The New Exciting Ways To Build a Membership Website Using WordPress & AI
Learn the latest techniques for building a WordPress membership website. Explore tools, plugins, and tips for a thriving online community.
Discover the latest strategies for creating a membership website with WordPress in our insightful show! We explore innovative tools, plugins, and design approaches to elevate your site. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced developer, you’ll get valuable tips to make audience engagement easier.
#1 – Can AI actually build a membership site from scratch, or is it just hype? — Where the tech genuinely works today vs. where a human builder still beats it.
#2 – What does an AI-powered member experience look like? — Personalized onboarding, adaptive learning paths, and content recommendations inside WordPress.
#3 – Is the traditional membership plugin stack dead? — How AI is reshaping (or replacing) familiar tools like course builders, drip-content plugins, and community forums.
#4 – Can AI keep members from churning? — Using predictive analytics to spot disengaged members and automate win-backs before they cancel.
#5 – The dark side: what are the real risks? — Privacy, data security, and whether members actually want AI-driven experiences on a paid community site.
#6 – What does a lean AI stack for WordPress look like right now? — Concrete tools and a realistic budget for a small operator launching their first membership site.
Novamira
WPVibe
Elementor MCP
An MCP server (Model Context Protocol server) is a lightweight program that lets an AI model or agent safely connect to external tools, databases, code repositories, and
I’m quitting Elementor (after 7 years) Rino de Boer
Novamira vs WPVibe vs Elementor MCP – Build a FULL Page – WordPress AI
This Week’s Sponsors
Jetpack: Jetback
Ninja Forms: Ninja Forms
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:16.780] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 191. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about the exciting ways you can build a membership website using WordPress and AI, mostly Claude Code. It’s a really exciting area. I think it’s going to rejuvenate WordPress. I’m more sure about it than ever. Um, it’s early days, um, and both me and I have some strong thoughts about this. So Kirk, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:00:59.240] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, my name is Kurt von Ahnen. I own an agency; it’s called Mañana No Más, and we do a lot of direct work for WP-Tonic as well.
[00:01:07.230] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, with WordPress, you get all the benefits of ownership, intellectual property protection, and scalability, plus AI. What a powerful combination. Com, com, that is. But before we go into the meat and potatoes of the show, I’ve got a couple of quick messages from our sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks.
[00:01:36.100] – Kurt von Ahnen
WP-Tonic is sponsored by Jetpack. Managing WordPress sites shouldn’t mean stitching together a pile of disconnected plugins. Jetpack brings security, performance, publishing, growth, and AI tools together in one WordPress-native toolkit. Use what you need: backup, scan, boost, social, VideoPress, stats, and more, all with modernized dashboards built into WP Admin. For your site or your clients’ sites, see what Jetpack can do. jetpack.com. WP-Tonic. is sponsored by Ninja Forms. And let’s talk about one of their powerful tools: conditional logic. Conditional logic is the clearest example. Every rule for the whole form lives in one panel instead of being buried field by field. On client work, build speed and low maintenance are part of your margin. A form that is fast to configure and that a client can run afterward without coming back means less friction during build and less support load after the handoffs. Ninja Forms, powerful and genuinely easy to work with without being dumbed down. To learn more, go to ninjaforms.com.
[00:02:55.890] – Jonathan Denwood
Coming back, folks. Should be a great show, folks. So, Kirk, how do we start off this conversation?
[00:03:04.450] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I would say, Jonathan, that the first thing we need to talk about is, you know, AI itself, you know, because a lot of people are confused about what AI is actually doing, right? Um, to me, and I’ve said this to a couple of clients at the risk of maybe upsetting them, but I was like, AI is a great amplifier if you know what the outcome’s supposed to be. It can amplify your abilities, your speed, your process, your things like that. But if you go into it confused and unsure, and you don’t know how things work, and you’re giving AI instructions, it can also amplify the confusion and chaos that your lack of base knowledge can create. And so I think it’s really important to have that upfront conversation. Like, what is your skill level? Like, if you wanna build with AI, that’s great, but like, what’s your skill level? What are you expecting? Do you know what to do with this kind of output? And if people do, AI can be a great tool. I mean, we’ve built a couple of projects from scratch with AI just to prove to ourselves we could do it.
[00:04:08.440] – Kurt von Ahnen
And it works really, really well. Again, if you understand what the output should be. Yeah.
[00:04:14.560] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think that’s totally a great place to start, Kurt, because, um, at WP-Tonic, and I’m sure at your own agency, we deal with people at all sorts of skill levels. And this applies to any software. You know, somebody can be using something, and they think it’s really easy, and another person, and it’s nothing to do with intelligence. It’s just to do with experience. And they just haven’t got the experience, and they find it hard. And this goes with the territory. And building a membership website with prompts, somebody can find that reasonably easy. Other people are going to find it even harder than having a starter website, and so there is this general belief that AI is going to make it easier. And I think you’ve put that very well. No, it really depends on circumstance, doesn’t
[00:05:22.850] – Kurt von Ahnen
it? It does. And, you know, this is one of these really strange conversations, Jonathan, where if we’re not careful, you know, we can put ourselves on some kind of pedestal like we’re at some level you could never attain. You need our, you know, you might not be. Yeah, you know, you need, you need our blessing before you can leverage these tools with success. That’s not what I’m saying at all. It’s not what I’m saying at all. But I do feel that there’s a bunch of AI, you know, AI bros over on YouTube that are perpetrating a completely different message. And they’re saying, hey, you don’t even need to consult a professional. You don’t even, you don’t even need to know the basics, man. You just plug these things in, tell it what to do, and Bob’s your uncle. You got you a million-dollar dream. And, uh, to me it is just that; it’s a dream. Like, you there, it takes a certain amount of base knowledge. Um, permission to derail just for a second, Jonathan?
[00:06:13.960] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, sure. I would definitely tell you that.
[00:06:16.370] – Kurt von Ahnen
We, we at our agency, we have had some special requests to do some work within, uh, Fluent Cart. Fluent Cart’s been out about a year. It’s still very much in development, but to me it’s, it’s lightweight. It performs well. I think it’s going to be a great alternative to WooCommerce as it continues to mature. So I’m very excited about Fluent Cart. We’ve been using that as an agency, but we’ve had a customer that wanted some changes, some things, some things done that work a little bit differently than the way Fluent Cart comes out of the box. And we’ve leveraged AI for a lot of this customization and build. But I’m here to tell you, Jonathan, it wasn’t a 5- or 10-minute AI request. This has turned into days of re-engineering and sampling and testing and looking at code and snippets. And then, having to make the decision: do I want this to continue as a snippet, or do I wanna package this up as an add-on plugin to add it to a different menu? And if you were to add— if you were to ask that to someone who is an amateur in the space, they would have no idea how to even process what you just asked.
[00:07:24.490] – Kurt von Ahnen
And that, to me, is the importance of: you need this base level of knowledge, this base level of experience, this ability to think on your feet and go, that’s the right way or that’s the wrong way. ‘Cause when you use AI, Claude asks you questions. Hey, here’s one of 3 ways to do something. Which way do you want me to go? And the way that you tell it to go is the way it’s gonna develop and build. So you wanna make sure you pick the right path.
[00:07:48.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s a balance, you know, using some of the tools that we’re gonna discuss in this show, folks, to build the front end of the website, I think is totally possible. Um, I wouldn’t do it on your live website, folks. I would do it on the staging website. Um, when it comes to actually utilizing it to customize something like LifterLMS, which we love, um, I think, you know, definitely don’t do it on a production site if you’ve got actual students. But secondly, really do it in very small steps and, um, Really, you do need some understanding about how LifterLMS works, how the flow works, other factors. And if you haven’t got this knowledge, it’s probably going to cause you even more confusion. It’s probably going to make things worse for you. But that would be the same in any circumstance. If The actual flow, how Lifter actually works with a student, it’s been developed over many years. And so you’re probably not going to improve that. You know, if you just want to improve a layout of something that Lifter has that you want to change, that’s probably possible. But you do need some understanding because otherwise You’re probably going to get into a bit of a pickle.
[00:09:29.500] – Jonathan Denwood
But I think the other, the other thing is, so customizing the front end, I think a very legitimate way it could help is personalizing the onboarding experience. Because I think that really matters because churn is a, is a problem. And if you can reduce Reduce churn for personalization. Adaptive learning paths. Well, that that’s much more complicated. That’s you really need some experience because you could make a you could make things a lot worse. Content recommendations inside. Well, that’s totally possible as well, but they are more. That’s a more intermediate step, isn’t it? So it really depends. I don’t know if you agree with this, Kurt. It really depends what you expect AI is going to do for you and what things realistically it can and can’t do. Would you agree with that?
[00:10:42.940] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think fundamentally it comes down to more than that in the reasoning, Jonathan. I feel like I feel like e-learning, I feel like e-learning is this really sacred place, right? Like personally, I’m really big in the coaching, training, development space. And so I think, I really feel that some things need to have a tactile experience, some things need to be hands-on. And so there’s a lot of opportunities for Yeah. automation. There’s a lot of opportunities for, you know, these adaptive learning paths that people talk about. But I think what’s important to recognize is that adaptive learning paths didn’t originate with AI. It originated with, you know, hands-on human experience through development in places like Articulate 360 and different learning packages and softwares that would, that would do these types of things. And so I think it’s really, really important when you’re thinking about AI and these things, You have to draw a line for yourself. You have to say, what things am I willing to automate? What things am I willing to turn over to artificial intelligence? You know, what things do I feel are safe? Like, like, what’s your, what’s your threshold for risk, right?
[00:12:00.520] – Kurt von Ahnen
So which items on my task list are okay for me to give to AI? And what things do I really need to be involved in? face-to-face, human-to-human, experientially. And for students, that can be a big thing as to whether they, you know, land and expand with you, like take more courses or recommend you to other people. If you are like a coach or a, you know, kind of like one of those continuing education platforms, the goal there is that you want people to keep coming back to you. But if people are getting a sterile experience because you’ve overleveraged AI and automation and they never seem to have contact with you, Well, then what’s the benefit of using you for the training? They could get the training from anywhere. And so I, there’s, like I said, foundationally, I think your question has merit. But for me, there’s certain things where I still, no matter how much I could automate it, I’m still gonna, I’m still gonna dip my fingers in a little bit. Mm-hmm. And I think that that’s where a lot of people don’t have, especially people new to the space, they don’t have the right experience to make the decision Without consulting somebody.
[00:13:09.650] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I totally agree with you. It— there are, um, I think we covered 2 parts, another 2 bits in the first half, and then, um, we’ll go into some of the solutions in the second half of the show. The next bit I want to cover in the first half of the show is, um, is the traditional membership plugin stack dead? Um, yes or no? Um, that’s the answer because, um, we covered, we covered last week what were some of the best membership plugins and why, when should you look at utilizing a learning management system plugin rather than a membership plugin. Um, and I think there’s some key plugins that it’s just not worth trying to build something from the ground up because they’re very cost-effective. They’ve been proven, the code is solid. But what AI does offer is that at some stage where you need some further customization that might have been too expensive to do, you’re going to be able now to consider it. Um, but there’s, there’s some core plug— and also having to add a little bit of functionality in that and having to add another plugin might be avoided. So, um, but I really don’t see the death of, of some of the core plugins like LifterLMS.
[00:14:52.340] – Jonathan Denwood
I just don’t see any kind of business argument that you would remove LifterLMS completely and just build your own solution. I think that would be a bit crazy, really.
[00:15:05.550] – Kurt von Ahnen
What do you think? I couldn’t agree more, Jonathan. In fact, Chris went down this lane with a social media post recently and he said, hey, if you want to build your own LMS using AI, have at it. But, you know, these are the elements you might want to consider. And then, you know, list like, you know, 3 pages of features and benefits that LifterLMS already has prebuilt into the platform. I think what’s really incredible to really think of is there are some people that think that eLearning is like a collection of PowerPoints that they could maybe host in a Google Drive and then feed via links to a series of pages, right? Like some people think that that’s what an LMS is, but a real learning management system. The keyword is in the system part, right? So how do you track students? Do they become part of a membership? Do you, you know, have a record of, you know, every question they’ve been asked and answered in a quiz? Do you have all of the submitted assignments that they may have done? Do you— and you might hear me say this and go, well, I don’t need all that.
[00:16:06.260] – Kurt von Ahnen
You know, I just need to show people a couple of PowerPoints and we’re done. If that’s all you need, you probably don’t need an LMS. We’re having the wrong conversation anyway. Right. But, but if you need the features of an LMS, it does not make sense to try to build your own, right? Especially when LifterLMS out of the box is free. So, so that’s definitely something to think about. But you mentioned something else that’s interesting because the core of our conversation is like on AI as well, right, Jonathan? So we’ve been experimenting on, on our side with, okay, let’s say that we have these 5 or 6 core plugins. That we believe are what give us the stepping stones to success as an agency. Meaning we have premium features, you know, premium features, premium benefits, but we also get the benefit of support of a third party should something go wrong with a customer’s website. And so that to me is like this giant— that’s this giant thing that everyone seems to be avoiding in the conversation, right? Who’s responsible for the support when things go bad? And things have gone bad 4 times this month.
[00:17:11.180] – Kurt von Ahnen
So if people are thinking that things don’t go bad, they go bad all the time. The last 3 WordPress updates have been security-oriented updates, and then of course we have our PHP emergency this week that everyone’s ranting and raving about. And so if you are on this train where you’re building your own custom stuff and you’re just trying to re-engineer, reinvent the wheel, and, and be the, the king of all you survey, you’ve got to be aware that Everything on the internet is cause and effect. So when you do something, it can affect something on the other side. And if we are leveraging AI at, at an effective, you know, efficient rate right now, you can use these plugins and you can have AI review these websites and come up with strategies to help them perform quickly. We’re getting website performance out of our packages now, Jonathan, that are blowing me away. But I wouldn’t have gotten that performance with all those plugins. 2 years ago without filtering them through AI and looking at some other solutions first. So you can use, you can use the heavy plugins, still get great performance, but get the benefit of the support on the back end.
[00:18:15.980] – Kurt von Ahnen
So it doesn’t make sense to try and rebuild stuff yourself if you’ve got tremendous performance, tremendous features, and tremendous support.
[00:18:24.150] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s great. I’m going to be talking about security and some of the solutions in the second half. Which we’re going to go to now. Should be a great second half show. We will be back in a few moments, folks.
[00:18:38.430] – Kurt von Ahnen
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[00:19:03.290] – Speaker 4
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[00:19:15.730] – Speaker 5
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[00:19:53.070] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re coming back. Folks, it’s been a great first half. Just giving you the reality of using AI with WordPress. Put some thoughts into your mind. Also want to point out I do a great newsletter. Send it to you every Tuesday and Wednesday. It normally covers one of the subjects. I do a number of podcasts, so I choose one of the podcast subjects and then I do a bit of a write-up. about it, give you a bit more information. And then also I scour the internet for the best stories that interest me, and I combine it all into a free newsletter. You can get this by going over to wp-tonic.com/newsletter, wp-tonic.com/newsletter. So the last thing before we look at some of the solutions, Kirk, is security. And I think you touched on it a little bit before we went for our mid-break, but I think security is not only affecting WordPress now, it affects— it’s affecting all sorts of online services, bank— from banking. There’s been scares all over the place. So I just want to put that in. But that’s one of the things you’ve got to be aware of. That’s why I would say it’s best to do it on a staging site.
[00:21:20.490] – Jonathan Denwood
Try it out. Then we, you know, any good host like WP-Tonic, we can set it up so you can push any changes to your production if you want to, or we can help you move something that you’ve done on the staging and you want to put it— it’s not massive, we’re more than happy to help you out. That’s— but security is not only affecting open source or WordPress, it’s affecting Everything, really. Would you agree with that?
[00:21:53.830] – Kurt von Ahnen
I would. I would agree. I think it’s affecting absolutely every phase of what we do and what customers experience as well.
[00:22:00.640] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. So let’s look at some of the solutions. And I think there’s 2 buckets here, Kurt. There’s solutions that hosting providers— there’s some hosting providers that really haven’t gone down this road that much. And then there’s other hosting providers that, like GoDaddy, offers their own unique AI builder that’s really got— it’s got nothing to do with WordPress. They still offer WordPress as well, but people get confused by that. There’s others that are basing it on WordPress, but it’s still a semi-proprietary solution, i.e., if you want to move from that hosting provider. It’s not that clear in some of the documentation I’ve read that you can actually move the website. I personally would prefer a plugin solution myself because it gives you more flexibility. What do you think of that statement?
[00:23:09.630] – Kurt von Ahnen
You know, the plugin stuff, I’m on the fence with that, Jonathan. There’s so many things that can be done within a snippet, you know, or something. And then there’s, there’s other things that you could have packages packaged up as a plugin. And I do see, I do see an issue. Like, so when a customer says, oh, I’m going to leave you, and like, so you develop the website for them and they say, we’re going to leave and they, we’re going to migrate somewhere. Well, sometimes in the migration process, they can get mucked up on what’s a plugin, what’s activated, what’s deactivated, what do the snippets do, are the snippets activated, did they deactivate in the migration? But realistically, and again, here we go again, if they’re using AI, AI can help walk them through that. Like they can say, hey, after we migrated the site, our shopping cart doesn’t refresh anymore after whatever, right? And then AI is going to be able to review the website, look at the code and go, oh, well, you have a, you know, you have a snippet that’s been deactivated, you know, click, click this link to reactivate that snippet.
[00:24:09.330] – Kurt von Ahnen
And so AI will help in that way. But the trick is to not lose your patience in the process. That’s, I think, the biggest thing when we’re talking about, you know, AI and building these sites from scratch. And now we’re talking about a possible migration is like you just got to keep your cool and you got to ask the right questions and you got to let AI try to help you and walk you through some things. And you need to learn as you go.
[00:24:36.760] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think Yeah, I think I’ve confused you a little bit. Yeah, I think I totally agree with you there, but I’m talking about the mechanics. You’ve got these, some of these, um, WordPress website hosting providers, they’ve got their own unique builder and it’s AI builder. It’s not—
[00:24:57.710] – Kurt von Ahnen
Oh.
[00:24:58.310] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s not that clear if you actually move away from that hosting provider with their unique builder. you’re going to be able to migrate it away. It’s not that clear, is it?
[00:25:12.260] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s not clear at all. It’s not clear at all. We just— so for the record, you know, we just lost a client. Like we had a client, we built them a website in WordPress. We are hosting it for the last year and a half. And for a year and a half, the customer said, you know, I’m going to add my own content, I’m going to this, I’m going to that. And they, of course, did nothing, right? Did a hot nothing with it. We stayed in touch. We offered them marketing packages. We said, we can help you create your content. We can do this, we can do that. Like, you’re not optimizing your— and to the point, we probably did nag them a little more, right, than they were hoping for. We were like, hey, you have an opportunity to promote your business and you’re missing it. Or, hey, people have been submitting forms and you’re not responding to the forms. ‘Cause we would see this when we would do the maintenance and updates for them. They ended up hiring someone that was local to them. And that local person said, oh, we don’t need this website anymore.
[00:26:05.110] – Kurt von Ahnen
We’re just going to start our own website. And I was like, okay, have at it. Let me know when to turn this one off. And they said, oh, you can go ahead and turn it off now. And I thought, well, that’s interesting. A month later, Jonathan, they had a website coming soon message to the, to the GoDaddy, you know, web builder. And I’m like, you had me turn off a functioning website so that you could go to a construction page in some tool that you can’t even migrate or move later if you change your mind.
[00:26:37.290] – Jonathan Denwood
No, but I’m not sure if the end client really understands. But you can only—
[00:26:41.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
The end client has no knowledge.
[00:26:43.930] – Jonathan Denwood
No, no, none. Not. So you’ve got hosting providers that are offering AI website building functionality. And then you’ve got some plugins and a lot of them, what they’re doing is not solely, but one of the easiest routes is to use is that there’s a kind of middle ground where the hosting provider will, will offer MCP server. That basically, it’s a hosted bit of software that will communicate with something like Claude. And if you’ve got a Claude account and you’re using some, like the website builder tool in Claude, you can actually build your website and through Abe, the interface, you could migrate that to your WordPress hosting provider, but you’re gonna need a plugin That will communicate with WordPress, with the NCP, which NCP communicates with Claude. Um, and there’s a couple solutions out there. Um, it’s still early days, but they’re getting, they’re getting reasonable traction. One of them is WP Vibe, and I think you’ve tested that, haven’t you, Kurt?
[00:28:18.880] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’ve used WP Vibe pretty extensively recently. It’s been, it’s been a really, it’s been a really good component for us.
[00:28:26.590] – Jonathan Denwood
And what are some of the things that you’ve learned from that experience, Kurt?
[00:28:32.800] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, WP Vibe is like the glue that kind of holds it all together, right? So I want to be like super clear, like some people say, oh, what about Nova Mira? Nova Mira is like a similar Kind of thing in my mind.
[00:28:46.610] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, that’s the next one I’m gonna be talking about.
[00:28:49.420] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, so we add a plugin, we connect it to Claude, and WP Vibe is like this glue that gives Claude certain skills within WordPress to make changes and do things for you. And I think it’s a really smart way to try and keep AI on the rails a little bit better. You know, you’ll hear about people saying, oh, I’m just gonna do an MCP connection and activate all the skills and let Claude do whatever. And I think, you know, if you’re working in staging, that’s fine. Like, like we’ve talked about this multiple times. If you want to work on your website in a space where people can’t see what you’re doing in your website, you do it in staging. And if you break something, not a big deal. Pull up a new staging site and start over. But if you’re working in production, you definitely want to have some guardrails. And for the most part, I found this WP Vibe thing very helpful because I add it as a plugin to the site. I have my site, I have a staging site. I tell Claude, hey, we’re going to work in staging, and we do a bunch of work in staging.
[00:29:54.570] – Kurt von Ahnen
And then as things work, I could tell Claude, hey, I want to duplicate this in production, you know, once we validated that things will work. And it does it for you. It just says, okay, let’s take the items that worked and let’s just transfer that over to the production site. And it does it. And It’s been really, really helpful in migrations and search and replace audits because I found that a lot of the hosting tools that do the search and replace when you migrate a website, they miss a lot of the details, the nooks and crannies in the database. And Claude’s really, really great at cleaning that stuff up. So the experience has been really, really positive. You explain to Claude what you want. And Claude basically, you know, does its best to make it happen. And then you validate the results. But again, I go back to cause and effect. There’s a lot of times where you’ll tell Claude to do something, and just because it can do it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do, that there might be a negative side effect that happens on the back end of that decision.
[00:30:56.880] – Kurt von Ahnen
And so you need to understand what you’re— again, it amplifies, it amplifies successes, but it also amplifies mistakes and bad decisions. Yeah. So, so you need to, you need to understand that what you’re working with is, is like basically a digital amplifier. It’s, it’s taking what you’ve talked about.
[00:31:12.580] – Jonathan Denwood
We’ve covered that bit.
[00:31:14.040] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah,
[00:31:14.600] – Jonathan Denwood
I think we’ve covered that bit. I like— but the actual mechanics. So you install the plugin on staging, you’re putting prompts through Claude.
[00:31:25.000] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, through Claude. I just talked to Claude.
[00:31:26.940] – Jonathan Denwood
And Claude then pushes it through WP5 directly
[00:31:34.810] – Kurt von Ahnen
to the site.
[00:31:35.790] – Jonathan Denwood
To the site. And then when you’re set, you’re doing that on staging and then you can ask Claude to push it to the production. Is that correct?
[00:31:47.030] – Kurt von Ahnen
Correct. Yeah. And it’ll do. So just to be— it’ll help you. You could say, I want to make a new page. It’ll make a new page from scratch. You could say, I want you to create a newsletter for me in FluentCRM. It’ll go do it. So it’ll, it really does have a wide breadth of skills that it can implement in the site for you.
[00:32:06.410] – Jonathan Denwood
Now, was I correct with wherever you’re hosting, if you’re using WP Vibe, you also got to set up an MCP server to work? No, no, you don’t need MCP.
[00:32:20.480] – Kurt von Ahnen
No, because the connection with WP Vibe runs through them.
[00:32:24.230] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, right. So they’re hosting the MCP, right?
[00:32:27.530] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.
[00:32:28.090] – Jonathan Denwood
Um, I think that the other one, Nova Mia, um, I think— I’m not sure if they do. I think— I’m not sure. Is that— have you— are you using the paid version of WPvibe or the free version?
[00:32:42.710] – Kurt von Ahnen
Paid.
[00:32:43.440] – Jonathan Denwood
The paid. That’s probably the difference because they are probably then providing— I’m only surmising this, Kirk, I could be totally wrong. But they’re providing with the paid version, the MCP server. I think probably with the— it’s the same in NovaMia, is that if you’re using the free version, they don’t provide the MCP, but if you’re utilizing the paid, they do.
[00:33:08.690] – Kurt von Ahnen
Hmm.
[00:33:08.930] – Jonathan Denwood
Um, so that makes things a bit easier. Well, it’s not that hard. You can ask Claude, as long as you’ve got the IPA or the credentials, you can ask Claude to connect if you’re using the MCP, using the free versions. But I could be wrong about this. I apologize, folks. But so yeah.
[00:33:28.240] – Kurt von Ahnen
So I think I have a clarification on WP Vibe.
[00:33:32.090] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah.
[00:33:32.500] – Kurt von Ahnen
On WP Vibe, their free version, I believe you still use their MCP.
[00:33:37.700] – Jonathan Denwood
All right.
[00:33:38.110] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s, it’s the same, but you get a very, very limited amount of actions that you can do. It’s like you can only get like 100 daily calls or something like that.
[00:33:48.050] – Jonathan Denwood
So how are they dealing with it? Yeah.
[00:33:49.890] – Kurt von Ahnen
And, and I don’t know if, again, people that are new to working with AI, like when you tell Claude to do something, it says, well, let me check this, let me check that, let me check the other thing, let me do this, let me do this, let me— and that’s that 100 calls get sucked up quick.
[00:34:04.810] – Jonathan Denwood
So what was your Claude usage like with the, the experiments that you’ve been doing? What Claude plan have you got?
[00:34:15.140] – Kurt von Ahnen
This is where I’m going to sound like I’m not an expert at all. I have, I have the $20 a month plan and I’ve only, I’ve only had it shut down on me 2 or 3 times in the last month.
[00:34:27.040] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah.
[00:34:27.620] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, you know, and so, so now I’m only doing one thing at a time, you know, one site at a time. One, I have— we’re both friends with people in the space that are making content, Jonathan. One of them is Mark Szymanski. Mark Szymanski is on, I think, a $300 a month plan with, with Claude, and he’s running 3 or 4 different chat windows at a time on 3 or 4 different projects at a time, you know, in a dashboard that he’s custom created and all these things. And I think just like anything else, we have the ability to deep dive and overcomplicate some things sometimes.
[00:35:05.600] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, he said, well, he wouldn’t mind me saying this. He is an AI, you know, he said Bro, isn’t he?
[00:35:13.800] – Kurt von Ahnen
He’s in, he’s in 100%.
[00:35:15.470] – Jonathan Denwood
And he runs a course on it. So he would be using a lot. I would hope he would be using a lot of Claude and, and other AI platforms because he’s teaching it, isn’t he?
[00:35:27.430] – Kurt von Ahnen
And, and I want to go a step further and explain to people, like, when you’re having Claude do the work for you, you could, right? So let’s say you’re an experienced person, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you got your Claude window going and you’re chatting with Claude and you’re telling it what to do. and you just authorize it. Like you’re not saying I have to approve every step. You’re just telling Claude what to do. You can go do other work. Like if you’re an agency, you can let it work on one window and you can go do other work. And that’s where people are seeing these giant efficiency jumps in agency work and productivity. But if you’re still in that learning space, I really encourage people to sit with Claude, work with Claude, co-work with Claude, if we could say it that way. Yeah. And learn from it, ’cause it’s gonna say, This is what I’m looking at right now. This is what I’m checking. This is what I’m seeing. I need your permission to do this. I need your— and I encourage people to go that route because that’s going to help build that, that core knowledge base for you personally that I’ve been talking about for half this episode.
[00:36:27.540] – Jonathan Denwood
So WPvive and Novomia, they’re very similar. They’re the 2 main leaders in this. We’ve put Novomia on one client’s website. Um, I’ve been approached by another— they want WP Vibe. I, I’m— I don’t know if Nodemia works in the same way as WP Vibe, i.e., the free version, they give you some access to MCP, but it’s limited. I don’t know. Uh, I’m gonna have to check that, folks. But they work in similar ways, basically, and they’re They’re head to head, that, but they do things with Claude. Do you know with WP Vibe, is it exclusively Claude or could you use—
[00:37:17.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
Oh no, you can use whatever AI LLM you want.
[00:37:21.320] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. That’s good. And I think that’s the same with NovaMea as well. So that’s good. The other thing I wanted to discuss before we finish this episode, the There’s a web design trainer that’s very popular on the internet, and he’s, he’s really down to earth, but he’s been mostly training people to use Elementor. And I’ve got no problem with Elementor, but it’s not the tool that I would use. Um, we recommend Kadence for the average person, or if you a more power user, or if you’re a freelancer and that, I would recommend Bricks or GeneratePress or Ollie. Ollie, GeneratePress, but I would recommend Bricks myself, right? But I think you’d be okay with either of those 3 choices. But I do like Bricks, but it’s not native Gutenberg. It can produce Gutenberg blocks though, I think. Is that correct? And, um, but I like General Cadence if you’re just interested in the, um, doing updates and that. Um, I think the free product is still pretty good. Um, but get back to this, um, trainer website designer, and it’s Reno de Beer. He’s based in Holland, and I always liked him, um, and always liked his videos and his down-to-earth attitude.
[00:39:06.030] – Jonathan Denwood
Um, and he’s a great trainer, like Kirk. Kirk, you’re very— you’re a great trainer as well. Um, but he, he really built his channel and his business, um, training, doing web design for actual real clients, but trying to offer training in Elementor. And he announced recently that he’s really— he’s no longer going to be using Elementor. He’s going to be utilizing, um, still be using WordPress because he— for the flexibility, the power, the ownership, all the good stuff that we’ve talked about. But he was going to use Bricks- not Bricks; he was going to use Claude. And he wasn’t; he was going to use Claude Direct. And then he was going to use maybe one of the tools that we’ve talked about. And when it came to clients, he had built his own editor, which I think he calls Pocket, um, so they could go to the front end and just— if they wanted to change a paragraph, if they wanted to swap an image, they didn’t have to even go into the back end of WordPress. They could do it, um, because he said, and I agreed with him, and I think it does depend on the client.
[00:40:43.320] – Jonathan Denwood
But tools like Elementor, for the average person, they can really mess up a website. Um, because all these— and that’s one of the reasons why I like Kadence and their block. Um, they haven’t quite— you can build a whole website in Kadence. Um, if I were a professional, I probably would do it in probably something else. Um, but, um, he made this plugin called Pocket because he said a lot of clients, if they go into Elementor, they’re lost because they’ve turned Elementor into a professional website-building tool. Um, and with Flexbox and all the new ways of building a website, I think you found that with some other tools that you were trying to learn, didn’t you? That they became extremely technical. Um, and for the average person who just wants to update something, it’s too easy to mess something up. So he’s produced his own plugin. I, I surmise that he vibe-coded it, and it’s called Pocket. But he said the people that wanted a lot more, he would just install Bricks, and he would offer them some online training, and they would have access through WordPress through Bricks. Um, because you get all different types of clients.
[00:42:19.050] – Jonathan Denwood
You get clients that don’t just want to do a minor change or put a blog post up, and others that want a lot more control, don’t they? It’s very difficult to have just one policy because you’re dealing with such a diverse group of clients, aren’t you? Would you agree with that?
[00:42:39.670] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I do agree at a certain level, but I’m coming into— and again, circling back to, like, the main theme of this particular episode with the AI influence, Jonathan, I’m really coming back to— I don’t need these page builders because, with the influence in WP Vibe, I can generate what I’m trying to do. Again, I’ll steal just 50 seconds. We had a website; it was one of the last forward-facing websites that we had as an agency that was still on Elementor. And I thought, well, this is the reason I’m going to resubscribe to Elementor this year for this one website. I don’t think so. I’m done paying for Elementor. And not that I hate Elementor, I’m just, I’m, I’m not using it anymore except for this one website. So I use WP Vibe. I went in, and I said, ” Hey, Claude, um, we want to get rid of our Elementor subscription. Can you take this basic design and keep most of the design possible, but, you know, move this over to just Astra? And using blocks, you know, and it took some time, Jonathan. It wasn’t an instant fix, and we had some things that we had to clear up along the way, but the website in the end came out better looking, crisper, cleaner, and we gained like 20 points on page speed.
[00:44:06.940] – Kurt von Ahnen
You know, just cleaning some things up, and I’m not saying it’s all Elementor’s fault, but it was the inspiration to go in and clean things up and make some changes. And so we ended up with a giant jump in page speed. We ended up with a better-looking website, and I didn’t need the page builder anymore. I just needed the theme in the background, and we chose Astra for that one.
[00:44:25.860] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. And I think that’s what Rene Dubois is talking about. He, he’s got this pocket so the client can update, and if they want a lot more, he can offer Bricks. And if he wants to do more control, he uses bricks, but for a lot of the design and the initial build-out, he’s just doing what you just said. And he’s a really down-to-earth guy. So I really and a very good designer. So I get a lot of comfort from this because I think WordPress is going to successfully be able to adapt. And of course, there’s always going to be a group of AI bro types that say, well, you don’t, you don’t need WordPress, you don’t need a content management system. And for some clients that don’t really value their website, don’t value getting clients that— or they’re using paid search, or they’re using Meta platforms- that might be okay. And there are a number of AI bro types that are kind of pushing that message. But I think with the bulk of people, you need some way to be able to update the website and have a platform that allows you to migrate somewhere else.
[00:46:04.420] – Jonathan Denwood
Because, um, I don’t interrupt any client. Any client who’s not happy with the way that WP-Tonic is managing their website, as long as they give us 30 days’ notice, we will, um, in most cases- I’m not going to say all, but almost 99% of the time- if they’re not happy, we will just migrate the website for them. And we’re not here to entrap anybody. So how would you finish? Any last words before we wrap up?
[00:46:44.700] – Kurt von Ahnen
Not really, Jonathan. I just think it is— it’s only fair to point out to the listener that, you know, out of the— out of the people that you and I know that we congregate with, that we share on the WP-Tonic, you know, roundtable show and stuff like that, I think I was one of the most reticent people to really jump into the AI bandwagon and leverage it in this way.
[00:47:08.420] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, cautious, and I think you had every right to be cautious.
[00:47:11.470] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, super, super cautious. I mean, I don’t wanna say late to the game ’cause I tried to stay educated along the way and understand things, but to use it, leverage it, and promote. So just for the record, we did this on personal projects first, and then once we experienced a certain level of success and confidence, we began leveraging some of these tools in customer environments. I am still very cautious about things that I do, and I leverage staging in big ways, big ways. And so I can’t stress enough, these are exciting times, but, like to steal your phrase, Jonathan, these are very much new days, right? So we’ve got to, We’ve got to stay the course. We’ve got to be diligent. We’ve got to be responsible. We can still be excited, but we can be excited with responsibility. And I just really want to end with that. Like, there’s so much to learn. There’s so much to do. There’s so much awesome stuff that we can play with. But, but you’ve got to, got to be cautious. And, you know, especially in— we’re in days where security updates are coming left and right. So you don’t want to leave yourself some gaping security hole.
[00:48:24.430] – Kurt von Ahnen
Because you weren’t aware of what you were building or doing.
[00:48:27.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think that’s fantastic advice. So what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to, Kurt?
[00:48:34.990] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m still on LinkedIn, and it’s a great way to reach me. I’m the only Kurt von Ahn in there, so I’m easy to find. I’m also Mañana No Más, so you can reach us on our websites, or you can reach out to me directly through the team at WP-Tonic, because we do a lot of work together.
[00:48:49.620] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. And if you want to support the show, folks, leave us a 5-star review on Spotify or iTunes. That really promotes us to new listeners and viewers. Got any questions? The best way is to go to the WP-Tonic YouTube channel and leave a comment or a question, and we’ll get back to you ASAP. That’s a great way to contact us. And like I say, leave a 5-star review. That really would help me and Kirk with the podcast. We will be back next week with another great topic. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
[00:49:27.370] – Speaker 1
Thanks for listening to the Membership Machine Show. Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes, and leave a rating to support the show. Until next time.
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