Some of the Best AI Plugins For Your WordPress Website in 2025
Transform your WordPress membership site with top AI plugins. Automate content, personalize experiences & increase member retention effortlessly.
In this show, we delve into the top AI plugins that can elevate your WordPress membership website. Discover tools designed to enhance user engagement, streamline content delivery, and optimize member management. From automated customer support to personalized recommendations, these plugins harness the power of AI to create a seamless experience for your users.
This Week’s Sponsors
Kinta: Kinta
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:00.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back to the Membership Machine Show, folks. This is episode 141. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about some of the best AI plugins that have come across our radar that will help you run a community or membership website. I’ve got my great co-host, Kurt, with me. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:00:32.340] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, sure, folks. My name is Kurt, Kurt von Ahnen. I own a company called Manana Nomas, and we also work directly with the great team over at WP Tonic.
[00:00:41.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, and it’d be great if I turned off my email as well, wouldn’t it? But there we go. I forgot. But I’m switching it off right now. We’re going to talk about AI and some of the best plugins out there. I’ve done a little bit of research, it should be a great show. But before we go into the meat and potatoes, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. And we’re coming back —we’ve also got a sponsor for the month, and Kirk has the info on that sponsor. Over to you, Kirk.
[00:01:30.120] – Kurt von Ahnen
I can’t believe you did that to me. I didn’t know it was coming up right now.
[00:01:33.160] – Jonathan Denwood
Let me go find it. All right. Sorry. All right. Well, we cut that out. Well, we do the whole podcast again, right? We leave that to Thursday, all All right.
[00:01:45.940] – Kurt von Ahnen
I got it. I got it now.
[00:01:49.420] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, let’s do the whole thing again.
[00:01:52.550] – Kurt von Ahnen
Oh, no, no, no. That’s the point: the plug-in shouldn’t feel risky to update.
[00:01:56.160] – Jonathan Denwood
Hold on. Let’s leave it till Thursday. All right, there’s no problem. All right. So three, two. Are you ready?
[00:02:04.800] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.
[00:02:05.220] – Jonathan Denwood
Three, two, one. Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 141. In this show, we’re going to be talking about AI. We’ve got some plugins and other stuff coming to our radar that will help you build your membership and community website. Should be a great show. I’ve got my great co-hosts who’ve already been given a mic tack. Kirk, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:02:38.160] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sure thing, Jonathan. My name is Kirk von Annen. I own a company called Manana Nomas, and we work directly with a great team over at WP Tonic as well.
[00:02:46.260] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. It should be a great show. We got a ton of plugins and other stuff to share with you. But before we go into the meat and potatoes, we got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. Also, I want to point out that we got a fantastic course done by Kirk himself. It really shows you how to build a modern membership or community website from beginning to end. It’s normally around $50, but if you go to this URL, you can get it for half price, around $29. Also, if you do buy, you will get a coupon code sent to you that will knock 50% off your first year’s hosting with WP Tonic, where you get Vulture hosting with a library of pro plugins, fully licensed, and a ton of other stuff. It’s a great offer. All you have to do is go over to wp-tonic. Com/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deals to get this great offer and get your membership website running on ASP. I think we go straight into it, really. We both like AI. It’s a great tool.
[00:04:15.540] – Jonathan Denwood
Some people are a bit over the top, but I use a lot of it; you use a lot of it. Let’s start with a couple of page builders. We’ve discussed them before, but I think you really like one of them. Well, you like both. I haven’t got that much experience with the second one. You’ve got a lot more, but I like the first one —I’ve got a bit of experience with it —and that’s Cadence WP. What do you think Cadence has utilized AI for? I think they’ve done a pretty good job —what do you think?
[00:04:49.380] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think it’s super important to stress that it’s a great first draft of a website. It’s not spit-and-polish ready to go, but it’s a great first draft of a website. And to me, it’s the missing link. So earlier —maybe a couple of years ago — you might throw in Cadence, then add the starter sites, and try to give a customer the opportunity to start with a starter template. But that starter template —one of the famous ones —is the lady doing the downward-facing dog pose, right? So here’s the yoga template. Well, the thing is, the customers might like the yoga template, but customers don’t have, generally speaking, that mental ability to be like, well, what’s that going to look like with a coffee shop in that picture instead of a girl doing yoga? It’s like the template and format were there, but people had a hard time imagining what it would look like with their content. The AI builder in Cadence lets them enter project-specific information, select pictures for that project, and choose colors and a format.
[00:06:07.880] – Kurt von Ahnen
And together, it puts it all together as a first draft, so the creator doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel the whole way. It just comes out and it’s ready to go for them in their genre, in their niche —however you want to phrase that. But it works really, really well.
[00:06:25.860] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think it’s great. They’ve done a really nice job with the interface. They’ve got a lot of AI integration with WooCommerce. You get the full set up if you host with WP Tonic. That’s their top-of-the-line product, but they do offer a ton of value, don’t they?
[00:06:47.240] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, again, Jonathan, I don’t think this one can be overplayed. I’m not one of these people that’s going to say, Zippity, bam, boom, 10 minutes, you got a website ready for show time. That’s not what I’m saying. But what I What I’m saying is this is an AI tool that is reasonable, does what it promises, and gives you a really good first draft and gets you going.
[00:07:08.240] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s getting over that first hurdle, isn’t it?
[00:07:12.360] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s breaking that writer’s block or that designer’s block. What I really like about it is a lot of times in the past, when you were looking at a starter site, it was all blue, or it was red with orange stripes, or it was whatever. But picturing with your color or your branding on it was very difficult for people. But now you can go through the process and you can say, I want this format with these colors, and there it goes.
[00:07:37.460] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, on to the next one, which is ZipWP. I haven’t used it, but got some great reports from a lot of people and you know a lot about it. You take over, Kirk, what do you see as its strengths? Does it Excel in maybe area where cadence doesn’t? I know I haven’t used The way that I’ve used Zip WP is a little bit different.
[00:08:04.720] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s important to stress Zip WP is an independent thing. You could go to Zip WP and use Zip WP. Boom. I’ve used it in conjunction with ASTRA. I’m an ASTRA Pro user. And so with ASTRA, it’s a similar set up as Cadence, where you’re going to say, hey, I want to do a starter site, and it’s going to say, Do you want to build that site with AI, or do you want to use one of our pre-existing legacy starter templates? And so you select the AI tool And it starts to go through the process. But then pretty soon it says, Hey, you got to sign in the Zip WP to make this thing work. Like the Cadence experience, it’s going to give you all of that experience. You put in the information about your project. I think it’s up to 3,000 characters you can put in to type in as a description. Then you pick pictures or upload your own. You pick the format, you pick the colors. Boom, it makes you that first run of a website. Now, what I really, What they like about that process is, and this is where they’ve fallen under fire, actually.
[00:09:06.100] – Kurt von Ahnen
This is controversial. I’ve seen some people raising a little bit of a stink on X. They’ll say, Oh, it’s force feeding extra plugins on you during the process because it’s going to offer you SureCart, it’s going to offer you Auto, it’s going to offer you SureForms, things like that. But you get the option to check them off or check them on. You could say, No, I don’t I want these or no, I do want these. So what I like about it is for certain users, for certain creators, that’s convenient. Click them, install them, good to go. In my agency, it doesn’t make sense because I use a different form tool. And I’m not always looking for a short card set up, especially if I’m going to put in Lifter LMS and do the e-commerce through Lifter’s native payment gateway. So there’s things I’m not going to want, but you get the option to deselect whatever you don’t want. That’s one thing. The thing I really like about Zip WP is it’s not just locked into that experience alone. If you opt to have Zip WP as a subscription, an additional subscription to build multiple sites with, it’s its own independent dashboard and library of sites that you’ve created.
[00:10:21.440] – Kurt von Ahnen
And you can actually go through there as an agency and create different templates or projects that you can repeat off of, which is pretty as well.
[00:10:31.560] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s fantastic. I don’t see any problem about them suggesting plugins that long as they give you the option not to install them or not, really. I don’t really see what the problem is, really.
[00:10:46.380] – Kurt von Ahnen
Now, one thing I want to point out because there’s a difference fundamentally with the two, with the Cadence setup and with the Zip WP through ASTRO setup. And that is, I think Cadence goes one step further and gives you that first step or that little baby step towards search engine optimization. Like, hey, what are the keywords that you’re after? And things like that. Whereas I haven’t seen that in the Zip WP process yet. Maybe it’s on the roadmap, maybe I just didn’t see it yet, but it seemed like Cadence was addressing that one extra step that I wasn’t getting in the Aster experience.
[00:11:24.100] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think that’s okay, isn’t it? I think for a local business, we know that might help a bit if you got a local business and you’re talking about local SEO, but getting your Google business page and getting that link to your website is probably even more important. Getting on some the chamber or some local listings that have a bit of local juice and getting that pointed to your website, your local website, is probably going to help a bit more, isn’t it? Yeah, I think so.
[00:12:04.440] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’ve been a big fan of the chamber. I think it depends on where you live. When I was in California, the chamber in my little town wasn’t doing much of anything. But then when you moved to Kansas, it’s like Big Fish, Little Pond. I think where you’re at has a lot to do with the strength of those associations.
[00:12:20.680] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think it varies from town city because it’s… On to another plugin that we really like, and they’ve added some AI magic, and that’s Fluent Forms. I didn’t quantify this before we were in on live. Is the AI, do you know if it’s offered on the free version of Fluent, or are we just talking about the Pro?
[00:12:50.620] – Kurt von Ahnen
That’s a super good question. I guess during the show, I could do a quick install on a test site. I’ve seen it on the Pro version, but I haven’t used the a free version in a while.
[00:13:01.440] – Jonathan Denwood
We don’t actually know, folks. I would imagine, but I’m only surmising this, folks, so don’t hold it against us. That’s only on the Pro version. We use it, we offer it as part of our hosting package. Especially with a membership or some larger, you’re building e-commerce or membership, you’re probably going to build more forms than normal as part of the process, an ongoing process. I thought the way they had done it was quite impressive, really. If you are building out a lot of forms and you might be doing a bit more of that on a membership website, I think it can be quite helpful. What do you reckon?
[00:13:49.440] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m still struggling a little bit with this one with fluent forms, to be honest with you, Jonathan. I may have gotten distracted from the question you actually asked me. As you’re asking the question, I was thinking like, I love fluent forms. I think it’s great. We use fluent forms with a ton of clients. I use them here at Manana Nomas. You use them at WP Tonic. This is just one of those things where I think they forced AI in because I think they thought they had to. Fluent Forms, once you get used to it and acclimated to its system, it is so easy to build a form. The idea that I have to go to AI to help me build a form in a tool that’s already superior in the market, I’m confused as to why they added it. But it does have an interesting ChatGPT connection where you click ChatGPT to import something from it, and I just still don’t see the sense of it.
[00:14:45.440] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think it just depends if you’re building some complicated forms, which you might probably look at Gravity if you’re doing a cast. But I think you can use Fluent, and I think Fluent, and if it’s quite a large form, having this AI functionality probably would help. But on the other end, I’m not going to over emphasize it. If you’re just doing your normal level of form, it’s not going to make a big difference. They got a load of templates, haven’t they? Form templates and that, haven’t they?
[00:15:18.870] – Kurt von Ahnen
They do have a decent selection of templates, and then, of course, you can customize each of those as you implement them. But I’m curious because you did the same thing that I do, and I’m interested to know where this comes from. You were like, well, if I had to build something that was really big or really whatever, maybe I’d go with Gravity, but with fluent. And I think it’s interesting that every time we want to do something deep or something like maybe that has conditional logic attached to it or something like that, we tend to instantly go towards the gravity route instead of figuring out a way to do it with fluent. So maybe that’s part of the reason they expanded with this AI thing to give us a chance to Well, that’s really more about Gravity’s enormous library of internal and external third-party plugins that extends Gravity, isn’t it? Yeah.
[00:16:15.380] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. I’ve got… But most things for most clients, they’ll be able to use fluent forms. I think the free and the pro version offer an enormous amount of value for for what you’re paying. I think it’s apart from these more custom solutions, I personally think it’s the best value in the market.
[00:16:43.720] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I’m super happy with Fluid.
[00:16:47.220] – Jonathan Denwood
Right, I’m on this one. I’m quite excited about this. I didn’t know they had done it myself, actually. We got a couple of websites that we host, and we provide this as part of our bundle as well. It’s Translate Press. They used to offer either Google or DeepL, and we suggest clients set up with DeepL, but they brought out this AI translation and they recommend it. I don’t know what the token levels are. It depends. We got the full version, but I would imagine you get so many and then you have to buy some from them, which is similar to DeepL, but I was looking up their help documentation, and they’re now recommending that you use their solution with AI rather than deep hell. What do you reckon about this?
[00:17:54.720] – Kurt von Ahnen
Jonathan, I see the commercials for the people with the earpods rods that translate. And I have heard firsthand that those work exceedingly well. And so it makes me think, well, maybe this is it. Maybe we’ve gotten there. This is one of those promises AI made two years ago in my mind that I was like, yeah, I’ll believe it when I see it, and it’s here. So I don’t know if I would take an existing project and convert it over just yet, especially if someone has a lot of international use. But for a new project, it might be good to go, Hey, let’s fire this up this time, and let’s use the AI tool, and let’s actually measure, are we getting complaints? Does the translation make sense? Things like that. But I tend to think this is one area that AI is really excelling in. Is that language barrier?
[00:18:53.400] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, we got one very large client that utilizes Transpress, hosts with and utilize what we provide. They’ve got it set up with DeepL, and they’re happy. I don’t see any reason to change, really. But if we’ve got some new clients, and it’s a really strong area for WordPress, having multiple translation, and I just really like Transpress. I think it’s probably going to be a shorter show this week, folks. I think we’re going to go for our middle break, and we will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a feast, a feast of AI. Before we go into the second half of the show, I just want to point out that we’ve got a great free resource, and that’s the Membership Machine Show Facebook group. Just go over to Facebook, just join for free, just put in to search the Membership Machine Show Facebook Group, and you can join for free, and you’ve got any additional questions, you can ask them there. So it’s a great resource. On to the next. I was quite impressed with this one. Better Docs. This is going to sound like an effort for WP because we offer this as part of our hosting package.
[00:20:26.500] – Jonathan Denwood
I didn’t choose these because we provide them, But a lot of them we do. But better docs, it basically helps you to provide support documentation, and a lot, it does, having really spending a bit of time on your support documentation and answering questions, and it really does reduce churn. If you’re looking for a really good WordPress solution, better docs is a really great solution. Then also they provide as an additional service, you got to pay $9 a month. Ai will index all the documentation on your website. I think it’s all the documentation, not I don’t know if there’s any better docs, but I might be wrong there. They provide a chatbot that will answer any questions, but that’s an additional charge, like I say, of $9. But in general, I was quite impressed what they’re doing with AI. What do you reckon, Kurt?
[00:21:32.560] – Kurt von Ahnen
Better docs, to me, is one of those… It’s one of those ones where you need to have content. And so whenever we talk about better… Whenever we talk about these kinds of things on an episode, I always want to stress to people, when you see better docs and you’ve got two PowerPoints and a couple of PDFs, you’re not a candidate for better docs.
[00:21:55.210] – Jonathan Denwood
I was talking about more a membership website. Exactly. And you know that you’ve got to produce some support documentation.
[00:22:03.700] – Kurt von Ahnen
When you get into that territory, the AI feature that does the document review, document summaries, that to me is nearly invaluable. I want to take you back, Jonathan, to when I worked corporately. I was the publication and training manager at a large company, and I was in charge of all the service manuals and the owner’s manuals tools and everything for just hundreds of items. And the idea that now in this world of AI, you’re able to just click on something and get a summary of it and go, Is this the right one? Before I send this to a customer, Is this the right one? Is it the right link? Is it the right whatever? What a good tool. It’s awesome.
[00:22:48.880] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, give it a thumbs up, folks. Really quite impressed the way they use it in AI. Better docs, great plugin. We use it at WP tonic. We offer it as part of our hosting package. You’re going to be delighted with it. On to a slightly more controversial one, but I do like what they’ve done, actually, LearnDash. Obviously, it’s in terms of For two parts. You can import a video playlist. Is it YouTube or is it only Vimeo and Whistler? I can’t remember that.
[00:23:26.280] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think it does YouTube, too.
[00:23:27.380] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. It doesn’t do bunny. Net, but most of them don’t. Also, you can build out courses and lessons, the structure. As we know, Kirk, that’s very time consuming. I was quite impressed with that little feature of LearnDash. I didn’t realize they had done that until I did my research for this show. They’re only two small elements, but I think they’re quite useful.
[00:24:03.280] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, they’re great on breaking the ice, right? Or some people think it’s really tedious to go in and use the course builder to be like, This is my section name, this is my three lessons, here’s my next section, the next four lessons. And to be honest with you, for me, that’s like typing out an outline. I mean, it goes pretty easy for someone in my communication style, right? But I know other people really struggle with it And the idea that you could create this list from a playlist is really cool. I worry, just me being a worry wart that I am, you put in a link to a a list that’s not yours. You’re basically creating a syllabus or a curriculum off of someone else’s content. And to be clear, it’s not- I’m not suggesting that. Yeah, to be clear, it’s not taking the content. It’s just taking the titles of the videos. And so it says, Here’s the course, here’s the section, here’s the list of titles that went to those videos. But that gives you that Head Start. So now you can click into any of those lessons to edit them directly and add the content you want.
[00:25:17.920] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I thought it was quite useful. But when you look at some of the SaaS solutions, what could you be in some of the other SaaS competitors’ WordPress? I’ve been underwhelmed by the AI features of these other platforms. It’s been okay but not impressive. Am I being a bit unfair there?
[00:25:54.960] – Kurt von Ahnen
I don’t think you’re being unfair at all in these regards. I think there are so many different ways that they’re trying to force AI into something like, Oh, look, we use AI. We’re cool, too. And in so many cases, the AI is not. This deal with LearnDash, to me, it’s a total not needed thing. In my mind, the way that my brain works. It’s a totally unnecessary thing. But if it saves you, if you already have an existing playlist and you want to convert it into a course, it’s a great head start, saves you 45 minutes or so, and it’s right in.
[00:26:31.660] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Well, I see where you’re coming from. I’m a little bit more positive about what they provided. But I’m not saying it’s revolutionary or anything like that.
[00:26:44.540] – Kurt von Ahnen
Now, creating the course outline from AI is a little bit different because you’re not copying from a playlist or worse, someone else’s.
[00:26:53.240] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, that’s the one I was really concentrating on.
[00:26:56.280] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, and that one’s interesting. I’ve used AI before, like, hey, I’ve got this idea for a course, and I need you —meaning the AI —to help me take this existing outline and create buzzworthy or influential lesson titles that would get people to take the lesson. And it usually dresses things up, and it gives you an outline, and then I just copy and paste that over. But this removes the copy-and-paste factor and puts it directly into the LearnDash platform, which is pretty cool.
[00:27:30.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. Are there any other plugins that came on your radar recently that might have an element of AI that you want to discuss? I’ve got a couple, but I’d like to give it a bit.
[00:27:41.690] – Kurt von Ahnen
There have been some things that… It sounds weird, but I’ve been playing around a bit with the Magi system I talked about. I’ve been playing around with Grok a ton, but those are standard AI. What do we call these? AI channels, learning a large length, right? Yeah, it’s not like it’s a tool. It’s not like I’m using the AI tools inside these other programs.
[00:28:09.480] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, one that’s come on my radar that we’ve recommended is SEO Press. They’ve put a bit of AI in where it does the meta description and it gives you recommendations for the titles and that. I think that’s useful, and they’ve sprinkled a bit of other AI functionality. It’s my favorite SEO plugin. I use it myself and I highly recommend it. I think the AI they’re using with it isn’t over the top. I recommend that. Obviously, you’ve got Bertha. We offer that at WP tonic as well, which It’s like chat or Claw, but it’s in the actual WordPress interface. I haven’t actually looked at that for a while because I… It’s gotten better. It has got better, has it?
[00:29:13.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s gotten better, yeah. It went through a clunky period, but it’s gotten much, much better. It’s more fluid now.
[00:29:22.710] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, good. Another thing that came on my radar is a product called Clear Out. Basically, it’s a plugin added to a service that stops a lot of spam for your contact forms. It also identifies whether people are using fake email addresses to download stuff, and that. It’s quite useful, actually. That came on my radar as well.
[00:30:01.540] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, outside of the WordPress space, I’ve been playing around a little bit with VidIQ, which helps you clean up your YouTube channel and generate AI-generated titles, screenshots, and other assets. And then Riverside, which is a podcasting tool, I’ve been playing with that a little bit, and it’s been making… Like doing the shorts and stuff like that, automatically, the snippets. And it’s pretty good quality. It’s been cutting things in really appropriate places, like an Opus AI thing.
[00:30:36.410] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, because you recommended that, but it’s difficult to justify both at the same time, isn’t it?
[00:30:42.940] – Kurt von Ahnen
If that’s the problem, I edit in Descript, and Descript makes snippets and cuts, too. It’s like there are all these things that there’s a lot of overlap. Even if a tool is really great at something, I’m not going to pay an extra 30 bucks a month just because it’s cool. Like, not if I’m paying for something else, too.
[00:31:03.420] – Jonathan Denwood
No, because it all gets out of hand, doesn’t it? All right. Sorry. I think we wrap it up now. It’s a quicker show than normal folks, but I just wanted to put these plug and put them to your attention. So, Kirk, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?
[00:31:23.520] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I’m available at maniananomask.com for anything that’s business. If you want to connect on LinkedIn, I’m the only Kurt von Ahnen, so when you find me, you know you’ve got me. It makes it easy.
[00:31:35.320] – Jonathan Denwood
If you’re looking to build your membership or community website on WordPress, I’d love for you to take a look at what WP tonic has to offer. We’ve got fantastic speed and security, plus we offer a library of the best WordPress technology, all fully licensed. Plus, we’ve got a great team at WP tonic, and you’ll get great support and a white glove experience. So go and have a look at what we have to offer. If you found this show useful and you’re listening on your phone in iTunes or Spotify, why not leave us a review? Both Kirk and I would be really appreciative. It would mean that more new people will see our podcast, join us, and listen. And that’s great for us and for you because it encourages us to make more of these podcasts. We’ll see you next week, folks. Bye.
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