What I Learned After Talking to 300 Old Customers About the WordPress Market

🗣️ Off-Topic Lounge
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Over the past days, I made 2 scripts: one to count emails from my inbox used for customer support. I ranked the email addresses which were the most conversed with… Next, I built another script to send these email addresses automatic messages, slow and steady, one email every 2-3 minutes. There were bunch of older customers, developer friends, agency owners and people I’ve known and who asked me for support, a couple of years ago.

I asked them some simple questions: are people still buying WordPress plugins? Are they still using WordPress?

After all these conversations (I had 40-50 conversations), my conclusion is this:

The WordPress market is still alive. People are absolutely still buying plugins. But their number is lower now. Years ago, many people would buy a plugin for a very specific little task. A helper plugin, a utility, a simple feature add-on. That market feels much weaker now, almost inexistent.

Also, most of the more technical users are not buying plugins any more, but they are building their own stuff, using AI. This is the market segment which was hit the hardest. Around 25% of my customers were in this category, so yeah, I personally got hit by this also…

At the same time, businesses, agencies, store owners and people who just want reliable solutions are still spending money on plugins. They are not looking for experiments. They want something that saves time, solves a real problem and comes from someone they trust.

That was probably the biggest thing I noticed from the replies I got.

Trust still matters a lot.

What also surprised me was how many people are still actively using products I built years ago. Some told me they still use them every week. Some said they would gladly buy from me again.

That was really encouraging, because it tells me the issue is not necessarily that WordPress products stopped being useful. It may simply be much harder now to get in front of the right people.

The conclusion was, that I need to build top quality products.

Less random small features and less “just because” plugins…

I want to thank all the people who responded to my emails, they helped me a lot understand what is actually going on…

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Nothing has really changed. AI is just an illusion, and it’s starting to show. I know things will get better, but who knows when…

When it comes to building quality products, this is what it should be about: to create a truly quality product, you need to be a good developer and engineer. There’s no way around that — not with “vibe coding” or AI agent coding.

The only way to build a quality product is to use your brain, know your skills, and use AI as a tool to help you, and in some cases let it literally write the code for you but always be in controll check the code flow with the logic giude it your way!

This will never change, no matter how good AI gets. And I say this as someone who works with AI every day and has 30 years of experience building applications. I think I know what I’m doing at this point.

The idea that the AI CEO are selling this days and right now it works well that you can build something properly without being a specialist is one of the dumbest trends out there. If you don’t truly understand what you’re doing, how would you even know when something is wrong?

That’s the problem. People confuse “making something work” with actually building something well.

Would you buy a car designed and engineered by a shoemaker? Probably not. The same logic applies to software, products, and AI-generated code. Expertise still matters, and it always will.

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I think the formula is something like:

(How critical a plugin is) X (How easy it is to do yourself)

Same as with a house: I’ll do gardening or put up a shelf myself (mistakes have low impact). I’m not going to do electrical or gas work.

A customer might vibe-code some small utility plugin. They won’t vibecode a discounts plugin for their $800K/year e-commerce business.

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I agree with this as well, but vibe coding a commercial plugin with top-notch quality, visuals, and functionality is impossible, literally impossible. I’m talking about pure 100% vibe coding, not agentic development where you step in and fix things manually.

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One thing I noticed is that many people did not actually leave WordPress because they hate WordPress.

They left because they stopped trusting how well it performed, because of the constantly changing rules, as SEO became unstable with fluctuations, affiliate income dropped (affiliate sites dead) and many other small things which lead to client psychology change. They experiment with different alternatives, hoping to get better results for their business.

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Who knows at this point? With all the AI propaganda, everybody thinks writing code and creating a plugin is as easy as watching a movie until they actually try it.

Things will eventually recalibrate as time passes, but right now it’s a disaster. And it’s not just WordPress, the entire industry is a mess.

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