Hi folks,
I want to hear about your actual hands-on experience with AI in WordPress work. I’m not looking for theory or marketing talk, just real stories about what works and what doesn’t.
I’m curious about different areas:
- Design work: Do you use AI for creating wireframes, choosing colors, or coming up with layout concepts?
- Coding: Does AI help you write custom post types, create theme functions, or fix bugs in your code?
- Page builders: Are the AI features in tools like Elementor, Divi, or Beaver Builder actually worth using? Do they save time on creating pages?
- Time savings: Which tasks actually get done faster with AI help?
- Overall impact: What percentage of your work involves AI now? Is it just for small stuff or does it handle bigger chunks of your projects?
I’m trying to figure out if AI is truly changing how we build WordPress sites or if it’s just another tool that sounds good but doesn’t deliver much value.
Share your honest thoughts and any examples you’ve got!
I’ve been using AI for WordPress development for about six months, and my experience is pretty different from what most people say. The biggest win isn’t coding - it’s content generation and SEO. Tools like Jasper and Copy.ai are actually useful for placeholder content and meta descriptions during development. For coding though? Pretty frustrating. AI gives me solutions that work alone but break everything when I add them to existing themes or plugins. It just doesn’t understand context well enough yet. That said, AI rocks for ACF custom field setups and writing database queries for complex content relationships. I’ve also used it to convert PSD files to CSS, though the code always needs major cleanup afterward. Those page builder AI features are mostly marketing BS - they just pump out generic layouts that clients hate. Right now AI handles maybe 15% of my work: research, documentation, and rough code drafts that I fix up manually. I treat it like a junior developer, not some expert consultant.
Been using AI tools for WordPress development for about eight months now and honestly, it’s been a mixed bag. The biggest game changer has been using ChatGPT and Claude for debugging custom functions - they spot issues in my PHP code that would take me ages to find manually. Just yesterday I had a custom post type that wasn’t displaying properly and AI helped me identify a missing capability parameter in two minutes. For design work, I’ve found AI pretty underwhelming. The wireframes are generic and the color suggestions are hit or miss. I still prefer doing that part myself or with traditional tools. Where AI really shines is writing repetitive code snippets and explaining WordPress hooks I’m not familiar with. It’s also surprisingly good at writing custom CSS for specific layout problems. I’d say about 25% of my development time now involves AI in some capacity, mostly for research and quick coding tasks rather than major project components. The main downside is that AI sometimes gives outdated WordPress practices or suggests deprecated functions, so you still need to know enough to verify everything. It’s definitely not replacing core WordPress knowledge, but it’s speeding up the grunt work significantly.
the ai hype for wordpress is def overblown. copilot keeps suggesting outdated jquery when i need vanilla js for theme dev. but it’s actually useful for explaing wp functions - like when i was confused about wp_query params for a custom archive. beats digging through the codex every time.