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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack (00:01)
Hi everyone and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack.
Today's episode features a segment from Matt's interview with Blink Page's founder, Nathan Tyler. Nathan explains why he moved his sites away from WordPress and to an AI-first static platform. The discussion looks at where WordPress fits in the age of AI. Now you can catch the entire episode over on our WP Minute Plus channel. Visit the WPMinute.com for all the details.
Nathan Tyler (00:31)
I think that outsourcing like all of your branding and marketing and thinking like generate the whole website and all my copy for me is like a big mistake that is increasingly obvious. Everybody has started to build this skill of like that's AI slop and I so I think that is not a good use of AI.
Because that's like your core like that's your core thing you're trying to communicate that you're now outsourcing. But what we should outsource is all the tedious drudgery junk. Like nobody needs to wrestle with HTML, CSS, or even one of our beloved page builders to know whether it's this pixel or this pixel that I have to drag it to to get it in the right subcontainer before the whole page blows up, right? Like I I you and I are like technically capable people.
I'm I'm
ultim very capable of managing my own elementor site, but even I just couldn't even deal with like we had an elementor guy. So we would design the page or figure out what it needs to be. We're gonna add this new pricing tier and then we gotta go send it to the Elementor guy because I just can't you know screw around with this thing all afternoon. So like that is the perfect use for AI. Like like instructing
Hey, I wanna add a third price tier and I wanna add the little free thing at the bone. I want to put the little stupid banner that says it's the most popular one, even if it's not, right? Like like Yeah. Yeah, like I I wanna be
Matt (01:47)
Your monologue sounds exactly like my inner monologue when I'm building something.
Nathan Tyler (01:52)
able to just say that and then just have it like sixty seconds later. Right? That's a fantastic use for AI.
To do just the drudgery stuff. So in terms of value, I think people should be using it more in those scenarios, like of course, blank pages and websites, but other scenarios that it's just the drudgery implementation part and less of the creative part. Like, why don't we actually just spend the time that we now have to craft in our creative message and and what we want to say? and then on the cost.
it's very hard to forecast, but I feel like there's gonna be this continual arms race and leapfrogging of models and frontier this and frontier that and the open source ones will trail belong behind, like and it for certain use cases, like
A low enough model is going to be good enough. Like Opus today is fantastic at page layout and all of the replacing Elementor page builder stuff. And you know, a year or two from now, like there's gonna be some open source model or some, you know, Frontier Lab model that's dirt cheap that is still just as good. Like I don't need I don't need Fable 78.9 to, you know, do that pricing box thing. So I think that the costs for
certain use cases will, you know, go to zero. Of course the frontier will always be the frontier and pushing forward and stay expensive and who knows what's gonna happen to pricing, but yeah, I don't worry about it too much because I can't do much about it. And I think that
Matt (03:12)
Yeah, yeah.
Nathan Tyler (03:13)
for certain use cases like Blink Page's use case, it's going to kind of commoditize out and we'll be fine.
Matt (03:19)
Yeah, fair. blinkpages.com. I'm on the price. Well, first it says the drop down. Who's it for? it's for consultants, founders, marketers, agencies, and organizers. the pricing has an interesting twist. So I'll let you you fill it in. You have a migration, like a one time migration, which comes with a a fee and then the monthly. The monthly goes between forty nine and one ninety nine a month. is would you say this is like
Quasi productize service where especially on the migration stuff, like a human's checking it out, a human's migrating it, that's the in that's the first fee. And then after that, it's 49 to 199. Those on the sidelines might say, Hey, that sounds like the same cost of me hosting a WordPress site. So what's the difference? I'll let you color in the lines.
Nathan Tyler (04:02)
Okay, sure. Yeah, so th right on the productized service for the migration, 'cause one problem that people run into is like
They want to manage their site with AI. They already have a site that they like. They don't want to build a generic Claude design new site, right? Most people have a site that they like, and if they have significant content or years of blogging history or custom post types or all these landing pages, just getting it into this new structure in Astro where you can manage it well with AI is kind of a annoying process as we've learned. as we've we've migrated a bunch of these sites.
And we've built up, you know, a Claude skill that does a good portion of it and checks all of these different things, launches sub-agents to check typography and hover color states and all of these different things that go wrong, and then we do human review on top of it. we do visual regression tests and screenshots and all this good stuff. so that that's a very annoying process that we've gotten very good at. And so we can do that in seven days, take any website and migrate it to Astro. Of course, you could then just take it and
Do whatever you want with it. You could host it on Cloudflare for almost nothing or Vercel. So like our value proposition for the ongoing plans are not hosting. Everybody knows that the value of just hosting is going to zero. So this is like managed hosting all over again, right? We've seen this with WordPress play out. And we know that you can host it on a VPS for 50 bucks and cram a thousand sites on there. We know that it costs almost nothing. But you know, WP Engine and all the other people that we know can charge hundreds of dollars a
site.
for that managed value. And so we are managing some of the infrastructure and plumbing, and then we do some of those annoying things that are a little bit hard,