Did you know that over 810 million websites worldwide rely on WordPress in 2024?

It’s no surprise, really. The open-source CMS provides business owners of any size with an agile, cost-effective way to create a functional website in as little as five days.

Now, imagine you could streamline your WordPress site management and enhance user experiences even further.

For 48% of small businesses that adopted AI in 2023, this vision is already a reality.

In fact, according to a recent SBEC survey, 93% of small business owners agree that AI tools offer an affordable way to boost savings and profitability.

And with 60,000+ plugins available in the WordPress directory, the potential for integrating AI techniques to improve your WordPress site is boundless.

Read on to learn how to make the most of it!

What can AI do for your WordPress site?

Integrating AI into your WordPress site empowers you to optimize performance, visibility, and conversion and opportunities. With deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), reinforcement learning, predictive analytics, and behavioral analysis available as third-party AIO tools, you can deliver a more personalized, efficient, and engaging experience for your visitors.

And why does user experience matter so much? Because 89% of users would choose your competitor after a bad user experience.

Other notable benefits you could leverage include:

• Faster website creation with AI-generated content like copies, images, videos, audio, and FAQs that resonate with your audience.

• Improved site performance and security with AI-driven optimizations and scheduled maintenance for an uninterrupted, safe browsing experience.

• Enhanced search engine rankings with advanced algorithms that analyze trends and user intent for improved website visibility and more organic traffic.

• Actionable insights and trends extracted from large amounts of data so you can drive business growth in the best moments.

• Increased sales with ecommerce inventory optimization, better and smarter lead gen tools and more.

For reference, here’s how businesses in 2024 choose to use AI.

How does this relate to the WordPress ecosystem, though?

WordPress and AI: An ongoing discussion

As an open-source platform, WordPress is known to seek the opinion of the community regarding new developments and the overall roadmap.

In a thread from May 2023, the core WordPress team and contributors exchanged opinions about the role of AI in the CMS.

Following the discussion, several highlights come through:

• AI belongs in the plugin territory: Since AI options currently require integration with third-party systems and pricing, AI adoption is more likely to be carried out by the plugin ecosystem rather than Core. At least until AI models become fast enough to run on the same server.

• DX (Developer Experience) as the next place for innovation: Several members comment on current DX shortcomings in the block editor and call for a focus on extensibility that might allow plugins to experiment more freely with AI integrations.

• AI for collaboration: Others suggest integrating AI for collaboration and better workflow. For example, AI chatbots could be included as “just another” user type in WordPress's Phase 3. A more bold vision is to introduce a personal AI assistant for businesses inside the admin panel.

Even though the discussion of AI in WordPress is not closed, the team’s roadmap clearly shows that artificial intelligence doesn’t (yet) have as high a priority as the action points already in motion.

However, it is worth noting that:

• In June 2023, WordPress integrated Jetpack AI assistant into the editor as a block to enable customizable content creation;

• Later on, in partnership with OpenAI, WordPress also introduced two new blocks: AI Paragraph and AI Image to empower auto-completing posts and prompt-based image creation.

Another exciting innovation (although not AI-related) is the introduction of the Speculative Loading plugin. It's based on Google's Speculation Rules API and allows site owners to request the browser to preload key pages that are highly likely to be visited by a user next.

In other words, predictive preloading of resources for future navigations that makes site browsing much faster, if not near instantaneous. Pretty exciting, right?

However, before AI becomes more prominent in WordPress Core, site owners can leverage five AI techniques to improve their WordPress websites.

6 AI techniques you can use for your WordPress site

In WordPress, AI techniques refer to different ways of adopting artificial intelligence into your workflow and daily business processes.

Automated web design and layout creation

When venturing into new business projects, time to market is key.

In WordPress, a lot of resources are spent on customizing available themes, which often drags out the process and introduces additional issues like development bug fixes, design reiterations, tech stack incompatibilities, etc.

With natural language processing (NLP) algorithms, WordPress website builders like Elementor AI and Divi AI aim to interpret user input and generate websites automatically. It’s done by analyzing user requirements and preferences, selecting suitable design elements, and populating pages with relevant content.

With AI, you could build a website from the ground up in days:

• Container layouts

• Unique images generation

• Relevant copy tailored to your audience 

• Custom code and more…

Every element is populated from your prompts, effectively saving a lot of time on development and design. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t need dedicated experts to polish and optimize the AI-generated website, but it will help them focus on what matters most.

Faster content generation

Similarly to website builders, content creation platforms use NLP models to analyze user prompts and produce human-like text.

Content teams, bloggers, and site owners can use these to flesh out new content for:

• Blog articles

• Product descriptions in bulk

• Social media posts

• Support articles and more.

Thanks to AI-powered tools like Bertha AI and Copymatic, you can generate content quickly enough to cater to a dynamic calendar where your audience remains engaged.

Fast personalized user experience

Critical elements that affect every site visitor are page loading time, site responsiveness, and information availability.

With users abandoning websites if they don’t load before 2.75s, WordPress site owners have a small window to make a good impression.

Site optimization tools like NitroPack employ complete resource optimization (media, code, and fonts) to increase loading speed and ensure visitors can interact with your content without interruptions.

Additionally, you can now leverage Navigation AI by Uxify to preload entire web pages before users click on them, resulting in near-instantaneous loading times.

After your visitors land on your website, you want to answer all their questions as quickly as possible.

Conversational AI is at the forefront of great user experiences, and introducing a chatbot to your WordPress site will not only help you provide visitors with tailored information but also increase engagement, satisfaction, and conversions.

With chatbots like Writesonic and Tidio, you can:

• Welcome customers with custom greetings and personas

• Handle customer inquiries 24/7

• Guide users through your site

• Display relevant questions and answers dynamically

• Gather contacts to streamline tickets

• And even schedule appointments.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Ranking higher in search engines guarantees more first-time visitors and new potential customers.

Traditionally, SEO requires a lot of manual work and daily tweaking to get you the best results. With AI, you can improve your site’s visibility by following recommendations based on keyword analysis, content scoring, and metadata optimization.

Tools like AIOSEO and Frase empower you to align with SEO best practices with actionable tips for optimizing on-page elements such as titles, meta descriptions, headings, keywords for blogs and site descriptions, and much more.

Automated website security and maintenance

With a whopping 56% of WordPress vulnerabilities coming from plugins, site owners need to invest heavily in robust WordPress security.

Thanks to intelligent threat detection algorithms, AI-driven scanning and false positive detectors, and pattern recognition techniques, AI tools like Quttera Web Malware Scanner can block malicious attacks and automatically apply security protocols to ensure zero downtime and data integrity.

Improved lead generation

Companies leveraging AI for lead generation see a 50% increase in leads and a 47% higher conversion rate.

Manual prospecting and cold calling take up too much time from your sales team, and leads are often not properly scored.

With AI, WordPress tools can analyze customer behaviors, preferences, and past interactions to pinpoint the perfect prospects for your business. Thanks to rule-based logic, you can choose to nudge prospects on key pages (e.g., pricing page) with:

• Personalized messages

• Offers

• Pop-ups

• Targeted notifications and more.

Additionally, tools like Link Whisper and Altis Accelerate can help you improve internal link-building and A/B testing processes to ensure your visitors are served with the most relevant content at any moment.

How do I introduce AI to my WordPress website?

For now, WordPress plugins are the fastest way to start leveraging AI to improve your site.

Generally, you’ll need to follow the same principles as if you were choosing a new plugin to add to your setup:

• Are the reviews and ratings positive? What’s the latest negative review?

• How many active installations does the plugin have? Is it popular and reliable?

• Is it supported regularly, and when was it last updated;

• Are the AI features part of a plan or come as an add-on; do they fit your budget;

• Is everything compatible with your existing tech stack and the latest WordPress version;

• Is the plugin certified for security, and does the developer behind it look reputable?

That said, most solutions offer limited free plans or trial periods to test new features, so make sure you reach out to their teams and do a test drive before you commit.