Using AI to Troubleshoot Performance Issues With WordPress
Using AI to troubleshoot WordPress performance issues saves hours. Discover automated solutions that identify and fix slow sites fast.
In this podcast, we delve into the innovative use of AI to troubleshoot performance issues in WordPress. Learn how advanced algorithms can identify bottlenecks and suggest effective solutions to enhance your site’s speed and stability. With real-time demonstrations, we’ll guide you through the troubleshooting process to ensure your WordPress site runs smoothly.
With Special Guest Brian Jackson, Co-founder of Forgemediallc
This Week’s Sponsors
Kinta: Kinta
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:23.120] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 1001. Yes, 1001 episodes. I’ve been doing that. We got a returning friend of the show. Always great discussions with Brian Jackson. Brian Jackson’s well known in the WordPress community. He’s also the co-founder of Forge Media, which produces some great plugins and is also an agency in its own right. Should be a great discussion. We’re going to talk about using AI to troubleshoot performance issues in WordPress, AI in general, and whatever else comes up during the interview. It should be a great show. So Brian, can you just give us a quick 1015-second intro, and then when we go into the main part of the interview, we can go into a little bit more of your background. Sure.
[00:01:27.900] – Brian Jackson
The brief overview, I run, yeah, Forge Media with my brother, and we developed two plugins at the moment, Perfmatters and NovaShare. One is Performance, I mean, both are performance-focused, but one is to help you kind of speed up your WordPress sit,e and the other one is focused on social sharing, but it kind of
[00:01:47.260] – Jonathan Denwood
from a performance aspect, and that’s fantastic. And I’ve got my great co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:01:58.310] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sure thing, Jonathan. My name is Kurt Von Ahnan. I own an agency called Manana Nomas, and we work directly with the great folks at WP Tonic.
[00:02:06.430] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Should be a great show. But before we go into the meat potatoes, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks.
[00:02:16.070] – Kurt von Ahnen
Hey, running a business is tough. You shouldn’t have to worry about your website, either. With Kinsta’s managed hosting for WordPress, you get lightning-fast load times, enterprise-grade security, and 24,7 expert support from real humans. Switch to Kinsta and see site speeds improve by up to 200% with effortless migrations and a powerful, easy-to-use dashboard. Join over 120,000 other businesses that also trust Kinsta. Get your first month for free at kinsta.com, that’s k I n s t a dot com Kinsta Simply Better Hosting.
[00:02:49.500] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re coming back, folks. Before we go into the interview, I also want to point out that we’ve got some great special offers from the show’s sponsors. Plus, we created a list of the best WordPress plugins and services for power users, small freelancers, or small agency owners. It’s a great resource. Where can you go to get all these goodies? Go over to wp-tonic.com, deals wp hyphen tonic.com, and you’ll find all the free goodies there. What more could you ask for, my beloved WordPress professionals? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page. Even brought a smile from Brian. He was looking tentative, I don’t know why. He’s been on the show a few times, so. So, Brian, would you like to go into a little more detail about your background and how you got into WordPress and started running WordPress plugins?
[00:03:55.520] – Brian Jackson
No, I’m a little. I’m a little tired of the AI running me down, but we can go into that later. But yeah, I kind of. I got into it. My first WordPress site was in 2008, and I launched it just as a blog. You know, probably like almost everybody who got into WordPress back then, I was in it wanted to just share what I was learning at work every day. I was troubleshooting like a novel, Active Directory, all this old school like enterprise IT stuff. And I got into writing, and I really liked it for some reason, and still do. And I’ve been using WordPress ever since, like, launched multiple blogs, finally got away from it, and went over to doing content marketing for companies like Key CDN, and then eventually ended up at Kinsta doing their marketing. So that’s kind of the, yeah, short background. But yeah, I got into it just from blogging and it. I stuck with me ever since.
[00:04:58.750] – Jonathan Denwood
And we love Kinster, they are major sponsor of the show, so we appreciate their support. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:05:07.140] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I think it was when Brian was at Kinsta that Brian actually landed on my radar and I started paying attention to things. And you mentioned your love for writing, so. And I know that we’re going to talk about AI today, so let me just cut right to that. How has AI kind of interfered with or caused a gap in the writing that you love to do?
[00:05:28.020] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, I was talking to someone the other day about this just recently again, and I think it’s caused a big. And we were talking more about like SEO content, how it’s changed, you know, like, is it, is it worth it to write purely for SEO anymore as much as it Used to, because when I joined Kinsta, they hired me to basically say like, we’re going to go dominate SEO in the WordPress hosting space. Because like at the time it was like WP Engine and maybe pagely. That was kind of it. So we’re like, we can do content better. That was our strategy. However, today I don’t know if that same strategy just from a like long form blog standard would even work anymore because I think a lot of people have seen their traffic maybe start trending down. I know even on our sites I’ve seen just kind of a slow growth and I’m not really trying to combat it the same way I used to be where I would be like, okay, I need to go back, update content, publish more content. I think we’ve come full circle almost with AI and now we’re like, now I’m back into like affiliate marketing.
[00:06:37.720] – Brian Jackson
I think doing webinars and podcasts like this are becoming more important. So I actually think we’re like going back and like in person events at word camps. I think actually these things because of AI are going to become more important again. Which is weird because I thought affiliate marketing was kind of like going down to die. I think it’s going to flip. Yeah, but as far as content with AI goes, I mean, I use it daily, like, you know, even if it’s late at night and I need to rewrite something and I’m, you know, tired, you know, I’ll throw it in AI, see if, you know, get like four variations, see if I like it and then tweak it from there. I’ve never used AI. I don’t know if this is just me being OCD writer, but, but I usually don’t ever go in there, say like, write me an article and then go tweak it. I, I’ve never done that once. Um, I know a lot of people are doing that. I don’t do that. And it’s maybe because I’m just, I prefer to like do the outline myself still, all that stuff and then use AI to like help me tweak things along the way.
[00:07:38.380] – Kurt von Ahnen
So yeah, I, I, I find that interesting because I, I do some work for another company and they had me, you know, write for SEO, right? So using all these tools and, and by the time I was like, I started with something I had written and then I tried to put it through their SEO tool and by the time we had made all the modifications and changes and keyword injections and all these things, it was not the same piece of Work and I was not happy with, I wasn’t happy with it. Like, I’m like, I don’t even want to put my name on this byline. Like I don’t even think this is the original message and. But they loved it and of course they ranked for it. So they’re like, oh, this is fantastic, you should write us some more stuff. And I’m like, I don’t think I want to write any more stuff. Yeah, so I still do a lot of writing for my projects, my enterprises, but I’ve come to like this weird. Like I think AI is a great tool. Like you, I use it all the time, but I think that it’s over leveraged and we lose our voice sometimes in the process.
[00:08:35.420] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, I 100% agree. Another way I use it too is a lot of stuff we’re doing, like really technical, you know, like page speed, insight issues, talking about cls and all this stuff that a lot of times I’ll use it like take what I just said but dumb it down to make it easier to understand. I do that a lot actually. And it’s really good at like taking something really technical and making it like, you know, how would an average WordPress user need to understand this? I like, I like it for that a lot.
[00:09:03.790] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, and that segues perfect into the next question that we had had. And that was you wrote an article about using AI to fix performance problems with WordPress. Just kind of give the listeners and viewers kind of like the quick outline on what that article’s key elements were and why you think it’s valuable.
[00:09:21.880] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, I started out as like a, it was in my last newsletter essentially on Substack is where I wrote that. And essentially I was just going to have like this little AI thing about Claude at the top. And then I started writing it and it turned into a bigger thing and then it turned into like one of my longest, longest newsletters I think I pushed out. It was like 80% AI content at the end. So basically the topic was I’ve been diving a lot deeper into Claude code over the last six months and trying to figure out like what is all this hype about? Because I think there’s so much stuff on social media that people are seeing that, like what are the actual real use cases here besides just some, you know, influencers saying AI has changed my life or something like that. Like what is it actually helping you do? And so I was like, okay, I’m going to dive into Claude deeply and figure out like if there’s ways I can like use it extensively. And so it happened to be that they just launched their Chrome browser too when I did this.
[00:10:32.410] – Brian Jackson
And that’s where the game changed for me, basically, because before I use it for troubleshooting performance stuff, and we can dive into that, like use cases here that I use. But before, let’s say when we were just like back with ChatGPT and the web, stuff like that, you’d have to go say, my WordPress site has this issue with performance. How do I fix it? And then Claude or Claude Gemini, ChatGPT will come back saying, this is how we think you should fix it. But they had no direct link to the site that you’re really working on. So it was almost like you’re a translator to the AI and they’re translating back. And that was for me, I was like, this is useless. Like, it’s faster for me to just, you know, troubleshoot it like I’ve been doing for the last 20 years. But once you unleash Claude code like at the terminal or in the browser extension, it gives it access to the DOM or like the actual HTML on the page and it can run and check console errors. That’s where it changes everything because it’s actually doing the debugging that I would normally do myself on a WordPress website.
[00:11:44.540] – Brian Jackson
That’s where the data literally just went night and day, like, wow, this is incredibly useful. And so for people that want something easy, the Claude browser extension, really great for performance troubleshooting night and day compared to if you’re just used to using the web. One and I can. If you want some examples and you want me to dive into those or.
[00:12:07.570] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, yeah, well, I’ll toss it over to Jonathan, but I’m up for some examples.
[00:12:12.570] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, let’s just give us some examples.
[00:12:15.690] – Brian Jackson
Sure. So, I mean, one I use it for a lot is. And again, some of this will be kind of technical, but this is what I’m doing daily in my tickets. And so one is like content layout shifts. So once you get a WordPress site that gets more complex, you got, you know, 30 plugins running, lots of people will run into shifts on their website happening. And Google is going to flag you. That’s. It’s a core web vitals metric. They don’t like shifting on a page because it’s bad for the user experience.
[00:12:44.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Can you give a quick outline? What you mean by shifting would be
[00:12:49.260] – Brian Jackson
like a page loads and then something bumps down as you’re scrolling, like immediately once you hit the page. So anything like when you Load a web page. If everything’s perfect without cls, it should just be static and nothing moves. If you hit the page and things are bouncing around a little bit while you’re scrolling, that’s shifting and that means something’s tweaked that shouldn’t be out of place because most themes out of the box shouldn’t have any CLs. The developers designed them not to have CLs, but once people mess with them, then that’s where you can get CLS. And so people will start getting dinged on PageSpeed insights. And that’s kind of where. Then they’re like asking me, like, we have CLS issues. And before. This is actually one of the, one of the more tougher ones to troubleshoot for people because for like render blocking things, you can go Google how do I fix render blocking strips, stuff like that, and be like, oh, use perfmanters, use WP rocket, you know, stuff like that comes up, it’s fairly easier to fix. But for CLS, PageSpeed Insights basically shows you one div and it says, Here you go, fix your CLS.
[00:13:57.580] – Brian Jackson
For most people, that’s not very helpful. And so for me, I’ve been the last, like five years, I’ve been using like a hybrid model of like Debug Bear and webpagetest because they have nice recordings to kind of show you where the CLS is happening. And so I’ve been kind of doing that, but with AI, now with Claude, you can take the browser extension, say, like, run my website, figure out where the CLS is happening and tell me how to fix it. Just as simple as that. And you can watch it in the extension. It will literally take your website, run it through PageSpeed Insights right there in front of you. You’ll see it running, come back, get your data, see, like, okay, we see the cls, then it will dive into Chrome dev tools, just like I would have done if I was also doing this. And it will start looking at, okay, which divs are shifting. And it will literally get down to the div, the plugin, the theme, whatever is causing the shift. And it will then tell you how to fix it. And I’ve seen many, many times come back with like, I would say it’s 90% accurate.
[00:15:03.330] – Brian Jackson
Most of the time there’s still with, you know, AI hallucinations, you know, happening even in the WordPress coding space. And so. But I would say for me, it’s, it’s changed my, my workflow dramatically. And the cool thing is how I have my. I don’t mind sharing how I have my workflow set up. So right now there’s some issues with Claude code as far as like, if you install the browser extension and just use Claude, it’s going to launch in your main Chrome profile. I don’t like that. I don’t like giving AI access to anything that’s in my normal stuff. And so what I’ve done is I just installed Chrome Canary, which is like their beta testing of Chrome. It’s just free. You can go Google Chrome Canary. And so it’s basically a separate Chrome install. And so I just install the Claude browser extension there and I just use Chrome Canary for all my Claude debugging. And so I constantly have that up all day long. And the cool thing is you can launch multiple tasks in there. So I’ll launch, I’m now multitasking tickets and I’ll start one ticket. I’ll let Claude run a job on something more complicated that maybe I know it could figure it out faster than I could and then I’ll start going to another ticket.
[00:16:21.150] – Brian Jackson
I’ll work on that while it’s doing its thing in the background. And so now with AI, I’m bouncing around, it is helping me solve tickets faster and also with the more complicated ones, not have to reach out to my brother, who’s the real developer behind the scenes and ask something like I’m actually saving him time from me bugging him, if that makes sense. So, yeah, it’s changed a lot of the stuff I’m doing.
[00:16:50.090] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s cool.
[00:16:50.770] – Kurt von Ahnen
Jonathan?
[00:16:52.650] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. What, what do you think? Because I think the main problem with WordPress with a lot of websites is that you can get the desktop up, but where a lot of things suffer is the mobile. And there’s various, you know, it’s one of the things like, you know, I got, funny enough, I’ve got a customer right now that. So it’s a very small customer, but they’ve been with me almost eight years. But they, they’ve decided through the influence of a pay per click consultant that they’ve worked for for a number of years, they’ve, they’re knocking out lovable websites and their hosting is coming up in April and they’ve decided that this guy is building them a website on lovable. So, but do you. And I think we could talk about that, but I think the main bear with a lot of people is the mobile performance. What can AI help identify? Or is it. You’ve already talked about a couple of the main things. Is that also really what affects mobile performance when it comes to WordPress.
[00:18:28.060] – Brian Jackson
Well, I mean, think of this. It’s hard to like portray in words like how important when you give AI access to the DOM or the actual debugging part of it is because, like, let’s say six months ago, if you go ask like, what could I do to improve performance on this website from the web AI? The data was crap, in my opinion. It was completely useless most of the time. If you go now and say, like, if you go, let’s say we use your website WP Tonic as an example. If we go to the AI and use the browser extension so it has access directly, you can ask like, give me the top 10 things I need to do to improve performance on my website. It will shoot them back to you in a nice table with severity and go down each one in the list. I mean, it’s way better than PageSpeed Insights. I mean for debugging anything, you can even ask it, like, I have long server response time, like, what do I need to do to fix this? It will even analyze your cache headers at your host to see if the cache is working properly.
[00:19:34.960] – Brian Jackson
I mean it literally knows everything once you give it access to just in the DOM right there in the HTML.
[00:19:42.760] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah.
[00:19:43.160] – Brian Jackson
So I mean, ask it, think bigger picture now since it has assets, like, what are the top 10 things I can do to improve performance on website? I think you’d be surprised when you use this approach before. Like if you had done this like:6 months ago just from a web browser version of the AI, it’s completely different.
[00:20:01.160] – Jonathan Denwood
And does the article that you’ve written some articles about this, does it give the information you’re outlining?
[00:20:07.600] – Brian Jackson
It does, yeah. And I have some. I took screenshots of like even that one question, like, what are the worst things or what are the worst things on this website and things I can improve? And I put a screenshot on that article of like how it categorized everything by severity and then you can ask it to dive into each one and say like, okay, what do I need to do to fix this, this problem? And knows what code you’re running on the site. So like elementor, if you’re running elementor analysis, it knows that that is running already as opposed to before, where it might guess that you’re using Elementor based on something in the HTML. Now it knows and it’s taken all the knowledge it’s gaining from everything else to debug the issues. So it’s insanely powerful.
[00:20:49.050] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. So a more journalistic question, where do you think WordPress is at the beginning of 20, 2016 and do you, you know, you, you know, you’ve all. You’ve had the competition from wix, Squarespace, more professional tools like webflow, but now you’ve got AI website builders. I just described this client, this small client, but it’s been with me a number of years and the next couple days they’ll be going to lovable. Where do you think WordPress is going to be in a year? Is it just a slow decline or do you think because we, we’ve seen WordPress 7, we’ve seen automatic try and put more AI elements into WordPress where do you think we’re going to be in the next 18 months, just a slow decline or do you think AI might actually help WordPress? I don’t know. Where do you think we’re going to be?
[00:22:06.170] – Brian Jackson
I mean I’ve been testing WordPress 7 already that you mentioned it because they’re changing the UI as you probably saw, I mean one of the biggest UI changes and I would say a decade probably to the WordPress admin and but I was also saw that, you know, they added, they added the AI connectors in there so there’s a new section in there where you can go add Claude Code chatgpt and hook it up and what that’s going to do is like, I mean even for performance too, I mean it will parse through all the code on your site. I mean it, I mean you can ask it to do new things, it’s going to be insane. So I think, I think leveraging AI inside of WordPress, giving it access to the code on there is going to be open up a whole can of worms but a whole new good and bad I guess you could say. But I do think I am more worried though to be honest about the AI website builders. I mean I don’t know if you’ve tried WordPress.com they launched their. I played with theirs just because I was curious, you know, because GoDaddy has one, I think WIX has one.
[00:23:16.010] – Brian Jackson
I forget what they’re called like Arrow and these other Things and the WordPress.com 1 Like I was, I’m not a designer by any means but like I launched a site in five minutes and I had it make a little logo for me just with a few prompts and I mean the website looked great in my opinion. I mean just for a standard static business website, I mean I was impressed for five minutes of work because in the past there’s been no way to do that a website in five minutes like that. The reason I’m worried though is because I’m worried about AI slop, which has become a term recently of what is this going to dump out as far as code goes? Because right now in the community WordPress themes and plugins all kind of develop things with a certain standard and same same way in mind like even Elementor Astra, even though they’re different, they’re all using the same practices in terms of how things are in queued stuff like that. With AI, I’m worried we’re going to start getting these just good looking sites but just junk code underneath and it’s going to be a nightmare for anyone trying to troubleshoot anything.
[00:24:24.520] – Brian Jackson
So I’m actually worried about that. I think AI builders are cool but I’m worried that they’re going to take off so fast that it’s going to create all this extra headache for, for anyone doing performance building agency, website, any, anybody. So I think it’ll be interesting to see where that goes.
[00:24:42.710] – Jonathan Denwood
Funny enough, you probably know this guy because he’s got a very large YouTube channel and I, I don’t. I disagree with a lot of his statements but he, for some reason I looked at his most recent video and it’s Daryl Wilson, probably know the name. And his latest video is about a little bit of a rant about Alamat and about what Alama has been trying to do. And I do agree with quite a bit of what Daryl was saying in this video about Alamata and what they’re trying to do. But he also pointed out that a lot of these AI websites, they all kind of look a bit the same but you suppose you could say what. And the content that they’re producing it what I’m struggling with. It’s very difficult at the beginning of 2616 to get a website that actually does something for you, converts people into actual action, into either buying your plug in your service or booking a call with you. I don’t think it’s ever been more difficult to get the action that you’re looking for. I don’t know if you agree with that statement. And these website AI builders, they think well if you build a website in 10 minutes, but actually getting a website that actually does something for you, it’s a totally different cup of tea.
[00:26:28.930] – Jonathan Denwood
Can you see where I’m going or do you not?
[00:26:31.410] – Brian Jackson
No. Yeah. No, I think it kind of goes back to a little bit what I mentioned. Where like where’s the real, the real use cases? Like all these people were saying AI is changing things. But when it comes to actually, you know, signing up new customers like you said and converting, that’s a whole different ball game. And I think, as you mentioned, I think there’s just way more noise today than there was five years ago, which is making it insanely hard for anybody. I retweeted this the other day. I have it in my notes because I really like the tweet was man was not meant to monitor this many situations is what the tweet was. And I was like, I 100 agree with that because I feel like I’m pulled in like some so many directions now as opposed to even five years ago. Like, and a lot of it’s to blame is AI. Essentially AI is just making things. Like making things easier isn’t always good. I’ve been slowly discovering too because let’s use like troubleshooting performance tickets. Before all my work was like, you get some satisfaction of like, okay, I solved a difficult a problem, I wrote a great piece of content.
[00:27:42.480] – Brian Jackson
But now if you’re just using the AI to do all this stuff, like where is the satisfaction? Like you’re going to get the grind without any satisfaction. That’s not a very. Doesn’t sound like a very fulfilling life to me. So I don’t know. I think AI is a double dodged sword at the moment. As far as being useful. I know some people might not agree with that at all, but all right,
[00:28:04.520] – Jonathan Denwood
it’s a good time for us to go for our middle break. We will be back in a few moments with our second half and our friend of the show, Brian Jackson. It’s been a great discussion so far. We will be back in a few moments. Folks.
[00:28:17.650] – Kurt von Ahnen
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[00:28:54.980] – Speaker 4
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[00:29:32.450] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re coming back, folks. Before we go into the second half, if you’re looking for a great hosting partner and much more, and you’ve got a large learning. I’m struggling here, folks. If you’ve got a large membership website, learning management system or community website project and you’re looking for a hosting provider that can provide all the best technology plus a lot more, why don’t you look at WP Tonic? You can find out more by going over to WP hyphen tonic.com partners. WP hyphentonic.com partners. Let’s build something special together. So over to you, Kurt.
[00:30:21.480] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I think it’s more of an extension of what you two are just talking about a little bit, but if we think about the views on AI and what it’s doing to the online marketing, especially in the WordPress space, I’ve used Zip WP successfully. I’ve used the Cadence AI Builder successfully. You were just talking about WordPress.com. they do make good first draft content. I, I believe. Good, really good first draft content. And then you look at it like Jonathan was talking about, where’s the conversion? Like, where’s the call to action that’s going to create a conversion? And so then you start trying to play with, like, titles or adding a video element or, you know, niching down on your, on your call to action thing. But then if you’re using AI, you’re getting conflicting information. Like you’re, you have, you know, as a, as a subject matter expert in your niche, you have certain founded principles that you go, this is going to convert. And then AI is telling you, no, no, no, this is going to convert. Or, hey, change your thumbnail. How much confusion do you think this is causing, not just with agencies and experts, but actually the consumer of the site owner?
[00:31:39.490] – Kurt von Ahnen
Like, how, how crazy do you think this is getting where nothing’s gonna matter anymore? Like, like idiocracy almost, right? Like nothing, nothing’s landing. Everything’s just mush.
[00:31:50.610] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, no, I think it is a big problem because I also don’t think people realize how much AI still hallucinates. I, I forget where someone, a friend of mine shared a study with me the other day where they dove into like all the models and the actual hallucination numbers. And I mean, we’re talking like 10 to 15%, which is, that might sound low, but that is very. And so the problem is with new people and the average users, as you said, it could send them easily off on a whole different tangent and actually end up wasting time sending them down a whole different rabbit hole. We get tickets actually all the time, which is kind of frustrating of people that tried to use AI to troubleshoot performance. And it literally hallucinated on them, told them something completely wrong and then they’re asking us why is this not working? And I just have to tell them that is wrong. The AI was literally wrong. So I see that all the time almost every day. Almost. I don’t think people out there realize how much AI is still hallucinating. And so, and it comes down to the marketing thing.
[00:33:00.710] – Brian Jackson
Like you said, it might think one thing is better for marketing, but if you’ve been in the industry for 30 years, I would hope that you probably are still smarter than the AI at some level, hopefully. And so like you don’t want to always just blindly trust the AI with some of these things and with new people. I think they are, I think they’re just, I mean, if you haven’t been in the industry for very long, I mean, you’re probably going to just roll with what the AI says and hope it works, I guess. I think that’s going to cause a lot of slop is what they call it, and just junk everywhere.
[00:33:33.890] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, like from a performance perspective, knowing that that’s your expertise. You know, I see end users, they’re saying weird things to us at the agency level. Right? Like, hey, I just vibe coded this cool plugin. I just need you to add it to my website.
[00:33:46.930] – Jonathan Denwood
Right.
[00:33:47.650] – Kurt von Ahnen
Like, I hear that more than I really think I should. The thing that gets me about AI is the customer said, hey, can you help me make a plugin for xyz? Right. And the plugin, the AI goes, that’s a really brilliant idea, Brian. Let’s develop that real quickly. Instead of saying, hey, Brian, maybe you should look in the repository, check out these three plugins that do exactly what you said you wanted to do with your own plugin.
[00:34:12.110] – Brian Jackson
Yep. Yep.
[00:34:14.030] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s kind of, kind of unique.
[00:34:15.870] – Brian Jackson
Yep. No, and that’s, and the problem also with that is let’s say that client, then they, okay, they skip the repository. So that’s one that’s bad for the ecosystem in my opinion because developers that worked hard on those plugins aren’t getting, aren’t getting that person. Second, that person’s blindly just trusting the AI code, probably at that point putting it on their website. Third, the maintainability and support for the Plugin is also important and they’re losing that probably going forward. Like the AI is not to go and go in there every day and check to make sure things are working. Like you might be able to do it yourself, but that’s not happening with most people.
[00:34:53.090] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, but I just wanted to interrupt because. Sure it. Because you and your brother, you got real commitment about support for your plugging. You know, obviously we’re not close friends but we’ve known one another for a while and you’ve been your friend of the show and there’s been a couple of times when you’ve gone beyond the call duty to help. Yeah, a little bit. But I get that Lon’s people are reasonable with you. You, you probably like that in general. So you’ve got a real commitment for your plugins. But there’s other plugins. You know, I, when I was setting up WP Tonic, one of our, one of the main thing is we provide a suite of plugins and a lot of them I bought the licenses, lifetime deals because I didn’t. I thought that was the moral, right way of. And also if, if we couldn’t support something, we can then contact the plugin producer and get their support. Some of it’s really great like with you, top notch. You know, if, if you’re interested in Brian’s plugin, his main plugin, it’s a great plugin and you will get fantastic support from Brian. But there’s other plugins, it’s pretty indifferent Brian, to be quite truthful.
[00:36:20.490] – Jonathan Denwood
So I think that’s the problem. I think a lot of plugins go really up their game because the support is going to be one of the main issues, isn’t it?
[00:36:32.330] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, no, I could see that. And then they’re at that point they’re like, will AI support the plugin enough or better than some of these other developers? And so I think that’s where it becomes, like you said, I think that the developers are going to have to up the teams are going to have to up their games as far as competing with AI. So I mean for us, yeah, like you said, like support, hands on support has always been one thing that’s worked really well for us and I think it’s helping us a lot now that AI is taking over too. But yeah, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens here in the future.
[00:37:08.180] – Jonathan Denwood
So you mentioned in the first half of the show that you, because you got a lot of experience in marketing, digital marketing, you were seeing that affiliate marketing will be coming back can you give what you mean? Because obviously I think blogging articles will always have a place to some extent and when you do get somebody to the website having calls for action products that get a response from those people. But where do you, what did you, you saw increase opportunities in affiliate marketing? What, what do you mean by that? Can you broaden that out your views on that?
[00:37:59.280] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. Cause yeah, I should probably clarify. I don’t mean affiliate marketing as most people might think. Like you go find a product and write a review and then slap an affiliate link on there. I’m talking more like building affiliate partners as far as like over the long term. So like if you go to just an example on our perfmatters website, we have a performance checklist page. If you go on there, like we have a lot of solutions that we recommend people use like Generate press, Generate blocks, stuff like that. And so I, it’s still like there are still some affiliate links on there, but it’s more in my sense kind of a partnership as far as like, you know, we like these companies, so we’ll send traffic to these companies. Because if people use GeneratePress, that actually makes my life easier. If they’re using Gener because it’s fast, well coded, I know how it works, that makes my life easier. So I like when people use products that I also use. So I, I send them traffic. And then, you know, Generate Press has also done, you know, they did a blog about perf matters a couple months ago for us.
[00:39:00.970] – Brian Jackson
So these are the type of affiliate things that I’m talking about, I guess more partnerships, I guess you could almost say, rather than classic affiliates. But the thing where it’s benefiting both parties type of a thing. And I think that’s going to become really important because if you’re say you’re losing traffic because of AI, I mean you got to find other avenues to make up for the loss there. So like, I mean, I think doing these partner type of things, I would say webinars is a great example. Like this stuff we’re doing right now. I did a webinar a couple weeks ago with Kyle from the admin bar too. You know, we do these things with our plugin on there. And then I think I’m going to say that I don’t go to a lot of conferences, but I, I think in person conferences is probably going to be more important than ever because of AI, like forming those relationships with people. Because you’re gonna have to find ways to get more, you know, assign more people, assign more clients Stuff like that. Because I just don’t think SEO and traffic the way it used to be will ever be the same because of AI, unfortunately.
[00:40:09.210] – Brian Jackson
I loved the world I grew up in where you could just write an article, spend a month or two on it, make it really great and shoot up to the top of Google like that. I mean if you go look at Google now, when was the last time you actually scrolled down? The AI response is right at the top. I think it’s probably been eight months since I actually used the scroll bar on a Google search. That’s scary as far as coming from a marketing perspective because you’re just taking what’s at the top. If you don’t like what it says, you just modify and you get a different result and you’re never hitting the listings on Google anymore. So that’s crazy.
[00:40:44.700] – Jonathan Denwood
But how do you do. But I don’t know. I would imagine you’ve spent a bit of time thinking about this. How do you think. And it’s not only WordPress, it’s anybody that’s sending digital products, websites and that. Are you saying, do you think we’re just on an inevitable decline where a lot of these businesses close up basically if they relying on digital marketing, I
[00:41:20.800] – Brian Jackson
mean that’s the top. I don’t know. I, I do feel like some businesses are just not going to make it. I definitely think that for sure. I think the ones that are going to make it are finding different avenues to do marketing. Like maybe, maybe you have a younger crowd. Like have you like experimented, you know, with like TikTok ads? I despise TikTok. I don’t have a TikTok account. But you see that’s my, like, I feel like that’s the old person in me talking and that is, that would hurt me if I have a younger audience for sure. Because that’s where the people, that’s where the young crowd is on. So I think you really have to because of AI, like find different avenues that are going to work for your audience that maybe you didn’t think about before. So
[00:42:06.980] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m older than Brian and I have a Tick tock.
[00:42:12.180] – Brian Jackson
I need to get out of my ways then. Like I just, I don’t like Tick Tock. So I’ve never signed up and I, I just, maybe I need to sign up for one. Is that what you advise you get on Tick Tock?
[00:42:21.940] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think it’s a hoot and I’m seeing more and more WordPress people on it now too. But I, I have these things to play with my other passions. You know, like, I love to barbecue and cook and stuff. So a lot of my TikTok stuff is, you know, running the smoker, not. Not, you know, chasing CSS on the back of a website.
[00:42:39.270] – Brian Jackson
Okay, but see, that’s another idea. It’s like, I mean, you could still like, build a brand around your personality a little bit and probably still get clients to see, like, what you do and then kind of a funnel that way. So, I mean, there’s still ways you can funnel in other clients even if you’re having, like, say, fun barbecue, TikToks stuff. Yeah.
[00:42:58.120] – Kurt von Ahnen
I gotta say, Brian, I really agree with a lot of what you said. I was playing around with AI Voice Search about a year ago, and I moved to a small town and I said, hey. And I didn’t tell AI who I was, right? I said, hey, who would I hire in Hutchinson, Kansas to get a website done? And Manana Nomas wasn’t mentioned.
[00:43:19.320] – Brian Jackson
And I thought.
[00:43:20.760] – Kurt von Ahnen
I thought I was doing better than that. And so I said, you know, why didn’t you mention us? And then why did you mention these other three? Because it mentioned three. And then I started playing with a bunch of other searches, and it always mentioned, like, three recommendations. And I thought, well, now if you’re not in the top three, you’re going to get screwed. And then I said, well, how do you. How are you making these recommendations? Why did you recommend these three and not Manyana Nomas? And I said, well, primarily SEO results. And that was right when everybody was saying, SEO is dead. SEO is dead. I’m like, I don’t think SEO is dead, but I agree with you. Like, if I can’t be in that top two or three or whatever for that recommendation through AI, I’ve got to leverage all the other channels. I mean, I’ve got to be involved in the chamber of Commerce. I got to go shake hands at Sand Hills and drink cold beer. I’ve got to go and, you know, get out and press the flesh and do these shows so that people, you know, kind of go, oh, where’s that Kurt guy at?
[00:44:14.220] – Kurt von Ahnen
You know?
[00:44:15.050] – Brian Jackson
Yep. Well, and actually, it’s a good caveat that you mentioned is. So while I said, you know, lots of people are seeing traffic decline, the AI is still. It gets most of its data from crawling content still. So, like, where does it get its answers? Like you said, so, like, if you don’t do any content, that is also bad. Because if you. Because if you want to show up in those results, it needs to get that data from somewhere and so.
[00:44:42.640] – Jonathan Denwood
Well isn’t that, isn’t that the contradiction? Because you know, in some ways before AI searches, I think it is the AI overviews that have really. And what I think Google obviously it’s probably it hasn’t affected their paid for click because in some ways I would have thought it would have affected their paid for click as well, but obviously it hasn’t because they couldn’t do it. But in the old days before, before OpenAI or Claw, you know, wasn’t it if you wasn’t the top one in search that got over 60% of all the clicks, didn’t it being in the top one of search, wasn’t it? It was like being the one or two or third. They got almost 90% of the clicks, didn’t they?
[00:45:36.610] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, yeah.
[00:45:37.810] – Jonathan Denwood
Well it’s not much.
[00:45:39.570] – Brian Jackson
Nothing below the fold, like it just drops off like immediately. Yeah, below the fold of.
[00:45:44.610] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, the research I’ve, I’ve, I’ve been absorbing is that if you do a search using any of the AI tools, OpenAI, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, any of them, you’re going to get different results and if you use the same tool you’re going to get different results but it’s, it’s going to pull from the top 10 that it finds. So in some ways that gives you more, more ability than in the old days because if you weren’t in those top three, you were, you were wasting your time basically because he was getting. So I think. And do you agree with the research that’s saying that when somebody is recommended you like, you like what Kurt said, you know, you do a open a open AI search and you’re in those top three or ever AI tool you’re using that the conversion rate’s much higher that if you go, if they do go to the website and it does meet their requirement and all the other factors that they’re going to be, they’re going to turn into a paying customer. Do you believe that?
[00:47:12.180] – Brian Jackson
I mean I haven’t really seen any, but I would just assume yes because if you’re getting it, if you’re getting your answer from AI, you go to the website, you look at it like okay, I’m good to go. I’m assuming like that’s a very easy workflow. So I’m assuming the conversion rates from the AI responses is much higher from the overviews. But I guess you could say it’s the same way as like pay per click ads too. I’m just wondering like, are People trusting AI more than some of these other things now, like do. Does a normal average user trust an AI overview more than like an organic search result? That’s what I, I don’t know the answer to that. I’m just, I’m just curious like how blindly trusting are people of AI in general?
[00:47:59.820] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, my experience, I’m not going to go into the, into the details because it’d be a bit boring, but I had to do something on my Mac. I had to go back to older version of the Mac because there was a bit of equipment when I did update, it no longer was supported. Right. So I had to go. And they don’t make it easy on the Mac to go back to older version and not in the question how you do it. And the AI overview was totally effing wrong. Right. Like it was only when I found a couple of videos, then found a couple of websites that gave me some resources and the video and the written and gave me resources to where I can go and get older version of the Mac operating system that I could trust, wasn’t a hacker and download it and blah blah, blah, that it went right for me. So. But people do have insane trust on these AI overviews, don’t they?
[00:49:11.680] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. And again, I think what you just mentioned, like was that AI hallucinating just because it didn’t know the exact answer. And so like I, I think, yeah, people need to be really cautious still as far as, because that if you had followed like you said, the AI overview there, you probably would have spent, if you’re talking Mac updates, like you would have spent hours on the wrong thing, right?
[00:49:33.400] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, it did it.
[00:49:34.880] – Brian Jackson
Okay, so see that, like that and then AI is like costing you time where it’s meant to save you time. So it’s. Yeah, that could be very dangerous. Like people need to definitely like double check, triple check, you know, sometimes with certain tasks like that.
[00:49:50.490] – Jonathan Denwood
So I think what we saying is, is it a right thing, is that I think the AI overviews, but I think you still got, you got to look at like you said, partnerships, person to person, meetings, conferences, but you also still got to have SEO strategy as well because that’s where the, that’s where these AI platforms get their recommendations from, don’t they?
[00:50:21.140] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, I would, yeah. SEO and content is still important. I just, I would view it as a different way than I did like five years ago. As far as when I did SEO, I was always like a keyword ranking type of guy and I got into very technical levels like using like accuranker and Ahref to track keyword ranking. You know, stuff like that that I think is going away more. Like, I know a lot of these trackers have launched AI trackers now and so you can track where you rank in the AI overviews now. So it’s like it’s the exact same thing but for AI now. And, but the thing is, like we mentioned before, how do you get into those AI trackers data? And you have to have content or mentions in videos, stuff like that. You have to be, your name has to be out there for that stuff to even show up.
[00:51:14.730] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, before we go to the final questions, I think we’ve gone in a big circle, but I think it’s been useful because I, I think it goes back to. The problem is that I think with the right strategy you’re probably going to get less traffic. But that track, if you’re doing it the correct way, that traffic should be much on the, the buyer’s journey. It should be much more qualified traffic if you’re doing things right. Less traffic. But a lot of it could have been top of funnel or around the middle. But if you’re doing your job right as an online marketer, it really should be lower traffic. With everything we’ve outlined, lower in the funnel and much more qualified traffic. So then it’s really down to you to get a conversion from the website and that goes back to maybe the problem of trusting the AI website builders and that and everything because you’re going to get less traffic. But it’s really important to have calls for action. Everything that a digital marketer knows to convert that person to your newsletter list, to buying a low price trigger, buying signal triggering a set of email that might upgrade them to, to your premier offering.
[00:52:43.930] – Jonathan Denwood
All the language of a digital marketer. What do you think with what I’ve just outlined?
[00:52:50.010] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, no, I think that’s a good overview of the new. I guess what you could say, hopefully the new approach that people should be taking. I, yeah, it’s interesting that you mentioned the buyer’s journey. I haven’t really thought about that as much but like as far as AI overviews to the website and then are those people going to convert more now because of this new workflow? I, I don’t know the answer to that but like I haven’t thought about that much. That’s interesting.
[00:53:17.850] – Jonathan Denwood
Right, over to you, Kurt.
[00:53:20.410] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, now I feel like I’m going to kind of ruin the show. Let’s just move on to a different subject altogether and you know, dive into your Rolodex, Brian, if you would. I mean, share with the listeners and viewers who are some, like, I don’t know, influencers or people that you look up to in the WordPress space. We could actually, you know, kind of send some focus on.
[00:53:42.100] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. So there’s. I made a note of this because there’s so many people in this space, but some people, I. I was trying to pick people like on X that I follow like regularly. I use X lists on X. So like I have certain people in list that I just have like a column for. So I see a column of people, basically I follow and a couple is. I’m gonna.
[00:54:03.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Am I on that list?
[00:54:05.540] – Brian Jackson
I’m. You are in the list, yes.
[00:54:09.110] – Jonathan Denwood
You don’t have to say that.
[00:54:10.550] – Brian Jackson
And no, anyone I interact with is on a fairly regular basis is in the list. But some of these names I’m probably going to slaughter. So I apologize in advance.
[00:54:21.030] – Jonathan Denwood
You could do a worse job than I do. I’m notorious for it.
[00:54:24.950] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, it’s Remkas Devries.
[00:54:28.230] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.
[00:54:30.630] – Brian Jackson
And he does this. He has a great newsletter and I think he does some course is now on within wp.com and. But he has some great tweets too. And I like what he puts out and so I think he even uses our plugin for some of his stuff. So I really like the stuff he puts out as far as performance in the WordPress space. Kyle from the admin bar, he’s just a great guy. I love working with him. He has a. A big Facebook group for agency owners. So if you’re an agency owner, he has like a nice little, I guess you kind of say like a private community. He’s kind of built his whole business around this funnel of like, you know, get in the Facebook group, sign up for services and kind of thing like that. But I’ve done some webinars with him. You know that he’s a great guy. I like Katie Keith from Barn too. The one reason I like following her is because she’s more transparent than anyone I’ve ever seen as far as sharing business financials and anything in the space. And since she sells EDD plugins, which is what we do, you know, it’s very similar.
[00:55:36.690] – Brian Jackson
Like she’s mentioned many things that I was like, oh, we’re also struggling with the exact same thing. So I really like following her content. If you make plugins in the WordPress space, she’s great.
[00:55:46.690] – Jonathan Denwood
She’s also a friend of the show as well.
[00:55:48.930] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. Great. Vikas Singh. Hal. I don’t know. But over at instawp, I really like what he’s doing. Like even though we host all of our sites at Kinsta, I use instawp, we’re a big client of theirs for their staging stuff. I just. It’s so easy to launch new dev sites and just destroy them, delete them and do it all over again. So like for WordPress 7 testing, we just launched an Instawp site. We’re going in there testing a few things with the, the UI changes and then we’re just going to delete it. Like it’s so, so easy. And he’s also launching some cool AI stuff integrations I’ve seen going with that. So he’s one to follow in the space. And the last one is. Who’s this? Ashley Rich. And he’s doing some cool stuff with. It’s called Debug Hawk. This is fairly new but it’s performance related. And if you’re familiar with like Query Monitor plugin, it’s basically like a Query Monitor APM tool, but specifically for WordPress and dumbed down for people who need more easier answers because Query Monitor is very technical. So he’s one to definitely follow. And I think what his old company was.
[00:57:08.000] – Brian Jackson
Let me see if I can find it really quickly.
[00:57:10.360] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, if you could send all those to me, and I’ll make sure they’re all in the show notes, Brian.
[00:57:15.800] – Brian Jackson
I think he used to work at Delicious Brains, I think. And so Debug Hawk has a beautiful UI, and so because anything in Delicious Brains has a beautiful ui so, their design stuff is always like top-notch. That’s one thing.
[00:57:29.600] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. But send me all the links.
[00:57:33.200] – Brian Jackson
Yeah.
[00:57:33.680] – Jonathan Denwood
And I’ll make sure they’re all in the show notes. Brian. I think we’re going to drop the last question because we’ve got to wrap things up. So Kirk, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to? Kirk?
[00:57:46.720] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, for business, Manana Nomas, and just making a connection, LinkedIn would be. I’m on LinkedIn all the time.
[00:57:54.000] – Jonathan Denwood
And Brian, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?
[00:58:00.240] – Brian Jackson
Well, I’m gonna go follow Kurt on TikTok after this. Let’s hear that. But for me, I’m mainly on X. Brian Lee Jackson. I am on LinkedIn too, but I’m not on there very much. X is the best place to really, really connect with me.
[00:58:14.660] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. That’s fantastic. We’ve got some great guests coming up in March and April. It’s got some great discussions like the one we’ve just had. Brian’s a friend of the show. I’ve known Brian for a number of years. Just a great guy, and I highly recommend his products. You have to get. You just get top notch products and support. So go over and have a look at what they’ve got to offer. We will be back next week with another great interview. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
[00:58:47.030] – Brian Jackson
Hey, thanks for listening. We really do appreciate it. Why not visit the Mastermind Facebook group
[00:58:53.110] – Jonathan Denwood
And also to keep up with the latest news, click wp-tonic.com forward/newsletter.
[00:59:00.710] – Brian Jackson
We’ll see you next time.
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