WordPress & AI

Why does AI matter to people using WordPress?

At first glance, artificial intelligence (AI) and WordPress may not seem to have things in common. WordPress is seen as the essential but rather simple content management tool. Artificial intelligence makes us think of self-driving cars and a wide range of robots such as R2D2, Terminator, Wall-E and Bumblebee.

But AI is best seen as a family of technologies ranging from the reasonably modest to the completely incredible. We use many AI technologies in our daily lives without even thinking about them. Google search, Google Maps, Gmail’s spam filter, Google Photos – pretty much any Google product you can name uses some type of AI. Same with Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon. Wherever there are large amounts of data and difficult problems to solve, you will generally also find an AI in the background.

Wherever there are large amounts of data and difficult problems to solve, you will generally also find an AI in the background.

But what about WordPress? Most of the sites that use WordPress and WooCommerce don’t have large amounts of data and most don’t run on the kind of hardware that AI needs. But there is still a crossover. Are there any examples of how you can get more out of WordPress by using AI technology today?

Examples of AI services you can use with WordPress today?

Clerk offers personalisation services for ecommerce stores (including WooCommerce). Personalisation is a great example of a problem that relies on analysing lots of data with lots of resources. Clerk, like all the AI-powered tools you can use with WordPress, is powered by an external service that integrates WordPress.

What we particularly like about Clerk is that it adds functionality to WooCommerce where you would otherwise have to rely on a large centralised, proprietary software platform. Plus, it can probably boost your sales too 🙂
WordLift automates several aspects of your website SEO. It uses Microsoft Azure’s cognitive services to analyse your content and suggest entity tags. Unfortunately, these are not WordPress built-in tags but rather separate “entities”. Aside from that small minus, it’s actually an incredibly powerful add-on that shows you how a machine (e.g. Google) is likely to see your content. WordLift then has a bunch of nifty features that let you organise this extra data and manage your user experience around it.

Two things we love about WordLift: firstly, it helps editors achieve better consistency with tagging. Secondly, through the device concept, it allows sites to take advantage of Google’s Help, Hub Hero content strategy by ensuring that content always has good internal link structure.
Automatic Alternative Text does something similar to WordLift (but simpler) but for images. It uses Microsoft’s Vision Cognitive Service to analyse your images as you upload them and suggest alternative text. Alt text is important for several reasons – internal searchability within WP media libraries, accessibility for users with visual impairments and for SEO. But it’s a job that’s often overlooked, and when it gets done, it’s often not done well.

What we love about AAT is that it provides content editors with a text suggestion for each new image uploaded, saving time and improving overall site quality.

How can I learn more about using AI with WordPress?

David was fortunate to be invited to speak at Press for Word in Israel, October 2021. For more examples of how you can use WordPress and AI together, we recommend watching David Lockie’s talk.

Using off the-shelf AI tools to augment WordPress from Angry Creative (UK)

Angry's David Lockie was the opening session! — Angry’s David Lockie was the opening session!

Our first in-person conference since COVID-19 and it was a busy one! — Angry’s David Lockie was the opening session!

Where can I see examples of AI and WordPress being used today?

The most visible of the AI examples in this article is Clerk.io. You can see this in action on these websites:

How can we at Angry Creative help you use AI services for WordPress?

Angry Creative loves to help our clients by saving them time and making their websites better. With AI technology, we can usually do both at the same time! If you’d like to try any of the solutions we talk about in this article, or David’s talk, get in touch.

Or if you’re the kind of person who wants to work with a WooCommerce-focused company that’s investing in using AI, find out more and get in touch!