WordCamp Europe 2025 - here's all the highlights from the event

Good morning from Basel, Switzerland!

James Capell (Editor, Web Hosting) and Owain Williams (Editor, Website Builders & CRM) reporting from the opening day of WordCamp Europe. We are looking forward to seeing what this year’s event has in store.

The doors have opened! Attendees are trickling in.

The exhibition hall has a fantastic buzz to it, lots of smiling faces and engaging conversations. You immediately get a sense of how close-knit the WordPress community is as you walk around.

What I'm looking forward to today (Owain Williams):

Having attended WordCamp Europe before, I know I’m in for conundrum over the next couple of days. So many great talks to attend, so many fantastic exhibitors to quiz, and countless amazing attendees to chat to.

I know I won’t fit everything in, but here are the three sessions I am going to make special effort to attend today:

1. 3 WordPress agency f*ckups and what I learned from them with Jennifer Aguilera Schumacher
2. Live website reviews by industry experts with Taco Verdonschot
3. WordPress speed build with Jamie Marsland

Our award for most colorful stand goes to Sodew AI. It is a relatively new company and takes an interesting 'pay what you want' approach to hosting and website builder services.

What am I looking forward to today (James Capell)?

So, today is day one for the public but WordCamp actually started yesterday with Contributor Day.

Contributor Day is a chance for contributors in the WordPress community to come together to collaborate, celebrate, and contribute to WordPress. There are various contributing teams that cover everything from accessibility to translation.

I'm looking forward to catching up with what happened yesterday and learning about new exciting projects for the future.

We dropped by Kinsta's stand to chat about all things hosting. We also had our portraits drawn by robotic arms. Not sure exactly what that has to do with hosting and we weren't impressed by the moustache accuracy - but it was fun nonetheless.

I just caught up with Roger Williams from Kinsta and asked him about what he did yesterday on Contributor Day.

What did you get up to during Contributor Day?

"I split my time between the Hosting and Five for the Future teams. We talked about how hosts can use PHPUnit tests to catch issues before a WordPress release, and how to make the Five for the Future program more appealing to company leaders. It was all about making contribution feel both practical and valuable."

What are you most excited to be working on?

"I’m most excited about the Five for the Future team — it has the potential to get more companies involved and support individual contributors who keep WordPress moving forward."

What in the future of WordPress are you looking forward to the most?

"I’m looking forward to seeing even more people use WordPress and feel empowered to contribute to it. That’s what keeps the project growing and evolving."

Catching up with our WordCamp hosts Hostinger - they have some exciting updates in the pipeline. We will tell you more when we can!

I caught up with Hostinger to get some insight into why they attend WordCamp Europe:

Why are you at WordCamp Europe?

We’re here to listen, learn, and connect with the WordPress community. WordCamp Europe is the ideal space to gather insights, exchange ideas, and build meaningful relationships - helping us refine our platform and give back to a community we’re proud to be part of.

Who in the WordPress community does Hostinger help?

We support the WordPress community by sponsoring contributors and empowering all kinds of users - from solo bloggers and small businesses to developers, freelancers, and agencies.

Our goal is to make their work easier, faster, and more secure by staying closely aligned with their ever-changing needs.

What do you want people to leave your booth knowing?

• Your voice directly shapes what we build
• Hostinger is an active contributor to WordPress
• We’re here to support - and grow with - the WordPress community.

You can learn more about Hostinger with our full Hostinger review.

That's a wrap on day 1 and what a brilliant day it's been. More networking, talks, and a fireside chat with Mary Hubbard and Matt Mullenweg to look forward to tomorrow.

Good morning and welcome to day 2 of WordCamp Europe.

According to the organizers, yesterday saw 1,860 attendees from 84 different countries collect their badges for the day.

Day 2 has a lot to live up to!

What is WordCamp Europe?

WordCamp is a community-run and locally organized conference on all things WordPress. WordCamp events happen throughout the year and across the globe, each varying in size and content.

WordCamp Europe is the biggest WordPress conference in Europe. The event spans three days, this includes a contributor day where members of the community meet to learn about ways they can get involved in the WordPress project, followed by two days of talks, workshops, and networking that are open to all.

The event brings together thousands of WordPress enthusiasts, professionals, and businesses from across the globe.

Thank you to Blackwall for providing some decent coffee.

Blackwall are a B2B company offering security solutions for WordPress that hosting providers can give to their customers.

Many of the best web hosting providers have their own in-house security solutions but Blackwall could simplify operations by protecting servers from bots with just one plug-in.

I interviewed Sachin Puri, CEO of Bluehost, about the new ecommerce plans on offer, the shake up happening at Newfold Digital and what it means for the millions of Bluehost customers.

We spoke at length for over half an hour so I cannot fit it all on this live blog.

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW

Back in February Cloudways launched Copilot. An AI tool to help manage web servers. I wrote about it when it was launched so it was nice to catch up face-to face to see how this project has developed.

I spoke with Ali Khan, director or product management, at Cloudways about Copilot.

Khan said, "Copilot is still in public review. We're increasing the capabilities to work on more than just the server level but also the application level. Currently it takes about 45 minutes to reach a fix from identifying an issue. With the next iteration of Copilot we expect to reduce this to less than five minutes".

I went on to ask when we can expect to see these new features launched and after a gentle push Khan was willing to say they're aiming for Q3. (TechRadar exclusive)

I also spoke with Fatih Mehtap about what he got up to on Contributor Day.

What did you get up to during Contributor Day?
As a Turkish speaker, I've tended to gravitate towards helping support the localisation effort at every Contributor Day I’ve attended over the years. I feel like I can make a real impact in this area, enjoying the community spirit while making a difference.

What are you most excited to be working on?
Continuing to be open-minded about the Cloudways platform and how we optimise to meet our customer needs. There are great tools being built in the ecosystem that remind us of how we can accelerate our own offering through seamless integration.

Obviously, Artificial Intelligence (AI) dominates most of our product roadmap conversations. From evolving our Cloudways Copilot offering, to enabling our customers to leverage new productivity gains, lots of exciting things are in the hopper.

What in the future of WordPress are you looking forward to the most?
I’m looking forward to seeing how Headless and WordPress continue to converge, particularly as we evolve further into different form factors and user interfaces. This is incredibly relevant for many of our customers who are adopting a ‘build once, publish everywhere’ mindset.

By making WordPress architecture more accessible to developers, we’re continually unlocking new waves of innovation. This is especially true with the rise of advanced JavaScript frameworks on the front end, which are enabling faster performance and greater flexibility in how WordPress is used. It’s a really promising direction for the platform.

I dropped by Kinsta's booth and cornered Katalin Juhasz, Outreach Coordinator at Kinsta.

How many times have you been to WordCamp?
This is my first!

How is it?
Great. Kinsta is fully remote so this is a great chance to meet everyone. We have people here from Japan and lots of from the USA.

Will you come again?
Absolutely. Absolutely, 100%

We then sat down and spoke in depth about what Kinsta is offering to agencies. I'm not going to write about that here in the live blog but there will be some more content on this coming soon.

Today is the last day of WordCamp but it's been so busy I'm still catching up with people about the first. Vlad, from ScalaHosting, shared what he got up to on Contributor Day.

What did you get up to during Contributor Day?

We collaborated with people representing different verticals of the WordPress ecosystem which are contributing to the experience of the people running their websites on WordPress. We shared knowledge, experience and good practices to enhance not only WordPress as a CMS but also everyone's business. We put the beginning to new partnerships which will result in much faster and more secure WordPress websites.

What are you most excited to be working on?

I was most excited to see so many passionate people working on what they love, the positive vibes and atmosphere. I am excited about doing my best to make WordPress hosting faster, more reliable and more secure while being a part of such a huge community.

What in the future of WordPress are you looking forward to the most?

I want to see more such events where people unite to build better products and elevate themselves by sharing knowledge, skills and best practices from their experience bringing a positive impact to everyone using WordPress.

We are hearing from John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google, he's busting some myths about appearing in search results.

When asked about the value of websites in the age of the AI overview John told us "The value of the website continues to be there if it provides value to the web...whether a product or long form information, people will need to go to your website for that" he added "If you are publishing thousands of articles with maybe 300 or 400 words, I'm not sure on the value of that"

Surprisingly, he also revealed that "Websites don't have to do anything to be visible in AI overviews"

Here's what Hostinger have been getting up to.

What did you get up to during Contributor Day?

I joined the Polyglots table and helped translate strings for the 6.8.x version of WordPress which is in active development. It was great to dive into the localization side of the project — especially knowing those translations will help WordPress feel more native and usable for people in my language community. Contributor Day always reminds me how global WordPress really is, and how even small contributions can make a big impact!

What are you most excited to be working on?

Right now, I’m really excited about our work around AI-powered tools and performance-first hosting. From smart troubleshooters and automated optimization to tools like Kodee, our AI assistant, we're focused on giving WordPress users a smoother, faster, and more intuitive experience - whether they're just getting started or running complex client sites. It's all about removing the friction so creators can spend more time building and less time fixing.

What in the future of WordPress are you looking forward to the most?

I’m looking forward to seeing WordPress continue evolving into a platform that's even more creator-friendly, intelligent, and performance-focused. As AI becomes more embedded in the workflow and as the ecosystem leans toward speed and simplicity, I see huge potential for empowering more people, from freelancers to agencies, to build faster, safer, and smarter websites with less hassle.

The talk we have all been waiting for. We are listening to Mary Hubbard and Matt Mullenweg talk about all things WordPress.

The first interesting development is the .org plugin directory getting security scanning for plugin updates.

Matt was asked how Five for the Future is evolving.

"We made a classic mistake, we were measuring input not output".

Matt would like to see more analytics and stats on measuring the output of contributions. To make sure contributions are matched with the goals of WordPress.

Mary announces the WordPress credits programme. 150 hours of contributions will equate to 6 credits towards a college graduation.

This started at the University of Pisa but will be officially launched June 25th for more students.

On AI Matt is most excited about AI scanners, writing tests, chat interfaces, developer productivity, and project administration. He notes that within WordPress it's hard to imagine an area that wouldn't benefit from AI.

With thanks to AI the 6 to 8 month plugin approval backlog is now over and the amount of plugin approval requests doubled.

Even with everything going on Matt believes that we can still expect to see a 6.9 version this year.

We're now taking questions from the floor

Milana, a contributor to WordPress is working on a plugin repository project and is asking Matt if he would support such a project.

Matt replied that he would consider it as he considers everything. He said that he is unlikely to support a repository outside of .org due to security issues and added that .org has never been a victim of a supply chain attack.

The claim was met by huge laughter from one part of the floor which then went to cause giggles throughout the audience.

I didn't catch who is asking this question, it was someone who was working on a environmental initiative that has had the Slack channel deleted from the WordPress Slack. The gentleman asked to have the channel reopened, with claps from the audience.

Mary has said that she believes that sustainability should be part of all of WordPress in everything they do, so it doesn't sound like she supports this channel being reopened.

Matt and the gentleman are now having a back and fourth about the benefits of the environmental team that was dissolved.

It's nice to see a project as large as WordPress have such an open platform that people part of the community can ask questions and have them answered and debated out in the open.

Lots of people in the WordPress community eager to ask questions.

Lilly, an audience member from France that runs an agency, is saying that recently she has been seeing lots of competition from SaaS like Shopify. She asks what is the plan to compete with SaaS.

Matt said that WooCommerce is now the largest business at WordPress and there is a lot of investment in it. He believes there is still a lot of work to do to improve it and that there needs to be better collaboration with hosts to improve onboarding.

Matt believes that WooCommerce will always beat SaaS for customisations.

He addas, one of the limitations of WordPress is getting data into WordPress. It's easy to get data in but getting data out is more difficult.

Quick fire questions:

(that have turned out to not be quick at all)

Audience member: Is it difficult to run an open-source company and how different is it from a for profit company?

Mary: It's very different. It's not top down and accountability is difficult because people are volunteers.

Audience member: How do you keep WordPress sexy?

Matt: The quick answer is that we need to sit down and write more code and have less meetings.

Audience member: Why is WordPress so late to adopt WordPress

Matt: I don't think we're late to adopt. I think it's not happened until now because APIs are still growing. A lot of stuff is brand new and still developing.

Matt ends with saying that he's never been so optimistic because of all the people that are currently working on WordPress and leaves the stage.

Time for closing remarks.

Big thank yous to everyone. This year:

• 2082 tickets sold
• Attendees from 84 countries
• 60+ speakers
• 29000 impressions on X
• 14,000 LinkedIn posts

Some late answers from Bluehost before we end our live blog

Mike Hansen, Vice President of Product at Bluehost:

What did you get up to during WordCamp?

I spent some time collaborating with our engineering team on test runners, then joined several meetings with passionate customers, partners, and stakeholders.

What are you most excited to be working on?

I’m most excited about empowering and enabling the Bluehost team to make a real impact. I have long held the philosophy that paid contributors should focus on the essential, behind-the-scenes work that keeps the project alive.

What in the future of WordPress are you looking forward to the most?

This was unexpected topic for me, but I had an incredible conversation with Mary Hubbard about the future of WordPress and revitalizing the contributor pipeline for the next generation. Hearing about the thoughtful planning and potential initiatives made me even more confident in WordPress’s future.

WordCamp 2026 will be in...

Krakow, Poland!

One last big thank you to all those who have contributed and volunteered at WordCamp Basel.

We've really enjoyed being here amongst the community - thank you.

The afterparty is still to come, but we are signing off. Thanks for joining us.