How GoDaddy Is Using AI To Improve the WordPress UX

0:00This episode of the WP Minute is brought to you by Pressable. You know what the best hosting feels like? Nothing. No panic alerts. No mystery downtime. No, hey, is the site down? Slack messages. That's the Pressable Experience WordPress hosting so reliable, you forget it's even there. We keep your site fast, secure, and up 100% of the time. So you can get back to building, selling, blogging, or binging CAD videos. No judgment, whatever you want to do. Go to pressable.com slash WP Minute and try hosting that disappears in all the right ways. Pressable.com slash WP Minute, pressable.com slash WP Minute. Thanks, Pressable, for supporting the show. Hi everyone and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Carcavac. Today I'm joined by Adam Warner from GoDaddy, a pillar sponsor of the WP Minute. He's here to tell us about the latest happenings with the company.

1:01We'll talk about AI, the company's agency program, Hub, and whatever else, Adam has in store for us. Adam, welcome to the WP Minute. Hey, thanks Eric. Happy to be here. So what's keeping you busy these days at GoDaddy? Where should I start? A lot. There's a lot of a lot happening here. We're a pretty sizable company. We have quite a large suite of solutions and offerings for people. My role is community-focused, which means customer-focused, so we sponsor different events. We engage different communities, WordPress being one of the primary ones that we're responsible for, and by engage communities, what I'm really saying is, we are WordPress users, we

2:08are agency owners, we are builders ourselves, and by engage, I mean, being active in conversations about all of the pros and cons of building sites for clients, the hurdles that we face, that other people face, and really trying to learn and keep our eyes and ears on the pulse of what's happening in the WordPress ecosystem as a whole, and making sure that we bring that feedback back into the company for engineering teams, for our care teams, for leadership, kind of across the board, to make sure that we're doing right by our customers and offering the solutions that people need, and oftentimes that pivots, you know, over the course of years, things change, especially now in our AI world. There's been a lot of change in that topic as well.

3:11So just to summarize that, I mean, a lot of what you're doing in the community kind of comes back and ends up being part of the product roadmap, really. It does, oftentimes, yes. We consider ourselves one of our roles as a feedback loop, right? So we have a lot of insights that we share, which could be more immediate, right? So if there's a high priority security issue, let's say within the WordPress ecosystem, we make sure there's awareness of that and follow through. We have a large network of connections, and by we, I mean, everyone here at GoDaddy that participates in the community, which is much more than just our team. And through those connections, and I'm speaking specifically about one-to-one relationships, you know, people that we meet at meetups or at conference events or in various communities,

4:13like WP Minute and the admin, the admin bar group and others, it often results in product enhancements, improvements, bug fixes. And sometimes we're contacted one-on-one by people from other businesses in the ecosystem. One example, and I won't go into detail with names and things, but we had a CEO of a product with millions of installs, and their users were having an issue with a certain part of our platform. He reached out to me because we had met. We held an agency dinner last year at Word Camp Europe. We met in person from that relationship. He reached out to me directly through LinkedIn, saying, hey, we're having this issue. Can you connect me? Of course, I did. And within, I think, an hour or two, the issue was identified, corrected, fixed, and everyone

5:13was happy. It's little moments like that that don't necessarily move the needle in terms of the size of our customers or the revenue that we bring in, but at the same time, those kinds of things are critical to making sure that we're delivering what we promise. Yeah, that's so important. He's often overlooked those one-to-one relationships, and that's how things kind of fester and get to a point where maybe somebody isn't so sold on your services anymore, but if you're having those relationships in, you're able to give that personal service, even as big as GoDaddy is, even as automated as things are now, that personal touch, I keep hammering at it because I think it's so important when you're working with other people. You have to be able to communicate and you have to be able to help them in those situations.

6:17So kudos to you on that. That's good to see that it's a focus. Yeah, thanks for that. And the credit goes to GoDaddy leadership for recognizing that this kind of community work or engagement and having dedicated people to that and encouraging people to get involved in whatever, not just WordPress, but whatever community that they're in that is connected to the work that they do here, or our solutions. Everyone is encouraged to participate and bring those kind of insights back. So it's rewarding. It's rewarding work. But it is across the board of community work, it's sometimes difficult to prove the business outcome and a lot of times companies are, I have a tendency to focus on the bottom line

7:18and which they should and they have to in order to exist and grow. So it's a thing, but GoDaddy does a really good job of encouraging and supporting this kind of direct to customer feedback loop. Well, that's great. I know AI is like, you know, getting into that, you mentioned that earlier, that's like the big thing we're all doing now, right? So we have to talk about it, but you have this arrow AI suite. That includes WordPress. I've tried that site builder. I was impressed with it. I have to say it was, it was not what I was expecting, but I know you've got more things going on with, with arrow, what's happening with that product right now and what kind of tools are we talking about? Yeah. So the way that I describe arrow at GoDaddy is basically it's GoDaddy plus AI and arrow is our AI tool.

8:19It pulls from multiple places and it's been integrated into, I don't know all, but I would say most of our offerings arrow now powers some of our domain search. It powers our website builder, which is non WordPress, our plus marketing digital suite. So for creating social posts and content, and then in our hosting platform, even in the background, arrow is powering a lot of that. The ultimate goal, I think, with arrow is to simplify, simplify a new user or existing customers' ability to find what they need for whatever they're doing. So if they are a small business and they come to kind of the main arrow portal, it's

9:25really prompting, what do you want to do? I want to build a website, I need an email address, I need x, y, and z, and arrow on the backend is a really good job of directing people to where they need to be in surfacing the solutions based on their prompts. Now, arrow for WordPress, let's talk about AI in the WordPress ecosystem in general for a second, if I may. Absolutely. We've seen the advent of AI across the board, but in the WordPress ecosystem specifically, there is a huge opportunity, I think, in front of us and for WordPress, the software in regard to AI. You know, it all started with people building solutions for content creation and those sorts of things. And then we have the WordPress website builders, which there's several of them that are AI-powered. And then the idea of building an AI into WordPress itself, right, as a core function,

10:37what does that mean? What does it bring to users? What does it bring to WordPress, the platform itself? And there was a recent article in whoever wrote this, please forgive me because I don't recall, but it was recent about WordPress is dead. And the whole angle of the article was, it's obviously not, right? That was another topic of, oh, there's this vibe coding platform and that vibe coding platform and now everyone's going to create every website and every solution with these, right? But then it became clear pretty quickly that there are gaps, right? So you build something with a vibe code, then you have to go outside of that to do the rest, right? You have to go get a domain, you have to go get a payment solution, and then come back and build those in and those sorts of things. I think the trajectory of WordPress to software being positioning more as an engine with

11:42the advent of AI and the things that are being built offers WordPress to software a huge and long-term future, right? This whole fear of it's going away, I think is, it's natural, it's a natural reaction, but I think it's unwarded as things move forward, and we'll see what the future holds. And so, in getting to Arrow and WordPress here at GoDaddy, we had started, I think about a year or more ago, experimenting with AI and Arrow-powered WordPress website creation. It went through many different iterations, there was a lot of beta user testing, a lot of feedback, and it's in the state now where it's pretty robust. You put in a prompt, you build what you want, it puts out a nice looking site, it accomplishes

12:48the mission, and then you have the option of exposing the WordPress dashboard right there within our Arrow-For-WordPress tool as well, so you can get into the nitty gritty of any WordPress dashboard WP admin area you'd need to get to. So, there's a lot more on the roadmap for Arrow-For-WordPress, but it's been very successful so far, and I also want to mention, you know, GoDaddy has two distinct type of audiences, or customers, and on one hand, you have SMBs and DIYs who want the no-code drag-and-drop builders, which are GoDaddy website builder addresses, but then of that subset, you have people there that say, I've been told to use WordPress, and then, you know, the standard WordPress,

13:53when they first drop into the admin, it's jarring, right, but we know that that's being worked on, right, by the community, but then we have this other audience, which are builders, web designers, developers, who are agencies, who are building for clients, and Arrow-For-WordPress is also for them, so it's for them for spinning up quick moxites or a quick, smaller kind of client sites, right, more of a simple projects where there's not a lot of customization, you don't need to have a thousand plugins or do any custom coding to get the job done, so it opens up an efficiency for agencies and builders to perhaps take on more work, maybe not the 50 or

14:56$100,000 client jobs, but, you know, the $1000 to $5,000 client jobs, they can do more of those because they can do them faster, so it's a continual process of finding the balance between those two audiences of WordPress here. Yeah, that's a challenge to satisfy both audiences with tools that are smart when you need them to be really smart and simple when you need them to be really simple, right, when I took the AI builder for a spin, I was impressed that for one, it used a block theme that was very minimal, there weren't, there were not 20 plugins installed, it was nothing of the sort, because I picture in my head the traditional site builder where you have maybe this third-party theme that is very robust and it has tries to please everybody without really pleasing anybody, so I was impressed that this had a very simple block theme, I could

16:00start something up, tell it what pages I want, tell it what color scheme I want, upload a logo, and then I've got my starter site there and I can just go in and build, and for maybe for the small business owner that's doing this on their own, maybe that's enough, they just go in and change the content a little, but for the professional it's more of just like a starting point. It's like, okay, I can go into this block theme now and make whatever changes I need to to make it look the way I want and make it work the way I want, and I have, you know, I've done that in five minutes, I have this whole site, so I think that's something, I can see the value both ways. Yeah, and that's nice to hear, Eric, and that was very intentional, was to use the default WordPress full-site editing block theme and expose the admin area of WordPress within that arrow for WordPress AI experience. For many reasons, one, why over-complicate things, right? Use what's there and enhance it and amplify it. I can't speak for the exact

17:13team building arrow for WordPress or the ones who have built it, but my take is not only was that intentional, but it sets a framework for the future, right? Because we're not over-complicating with custom things, right? Like a page builder would have all of their features and options, and then you have a thousand of that page builder add-ons that you could then add, right? So it just adds complexity when then complexity adds more work for the person maintaining the site, it could potentially expose security issues because you've got just more points of potential points of failure with that kind of stuff. So it's been fun. It's been fun to watch. I'm in way too many Slack channels internally, but it is incredible to see the discussions happening there with developers and engineers, and I always learned something, even though I

18:17tried to be a developer, and I broke most everything I tried, and I tried to be a designer, and everything was ugly. So I'm happy to watch from the sidelines. Yeah, they just interesting to see how this evolves. As you said in the WordPress dashboard, I just see such a big opportunity there because the new person isn't going to know where everything is, where every setting is. So having the AI agent in there, being able to ask it to do something for you, that makes a lot of sense, and it really cuts down on that learning curve. I wanted to do more to do, but go ahead, sorry. As I was going to say, you spoke about the professionals, and I know you have an agency plan, an agency program going, how is that working for you, and how have you seen that evolve since launching it? Yeah, that's been very exciting.

19:18Any business offering agency tools or programs and things, we're seeing a lot more of that in this ecosystem, and the GoDaddy Agency program here started last year as a pilot program, and through several different iterations and through the sheer amount of applications that came in, and then the agencies that are in the program seeing how they're utilizing not just the program, but the ecosystem that we've built around it, they're growing, and they're growing faster due to our research, than other agencies who aren't in any program and don't have a centralized portal. So this year, the GoDaddy Agency program is a major focus for us in helping to scale that,

20:23and the whole idea with an agency program is, we're not charging for inclusion or membership, or anything like that. It really is kind of a, not kind of, I'm looking for the right word, but there are multiple reasons why the agency program exists. There's the obvious one from the business case. We would love to get more people using our solutions, whether that's domains, hosting, Errol for WordPress, or Hub, which I'll talk about in a second, and because we're a business, obviously. But the benefit to the users is that we're bringing in these solutions and tools into a centralized location to help them manage their agencies in their freelance business, manage clients and, you know, site maintenance and all of those things in one spot. So it's been

21:26good. We have a big plan. We've gone global with the agency program, and so far it's been really well received. And our goal is to help you grow, right? If an agency or an individual freelance or grows, so do we. So that's it. So what kind of tools could someone expect that an agency owner wants to look into this? You said site maintenance, I know the hub is part of that. What other types of things are you offering? Yeah, so within the agency program, it does require opting into the hub use, which you can use or not use. It's there's no charge. It's free. But what the hub is, is it's basically, it started out as kind of a site maintenance tool or a client maintenance tool as well, right? So all of the things that we know in our industry that are pretty table stakes these days, if you're building sites

22:29for clients and you're offering a maintenance plan as another revenue stream, recurring revenue stream, you need to tend to those sites like a garden, right? You need to run regular security scans, you need to update themes and plugins when there's, when there's issues, you need to monitor uptime. All of those things that are a little bit commoditized nowadays, admittedly, we have been doing that for years, right? With our, with managed WP, joining the GoDaddy. And so within the hub, you have that. But we have also a client area in the hub and it's where you can enter your client details, their site, their contact info, all of the things. And then on top of that, within the client area of the hub, we've built Arrow into that as well. And so the first, the first Arrow

23:32integration was client market research. So I've got a new client have come, came through my contact form. They've given me a little information about their business or I've done an initial call and then I've set up a discovery call. I can take that information that that potential client has shared. And I can prompt it inside the client market research. So let's say it's a local turf installer as an example. I write a bit about their business, what their location is, and then that market research will spit out kind of an overview of the industry in that location, what the opportunities are, historical context. It will suggest opportunities where that particular business can succeed. And you take that to the client and it's impressive that you've done that

24:33that work, right? You've learned about their business about their industry, which supports them wanting to hire you, right? But it's not, it's not trickery because you've also informed yourself about what this business needs, what this client needs, which informs how you, how you build a site. Now, the latest iteration of the hub, it's moving fast. Proposals, a proposal creation is now built in. Invoicing is an option there. It's built into the hub, using our GoDaddy payments processor, which I think still has the lowest percentage in the industry. I'll have to double check myself on that. But so the idea is you can manage your client information everywhere from the initial contact all the way to the site build and then further on to to maintenance. That's the idea is to kind of bring everything in there and keep building in more aerosolutions into that to automate whatever needs to be automated or make sense, I suppose,

25:37to automate. That's good enough. Actually, when I first started looking into the hub a little bit, the first thing that did come to my mind was manage WP because obviously when you acquire them, you get that technology for all the site maintenance things. But now you're also adding just the opportunity to kind of take care of your client relationships along with their website, which I think is kind of a nice touch. You know, we're so used to these days having having to log into like 30 different places to do business these days. So you have this one portal basically and you're just doing all the things there. Yeah, that's the idea is to make it a one-stop kind of a business toolbox for any freelancer or agency. And there's a lot more involved in that but I won't go into detail. Let people check out the hub for themselves. Again, it's free. So if you're a GoDaddy customer, if you have a GoDaddy account or you can create

26:41a free account, just search GoDaddy ProHub and you'll get right in there and see what's available. Awesome. Awesome. So is there anything else going on at GoDaddy that you're excited about or where are we going to see you this year because I know you're always off to word camps and things like that. Yeah. So there's so much going on at GoDaddy. And again, I'll mention like GoDaddy plus AI. Like there's no turning back from AI integrations and tooling and feature sets and all of the things. One of the exciting things that I don't have a huge depth of knowledge in just yet is our agent name service offering. And what that is and we've all seen the advent of AI agents. And we've seen the pros and cons of those things and the agent name service or ANS as it's known

27:47is meant to verify the identity of any given agent that happens to join that agent name service in order to build a trusted flag for whatever agent is in there and across the industry. So think of it like almost like a domain service in that it's verified. The agent will be verified. So that's pretty exciting at scale. But yeah, with me traveling, I've taken a bit of a step back. I've made a few trips last year and I've got a couple more coming up. But what I tend to do is instead of doing it all myself, we have a team and we have no lack of people within the company that would have the subject matter expert for any event or meetup or anything else we wanted to do.

28:52So part of my job is coordinating and finding the right person for whatever opportunity is in front of us. Yeah, that sounds good. I mean, there's only so much world traveling you can do with the number of WordPress and another, you know, Cloud Fest and those other type of events going on probably good to save your frequent flyer miles for another day. Yeah, you know, I was a road warrior for many years traveling to events and now that my kids are a little bit older, it's more important now than ever that I'm here instead of gone every week, which you know, it's served its purpose and it was great and I loved it. But you don't have to be everywhere all the time and there's ways to support the community and these events from afar as well. Absolutely, that's important. I mean, the family time, you know, that's the most important thing. So good for you. I'm taking a step back

29:57on the travel and getting spend some time with those kids. So where can folks connect with you online? Adam, if they want to ask questions or they want to take this agency program for a spin? Yeah, so the short answer is too many places. That's on me. I need to, I've got so many, so many messages and so many places it's hard to keep up. But I would say I'm on X a lot or Twitter as I'm still going to call it at WP Modder WP M O D D E R. That's it. And side note, that's a handle I chose back when I started really digging into WordPress and I was modifying WordPress through, you know, page templates and functions and those sorts of things. I'm also on LinkedIn. I'm pretty easy to find there. And, you know, within WP Minute, within WordPress.org Slack, within the Facebook

31:03specific WordPress groups, I'm everywhere. So pretty much just looks anywhere you happen to be in Adam Warner is going to be there ready to answer your questions. That's it. I'll go with that. So that's good to be well. Well, thank you so much, Adam, for being on the show and thank you to GoDaddy for being a sponsor of the WP Minute. We really appreciate that. And for you folks watching and listening, we thank you for supporting what we do here at the WP Minute. Please visit us at the WP Minute dot com slash subscribe. You can get our newsletter. Find out what's happening in the world of WordPress. And there's some new things in our newsletter. We're actually getting some exclusive content. I'm writing a column in there now and we're going to do some other things to spice it up. So thank you all for watching and listening and we'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to the WP Minute, part of the Matt Report Media Network. This episode wouldn't be possible without our amazing pillar sponsors, Pressable, Kinsta, GoDaddy,

32:0520i and Elementor. These brands are supporting WordPress media and helping us invest in your future as a WordPress professional. Our foundation plus sponsors like Hostinger, Big Scoots, Stellar WP, Personalized WP, WeGlock and PatchStack help us keep the lights on. Thanks to all of our members in the WP Minute Slack channel, which you can join too, head on over to thewpminute.com slash support to get access. Thanks for listening and don't forget to hit the share button or tell a friend about this podcast. See you in the next one.