The difference between sponsorship and partnership. Reshaping events in the WP industry – Greyd Conversations #17. In this episode of Greyd Conversations, Sandra sat down with @CaroleOlinger, head of the @CloudFest Hackathon and the WordPress [Business & Agency Summit], @raquel__karina, founder and executive producer of PressConf and Mark Weisbrod, CEO of Greyd and advisory board member for @CloudFestUSA. Together they covered why attendance and sponsorship numbers at flagship WordCamps are declining, what business-focused event formats are doing differently, and where the real competitive pressure on WordPress events is coming from. Some of the many takeaways: ✅ When a sponsorship for a WordCamp crosses $75k, "giving back" is no longer a valid return on investment. That shift was never addressed structurally in the WordCamp model, and it is one of the root causes of the numbers dropping. ✅ Asking a potential sponsor to fill out an application form is the fastest way to lose them. They are investing, not applying. The cold email plus form plus rules approach signals a fundamental misunderstanding of what a sponsor relationship is. ✅ A clearly defined target audience is what makes an event sponsorable. Mark explains why he commits his budget to PressConf and CloudFest without hesitation, and why he cannot do the same for events where he does not know who will be in the room. ✅ Sponsors often pitch the wrong thing to the wrong audience. Carole's point: an agency does not want to hear how a hosting company built its infrastructure. They want to know it works. Good event organisers coach partners on what the audience actually needs to hear. ✅ The real competitive threat to WordPress events is not internal fragmentation. It is AI-focused events arriving from outside the ecosystem, with larger budgets and broader appeal, competing for the same sponsorship money. ✅ Budget timing is a structural problem. Enterprise companies plan their event budgets at the end of the year. An event that reaches out in February for an April slot has already lost. Watch the full conversation to hear how three people who build, sponsor, and produce these events are thinking about what comes next: eu1.hubs.ly/H0xXzhK0

"SEO is dead and distribution of partnerships are a waste of time". How can product companies grow in WordPress right now? – Greyd Conversations #19. In this episode of Greyd Conversations, Sandra sat down with three people watching the same market from very different seats. @Katie Keith, founder of Barn2 and one of the few people in the space who publishes real numbers. @AurelioVolle, founder of WP Umbrella, bootstrapped to nearly 2 million ARR in five years. And @learnwithmattc, who coaches WordPress founders through Roots & Fruit. They started with Elementor cutting 30% of staff and worked out from there. Some of the many takeaways: ✅ Katie's new sales have been dropping for two years. She named the patterns for who is most exposed right now, and she falls into all of them. ✅ A room at WordCamp Europe was asked to name 20 plugins and struggled. Matt calls it a branding problem, and he picks one very well known plugin as the example of what went wrong. ✅ Most product companies are not spending too much on paid acquisition. They are spending too little. Matt puts a number on what it should be. ✅ Aurelio's advice on distribution partnerships is to skip them. Three years of trying, two that worked, and a clear reason why the timing matters. ✅ Katie sold Document Library Pro for five years before discovering who was actually buying it. That discovery changed the product roadmap. ✅ Raising rates on existing subscribers is treated as a cardinal sin in WordPress. Matt makes the case that it is the healthier option, for the customer too. Watch the full episode for the full conversation on churn, ICP, and what to do when your best acquisition channel stops working: eu1.hubs.ly/H0xXB0m0

Franchise networks can double lead generation across all their local websites, without overhauling local operations or asking franchisees to develop any technical skills. A women's fitness franchise operating more than 250 local club websites had a clear gap between brand strength and digital performance. Local franchise operators didn't have the technical resources to keep their sites current. Class schedules, local events, and membership offers stayed outdated. The content infrastructure wasn't built for localized, non-duplicate content, so SEO performance across the network was lower than the brand warranted. After implementing Greyd.Suite through a centrally managed multisite architecture, local clubs could update their own content through a simple interface requiring no technical knowledge. Campaigns rolled out across all 250 sites simultaneously from the corporate level. The content structure was rebuilt to support local SEO without generating duplicate content issues. Lead generation across the network doubled. Local SEO visibility improved by 11%. Read the case study: eu1.hubs.ly/H0yYv_S0 If your franchise locations aren't pulling their weight as lead gen channels, that gap is worth a closer look. Let's talk! eu1.hubs.ly/H0yYw1q0

"85% of AI citations come from outside of a brand's own website." In this episode of Greyd Conversations, our COO Sandra talks with Emma Young, Head of Organic Marketing at @Hostinger, where she leads SEO, content, YouTube and localization across a team of around 65 people. The conversation covers how search behavior has shifted away from Google as the starting point, why AI systems still depend on Google's index, and what technical foundations, accessibility and content governance now mean for getting cited. Some of the many takeaways: ✅ If you're not in Google's index, you do not exist in the AI answer. There is no separate track. ✅ Around 85% of AI citations come from somewhere other than your own website. Your content is the other 15%. ✅ A screen reader and an AI crawler are solving the same problem, which is why accessibility work pays twice. ✅ Semantic HTML is having good manners for a machine. Most sites are rude. ✅ Incoherence was always there. AI just handed it a loudspeaker. ✅ Everyone agrees AI visibility matters. Almost nobody is accountable for it. Watch the full episode for Emma's three things any company can do next week, without extra budget. eu1.hubs.ly/H0xXzFH0

One website is easy to manage. Even two or three are usually fine. But when success in a franchise also means that the number of local sites sneaks up on you and you end up having 50 or a 100 local websites, a simple content change stops being a content task. It becomes a full fledged operational project. Someone updates the central website. Someone else emails the locations. A few local teams make the change immediately. Others get to it next week. And one site is still showing last year’s campaign six months later. The obvious response is to lock everything down centrally. But that creates a different problem, especially in franchise and other multi-location setups: local teams can no longer update the information they actually know best. The better approach is to separate the two. Headquarters controls the content that needs to be consistent: brand messaging, campaigns, legal information and shared assets. Local teams control what is genuinely local: opening hours, contacts, events and regional information. With Global Content in Greyd.Suite, centrally managed content can be created once and synchronized across the entire network, while local editors retain control where it makes sense. That means faster campaign rollouts, fewer outdated pages and far less repetitive work. We offer several case studies about that on our site, check them out here: eu1.hubs.ly/H0yHTKM0 Want to dive deeper? Let’s talk: eu1.hubs.ly/H0yHTFP0 Alternatively you can also watch the demo: eu1.hubs.ly/H0yHTGm0

🔥 The Hidden Complexity of Global Websites – Greyd Conversations #20 is out! In this episode of Greyd Conversations, Sandra sat down with Thibaud Guerin, Agency Partnerships Manager at @weglot, the AI-powered website translation plugin used on more than 110,000 websites. They unpacked what changes once a website goes beyond one or two languages, from ownership and governance to multilingual SEO and visibility in AI search. Some of the many takeaways: ✅ Translation copies the content, localization adapts it to a country, region or city. Design, images, currencies and tone all play a part. ✅ Someone has to own it. Marketing decides where to go, local teams fine-tune the message. Weglot's own Bill 96 blog post came from their Canadian colleagues and became one of their best performing posts. ✅ Multilingual SEO is its own discipline: hreflang tags, unique URLs per language and translated metadata, including alt text. ✅ A separate website per language looks like a shortcut, but the same content in two languages can be treated as duplicate content by search engines. ✅ Translated content on your own site also matters for AI search, and it keeps control of the wording in your hands instead of a browser's automatic translation. ✅ Agencies become growth partners: start with data on where the traction is, focus on the 20% of pages that drive 80% of results, then localize. Watch the full episode for the practical details, including what is coming in the new version of Weglot. Watch it here: eu1.hubs.ly/H0yJnZh0 #WordPress #Multilingual #SEO #Agencies #WebDevelopment

WordPress events need to balance between sponsors and audience. In this episode of Greyd Conversations about reshaping events in the WordPress industry. In this episode of Greyd Conversations, Sandra sat down with @CaroleOlinger, head of the @CloudFest Hackathon and the WordPress [Business & Agency Summit], @raquel__karina, founder and executive producer of PressConf and Mark Weisbrod, CEO of Greyd and advisory board member for @CloudFestUSA. Together they covered why attendance and sponsorship numbers at flagship WordCamps are declining, what business-focused event formats are doing differently, and where the real competitive pressure on WordPress events is coming from. Some of the many takeaways: ✅ When a sponsorship for a WordCamp crosses $75k, "giving back" is no longer a valid return on investment. That shift was never addressed structurally in the WordCamp model, and it is one of the root causes of the numbers dropping. ✅ Asking a potential sponsor to fill out an application form is the fastest way to lose them. They are investing, not applying. The cold email plus form plus rules approach signals a fundamental misunderstanding of what a sponsor relationship is. ✅ A clearly defined target audience is what makes an event sponsorable. Mark explains why he commits his budget to PressConf and CloudFest without hesitation, and why he cannot do the same for events where he does not know who will be in the room. ✅ Sponsors often pitch the wrong thing to the wrong audience. Carole's point: an agency does not want to hear how a hosting company built its infrastructure. They want to know it works. Good event organisers coach partners on what the audience actually needs to hear. ✅ The real competitive threat to WordPress events is not internal fragmentation. It is AI-focused events arriving from outside the ecosystem, with larger budgets and broader appeal, competing for the same sponsorship money. ✅ Budget timing is a structural problem. Enterprise companies plan their event budgets at the end of the year. An event that reaches out in February for an April slot has already lost. Watch the full conversation to hear how three people who build, sponsor, and produce these events are thinking about what comes next: eu1.hubs.ly/H0xXzjB0

Meet us at @Press__Conf in Barcelona next month! A business conference built around the conversations that happen when the cameras are off. Our CEO, Mark Weisbrod and COO / CMO Sandra Kurze will be in Barcelona, Spain, 27 – 30 Oct 2026. Whether you're scaling a WordPress agency, rethinking how your team delivers projects, or trying to grow without adding complexity to your stack, those are the discussions they're there for. PressConf keeps its sessions unrecorded by design. The organizers are explicit about it: the format exists so industry leaders can say things in that room they wouldn't say on stage. Anyone who has sat through a conference panel knows how much that changes the conversation. If agency growth, product strategy, or the business side of WordPress is on your agenda, let's talk!

So many franchise systems have this one location whose website still shows the old logo, last season's pricing, and a promotion that ended in March. Head office did not approve that page. The franchisee did not ignore the guidelines either. It’s just that they needed to change their opening hours on a Tuesday, the agency quoted a week and an invoice, so they found a workaround. That is what copied templates do at a larger scale. Two hundred and fifty local sites mean two hundred and fifty places where a campaign has to be rebuilt by hand, and every rebuild is a ticket. And then there’s the SEO issue on top of that: duplicate content across those sites eats the local search visibility the network was supposed to create. The bill lands in marketing. Campaigns go live late, leads arrive on pages that look like a different company, and the marketing director spends the quarter chasing locations instead of running campaigns. One of Germany’s largest fitness franchises runs more than 250 club sites from one master with a central design system, using http://Greyd.Suite. The clubs edit local content such as opening hours, trainers, and news inside the approved frame. The head office manages everything else, centrally. Lead generation across the network doubled! Did that take an army of developers? No. Less. It’s probably not news to any franchisor; franchisees use whatever system is easiest. It’s head office that decides whether that is the approved one. If you're tired of chasing locations, let's talk: eu1.hubs.ly/H0yzVlb0 Curious about the case study of the example we gave? Check it out here: eu1.hubs.ly/H0yzVld0 Or watch the demo first: eu1.hubs.ly/H0yzVlf0

The branding problem: How can product companies grow in WordPress right now? In this episode of Greyd Conversations, Sandra sat down with three people watching the same market from very different seats. @KatieKeithBarn2, founder of Barn2 and one of the few people in the space who publishes real numbers. @AurelioVolle, founder of WP Umbrella, bootstrapped to nearly 2 million ARR in five years. And @learnwithmattc, who coaches WordPress founders through Roots & Fruit. They started with Elementor cutting 30% of staff and worked out from there. Some of the many takeaways: ✅ Katie's new sales have been dropping for two years. She named the patterns for who is most exposed right now, and she falls into all of them. ✅ A room at WordCamp Europe was asked to name 20 plugins and struggled. Matt calls it a branding problem, and he picks one very well known plugin as the example of what went wrong. ✅ Most product companies are not spending too much on paid acquisition. They are spending too little. Matt puts a number on what it should be. ✅ Aurelio's advice on distribution partnerships is to skip them. Three years of trying, two that worked, and a clear reason why the timing matters. ✅ Katie sold Document Library Pro for five years before discovering who was actually buying it. That discovery changed the product roadmap. ✅ Raising rates on existing subscribers is treated as a cardinal sin in WordPress. Matt makes the case that it is the healthier option, for the customer too. Watch the full episode for the full conversation on churn, ICP, and what to do when your best acquisition channel stops working: eu1.hubs.ly/H0ytN_x0

Every #PressConf has its own energy.⚡️ We felt it again at our second PressConf US earlier this year — a room full of conversations, ideas, and moments that only happen when you’re there. We don’t record our talks because some conversations are meant to stay in the room. Now we’re bringing that energy to Barcelona, October 27–30, 2026.🌴 You either get to be there, or you’ll have to hear about it. 🎟️ PressConf Europe 2026 tickets: pressconf.events/locations/b…

"Google is not the first anymore." Beyond SEO: How AI Is changing what websites need to be. In this episode of Greyd Conversation, our COO Sandra talks with Emma Young, Head of Organic Marketing at @Hostinger, where she leads SEO, content, YouTube and localization across a team of around 65 people. The conversation covers how search behavior has shifted away from Google as the starting point, why AI systems still depend on Google's index, and what technical foundations, accessibility and content governance now mean for getting cited. Some of the many takeaways: ✅ If you're not in Google's index, you do not exist in the AI answer. There is no separate track. ✅ Around 85% of AI citations come from somewhere other than your own website. Your content is the other 15%. ✅ A screen reader and an AI crawler are solving the same problem, which is why accessibility work pays twice. ✅ Semantic HTML is having good manners for a machine. Most sites are rude. ✅ Incoherence was always there. AI just handed it a loudspeaker. ✅ Everyone agrees AI visibility matters. Almost nobody is accountable for it. Watch the full episode for Emma's three things any company can do next week, without extra budget. eu1.hubs.ly/H0xXztM0

Will we see you in Barcelona?

"Keep an eye on the evolution of the WordPress ecosystem in general. There are a lot of changes going on right now in how people use WordPress." ~ Mark Weisbrod of @greyd_suite Read More. 👇 wpfounders.com/wordpress-plu… #WordPress ⁠#wpfounders

Great coverage from @therepositorywp about the upcoming @CloudFestUSA. Will we see you there?

"What do you think is changing in the WordPress event landscape?" In this episode of Greyd Conversations, Sandra sat down with @CaroleOlinger, head of the @CloudFest Hackathon and the WordPress [Business & Agency Summit], @raquel__karina, founder and executive producer of PressConf and Mark Weisbrod, CEO of Greyd and advisory board member for @CloudFestUSA. Together they covered why attendance and sponsorship numbers at flagship WordCamps are declining, what business-focused event formats are doing differently, and where the real competitive pressure on WordPress events is coming from. Some of the many takeaways: ✅ When a sponsorship for a WordCamp crosses $75k, "giving back" is no longer a valid return on investment. That shift was never addressed structurally in the WordCamp model, and it is one of the root causes of the numbers dropping. ✅ Asking a potential sponsor to fill out an application form is the fastest way to lose them. They are investing, not applying. The cold email plus form plus rules approach signals a fundamental misunderstanding of what a sponsor relationship is. ✅ A clearly defined target audience is what makes an event sponsorable. Mark explains why he commits his budget to PressConf and CloudFest without hesitation, and why he cannot do the same for events where he does not know who will be in the room. ✅ Sponsors often pitch the wrong thing to the wrong audience. Carole's point: an agency does not want to hear how a hosting company built its infrastructure. They want to know it works. Good event organisers coach partners on what the audience actually needs to hear. ✅ The real competitive threat to WordPress events is not internal fragmentation. It is AI-focused events arriving from outside the ecosystem, with larger budgets and broader appeal, competing for the same sponsorship money. ✅ Budget timing is a structural problem. Enterprise companies plan their event budgets at the end of the year. An event that reaches out in February for an April slot has already lost. Watch the full conversation to hear how three people who build, sponsor, and produce these events are thinking about what comes next: eu1.hubs.ly/H0xXyvV0

🔥 Two of the most requested Greyd.Forms features are now live! FRONTEND POST FORMS Frontend Post Forms let anyone add or update posts straight from the frontend, including custom post types. No need to give a user backend access, so no login handed out, and no design knowledge required. Each new post drops into the correct layout automatically, so it stays on brand whether it comes from a client, an employee, or an outside partner. You decide whether it publishes immediately or waits as a draft for review, so control over what goes live stays with you. This feature is now available in the Growth and Scale plans. Documentation here: eu1.hubs.ly/H0xSC3N0 DYNAMIC FORMS Dynamic Forms (available in all plans) go a step further. A form can now read your post content and fill its own fields. A job application form that only ever lists the positions currently open. One global sign-up form running across dozens of local sites that already knows which location each entry came from. Those fields can appear in the frontend and update as posts change, or stay hidden and quietly enrich your entries in the backend. Documentation here: eu1.hubs.ly/H0xSztQ0 We love to hear your thoughts! Want to dive deeper? Let’s talk: eu1.hubs.ly/H0xSxs80

"Sales in WordPress products are down across the board." How can product companies grow in WordPress right now? In this episode of Greyd Conversations, Sandra sat down with three people watching the same market from very different seats. @Katie Keith, founder of Barn2 and one of the few people in the space who publishes real numbers. @AurelioVolle, founder of WP Umbrella, bootstrapped to nearly 2 million ARR in five years. And @learnwithmattc, who coaches WordPress founders through Roots & Fruit. They started with Elementor cutting 30% of staff and worked out from there. Some of the many takeaways: ✅ Katie's new sales have been dropping for two years. She named the patterns for who is most exposed right now, and she falls into all of them. ✅ A room at WordCamp Europe was asked to name 20 plugins and struggled. Matt calls it a branding problem, and he picks one very well known plugin as the example of what went wrong. ✅ Most product companies are not spending too much on paid acquisition. They are spending too little. Matt puts a number on what it should be. ✅ Aurelio's advice on distribution partnerships is to skip them. Three years of trying, two that worked, and a clear reason why the timing matters. ✅ Katie sold Document Library Pro for five years before discovering who was actually buying it. That discovery changed the product roadmap. ✅ Raising rates on existing subscribers is treated as a cardinal sin in WordPress. Matt makes the case that it is the healthier option, for the customer too. Watch the full episode for the full conversation on churn, ICP, and what to do when your best acquisition channel stops working: eu1.hubs.ly/H0xXzqG0

Ha, so do we! It's a joy having @jessicalyschik on our team!

ICYMI: Gutenberg Changelog #134 – Gutenberg 23.7, 23.8, WordPress 7.1 and more with special guest @jessicalyschik of @greyd_suite and host Birgit Pauli-Haack @bph - now with transcript gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/g…