Nachverfolgen: Track 2 – English – Room Aula

Websites are no longer just pages, they are living systems. In this talk, I’ll show how automation-first thinking and AI completely changed the way we build and operate WordPress sites.

Using real examples, I’ll demonstrate how we replaced manual work with automated workflows: AI-driven translations instead of traditional multilingual plugins, automated content publishing with full Gutenberg support, and workflows where humans design intent, not repetitive tasks.

This talk isn’t about tools or code. It’s about a mindset shift: if something can be automated, it should be. The goal is to inspire developers, agency owners, and marketers to rethink what a WordPress website can (and should) be in the age of AI.

NIS2 (Directive (EU) 2022/2555) is the EU’s new baseline for cybersecurity and incident reporting across a wider set of sectors and digital service providers. It can feel “too legal” or “too enterprise”, yet many WordPress businesses may be affected directly (depending on services and size) or indirectly through customer and supply-chain requirements. In this talk, we’ll explain NIS2 in plain English: the rationale behind it, the big changes vs. NIS1, and the “essential vs important entities” concept. Then we’ll map the directive to real-world WordPress work: hosting and managed WordPress, maintenance retainers, plugin/theme dependencies, and the practical meaning of “supply chain security”. NIS2 explicitly highlights supply-chain risks and relationships with suppliers, and it also sets structured incident reporting expectations (including early warning and notification timelines).

This session is about how WordPress professionals can turn website maintenance/care into a real, sustainable business, instead of treating it as an afterthought or an “extra” service.

Based on my experience as a WordPress agency with +70 clients and as the founder of a tool that helps 3,000+ professionals worldwide to grow their WordPress maintenance service.

I’ll explain why relying only on one-off website projects is increasingly risky (more than ever thanks to AI), and why maintenance is becoming a key pillar for stability, scalability, and long-term growth.

The talk will cover:

• Why maintenance is essential for WordPress sites and clients.
• The core tasks that should be included in a professional maintenance service (beyond updates).
• Why maintenance works so well as a recurring revenue model for freelancers and agencies.
• Common mistakes professionals make when offering maintenance.
• Practical ideas on how to package, price, and sell maintenance services in a sustainable way.

Many people stop at using WordPress as a website. This talk focuses on how individuals and business owners can use the WordPress ecosystem and its community to support content, communication, and everyday operations in a sustainable and practical way.

Instead of adding more tools or custom solutions, the session looks at how individuals and business owners can make better use of existing plugins, shared practices, and community-driven knowledge. Attendees will leave with a clearer sense of how to work with the WordPress ecosystem rather than around it.

Many WordPress sites still rely on visual builders by default. But the Block Editor has grown a lot in recent years, and it already includes powerful features to build fast, accessible and maintainable websites.

Nobody teaches you how to stop doing everything yourself. Technical skill gets you hired and gets you through the first few years. Then the work keeps growing, but you don’t scale. You’re saying yes too often, explaining too little, and wondering why „just let me handle it“ stopped working.

This panel brings together three professionals who’ve each hit that wall differently. Birgit Olzem runs support operations at Codeable and has spent years figuring out how to get what’s in her head into other people’s hands. She looks at why delegation is so hard. Cognitive science shows we’re wired against it and what changes when AI enters the picture. Andrei Trașcă has learned the hard way where agency owners need boundaries with clients, and what happens when those boundaries aren’t there. Yevhen Reshetar brings seven years of freelancing on Upwork and an honest account of what nobody warned him about when he started.

The conversation will move between the personal and the structural: when do you protect your time, and when do you invest it in teaching someone else? What does „building systems“ look like at different career stages? And why do we keep falling back into doing everything ourselves, even when we know better?

If you’ve ever thought „it’s faster if I just do it myself,“ this one’s for you.

We often rely on best practices. They save time and help us prioritize our efforts, but is there a limit to their usefulness?

In this presentation, Delfina dissects common web design best practices and shares unconventional UX decisions that worked in real-world scenarios.