

🚨 Woo should be leading by example. Look at the “What is WooCommerce?” page…not a single reference to open source.

2) Woo events: WooConf, WordCamps, and “WooCommerce Day”

Beau paid tribute to community events (e.g., Checkout Summit) and highlighted the opportunity cost of running a major conference and the cost-to-benefit ratio:

“We want to make sure we do it right… in a way that’s sustainable… not just… once.“

💡 I do get where Beau is coming from, I do, and I am glad Woo is looking at it internally. I’ve organised a WordCamp, and I know the complexities events bring, but sometimes you need to go through some pain and give it a go.

This leads to a question asked by Dave in the live Q&A, “What about a WooCommerce day - Bolted onto WordCamps?“

Beau, James, & Katies all answered the question. They discuss adjacent/side events, but note WordCamps are volunteer-led and can’t appear to “push one specific product.”

• Beau: “I don’t think WordCamp would allow it… they don’t want to be seen like pushing one specific product.”

• James: Avoid “muddying” WordCamp’s independence and purpose.

💡 Again, those are fair points from Beau and James, but for me, this further underscores the need for WooCommerce to resume hosting dedicated events in some form.

3) Who Woo serves and how priorities work: Merchants, Builders, Agencies, and Shoppers

Both Beau and James tackled this one, and key points from their answers are as follows. 👇

• Beau doesn’t give numeric goals and says responsibilities are split across sub-organisations that tend to focus on different parts (e.g., Automattic for Agencies, which focuses specifically on agency programs).

• In Woo's core, priorities are “a mix,” and he adds a fourth stakeholder: shoppers.

• Beau frames “shoppers” as interdependent: merchants need good shopper experiences, and builders/agencies need customisation to meet merchant needs.

• James emphasises continuous feedback loops with merchants (including different sizes) plus agencies/devs: “A lot of listening and iterating and improving based on what we hear.”

• James noted the difficulty of defining “core” when small and large merchants need different things: “A small merchant… doesn’t need the same features that a massive merchant… needs.”

💡 I really appreciated the clarity provided on this, as Matt’s answer was pretty vague, and I highly commend the work that the likes of James and Brian Coords are doing in the WooCommerce community.

Whilst we don’t need numbers, I would love to see a published set of goals and priorities for each of these segments, so that:

• There is public accountability.

• The community can identify goals and priorities to see whether we can help achieve them.

All of Woo’s (and Automattic’s) goals and priorities will not be mine or yours, {{first_name|friend}}, but there will be occasions when there is collective responsibility.

That’s it for this week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

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It’s just over two months to the Checkout Summit, and Early Bird ticket pricing ends on February 15th. Grab your 30% off before it’s gone!

🚨 This is the first dedicated WooCommerce event in years, and there will be no recordings or streams.

If you haven't heard of Checkout Summit or aren’t sure about the cost and the benefits, Rodolfo’s latest video explains everything.

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Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• 🚨 New Date Pending - WooCommerce 10.5 Release is Delayed. (WooCommerce)

• Now a Defendant - WP Engine Wins Approval to Add WooCommerce as Defendant in its lawsuit against Automattic. (The Repository)

• 🔥 Amazing! - Proposal for merging WP AI Client into WordPress 7.0. (WordPress)

• MailerPress 1.2 - Native Integration with Bricks & Elementor! (WPTuts)

• A Resignation - Beauard of Directors Meeting Minutes. (The WPCC)

• 😎 Now Enrolling - Bricks Accelerator. (Dave Foy)

• Faster Testing - New AI Agent Skill for WordPress. (WordPress)

• Claude Code - Replacing...Everything?! (The WP Minute & Brendan O’Connell)

• 😮 The right time - Leaving Automattic. (Nick Diego)

• WP Engine Launches Newsroom - A Publishing Platform Built on Big Bite’s Newsroom Expertise. (The Repository)

• Now Available - WordPress 6.9.1 Maintenance Release. (WordPress)

• Does This Change Everything? - Elementor One vs. Elementor Pro. (Jeffrey @ LytBox)

• 🚀 Mamba Cache is Live - Lightning fast WooCommerce. (Mamba)

• Rethinking My Setup with AI - Migrating from WordPress to MDX. (Nick Diego)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #192 of Loop WP!

Last week, we dissected some of Matt Mullenweg’s answers from his interview about the “future of WooCommerce” on the newly relaunched Do The Woo Podcast, and it left me with more questions.

This week, we learn a bit more about Shopify Merchant fees for Agentic Commerce and what those implications could be for WooCommerce.

Let’s go! 👇

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We cover real product launches, model updates, policy shifts, and industry moves shaping how AI actually gets built, adopted, and regulated. Written for operators, builders, leaders, and anyone who wants to sound sharp when AI comes up in the meeting.

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What do Open AIs 4% Merchant Fees mean for WooCommerce?

Shopify merchants are about to get a new line item; OpenAI takes 4% on sales completed via ChatGPT Instant Checkout (on top of Shopify’s existing fees), reportedly going live January 26, 2026.

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke put it bluntly: “ChatGPT charging 4% and we collect the fees on their behalf.”

Shopify’s Agentic Storefronts terms back that up; the payment processor collects the agentic fees on Shopify’s behalf.

How can a decentralised WooCommerce collect 4%?

The primary concern for WooCommerce merchants is how this fee is collected, especially when they are not using a platform-mandated gateway like Woo Payments.

✅ In the Shopify ecosystem, the 4% fee is automatically deducted from payouts before they hit the merchant's bank account.

WooCommerce hasn’t released a huge amount of detail on the Agentic Checkout yet, and in last week’s newsletter, Matt Mullenweg didn’t enlighten us much, but what we do know so far:

• AI & Agentic Commerce in WooCommerce

• Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Suite

Hopefully, we will know more after today (more on that towards the end of this newsletter). 😉 

🧠 For the decentralised WooCommerce environment, three primary mechanisms have emerged (if you are not using WooPayments, which I will assume can theoretically automatically take the 4% from merchants):

1. Split-Settlement via ACP-Compatible Gateways

💡 The Agentic Commerce Protocol utilises the Shared Payment Token (SPT). This token allows a Payment Service Provider (PSP), such as Stripe or PayPal, to handle the financial handshake.

✅ If a merchant uses the official Stripe extension for WooCommerce, the fee collection can be automated at the gateway level. When a transaction is processed, the gateway can be instructed to route 4% to OpenAI’s account while settling the remaining amount to the merchant’s account.

PayPal has also integrated with the ACP to act as an aggregator, bridging its merchant network to ChatGPT and handling routing and payment orchestration in the background.

2. Direct Billing via the OpenAI Merchant Portal

For merchants using gateways that do not natively support split settlements, fee collection often relies on a direct billing relationship.

🚨 To enable Instant Checkout, WooCommerce merchants must apply for approval and integrate with the OpenAI merchant portal.

💡 Because the WooCommerce store must emit real-time webhooks (order.created, order.completed) to OpenAI for every successful transaction, the platform can then reconcile these events and charge the merchant's stored payment method.

(I would presume a credit card or ACH account, typically, at the end of a billing cycle.)

3. Middleware and Third-Party Plugins

The WooCommerce community has already developed specialised "bridge" plugins, such as “Shora” or "AI Checkout for WooCommerce," to handle the technical requirements of the ACP.

These plugins often require merchants to maintain an account with the plugin provider, which “may” then act as a sub-processor or billing agent to ensure that OpenAI’s fees are remitted correctly (but that isn’t confirmed).

What’s Next for Merchants?

🫠 Like most things in life, we want things as frictionless as possible, and sometimes that means merchants might be willing to compromise where they weren’t previously.

🤔 Could we see a rise in the adoption of WooPayments or in the use of the official Stripe and PayPal gateways in WooCommerce?

There is definitely an opportunity for WooCommerce to market its plugins around this aggressively, but if they did, would it be at the expense of independent developers and plugin companies?

What are your thoughts, {{first_name|friend}}?

Reply and let me know.

Before You Go

This newsletter drops just before a live follow-up interview with Beau Lebens happens on the next Do the Woo Podcast.

It’s a follow-up to Matt Mullenweg’s interview, which I covered last week, and I’ll be covering Beau’s interview next week.

Do the Woo have said, Maarten Belmans, and my questions (and others) will be answered in the interview, so I’m very much looking forward to it.

That’s it for this week. 👋

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Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• Product Truth - How Do You Compete In Agentic Commerce? (Kevin Indig & SEJ)

• Education Initiatives - WordPress[dot]org Launches New Education Hub Highlighting Campus Connect, Credits, and Student Clubs. (The Repository)

• Hosting Checklist - Searching For a New Hosting Provider? (Rocket[dot]net)

• Even on Restrictive Hosts - How We Made EDD Licensing Work Everywhere. (WPChill and Cristian Raiber)

• Introducing Harmony - Vibe Coding meets Drag & Drop freedom. (Wix)

• The Myth of Secure Hosting - Only 26% of Vulnerability Attacks Blocked by Hosts. (Patchstack)

• PHP can AI - WordPress[dot]com Agentic Infrastructure. (Artur Piszek)

• Momentum - Big Picture Goals for 2026. (Mary Hubbard)

• Call for testing - Experimental REST API Caching in WooCommerce 10.5. (Woo Dev Blog)

• Security Risks - What happens when one site gets hacked on shared hosting? (Kinsta)

• No-Code Workflow - Streamlining block theme development with WordPress Playground and GitHub. (Birgit Pauli-Haack)

• Inside WordCamp Europe 2026 - Lead Organisers on Getting More People to Kraków and This Year’s Education Focus. (The Repository)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #191 of Loop WP!

Last week, we explored Google’s UCP announcement and its implications for e-commerce and WooCommerce.

This week, following up on last week, Matt Mullenweg was interviewed on the newly relaunched Doo The Woo podcast, which addresses my question about Google UCP and more.

Let’s go! 👇

AI-native CRM

“When I first opened Attio, I instantly got the feeling this was the next generation of CRM.”
— Margaret Shen, Head of GTM at Modal

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Join industry leaders like Granola, Taskrabbit, Flatfile and more.

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The Future of WooCommerce - A Conversation with Matt Mullenweg

You can watch the full replay of the interview over on the Doo the Woo Podcast YouTube channel.

James Kemp and Katie Keith are the new hosts of the new podcast under the umbrella of Open Channels FM.

While I personally found some of Matt Mullenweg’s answers a bit awkward at times, they seemed like honest answers.

It was a great first show, and it addressed a lot of questions, including one from last week’s newsletter: “Why wasn’t WooCommerce part of the launch announcement (again)?”

Let’s look at those in more detail (questions are taken from the video transcript). 👇

The Questions Matt Answered

🚨 These are not all the questions put to Matt, but a selection I feel are most important to this newsletter and to you, the reader. The answers do not include anything added by James or Katie.

I am adding my own thoughts ( 💡 ), and some of Matt’s answers are paraphrased. Let’s get cracking!

💡 Matt is probably right in that WooCommerce is “too big to fail”, but that won’t necessarily stop WooCommerce from losing significant market share (and its dominance).

💡 From a Dev, Agency or Builder perspective, I get that, but what about from a store owner's perspective? Most don’t care about ownership/open source…they want something easy to use with as little friction to income as possible.

💡 I don’t think this should be the community's sole responsibility. With the creation of the Checkout Summit (Issue 176), there is a clear community appetite for a dedicated WooCommerce event.

Automattic needs to be intentional around this. In Issue 189, I talked in detail about the role marketing needs to play for WooCommerce in 2026 and beyond.

💡 I would love to hear more on this. As a freelancer, I’ve been rejected from the agency program in the past (and that hurt a little bit), but I would love to know:

• What are the goals for each segment?

• How are those goals being achieved?

💡 This is encouraging to hear, as Shopify is much easier to use for Merchants than WooCommerce, and there are new additions to the ecosystem like FluentCart, which I covered in Issue 179.

💡 I would love to know where Matt gets his transaction data from (genuinely), but it’s encouraging to hear WooCommerce will support UCP.

💡 I disagree with Matt here. To remain competitive, I think Woo should reconsider a hosted, decoupled version of WooCommerce (after the failed Woo Express attempt).

💡 Let’s hope so! WooCommerce made huge performance improvements in 2025 and (so far) 2026 is looking good too. There have been moves to improve the UI, but there is a long way to go on that front.

Your Thoughts?

What are your thoughts on the questions above, {{first_name|friend}}? Have you watched the interview?

The Repository has already written an article on the interview worth reading.

Reply to this email and let me know.

That’s it for this week. 👋

Classifieds

Managed WordPress Hosting redefined. Dynamic autoscaling with high-frequency CPUs & CDN pre-cache for always-fast performance. Easy migration, any time.

Get access to WooCommerce tutorials, a private community powered by humans, and exclusive learning content with the Business Bloomer membership.

Kinsta, a reliable hosting partner for your WordPress sites. Everything you need: edge caching, CDN, WAF, 24/7 support, free migrations and much more.

Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• Developer Advisories - Removal of the AccessiblePrivateMethods trait in WooCommerce 10.5. (WooCommerce)

• Checkout Summit - A Conference for WooCommerce Devs ft. Rodolfo Melogli. (Brian Coords)

• Performance Nightmare - I tested the performance of 6 WordPress wishlist plugins so that you don’t have to. (Sabrina Zeidan)

• A-Z - A Glossary for The Future of The Web. (James LePage)

• Web Framework - Astro is joining Cloudflare. (Cloudflare)

• ✨ Elementor One - One subscription. The complete experience. (Elementor)

• Variable Products - Add to Cart button disabled by default in variable products in WooCommerce 10.5. (WooCommerce)

• 🎂 25 Years! - Happy birthday, Drupal. (Jonathan Desrosiers)

• No Hearing Date Yet - WP Engine Customers Refile Class Action After Judge Flags Pleading Gaps. (The Repository)

• Product Management - How I Got Ralph to Ship Overnight. (Rich Tabor)

• Performance First - Scaling Is Capacity, Performance Is Efficiency. (Remkus de Vries)

• Progromatic Creation - WC REST API fixes for product variation attributes with special characters in WooCommerce 10.5. (WooCommerce)

• MCP Tutorial - Using a Local Model to Access WooCommerce MCP in WordPress 6.9. (Nik McLaughlin)

• ✨ Introducing Rivale - Competitive Intelligence for WordPress Plugin Developers. (Rivale)

• Simple Points and Rewards - Conditional Rules, Points Summary, and more! (RelyWP)

• 🚀 Performance Boost! - Experimental Product Object Caching in WooCommerce 10.5. (WooCommerce)

• 🤦‍♂️ I Didn’t Like it - WordPress[dot]org X Account Sparks Backlash Over FAIR Jab. (The Repository)

• Sky’s the Limit? - What’s Possible with WooCommerce MCP w/ Nik McLaughlin. (Brian Coords)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

The image for the web version of this newsletter is sourced from YouTube. WooCommerce, Do the Woo, Open Channels FM, and the names or likenesses of Matt Mullenweg, Katie Keith, and James Kemp are trademarks or property of their respective owners. This image is used for editorial and informational purposes only and does not imply endorsement or affiliation.

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #190 of Loop WP!

Last week, we returned to our regular format to discuss why WooCommerce has significant work to do in 2026 to remain relevant and build on the major improvements of 2025.

This week, we explore Google’s UCP announcement and its implications for e-commerce and WooCommerce.

Let’s go! 👇

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Google Announces Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

You can read the full announcement post on the Google Blog, but in summary:

• "New Tech and Tools for Retailers" discusses AI's role in agentic shopping and retail growth.

• The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is a new open standard for agentic commerce across platforms.

• Business Agent lets shoppers chat with brands directly on Search, like a virtual sales associate.

• New Merchant Centre data attributes help retailers get discovered in conversational commerce.

• Direct Offers in Google Ads let retailers present exclusive discounts to shoppers ready to buy.

What does UCP mean for e-Commerce?

The industry has already been weighing in on this, and one of the best summaries comes from Aleyda Solis:

💡 You can read the full article with seven key points over on Aleyda’s SEO FOMO website.

Search Engine Journal (SEJ) also has a great complementary article on this. For me, the key highlight from this article is:

🚨 There is a table towards the bottom of the SEJ article comparing ACP and UCP in terms of:

• Primary Focus

• Journey Coverage

• Driver

It’s in the “driver” that Joost de Valk notes the omission of WooCommerce’s mention as a platform in Google’s announcement.

🧠 Joost has written an article about the absence of WooCommerce as a named launch partner, and he makes several points.

I am not saying I agree with all of these, but this is what stands out for me from Joost’s article:

• This omission exposes a dangerous structural flaw in our [WordPress] community.

• WooCommerce isn’t just a plugin; it is an economy.

• If WooCommerce slides into irrelevance because it can’t “speak” to Google’s new AI agents, their [companies/economy] revenue streams dry up.

🚨 Joost goes on to say:

💡I said in last week’s newsletter that I think WooCommerce has a lot of work to do this year to remain competitive and stay relevant, and I would tend to agree with Joost on this point:

• “If you are on Shopify, your products will soon be natively understandable by Google’s AI agents. A user asks Gemini for “a good running shoe,” and the AI can theoretically find it, vet it, and even initiate the checkout without the user ever wrestling with a clunky website.

• If you are on WooCommerce, right now, it looks like you are stuck in the slow lane, waiting for a plugin developer to build a bridge to this new world.”

What are your thoughts, {{first_name|friend}}? Please reply and let me know.

That’s it for this week. 👋

Classifieds

Managed WordPress Hosting redefined. Dynamic autoscaling with high-frequency CPUs & CDN pre-cache for always-fast performance. Easy migration, any time.

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Kinsta, a reliable hosting partner for your WordPress sites. Everything you need: edge caching, CDN, WAF, 24/7 support, free migrations and much more.

Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• Warning - Agentic AI is insecure, unreliable, and a surveillance nightmare. (Coywolf)

• Category SEO Changes - Product Permalink Changes Coming in WooCommerce 10.5. (WooCommerce)

• Acquisition - WP Engine Acquires Big Bite, Bringing Newsroom Expertise In-House. (The Repository)

• Staging is a wasteful lie - The case for the mono-environment. (Tom Phillips)

• 🚨 New Plugin Alert! - Synced Pattern Popups helps you create popups using the WordPress editor you already know, not yet another builder. (Matt Cromwell)

• Tailwind - A Cautionary Tale For Anyone Relying on an Open Source Project. (Jonathan Desrosiers)

• Accelerate - Block-Native A/B Testing for WordPress. (Kinsta & Noel Tock)

• 😎 Triaging Bugs - Launch WooCommerce Playground Sites with a Single Keystroke. (James Kemp)

• Useful GA4? - Try the Google Analytics MCP server. (Google Analytics)

• Another AI Checkout - PayPal Powers Microsoft’s Launch of Copilot Checkout. (PayPal)

• Developer Advisories - Variation prices caching improvements in WooCommerce 10.5. (WooCommerce)

• January 2026 - What’s new for developers? (WordPress Dev Blog)

• 🎉 Speaker Announcement - Checkout Summit announces its first batch of speakers. (Rodolfo Melogli)

• Already in Alpha - WordPress 7.0 Planning Continues With Call for Release Squad Volunteers. (The Repository)

• hidden=until-found - Details disclosure element can now auto-expand using the browser’s find on page feature. (Coywolf)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

Illustration for the web version of this newsletter sourced from Google Blog. Used for editorial and explanatory purposes.

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #189 of Loop WP!

Last year (I love making that joke 🤭), we looked at your “Email of the Year” and your “Top 10" emails of the previous six months.

This week, we are back to our regular format (after a couple of quick emails to only subscribers)…and yes, there are a lot of “year in reviews” (they are all worth it).

Let’s go! 👇

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My Perspective - WooCommerce in 2026

Context is essential, so let’s look at 2025.

Last year saw significant changes in e-commerce, particularly among the big two platforms:

• WooCommerce finally got its first iteration of native POS and an MCP.

• Amongst a host of performance and accessibility improvements, WooCommerce got Address AutoComplete and Order Fulfillments (beta).

• Agentic Commerce from OpenAI launched with Shopify initially (third-party developers connected WooCommerce), and shortly after, WooCommerce officially joined Stripe’s Agentic Commerce.

• “WooCommerce vs Shopify” also got a shiny update.

• Shopify then launched its own WordPress plugin.

🚨 Then there’s FluentCart, which entered the scene and could be a genuine disruptor to WooCommerce. I’ve been impressed so far.

It’s hard to compare Shopify’s native AI (Sidekick) to WooCommerce, as AI for WooCommerce core is going to rely on WordPress Core and how it handles AI.

🤔 Sidekick is already well-established, robust and pretty damn awesome…WooCommerce doesn’t have those capabilities yet, but I think it will in terms of core (how third-party plugins integrate will be interesting).

WooCommerce Marketing

In 2025, I built WooCommerce stores, shut down one, and maintained the others.

Shopify has always focused on custom development and maintenance rather than new builds (it’s easier for businesses to get started with Shopify on their own).

😬 Shopify has a juggernaut of a marketing department, budget, and partnerships with the likes of Klaviyo that Woo lacks (though the brand refresh and work from the likes of Brian Coords and James Kemp in the community are very welcome).

Woo will need to continue ramping up their marketing game in 2026 to avoid losing market share to Shopify (and others, e.g., FluentCart), which I do think will happen.

The fact that WooCommerced doesn’t have a dedicated major event baffled me, and fair play to Rodolfo Melogli for getting Checkout Summit off the ground.

AI, WooCommerce & Me

It was a challenging year for many people (if you read the “year in review” posts below), and the same goes for me (I still have three months of my financial year left).

After a brilliant 2024, 2025 has seen:

• Client budgets slashed.

• Projects put on hold or cancelled.

• More clients are turning to AI to do work for them (and then ask me to tidy it up).

• Very few new projects and more maintenance work.

I use AI daily in my workflows, and my work extends beyond WooCommerce and Shopify. I wonder whether, in 2026, it will shift toward training and educating others to use native AI rather than me doing more development or design work. 🤔

This could definitely happen with email marketing and Shopify, but WooCommerce remains to be seen, as it will depend on how quickly that develops in core.

🔮 I do see myself working less with WooCommerce this year, maybe that’s a regional thing, but the conversations I had last year with potential clients were never about WooCommerce.

Even existing clients were considering moving away (and one did).

I’ve been working with WooCommerce since 2015, maybe even before, and I do think there is still a place for WooCommerce in 2026. I firmly believe that.

🚨 However, I think WooCommerce has a big fight on its hands if it wants to stay relevant and in the conversation when it comes to building an e-commerce website.

What are your thoughts, {{first_name|friend}}?

(Please reply to this email and let me know.)

Before You Go

There are many links in this week’s email, and we have taken a two-week break, so there’s a lot to catch up on.

I highly recommend the links below, especially the “year in review” post.

There has been a lot going on in our community, and many people in the WooCommerce ecosystem have had similar experiences and plans for 2026.

That’s it for this week. 👋

Classifieds

Managed WordPress Hosting redefined. Dynamic autoscaling with high-frequency CPUs & CDN pre-cache for always-fast performance. Easy migration, any time.

Kinsta, a reliable hosting partner for your WordPress sites. Everything you need: edge caching, CDN, WAF, 24/7 support, free migrations and much more.

Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• Store API Vulnerability - Patched in WooCommerce 8.1+: What You Need To Know. (WooCommerce)

• Do the Woo is back - A podcast for the WooCommerce community. (Barn2)

• 2025 - What a Bleeping Year. (Eric Karkovack)

• Newsplicity - We’re building a publisher operating system that unites WordPress and Shopify into a single, modern stack. (Vinny S. Green)

• 2025 - My Year in Review. (James Kemp)

• Block Accessibility Checks - Real-Time Validation for WordPress Content. (Troy Chaplin)

• Design System Diff - Finding Open Design Systems. (Tammie Lister)

• Lessons Learned - Course Building Edition. (Remkus de Vries)

• Agent Skills for WordPress - Teach AI coding assistants how to build WordPress the right way. (Automattic)

• At Scale - How Kinsta handles PHP threads, caching, and performance. (Kinsta)

• 2025 Recap - A Year of Clarity, Focus, and Enterprise-Scale Ambition. (Greyd)

• Innovation & Adaptability - Where Elementor is headed in 2026. (The WP Minute)

• RelyWP Levels Up! - How to load CSS (fast). (Elliot Sowersby)

• A little wild how much…happened - The Stories You Read Most in 2025. (The Repository)

• A Need to Adapt - Wombat Plugins 2025 Year in Review. (Studio Wombat)

• WooCommerce 10.4.3 - Dot Release. (WooCommerce)

• Declining Sales? - Are WordPress Plugin Sales Really Down? What the Data Says, and What it Means for 2026. (WP Product Talk)

• A Mixed Bag - 2025 year in review & transparency report. (Barn2)

• E-Commerce Growth - Harnessing Social Media. (The WP Minute)

• Revenue Mindset - Why Agencies Must Think Like SaaS Companies to Grow in 2026. (Rocket[dot]net)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

WooCommerce and Shopify logos are trademarks of their respective owners. This illustration is for editorial and illustrative purposes only and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by WooCommerce or Shopify.

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #188 of Loop WP!

Last week focused on WooCommerce 10.4, the final release of 2025.

This week is the last regular newsletter of this year, and it’s one of my favourites.

Let’s go! 👇

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Your Top 10 Loop WP emails & “Email of the Year”

Every six months, I review the “Top 10” newsletters based on engagement from you, {{first_name|friend}}, and the rest of my lovely readers.

⚡️ The last time I did this was on July 2nd, 2025; check it out.

So, let’s look at your “Email of the Year” and your “Top Ten” from the last six months in order of engagement. 👇

Top 10 Emails of the Last Six Months

1. Loop WP Issue #169 - WordPress Getting Better? WooCommerce Falling Behind?

2. Loop WP Issue #179 - FluentCart - A New Era in WordPress Commerce?

3. Loop WP Issue #177 - Buy it in ChatGPT - What's Next for WooCommerce?

4. Loop WP Issue #173 - WCUS review, Phoenix surprise, WP Engine vs Automattic drama, and FAIR insights—your WordPress roundup.

5. Loop WP Issue #168 - Wappu Games, Inner Circles and a WordPress Wake‐Up Call?

6. Loop WP Issue #172 - From Security Lessons, a hosting shakeup, WCUS to $299 LTD...it's a big week!

7. Loop WP Issue #178 - Redesigned - WooCommerce vs Shopify.

8. Loop WP Issue #184 - 🖤 A Twist on the obligatory BFCM Edition.

9. Loop WP Issue #171 - WP Simplified with a side of accusations. 😬

10. Loop WP Issue #175 - The Future of Loop WP.

Did one of your favourite newsletters make the list, {{first_name|friend}}?

"Loop WP" in Numbers

🐝 This is my second year on Beehiiv, and I received my annual “Beehiiv Wrapped”.

It was so cool, and you can check out the full details on my LinkedIn, but in summary:

• ✍️ 52.7k Words written

• 📄 50 Issues

• 👀 25.4k Impressions

• 📭 Avg. Open Rate 57.3%

• 📈 17% Audience Growth

• ⏩ Avg. CTR 18%

💡 If you’d like to compare to last year, you can check those out on last year’s announcement post.

Email of the Year

🎉 Beehiiv Wrapped revealed the top newsletter of the entire year by engagement from you, {{first_name|friend}}, and my other readers…Loop WP Issue #169 - “WordPress Getting Better? WooCommerce Falling Behind?”

Issue #169 Loop WP

Editor Suite stirs excitement, Agentic AI reshapes WordPress and eCommerce, and WPKitchen serves the community with tea.

newsletter.loopwp.com/p/issue-169-loop-wp

A Special Thank You

Loop WP has had several sponsors over the year, and without them, this newsletter would not be possible, so a special thank you to:

• Modular DS

• The WP Minute

• mySites.Guru

• 20i

• Business Bloomer

• Kinsta

• WP Concierge

• AspirePress

• FastPixel

• AI to Text

• Coupon Affiliates

• Checkout Summit

Before You Go

Last week, I asked you if you used WooCommerce Blocks or a Block Theme. The results are in. 👇

I hope you’ve a lovely break over the holidays, and the regular format will resume on January 7th, 2026. 🎊

That’s it for this week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

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Get access to WooCommerce tutorials, a private community powered by humans, and exclusive learning content with the Business Bloomer membership.

Kinsta, a reliable hosting partner for your WordPress sites. Everything you need: edge caching, CDN, WAF, 24/7 support, free migrations and much more.

Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• Agentic Commerce Suite - Launching with WooCommerce support from day one. (WooCommerce)

• Crystal Ball - WordPress Predictions for 2026. (The WP Minute)

• Deep Links - Open in WordPress Studio button. (WordPress Developers)

• Product Discovery - A new Merchant API is coming to Google with expanded, improved and more data and integrations. (Aleyda Solis)

• WordPress 7.0 - Planning Kicks Off With a Big List — Including Real-Time Collaboration and an Admin Refresh. (The Repository)

• Insightful - We All Lose With Ad Hominem Arguments. (Remkus de Vries)

• Dot Release - WooCommerce 10.4.1 -10.4.2. (Woo Dev Blog)

• Compression Dictionaries - How to load CSS (fast). (Planet Performance)

• Safari catching up - Both INP and LCP support in their 26.2 release. (RumVision)

• Global Sponsor - 2026 Global Partner Program Announcement. (WordPress)

• Tax Updates - Prepare your business for 2026 EU tax changes. (WooCommerce)

• Troy - Alternative to WordPress[dot]org Plugin Distribution. (The Repository)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #187 of Loop WP!

Last week was about two of my favourite plugins for boosting WooCommerce performance.

This week focuses on WooCommerce 10.4, the final release of 2025.

Let’s go! 👇

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WooCommerce 10.4 is here!

WooCommerce 10.3 was released seven short weeks ago, bringing a host of improvements and features, including Address Autocomplete, for which I created a free plugin.

10.4 was initially scheduled on November 24th, 2025, just four days before Black Friday. 😬

Thankfully, Woo wisely changed this until after Cyber Monday and most extended sales periods had ended. 😮‍💨

Let’s look at the highlights from this release. 👇

Accessibility Improvements

• Product Collections Carousel now features improved keyboard focus support (with more padding on linked images) and clearer navigation buttons, even in mobile or zoomed views! 😎

• Email templates have been updated to improve screen reader accessibility. Layout tables now use role="presentation" , and data tables use proper semantic markup.

HPOS Datastore Caching: Now Standard

🎉 The HPOS Datastore caching feature moves out of “experimental” mode.

While it won’t be enabled by default just yet, this signals a more stable, performant data storage system in future releases.

Block & UX Optimisations

• The “Add to Cart + Options” block now supports product variations when used within the Single Product block, bringing it in line with the classic version.

• Cart and Checkout blocks have been refreshed with improved typography and spacing for a cleaner, more polished look.

• The Featured Product & Featured Category blocks now allow more flexible layout control. Inner blocks let you rearrange titles, descriptions, or prices as needed.

• The new Interactivity-API-powered Mini Cart replaces the older React-based Mini Cart by default, improving performance and compatibility.

✨ That last point is particularly awesome!

Faster REST API & Admin Performance

The wc-admin and wc-analytics REST API endpoints are now lazy-loaded — meaning requests not using them should be about 30–60 ms faster, improving performance across the board.

🚀 WooCommerce has been on a performance roll since 10.3 (and subsequent Dot releases), so it’s great to see even more performance improvements in 10.4.

What does it mean for Store Owners?

• If you run an accessible-first store, these email, carousel, and UI improvements will help make your site more compliant and user-friendly.

• For larger stores (or stores scaling up), the HPOS caching and REST API performance enhancements can make a noticeable difference in speed and stability. **

• For shops using block themes and block-based layouts, the new block fixes and refinements provide greater flexibility, a smoother UX, and fewer legacy quirks.

Can you answer this quick question? 👇

Before You Go

This is the last regular-format newsletter of this year!

🤩 Next week, on December 17th, I get to share one of my favourite emails of the year!

We will then take a break for a couple of weeks as I spend time with the family over the Christmas Holidays.

The regular format will resume on January 7th, 2026. 🎊

That’s it for this week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

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Classifieds

Get access to WooCommerce tutorials, a private community powered by humans, and exclusive learning content with the Business Bloomer membership.

Kinsta, a reliable hosting partner for your WordPress sites. Everything you need: edge caching, CDN, WAF, 24/7 support, free migrations and much more.

Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• Whoops! - WordPress Misconfiguration Blamed for UK Budget Leak as OBR Chair Resigns (The Repository)

• 😎 So cool!!! - Building a Woo Product Category Image Block with WordPress 6.9. (Brian Coords)

• 😂 It’s Still Valid! - Is this the coolest robots.txt file ever!? (Bernd Wunsch)

• Award Winners - The WP Awards 2025 results are in. (The WP Weekly)

• Img.Express - Simple, client-side tools to edit and optimize images for your website. No uploads, no tracking—just fast, browser-based image processing. (Corey Maass)

• What’s Next? - Why I Left Circle and Closed The WPTuts Academy. (WPTuts)

• 33% Boost – WooCommerce on PHP 8.5 gets a big boost over 8.4. (Kinsta)

• eCommerce SEO - This is an epic addition in GMC Next and directly addresses work related to Google's Top Quality Store badge. (Brodie Clark)

• Inline Editing - Comes to ACF blocks! (ACF)

• Tenant Solution - How and Why We Rebuilt Scanfully for True Multi-Tenancy. (Scanfully)

• 🤔 AI for WordPress Hosts - The project depends on hosts taking ownership of this step and including it in their offerings. (WordPress)

• State of the Word 2025 - AI, Education, and a Community Holding Steady Through a “Rollercoaster” Year. (The Repository)

• Borrow from the Best - 5 Enterprise E-commerce Tactics for Your WooCommerce Store. (Katie Keith & WP Product Talk)

• Virtual Media Folders - Brings virtual folder organization to your WordPress Media Library. (Per Søderlind)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

WooCommerce and the WooCommerce logo are registered trademarks of Automattic Inc. Their use within this material is for descriptive and editorial purposes only. This work is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Automattic Inc.