WordCamp Europe 2026 – My Key Takeaways

Recently I attended WordCamp Europe 2026 in Krakow, Poland. When Krakow was announced as the location, it was a must attend for me. I love the city, have family here, so to have Europe’s premier WordPress event was a must attend, no matter what was going on in the community.

It’s been three years since I last went to WordCamp Europe, so it was good to get back with the community and see folks again. It felt a lot less, and the event flew by. I didn’t go to too many talks, as there was a bit of work I needed to do, so for the talks I did attend, here’s what I took away from the event.

Maybe we’re looking to be more sustainable as a project.

A rising tide raises all ships, and I felt like companies and agencies were beginning to look after community members. I’ve nothing beyond a sense, but in the lead up to the event I was approached a lot more to attend events, have meetings to discuss business opportunities, and in the sponsor hall it felt like plugins and service providers were wanting to sign up partners, as opposed to making direct sales. I don’t know whether it’s market conditions or wanting to actually keep the community together, but it felt this was being underlined in a number of talks.

Similarly to this there was a section of talks on contributing back to WordPress. Marcel Bootsman discussed how the team at Kinsta support WordPress – which was interesting as unlike anything else he made the business case better than anybody else (by supporting these, you don’t have to keep switching your tech stack and make it more robust) and it was followed immediately by Karin Christen talking about how her agency help supports WordPress and how to bring people on board.

It’s no secret that WordPress has had a pretty rocky few years, being attacked from all sites, some questionable decisions on top, and levels of burnout amongst some sections of the community (myself included).It felt good as I think this was the first time in a while I felt like it was being seen, recognised, and being made aware of.

Human assisted AI may be the way to go

It’s no secret that you go to a WordPress conference, you’ll hear about AI. It’s been interesting to go back and read what I wrote about AI in the past as 3 years ago it was just beginning to become a thing. Now, rightly or wrongly, it’s hear to stay for now – WordPress has AI connectors in WordPress 7.0 (which I’m not too happy about, but that’s by the by). But to be honest I heard a few talks that maybe made me re-evaluate my stance with AI.

Tammie Lister’s discussion on being the Human in the Loop was interesting as it gave examples on exactly where humans need to be and where AI needs to be in the loop of things. Similarly, Vasselina Valchanova gave an excellent talk on personal branding and how to get your message to cut through the slop. Both talked about using AI in interesting ways.

I’ve talked a few times before about part of my reticence for adoption for AI has been the messaging. Both Tammie and Vasselina’s talks (which granted were from two very experienced speakers in the WordPress space who have laid the groundwork over many years to be authoritative) made me pause and re-evaluate my relationship with AI. I’ve still concerns (particularly with the ecological impact with it), but I may not be so dismissive going forwards.

A heavy focus on security

There was a number of talks on security, particularly on the second day. One bad thing with the rise of AI has been there’s been a bit of arms race between developers and hackers to keep their plugins secure, and there was focus on how to manage it. The keynote – Two World’s Collide – touched on how they did it at CERN, and although the other keynote was changed due to family reasons, the announcement that there will be a 24 hour cooldown period before automatic updates will be pushed was made. I think that’s really important.

The Playground is evolving

Finally, the other exciting thing I saw at 2023 was WordPress Playground. Fellyph Cintra talked about how it has improved and it’s seriously impressive. Running WordPress in your browser is impressive, and it’s gone from being a fun little sideshow to amazing architecture. The fact you can run native PHP of most versions, and any version of WordPress in playground, is incredible.

Final thoughts on WordCamp Europe 2026

Overall, WordCamp Europe 2026 was a great conference. Numbers were back up from the previous year, probably because it was in a cheaper part of the world, and there was almost a renewed sense of vim & vigour from being in the crowd. It’s been a rough few years for WordPress, but I am hopeful it’s back on track a bit more.

I’m not going to make promises I’ll be at the next one (I said that I’d be in Torino in 2024 and it took me until 2026 to go to another one), but from the conversations and discussions had at the after party (which – by the way – was excellent, as it had a lot of spaces to continue discussions), I’m going to attempt to get there. It falls nicely/not nicely for the UK (it’s a bank holiday weekend, so a lot of Brits will be heading to Malaga), so we shall see.

Image Credits

Thumbnail Image from Nilo Vélez.