Search and discovery are shifting fast. AI results, voice answers and zero-click experiences are already changing how people reach our sites. We'll look at what happens when algorithms, not humans, are your primary audience - and how that reshapes the way we design, build and measure WordPress projects.

The WordPress Performance team was established in 2021 with the goal of improving the performance of WordPress Core. As a fundamental part of rendering each and every page of a WordPress site, the `WP_Query` class has received a lot of attention.

In this talk, Peter will discuss how the performance of `WP_Query` and the WordPress Query component have been improved with increased caching, and how that can be taken full advantage of when building WordPress sites at scale.

Dataviews is a package that was built with the wp-admin redesign in mind. Its first iterations surfaced in the Site editor, in the Pages and Templates indexes. But Dataviews is more than just a tool to render wp-admin index screens: it can be used to display any data, within or outside of WordPress.

This talk looks at the Dataviews API and dives into some examples of how it can be used on any React project. Plus we’ll be taking a peek at how it is evolving to fit the needs of the future wp-admin!

Forms are a critical part of any WordPress website, but with hundreds (maybe thousands) of form plugins available, all offering to do the same thing (but better), and some talking briefly about ‘WCAG compliance’, but not really about accessibility.

It can be quite difficult to work out which plugin or platform to use if you need to build forms with more complex interactions than a simple contact form, while making sure the experience is accessible.

But Formidable Forms makes this easier than most. In this talk, I’ll go beyond the basics to show you how to build properly accessible forms in WordPress using Formidable Forms.

We’ll look at what accessibility features you get out of the box with formidable forms, common problems with examples of how to fix them, practical enhancements, and real-world demos.

I’ll cover everything from semantic structure, error handling and screen reader compatibility to appropriate use of ARIA.

This is NOT a product ad, you’ll leave with an understanding of how to build accessible forms in WordPress using Formidable Forms, and actionable tips and tricks to make your forms work better for everyone.

We'll take a deep dive into 2-3 specific real life case studies of using the WP Interactivity API in an enterprise WordPress setting, discussing the challenges we faced and how we overcame the learning curve and replaced more traditional React components with the Interactivity API. It won't be an exhaustive look at all that the Interactivity API can do, but more of a focus on some of the use cases we found for it, that are perhaps a bit different to the examples you can currently find for it.

Each case study will be presented from both a strategic perspective, how we planned it out, and then from a practical perspective, engaging with real code examples. There will be both conceptual and practical examples and I'll break down some of the common misconceptions or misunderstandings of how to use the Interactivity API, when to use it, and when not to.

Some example topics we'll cover: how do you actually use the Interactivity API in classic or hybrid themes, why would you want to use it, performance considerations, server-side state, integrating analytics/tracking, and more.

Before the introduction of the block editor, the Advanced Custom Fields flexible content field was one of the main ways developers could build custom layouts while giving clients control over the content. While the introduction of the block editor in WordPress 5.0 was rocky initially, it wasn't long before it offered a far more powerful experience than the flexible content field could provide. But what do you do when you want to move to the block editor on a website already has thousands of posts? Learn how we were able to automate the process with just a few lines of code.

What happens to WordPress when AI becomes part of the building workflow? How does the foundation of blocks and the tools being created support that future? What could that future even be? As someone who has spent years contributing to WordPress and open source systems, Tammy Lister has watched how new AI building blocks are changing how people think about creating with WordPress. There is an increasing need for WordPress development to embrace the systematic design thinking that underlies its block-based foundation.

In this talk, she will explore why open design systems provide the strongest foundation for WordPress in the future. How they unlock creativity and product innovation, and how transparent, community-driven approaches give us the flexibility to adapt and evolve. Attendees will gain practical insights into building with WordPress today, understand the implementation challenges of integrating AI tools into WordPress workflows, and learn how to experiment with systematic design approaches in their own WordPress projects.

This talk explores the coming “agentic web,” where AI assistants and automated agents retrieve, interpret, and act on information without a browser or a click—and what that means for WordPress sites. We’ll talk about changes in the flow of traffic, why content needs to serve both machines and humans, and practical steps to ensure your work remains visible, and valuable in an era when answers can be created before visitors ever see a site.

AI agents want to do more than just chat – they want to actually interact with our WordPress sites, create content, manage plugins, and analyse data. I've been experimenting extensively with WordPress Model Context Protocol (MCP) and other emerging standards to build these bridges between WordPress and AI, and the results are pretty exciting. Rather than getting caught up in which AI tool will "win," I'll focus on the integration patterns that actually matter: how to make your WordPress site AI-accessible, what development approaches work best, and practical examples of AI-WordPress workflows that you can start experimenting with today.

In this session, Vineet Verma will walk through how to set up a modern headless architecture using WordPress as the single source of content for both a website and a mobile application. He will demonstrate how to decouple WordPress from the frontend, expose content via REST or GraphQL APIs, and structure the backend for scalable content delivery.

Along the way, Verma will address the common challenges developers face in headless WordPress setups such as content previews, authentication, routing, SEO, and plugin compatibility and share practical solutions and workarounds for each.

If you've ever wished there were three of you (or maybe just a quieter version who gets stuff done), this talk is for you. As Head of Engineering at Relevance AI, I’ve been quietly offloading parts of my job to agents - and somehow still kept my job.

In this session, I’ll share how I use AI to automate the boring parts, delegate without a team, and build agents that make decisions so I don’t have to. You'll get real examples, battle scars, and a practical playbook for working smarter - or at least pretending you are.

We round out the day putting the hard questions to some of our speakers. What is the future of WordPress and the future for developers in the WordPress ecosystem and beyond?