How To Vibe Code A WordPress Website With Claude And WPVibe By John Turner

Chris Badgett discusses how AI is transforming the development, administration, and use of WordPress websites. He discusses leveraging AI technologies like Claude and ChatGPT to communicate directly with WordPress rather than manually navigating dashboards and menus with John Turner, the author of WPVibe.ai, in this LMScast episode. John Tuners also has a YouTube Channel.

For instance, without having to manually import people or go through several WordPress pages, an HR manager could use AI to develop a safety training course, add hundreds of employees, and enroll them in it. Chris also talks about how important it is to provide AI with additional context. AI can do much more than just respond to inquiries when it has access to a WordPress website, analytics, Google Search Console, email, and other resources.

It has the ability to evaluate data, offer suggestions, and act. He gives an example of how an AI agent can find and replace missing alt text in thousands of photos, a work that would have taken weeks for a person to do. Chris also stresses that since AI is developing quickly, individuals should begin studying and playing with it right away.

According to him, AI is a tool where users take on the role of director, directing the system toward the intended outcome. People can get an edge in their profession and learn how to use AI more quickly if they play with it more. In general, Chris believes AI will be the next development in the creation and administration of WordPress websites. AI is now enabling individuals to create, administer, optimize, and personalize websites using natural conversation, often without the need to know how to code, just as WordPress formerly made website building accessible to non-developers.

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Episode Transcript:

You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show, back from episode 2009, where we talked about SeedProd, but this is John Turner. He’s a, a very prolific WordPress creator, a super awesome guy. He has WPvibe.ai, which essentially allows you to build a WordPress website, manage it, modify it from an AI chat connection we’re gonna dive into that today.

AI is, sweeping the world. I’m so glad John is working on the opportunity in WordPress, and we’re gonna go deep into what WPVibe is, how it works, and how you can think about it for the future, and how to get started with it. But first, welcome on the show, John. Awesome. Thank you for having me, Chris.

Yeah, it has been a while. I’m super excited to be here. I’m super excited to, to talk about AI, because I know there is an education gap right now, and I think that definitely needs to be filled to help move and excel WordPress with AI, so excited to be here. I have this saying that every s- company, but we could say every software company, is a education company, whether they realize it or not.

And particularly with a new emerging technology like AI, it’s never been more important. Let’s lay the groundwork just in terms of terminology, ’cause there’s gonna be people listening and watching of different experience levels. Sure. We have, AI models, we have MCP servers, we have connectors, we have WPVibe we have WordPress abilities.

Give us the 101 on what the key terms are and what they mean. Sure. Typically what most people are familiar with is they’ll go to ChatGPT or Claude.ai and they’ll talk to a chatbot, okay? And that’s where they’re just talking and then getting a reply back, okay? Now, what has happened is they’ve started expanding that ability.

So both of them have added… they have different names for it. Some of them call it connectors, some of them call it apps, some of them call it plugins. But essentially, they’re all MCPs in the background, and MCP is just a technical term for the protocol that AI uses to ter- talk to third-party sites.

So essentially, imagine you wanna talk to your Gmail or have AI read your Gmail. You would use the Gmail connector, which is essentially an MCP under the hood, okay? So basically, that’s how you connect other side other sides. Then you have agents, and agents are typically things that will do stuff for you.

So imagine you’re like read all my email and close all the spam ones and let me know the ones I need to reply to. So AI would run a series of calls to make that happen, and that is s- essentially is agent functionality Nice. Nice. And I actually do that. I use Claude Cowork to- Yeah … read my email, get rid of the cold pitches and everything, and also Slack me the most important things with a link to open the email right away- Yeah

on a scheduled task that happens every day at 5:00 PM. So that’s an example. And it’s surprisingly really good, I bet, right? It is, and I just wanna note on that, I had to get over some fear. I’m like, “Oh, I don’t know, if I give Claude access to my email, is there a risk? Is it gonna start- Yeah … doing things?”

But then I started thinking about it, and I was like, Gmail reads all my emails and serves ads based on what it’s seeing and- Yeah … Anthropic or Claude is actually pretty secure. Yeah. I’ve made mistakes where I’ve put something in Claude Code or a chat or something, and it’s like, “Oops, you shared that secret key.

You’re not supposed to do that. I’m deleting that.” “Go ahead. Here are the steps to reset that and all that.” Yeah. It’s actually s- I find it safe, but it does feel risky, but all technology feels that way, right? Yeah. A- and really, it c- this is kinda where the model conversation comes in.

So each company makes a variety of models, and then if you might have heard things of Hermes or OpenClaw. You can use open source models with them. So your risk level really depends how smart the model is. So Claude is actually known for being safe models. They put a lot of guardrails in.

But if you were to use a model, like an open source model that might not be as smart, that does tend to open up the risk a little bit because it just doesn’t have the intelligence like some of the frontier labs have that are able to recognize when a destructive action’s about to happen and prevent it from happening.

Typically I, if you’re an- someone new to AI, I tell them to use one of the US frontier lab models typically to get the best results. So that’s gonna be, like, ChatGPT or Claude? Yeah. Is there anything else on that list? Google is okay for just chatting, but the, the…

Google has struggled with tool calling, and I know they’ve delayed their recent model, but hopefully they’ll get that fixed soon. Grok actually just released a new model called Grok 4.5 which is apparently really good at doing these agenit- agentic task for you, so that’s another one to look into.

But typically right now the two I would look into are ChatGPT and Claude Nice. And I’d love to hear your explanation, and we can roll this into WP Vibe. How do you think or explain the difference between Claude.ai chat versus CoWork versus Code, and which one should you use with WP Vibe? Yeah all right, so yes, it’s a little confusing.

So they have this ecosystem, and basically each level gives AI a little bit more access. All right, so you have Claude.ai, and that’s a website you go to, and you talk to any of your connectors. So if you have WordPress connected via WP Vibe, you can talk to WordPress. You got Gmail, you can talk to it.

All right? So that’s level one, typically the safest level. Then you have CoWork. CoWork can run on your desktop, and what that does is it gives AI access to your local computer, but it sandboxes it. Okay? So it sits in a, a sandbox where it can’t really go outside that folder that you give it access to.

The next level is Claude Code, and think of that full computer access, just opening up the clot- floodgates, and it’s really for the power users. If you’re new, I recommend using Claude.ai, and if you connect, for example, WP Vibe at the Claude.ai level, it cascades to all the other clients like Claude CoWork and Claude Code as well.

So you can use them on any of them that you feel comfortable with. So again, I think they’re slowly merging everything in, but that’s how I look at it right now And just to be clear what’s the difference between Claude.ai versus the desktop app? I find myself kind of recommending people if they’ve been using the website to install the desktop app, ’cause it’s gonna give you some more capabilities like co-work and code and stuff.

Yeah Claude.ai only gives you access to the chat, the, the web chat. It… You don’t have… actually, I take that back. They do have a web version now of Claude Code, but you have to connect it to GitHub. Typically, I do recommend yeah, running it locally. So download the Claude app for Mac or Windows, and then the…

Right now, again, this… By the time this goes out, this might be changed, but the, the… They have two modes. They have one I think it just says Home. The other one says Code. And within the Home tab, you can chat or you can select Cowork. And then the Code tab obviously has a little bit more features. The Code tab will let y- show you Git diffs and open up a browser.

It’s a little bit oriented for coding essentially, whereas Cowork is more, like, knowledge work, kinda, non-nerd work. And then Chat is just chatting essentially. And one more piece of groundwork, let’s just talk about pricing. So Claude has the free version. When people get serious, they usually upgrade and get the $20 a month, and then- Yeah

there’s the 100 or 200 a month power user level. Yeah. And then WP Vibe has a free version, and then pro versions. Walk us through the pricing of, and what’s the best config and how are they different at the different levels? Yeah, so every… So we followed the AI labs pricing models. The difference is we don’t provide inference, and inference is basically talking to AI.

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So what I recommend most people do is ChatGPT and Claude both have free levels, and you can just chat with them as much as you want. And basically the way they get it is the more value you get from AI, they’ll start charging you. So they cap your usage. So say the free version, they might give you 20 chats.

I’m just picking a random number. And then when you hit that, they’ll say, “All right. You’re, you’ve reached your limit today. Tomorrow you can reset.” That’s exactly how WP Vibe works. So we give enough daily tool calls for you to get really the average user to, to do real work. But then if you’re, like, a freelancer, agency, or you’re powering through some stuff, then we prompt you basically to upgrade and get more tool calls per day.

Because, again, ours, even though we’re not pro- providing AI inference, we still do have a cost because we’re hosting the tool, the back end. And again, it’s just it adds to our cost. So essentially we wanted to make it just like the, the AI companies where you could test it and get real value out of it to see if that’s something you wanna continue on, and then if so, then you upgrade.

And I think a lot of people, once they touch AI and see the value they get from it, it’s kinda hard to go back really. It really is. So really, and a lot of people are probably already coming with their own $20 a month Claude or ChatGPT subscription. So you bring your own subscription- Yeah … and then wal- walk us through the setup of WP Vibe.

And then if we’re just looking at a plain WordPress site with nothing on it, what are some of the first things we should try just to play around with it and experiment? Yeah so the way it works is, In ChatGPT, we actually have a official connector. So they have a store, they can search for WP Vibe and hit connect, and it will walk them through the process.

So let me give you an idea of the process. In Claude, you have to add a com- a custom connector, but that is basically putting in a MCP URL, and you hit connect. From there, what happens is it sends you to our website and you basically authenticate. So we’re just trying to figure out, are you the person you say you are?

We send you a, a code, a one-time code. You enter that, and you’re authenticated with our connector, okay? So at this point, you can add any number of WordPress sites, and the way you add a WordPress site is you just say simply connect seedprod.com for example, and it will call out to that site, and it will…

Actually, let me back up real quick. We do have a plugin we offer as well on the wordpress.org site. It’s not required, but it does give you a lot more functionality. But what happens after you add the site, it calls your WordPress site, and it- and WordPress has a built-in authentic- authentication system which talks back to our MCP and then authenticates the site.

So there’s no credentials we see. We encrypt everything, and at that point you’re actually connected. I can share my screen and show you, but I don’t know if we wanna go that far. But that’s essentially the flow. Yeah, we can do if you’re listening on the podcast, go to the LMScast website and you’ll see the YouTube version of this, if you wanna give us a little quick demo of that.

Sure. So let me look at the… How do I share my screen here? It’s at the bottom. There’s a plus- Okay … I think. And then I might have to bring it up once you authorize it

All right So I’ll pull it up. Just let me know when you want me to pull it down. Okay All right. This is, for example, we’re connected to testing.seedprod.com. Okay? So the way I do that is let me remove this. Okay. Can you remove testing.seedprod.com? I’m gonna reconnect it to show everyone how we connect the website.

All right. So again, it’s … A lot of people type, and one hint I’ll give you is get a voice a voice-to-text agent, because what that will do is save you a lot of different keystrokes, and it’s so fast. Do you use that, Chris? Do you use it any- I use Whisper Flow. Okay. I use something called Super Whisper.

Again there’s tons of them out there. All right. So it’s removed it okay, let’s reconnect to testing.seedprod.com. So again, I’m… While it’s doing that, I’m gonna show you up here in my connectors, I have WP Vibe connected, and you can see it here. Okay? Now, the way you do that is you just go hit add, add custom connector, and our website has this URL you put in here.

So let’s go back here. All right, so now-

All right, so I’m just authenticating on my app. I’m actually gonna… Oh, I don’t have my

Let me open up my browser real quick because- I just stopped sharing in case you were typing in your password or whatever. No, I’ve got this is a testing site. I just- Okay … I couldn’t remember

All right. All right, so we’re back here, and then I just click… Oh are you sharing again, Chris? Yeah, we’re back. All right. We just hit approve this site. All right, and we’re connected. So now I can say, “All right, tell me about this website. What plugins are installed?” And while it’s doing that, I’m just gonna go back to the site here and pull it up

All right, so here’s a website, and it’s connecting to our site, and it’s telling us what plugins are installed. Now, what’s cool is we actually just pushed out a widget, and it has some things that you can try on your website. So it’ll detect your plugins. So right now it knows we have Lifter installed, so it’s like, “Enroll students in your course, build an online course.”

And you can just copy these prompts and paste them in and it’ll do it for you. Okay? But so Here we go. It’s showing our plugins. And again, when you’re talking to AI, it’ll do anything that you can do on a website. For example, we have four updates. We’ll just say, “Okay, can you update the four plugins that need to be updated?”

All right. So essentially, anything you need to do on your WordPress website, WPVibe can do. We can make posts, we can run audits, security audits, we can run SEO audits, we can update plugins, we can create a new theme. Just you name it, it can do it. Is there anything you’re interested in seeing, Chris, or? I’m interested in all of it.

And I just wa- I just wanna say you had a you have a saying, as AI keeps getting better, a lot of the dashboards and menu clicks fade into the background. So this is like a conversational interface with your WordPress site without clicking add new and… ‘Cause in the past, we would do a lot of copying and pasting from ChatGPT if you’re trying to write a blog post in ChatGPT, but this is actually, you can just talk directly to your website, which is- Right

really amazing. Yeah, e- exactly. And also, what you can do is, All right, so it, right here, it said one of the, the plugins had an error updating. So it’s it’s smart . It knows what is actually going on here. And then, so this is CloudCode, and it has a built-in browser here. But if you’re on the website, so we’re on the website right here, as things are updating, we actually have a live reload thing that pops up here and helps you see what’s going on in your with your website.

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So whenever you’re on your website, like you can tell it to navigate to a different part of your website, and this will actually update for you. So it’s just a complete unified experience. That’s awesome. And I just wanna… Maybe you could help expand on what I’m gonna say. For a Lifter example, if you do a Google search for LifterLMS, there’s a a LifterLMS MCP.

You’ll see all the abilities. So for courses, there’s things like list courses, get course, update course, get course content create lessons all the money stuff like list access plans, create access plan, list students, update student, enroll student, and all this, and there’s many more. So explain how the benefits of this compare to clicking around and trying to do it all manually on your WordPress site.

The biggest thing is it’s a lot faster here. Is there something that really takes a long time in Lifter that we could maybe test? So I have a, a, a course here, or a test course. Is there anything in particular you wanna test here? I’m… Right now I’m just having it lift out, or list out all the Lifter abilities.

Maybe just adding some- It says, “Lifter doesn’t have any roaster abilities.” Maybe- Let me see here. What version of Lifter has the abilities? We’re on 10.1 or something like that. Okay. we have a REST API

Let’s see here. Okay, are you sure? Check it again and see. Is it, is the REST API the only thing you have access to?

So I’m gonna open this up a little bit here so we can see it

I’ll put a a comment here in StreamYard that goes to the LifterLMS MCP thing on GitHub. Okay. And again, the, the Abilities API is pretty new, so- Yeah … i- i, there, there might be some il- issues with it just discovering. Here’s what we found here. So we found just these here. So I can look into this more on the Abilities and see why it’s not recognizing it.

But we do have the REST API, so we can do stuff there. Nice. And also what we do- Yeah … Chris, is another thing, is a lot of… Okay, so le- let’s explain what the Abilities API is first. So the Ability API is WordPress core’s answer to expose functionality to AI clients, okay? So as you can see here, we do have a REST API where we can modify stuff, but the Abilities API goes a step further and helps unify what an agent sees versus what it can do.

Now, since this is new and a lot of stuff coming out doesn’t have the Abilities API, we also ship a WP-CLI emulator. So we ship primitives because essentially everything on WordPress is either in the database or on the theme. So we can touch any parts of WordPress, even if a plugin doesn’t ship with a specific AP- Abilities API functionality, if that makes sense.

If not, I can explain it a little bit more. That’s very cool. Expand. So essentially i- imagine that you have an SEO plugin and it has no Abilities API. What AI will do is it will look at our database, say, “Oh, this is how it stores all its meta titles and descriptions. I’ll just update these directly.”

Okay. And it’ll update them, say, if you’re doing a SEO au- O audit on your website. And what happens here is we actually have built-in gates. So the biggest thing is people are scared of letting AI touch their site. But if we do something destructive, it will actually prompt us and tell us, “You can’t do it unless you agree to do it.”

So let’s try it here. Okay, can you create create a user, and then I wanna delete that user so I can demonstrate how our gates work, our permission gates? So Chris, if you’re working on, for example, your courses with Lifter and you’re wanting to do cleanups, basically our philosophy is if anything has a trash or is not, is non-destructive, then we let it flow.

If not, then we prompt the user to agree to take a destructive action. So if you’re… okay, so you can see it doing stuff right here and saying refresh because it’s creating the user and stuff. So essentially what happens is, i- if it’s gonna delete something, it’s gonna prompt you and tell you, “Hey, I can’t delete this unless you agree.”

We wanna make it as safe as pop- possible for people to get work done on their website, but not destroy their website in the process. That is super cool. All right, so here’s the approval gate loading right now And this is an approval gate to delete a user? Yeah. Yeah. And it tells you exactly what it’s gonna do, but this would show up for anything that is non-reversible ex- essentially, like deleting a plugin, deleting a course.

Anything like this would show up. And then we have a session thing. So if you don’t wanna keep doing this and cl- keep clicking approve and execute, you can set a session variable where it’ll just do it once and then freely continue to do stuff. Okay? So we’ll execute that, and it’ll run it, and we’ll push it here and say, “I approved it,” and it’ll just check it and say, “Oh, this, this user was removed.”

I’m thinking of a real-world use case where some people use LMSs to just train people at a company. And let’s say they just set it up and they wanna add, create these 200 users and enroll them in a certain course or membership or whatever. Yeah. They could… That HR person could do all that from Claude without, having to figure out how to import users into WordPress.

I’m imagining you could give it a CSV of email addresses and names or whatever and just- Yeah … say go. Absolutely. So let’s try it real quick. What’s an example course? I won’t have it build out the whole thing, it’ll take too long, but I’ll just for this demo, like- just safety training.

Okay. So I wanna demo building a course on LifterLMS. Just make a simple safety training course like your typical HR person would create. I wanna make this as quick as possible, just so don’t build out ribose, robust or verbose courses. Create it and then let me know what you’ve done. All right.

So we’ll let that build out here. And so first of all, typically what they would do is build the course, and then, Chris, I guess the next thing is, they would do is enroll people in that course. Is that correct? That would be the next thing. Okay. So we’ll let this build out. And the biggest thing is what they’d wanna do is obviously curate this course a little bit more or, the, the average user might even talk to Claude and say, “You know what?

I don’t e- what do, what should this course even look like?” And that’s the big thing with AI, like it is an amazing brainstorming partner. Yeah. So imagine if I was an HR person I could actually chat with the AI and say, “All right. I work in HR. W- we’re a construction company. We build commercial properties.

I’m trying to build a safety course. Can you help me plan this out?” And it would actually plan it out for you and then implement it, which is absolutely amazing. And we can do something like that as well once, once this kind of builds out if you want to, but I’ll let you decide how, h- what direction we go.

I think that’s super cool. The, the concept really is like the speed of iteration, like the brainstorming and okay, you create version one, but you’re not 100% happy. Just keep iterating. Yeah. And that’s never been faster. Yes. I don’t know about you, but with the voice to like the whisper flow and the one you use- Yeah

I’m 10 times faster. I’m already a slow typer. Yeah. And it’s that, that efficiency right there, and then AI speeding up, now I get impatient waiting the like minute or two for Claude to do its thing, but hey- Yeah … you’re still going a thousand times faster than you used to, right? Yeah. And, once you get the hang of this, you can actually just open up another session while this is running and continue to work on it.

So this one actually has a thing here that’ll let you know when it needs input. It’s a little overwhelming at first, but once you get the hang of it, like you can run two or three of these chat sessions and really get a lot of work done very fast. So here’s our course right here, the worst workplace safety essentials it created.

And, again, we didn’t fill out a lot of the content of it. It’s more of a skeleton here. But, that, we did that what, in a, a matter of seconds, right? So again, let’s just… I wanna give people kind of a brainstorming session because I think it’s a thing people overlook a lot of times.

All right, so let me just… Okay, so I’m actually new in HR, and again, this is demo. How- what would this course look like, you think? All right. And it would… You can go back and forth with it, and then it will update your course for you, right? And then we’re like, w- if we had a list of s- people, we could just upload it to this chat and it would add the users and enroll them in the course for us.

How much does the, the person have to think about multi-step processes? For example, if you give a bunch of users, it’s really create a user in WordPress, step one. Step two, enroll them in this course. Yeah. Do you have to know the chain of tags? Or- N- no, not at all. So I’ll create some users here in just a second.

Especially with the smarter models, so as I was saying here the, the smarter model you use, the better it’s gonna do without giving it explicit instructions, okay? If you use kind of a smaller model like Hoo- Haiku, you might have to tell it, “All right create a user, add it to this course specifically.”

But the smarter models like the Frontier models the labs are releasing, you can just tell it to add a user and it knows what to do essentially. Yeah. Yeah, there’s that saying, and this is why I wanna just compel with some urgency, is like we’re always working with the worst version of AI. It gets better every day, every week.

So if you’re not on the train, it’s time to, do some learning. And I’ve found that you just have to experiment and just play with it for a day, a weekend, a week, a month, 60 days, and y- you’ll be shocked. And the thing is it’s going so fast that the time to start learning tools like WP Vibe and how AI interacts with WordPress is of the essence, ’cause it’s just gonna get faster and better, and as- Yeah

there’s no better time to start learning. Yeah. If you’re, if you’re- yeah. You want to get in right now because the quicker you get in, the quicker you realize the advantage you have over people that haven’t learned this skill yet. And just, whatever you’re trying to achieve, you can move a- at least 10X faster is what I’ve seen, it is quite amazing and yeah, chatting with it and just putting in those reps is the best advice. And one way I like to describe AI is that it’s kinda like an actor and you’re the director, so you can basically tell it or direct it however you want to do. But one thing is sometimes it can go off script, someki- sometimes it can ad-lib and make up stuff.

So you just need to be aware of that and be aware of, the capabilities versus the restraints as well w- this is trying to take screenshots of this, so I’m gonna stop it here and I’m just gonna say, “Okay, can you just add some test users? May- maybe add three test users.” So again, I’m not telling it specifically how to do it.

It should add it to that course. We’ll see. I actually, I just said add test user, so it might not add it to that course. It might just add the users, but again, you’re, you need to kinda watch it and, be as specific as you think you need to be essentially. One thing I love about AI recently is that it almost anticipates your next step.

So it might even prompt you here “Hey, do you want me to enroll them in the course?” Or- Yeah … it’ll give you like three o- options and then say which one it recommends and stuff like that. It’s re- it’s becoming more and more proactive, which is amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s, it is crazy because, yeah, they will come back and…

All right, so this one actually says, “Not enrolled anything.” So then you would just say, “Yep let’s enroll them,” add them to the course, whatever you need to do. And again, this versus just clicking around here, again, once you experience kind of this magic, it’s hard to go back and start clicking around in the dashboard.

I still do occasionally, but the more and more, I’m just talking to AI and telling it what to do. Now, the cool thing also about WPVibe is we have skills. So if anybody has heard of skills, so they’re essentially like knowledge base, like how to do stuff, okay? And we load a variety of skills built in, so we actually have a recipe book on WPVibe to AI for tons of different plugins.

Like we have over 100 something skills right now. But you can make your own skills as well. So imagine you keep doing the same thing over and over again, you can create a skill and recall it in the future. So I’ll just say, “Okay, so I wanna demonstrate our skills. What is a skill someone working on a course would typically need that is a repeat process?

Can we save that as a custom skill?” So what this will do, again, you wanna tell it what you wanna do, but this will save a custom skill, and then you can recall it in the future. So say that need to, I don’t know, add attr- attribution to videos or images or something every time you create a course, it will do that for you.

You just say, “Run skill X,” and it will do it for you. Does that make sense? That makes sense. A question on that. At LifterLMS we have a, a fancy AI agent that’s super custom with tons of skills and stuff that we just use internally at our company. But one of the, just you can come up with all these fun projects.

Similar to you, I’ve been around WordPress for a very long time, and my website is very old. Yeah. So I asked the AI, “How many images do we have that don’t have alt text?” Which is bad for SEO- Yeah … and accessibility. And then our agent found them. It built a little test area where we could review it writing the images.

We gave it some of our top SEO terms and told it not just to put it in everything, but when it made sense. And then it basically executed across 7,000 images in 10 minutes. Yeah. And fixed a problem we’ve had for a long time that would have taken a human at least a month to figure out and do. Yeah. Yeah, it’s quite amazing.

And that’s where we’re going with WPVibe. So right now we just shipped the ability… So Google has an audit tool called Lighthouse. Yeah. And it lets you run speed audits, accessibility audits, and o- other audits on your website. So we’ve built that into WPVibe, and soon we’ll be adding GA4 and Google Search Console.

So essentially everything’s together. So it can look at Google Search Console, look at articles that maybe need a little tweaking. It could tweak that article and then help bump it up in the rankings for you. Or, y- anything you can think of where you need that context, like analytics or r- query rankings in Google, it can pull all that together and take out that step of you going to Google Search Console or Google Analytics and taking that data and pasting it in here.

What’s an example, I think an SEO project, whether somebody’s using all-in-one SEO or something else- … that it’s like one of those areas where people wanna experiment and learn first. Yeah. What’s an… Maybe expand a little bit on, like, how somebody who wants to do their first SEO project with WP Vibe, what kind of project would they do?

So the, the first thing I would do is I would just say right here, I would just say, “Okay thank you for creating this skill. Let’s just do a simple SEO audit of these courses. What do you recommend for the meta title and description?” And it will look at the courses, the content, and sub- and recommend SEO titles and descriptions.

We actually have a skill called SEO Audit, and it will do a lightweight pass across your entire website and look for things like H1 tags, alt tags missing, again, your meta ti- meta title and descriptions, and it will recommend things for you. And actually this is using Lighthouse. So if you remember, I told you we had some of the Google tools built in.

It decided to use the Lighthouse tool to do the, the SEO audit here

That’s amazing. And again I know it takes a little while ’cause you gotta wait on this stuff here to run the tools here, but it should come back with recommendations on what to do, and then again, you just say, “Do it or don’t do it.” And another thing I like to do is what these agents can do is spin up sub-agents.

Yeah. So are you familiar with sub-agents, Chris? Yep. Okay. So what that essentially does is it spins up another copy of itself. So if you’re not sure about something or you think something doesn’t sound right, you can say, “Spin up an adversarial sub-agent to review these findings.” And what it will do is it will spin up another agent, pass in its findings, and basically look for gaps or blind spots That’s awesome Yeah, so it’ll almost check itself.

So here we go. This just came back with a bunch of stuff here. So pages blocking from… This is a test site, so public blog is set to zero. That’s the stuff you might have even forgot about, right? … “Oh, I turned this, this site off. I discouraged search engines from checking it.” And then a- again, it’s got title and descriptions and, we could have it update these for us.

So yeah it’s quite amazing and I think that th- this is just the way we’re gonna be interacting with WordPress in the future. It reminds me of the early days of WordPress, ’cause unlike John, I’m not a developer, but when I found WordPress, I was able to build websites and basically solve business challenges as a agency owner, and WordPress democratized website building for people like me.

And now I see this next wave of AI really doing that for WordPress again at a, in a different way with speed and going outside your skill set with code and things like that, that the AI just does for you. Yeah. Yeah. It’s amazing. And again, the more tools you give it, the more power it will see. So like I said, this one just ran the Lighthouse audit tool.

A few other tools we ship is we ship a, a, a image search tool. So say you want a image for your course, we can just say, “All right. Can you find a image for this course and apply it?” So we’ll try that. Okay. On the Workplace Safety Essentials course, can you find an image and apply as a featured image?

We have a code snippets tool, so it can create any code snippet you can think of to push out on your site. So just the, the possibilities are limitless, and what we focus on at WP vibe is giving it primitives. So primitives are, again, like access to basically what a developer would have. So WP Vibe can almost act like a developer for you and do that stuff that you might not know about, Chris, not being a developer, but- AI certainly does know how to do it and knows how to apply it I think one example, I’m just thinking back to my early agency days is when somebody wants to ins- they’re gonna run Facebook ads and they wanna install a tracking pixel.

AI could just do it for you instead of having to get a developer to be like, “Hey, I need to put this pixel wherever it’s supposed to go, and I don’t understand the Facebook developer pixel documentation.” Yeah, absolutely. It can do it for you, and then you can even use a Facebook connector if they have one, and you can close that gap as well.

So not only can it set up the pixel, but it can see your ads and then help you adjust and modify those. For the general education, I think the i- the key idea here is context. The more context you give your AI “Oh, I can see your Google Analytics, I can see your WordPress site, I can make changes. I can see your email or whatever else,” you’re just providing so much more context.

‘Cause just chatting with AI and the large language model is cool, but this whole thing, by giving it all this context about your website and your business and what you’re trying to do and the tools you use and the analytics you use- … it just, it’s like a whole nother level than just chatting and copying and pasting things.

It absolutely is. And, just to go back to what we were working on. So it found this image. It… do your courses have a featured image place? They do. All right. So let’s see if it applied it. If I go to here to course, it said it applied it here. Do I just click edit or where would I see that at?

View. Okay, view. Oh, yeah, there it is So yeah, it just found an image for us, added it, and, done. So pretty amazing. I got… I have two more questions for you, John, two more quick areas to explore. One is design. Yeah. We’re doing a lot with functionality and adding users and stuff. Themes have really changed in WordPress, and now there’s full site editing and Gutenberg and everything.

Yeah. How… What kind of design things, or what would be good first design related projects that you could do with WPVibe connected to your WordPress site? Yeah I’m glad you brought this up. So essentially, there’s lots of different ways to apply des- design to a WordPress site. So if you actually go to WPVibe.ai, we built this entire site with WPVibe, and we have a video on our YouTube channel.

So if you go down here to the bottom and click on YouTube you can see this video of how we built our website with AI, and we approached it a little bit different. So this entire website took me about an hour and a half to build, and it’s very robust. It has it has a recipes generator. It’s got all this stuff, and then I can edit it just by talking to WPVibe.

WordPress has full site editing built in, okay? And it uses Gutenberg. Now, what we have found is AI typically struggles with Gutenberg, and the reason is that it is so verbose. So if you look at how Gutenberg is generated for you non-technical people, it creates basically a big wall of text to create a heading or something like that, okay?

And AI has to figure out what this text means and then how to edit it. And not only that, with full site editing, you can make changes in the block. You can make changes at the site level. You can add custom CSS. So it has all these different things it’s trying to figure out how this one title is being rendered or the custom CSS behind it.

And it’s not only Gutenberg. Elementor CProd, the plugin I, I build, the page building plugins, it has to infer all this. Now, the good news is it can still work. It just won’t be as complex. So it’ll be more of a basic site. Like trying to do something like this, it would struggle with. But if you want to build like super complex sites where you take, you vibe code like HTML and have it render it that, what we have found is classic themes are the best way to do it.

And that’s the way WP Vibe works, is it will generate a classic theme, and for those who are not familiar before full site editing WordPress, you would just create a theme with code and it would display for you. AI is super good at reading the file system and editing code, and we have found that is the best way to build themes with AI.

Again, if you’re not technical, we also ship with WP Vibe something called AI custom fields. So you can tell it, “I want this to be editable,” and this will turn this into a custom field that you can change on the back end. And again, if you watch that video, it goes into a little more details on the why, but you can see exactly how we built this.

But as the models continue to get better and more robust, it is unlocking a lot of the full site editing. It’s getting better at it, and it’s making less mistakes. So I think it will get there eventually, but right now it does struggle. Again, it can create small things, but if you’re like just build out the entire website, typically it- you’ll have more errors or frustration than going with like the classic the- theme way.

And in your case, you didn’t modify an existing classic theme. You created a brand new one. Yes. Is that correct? Just by talking. Just by talking, and again- It- … I didn’t tell it to create a cla- classic theme. I just said, “Hey, I wanna build a n- a WordPress website,” and I told it what I wanted, and it chose how to do it.

We tell it how to do it on the back end because we know that this works best, but it will just do it for us and create a test site and go from there. I could demo it, but it does take a little bit longer to build out a th- a site because it’s generating a lots of code.

Last question for you, John. How should an agency owner or a freelancer think about this? What are the biggest benefits? Obviously, there’s a speed increase in the ability to implement and perhaps offer services that are they didn’t offer before, ’cause now they can do an SEO audit as an example.

Yeah, so- But, like, how, what would what’s in it for agencies and freelancers? So yeah, I think if they want to free up more of their time and offer more robust services to their clients, then they want to start leveraging AI right now. So we actually just got a review the other day, and I thought it was pretty cool because this is a agency person and he said, I tried several tools like this, but this beats them all.”

And, he maintains 50-plus sites, and I think that, with WPVibe, we can add as many sites as we wanna add. Right now I have four or five sites. Can you list all the sites I have connected? But imagine you have something you need to do on every site, like update plugins. We can say, “Can you update plugins on all of my sites?”

And it would do it for you while you’re out taking a walk or something, right? And, I think agencies are gonna wanna start offering this ability to clients as well, and that’s something we have planned for WPVibe, where you can add clients to your account so they can edit their sites as well.

And what’s cool about AI is you can actually say, “Hey, this client should only have access to the about page or the contact page,” and then it will prevent them from editing other parts of the website. So there’s a safety layer built into it as well. Ultimately, we wanna get to the point where you’re talking to AI just like emailing a developer.

But instead of emailing developer, you’re talking to AI and it’s doing the work for you. That is so cool. So in your view, I’m gonna pull the screen share down and we’ll land the plane here, is Okay … what do you see as the future of page builders? This feels like the next evolution of page building, just doing it through AI, right?

Or- Yeah … what do you think about that? You even have CProd, which I think has 800,000 installs or something, and it’s a page builder, and it comes- Yeah … in the same thing. So you’re the guy with b- on both sides of the story, so how do you see- wordPress, last I checked, was like 43% of the web, right?

Millions of sites, millions and millions of sites. Not all those sites are gonna start fresh and create a new site or a theme. So that is actually our goal. We want, at WPVIWe want to provide a first-class AI experience, no matter you have a legacy site or building a new site. All those, we want to meet you where you’re at.

So we actually just shipped Elementor V4 skills. So now when you’re working on Elementor site, we understand how V4 works. We can make changes to you, to the site for you, and it will show up in work. And again, like I said, it does work right now, but it’s not 100% like it is when you’re building like a classic theme.

The, the… It’s more error-prone, let’s just put it that way. But we try to solve that with our MCP, but whenever we get an error, we actually feed it back into the AI so it can understand from its mistakes and it won’t try it again. So that’s one thing we actually have a upper hand on because WordPress ships with the ability to connect like an API key to WordPress.

And again, it’s two different methods for talking to your WordPress site with AI. We believe people will want to use their agent of choice as opposed to an ad hoc API key, ’cause first of all, you have to pay extra for that. You don’t get to use your subscription with an API key. And then you run the risk of having a A- API key exposed, right?

So essentially, what we wanna do is we want to, whatever WordPress site you have, whether it’s old, you’re running old plugins, we want to be able to use our AI to manage and not only manage it but do a, a, a great job at managing that website and helping you save time with it. My mind is blown, John.

Thank you for this. Awesome, Chris. And I wanna encourage all you out there listening and watching to go to wpvibe.ai. Try the free version, fall in love with it, and then get on the pro version. I’m looking forward to experimenting with it more, and this pla- this, this thing is moving fast. Like- Yes

three months from now, who knows? Yes. So this is the time to learn and get started with all this stuff. Absolutely. Now is the time. And it’s actually quite fun once you get into it, it is fun. Yeah. Particularly when you unlock the talking thing. Yeah. And and as you get better, like you said, sometimes you’ll s- all right it’s doing this, it’s creating this course.

While it’s creating the course, I’m gonna do this other thing and then- Yeah … start another one, and it… I don’t know, the productivity is just insane. Absolutely. Yes, it is. Yeah. All right, John thanks for coming on the show. Go to wpvibe.ai. Also, subscribe to the WPVibe AI channel. I saw your videos come up and I see tons of tech videos, but then I saw yours and I’m like, “Yes, this is WordPress and AI.

This is like-” Yeah … “so fun.” And you’re really leading through the space, so it’s awesome to see. Keep up the amazing work. Yeah. And thank you for coming on the show. Oh, thank you for having me, Chris. It’s been awesome.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.