Shaping the Space & Driving Change: 56 WordPress Experts to Follow Online

Being a newcomer to WordPress can be daunting, especially when you’re a writer, not a developer, and have no great knowledge of the space. As I started this journey (AKA new job), my imposter syndrome kicked in by reminding me of a scene in Disney’s Tarzan where Kerchak tells Kala: “It’s not our kind.”

I asked myself: Would this outdoorsy forager from South Africa be accepted into this new tribe? This is not to say that I think developers are primates. Actually, hold on — this analogy is failing miserably. Let me explain…

I’m Robert Nolte, a new Digital Copywriter at Freemius, and over the past three months, I’ve immersed myself in the uncharted world (for me) of WordPress.

As I tried to get a grip on the proverbial vines so I too could swing with the devs and other WordPress experts, I realized that WordPress is more than a piece of software, and what truly makes it unique is the diverse community — the tribe — that’s gathered around it. My focus then shifted from software to community; to the creators and makers that drive progress in the space together. Basically, I wanted to get to know you guys as much as possible 🤣

For this article, I’ve curated a list of 56 WordPress experts that showed me their world through the content they share and the tweets they tweet. From entrepreneurs and engineers to founders and pioneers, from writers and podcasters to consultants and educators — this is a comprehensive starting point for new and established WordPress entrepreneurs looking to learn, connect, and make their voices heard.

Ready to meet them?

	Adam Preiser Product Reviews WordPress Developments
Adam is the founder of WPCrafter, and the co-founder of CartFlows. CartFlows is a sales funnel builder plugin for WordPress eCommerce sites, while WPCrafter is a platform that offers various paid hosting subscriptions along with free tutorials, blog articles, product reviews and comparisons, and resources for non-developers. Adam is a natural-born entrepreneur and authority on all things WordPress, as is evidenced by WPCrafter’s YouTube channel which – at the time of writing – has 234k subscribers and almost 20 million views. Adam tweets about his own business developments and sparked an interesting conversation about why especially experienced WordPress developers are not taking kindly to Gutenberg.
Adam Preiser WPCrafter CartFlows

	Adrian Tobey Marketing Business Plugins
In 2018, at only 21 years of age, Adrian founded Groundhogg, a “marketing automation and CRM for agencies and small businesses using WordPress”, which today services clients that include WooCommerce and Amazon Web Services. Adrian is also the CEO of three plugins: MailHawk, FormLift, and WP Simple Chat. In addition to his success on the WordPress business front, he offers coaching to freemium WordPress plugin developers and companies who are looking to scale their businesses and glean valuable insights from new entrepreneurs like him. This young hotshot is making some serious waves in the ecosystem by paving the way for the next generation of WordPressers. Namely, by introducing tools and solutions that focus on web optimization by improving user experience, and exploring the possibilities of how data is protected and regulated by companies as a business avenue in and of itself. His journey as one of our WordPress experts to follow online is very much worth watching on Twitter.
Adrian Tobey Groundhogg MailHawk FormLift WP Simple Chat Coaching WordCamp

	Alain Schlesser Development Engineering
Senior Software Engineer at XWP, Maintainer at WP-CLI, WordPress Core contributor, Software Engineer and Consultant at Bright Nucleus, and Google Developers Expert. Alain started his career as a government agent in prison administration. Today, he has more than 25 years of experience working with various platforms and programming languages and is part of a subset of WordPress experts in software engineering (or as I like to call it, ‘really complicated stuff’). Alain is the lead contributor to the WP-CLI (WordPress command-line interface), a toolkit that speeds up workflows and introduces automation to building for advanced development teams. In this recent podcast interview, he talks about the toolkit’s roadmap over the past year and discusses how current issues around so-called backward-compatibility are being addressed. Check out this thread where he enquired about what makes WordPress users mad, and this one about a book that he strongly recommends for Google software engineering.
Alain Schlesser WP-CLI XWP WordCamp WordPress.org Google Developers Experts Bright Nucleus

	Alex Denning Community Marketing Business
Alex founded WPShout in 2009 and is currently Managing Director at Ellipsis Marketing, which was recently featured in the New York Times. He is also the co-founder of FlipWP, a “private acquisition marketplace for WordPress” with “no middlemen”. Essentially, it fast-tracks the process of selling plugins and other WordPress businesses by pairing sellers and buyers with the intent to move quickly. His experience in the marketing and business arena secures his space as one of my WordPress experts to follow online. Have a look at this data-rich tweet that he shared about the decline in WordPress’s market share. Alex is also no stranger to Freemius and has written pieces about freemium upgrades and acquisitions as a guest author.
Ellipsis Marketing FlipWP Ellipsis Marketing Blog WordCamp eBook

	Andrew Palmer Plugins Business
Andrew is the founder of WP Plugins Plus, a company that does custom website and plugin development. He is also the co-founder of Bertha.ai, which is described as “the world’s first AI-based writing assistant that helps website owners to generate content that is engaging, creative and converting within WordPress” (and leaves this writer feeling slightly disconcerted *gulp*). He is a passionate WordPress speaker, coach, and advocate, and is also the host of Agency Radio, where lovers of music, WordPress, creativity, and web development can listen to his daily playlists and occasional live talk shows. Andrew is a well-known WordPress expert in the ecosystem and regularly tweets about updates, announcements, interviews, blogs, and podcasts that you’ll want to know about.
Andrew Palmer Bertha.ai GridPane WP Plugins Plus Agency Radio

	Anh Tran Development Plugins
Anh is the founder of eLightUp, a company that builds websites and provides online solutions to those looking to grow their businesses. He is arguably best known for creating Meta Box, a free Gutenberg and GDPR-compatible custom fields plugin and framework with 700,000 active installs that makes it easy to customize websites. Anh tweets handy coding tips about programming languages like PHP and JavaScript.
GretaThemes eLightUp Meta Box Slim SEO Deluxe Blog Tips

	Birgit Pauli-Haack Community WordPress Core Development Gutenberg
Birgit works as a Developer Advocate at Automattic, and is the editor and publisher of Gutenberg Times, a publication that covers news and developments around all-things Gutenberg and the WordPress Block Editor. She is also a co-host of Gutenberg Changelog, a podcast that informs “designers, developers, DIY site owners and consultants” about the “newest features, community voices and designs of Gutenberg”. Unsurprisingly, her Twitter account is always up to date with new developments in WordPress and Gutenberg, which is why you’ll want to take note of what she’s posting about if you’re serious about Full Site Editing (FSE).
Gutenberg Times Automattic Podcast

	Bob Dunn WooCommerce Podcasting
Somewhat of an enigma in the WordPress universe, Bob Dunn — known around the web as BobWP — is a former design and marketing agency owner who has dedicated the last thirteen years of his career to helping people get to grips with WordPress. Bob is the brains behind Do the Woo, a platform dedicated to helping the WooCommerce community via mini-tutorials, a blog, and a podcast where he interviews successful WooCommerce and WordPress experts ranging from business owners in the CBD and cannabis industry to passionate open-web and open-source experts.
BobWP unplugged Do the Woo Podcast WordCamp

	Brian Gardner Development Design Gutenberg
Principal Developer Advocate at WP Engine, creator of Frost — a new FSE theme — and founder of very recently launched design studio/creative workspace Minimologie. Brian is a talented WordPress designer and developer, so it’s no wonder he’s passionate about innovating with the Block Editor. His crisp, modern approach to WordPress website layouts — I mean, just look at this — seems to be a prophecy of where the platform is headed from an aesthetic perspective. Moreover, his tweets convey a positive attitude about the industry and give valuable insights into opportunities worth exploring.
Brian Gardner WP Engine Frost Minimologie WordCamp

	Bridget Willard Development Design Gutenberg
Bridget describes herself as a self-confessed Twitter nerd, marketer, copywriter, product owner, keynote speaker, author, and CEO of her eponymous marketing agency. She’s also Chief Marketing Officer for Gatsby WP Themes and presents the Launch With Words podcast, which focuses on conversations with small business owners around the world about the importance of marketing and digital. The podcast supplements Bridget’s WordPress plugin of the same name, which “merges the experience of a small business writer with blogging prompts to help clients publish a blog post once a month.” Did I mention that she’s also written no less than six eBooks on business and marketing? Bridget is an authority on content marketing and social media, and understands how this knowledge and expertise translates into the WordPress ecosystem, which rightfully earns her a reputation as one of this list’s WordPress experts. If you want to learn about getting your name out there as a WordPress solopreneur, check out what Bridget is tweeting about.
Bridget Willard Gatsby WP Themes Blog Tech Blog Podcast eBooks WordCamp

	Carolina Nymark Themes WordPress.org
Carolina is a WordPress Core contributor at Yoast and owner of Full Site Editing, a platform dedicated to revolutionizing how end-users use themes and how developers build them by utilizing features such as block themes, template editing, site blocks, and global styles. In this tweet, she shows how you can add patterns to your theme with WordPress 6.0. This recent thread she started about a comment on GitHub that says themes should not include their own patterns illustrates why she rightfully forms part of important WordPress experts to follow online. Her passion for Full Site Editing and blocks coupled with an open-minded approach means that she is eager to spark productive conversations between developers and designers about the future of the ecosystem.
Full Site Editing Yoast WordCamp

	Chris Badgett Marketing Business Entrepreneurship Sales
Chris is the founder and Software CEO of LifterLMS, a platform for “education entrepreneurs to help their learners achieve desired outcomes” and flourish. He tweets worthwhile content about business and marketing practices, like this one about how course creators can build sales funnels and this one where he discusses unconventional marketing ideas. Fun fact: before discovering WordPress in 2009, Chris helped a dog sled musher train and raise sled dogs for nearly a decade while trying to create a blog about outdoor leadership.
LifterLMS LifterLMS Blog Podcast LifterLMS Academy Cloudways Webinar

	Dan Maby Community
As per Dan’s WordPress profile, he is “a Director at Blue 37, a UK-based web design and development agency, and the founder of Big Orange Heart, a registered non-profit that supports and promotes positive wellbeing and mental health within remote working communities.” Big Orange Heart is a peer-support community that offers resources like live events, a blog, podcast, and live chat support. It’s also championed by big names in the WordPress ecosystem, such as GoDaddy and Bluehost. Dan’s updates about his day-to-day WordPress life receive plenty of engagement — like this one about the joys of traveling to WordCamp Europe 2022 — and he frequently sparks conversation by posting about the community.A quick aside: I mentioned that I’m an outdoorsy kinda guy, which is why my remote job ticks many boxes — mushroom hunting or fishing before work, anyone? But I’ve also learned that having limited social interaction five days a week can take its toll, which is why being mindful of mental wellbeing is crucial to sustaining working from home or (occasionally) a seaside cottage in the middle of nowhere. Connect with Dan and Big Orange Heart on Twitter — you owe it to yourself.
Dan Maby Big Orange Heart Blue 37 WordCamp

	Daniel Schutzsmith Community Technology
With a background in design, code, and strategy, Daniel has worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council and Amnesty International USA. Today he is a designer, developer, and entrepreneur, a Website and Digital Project Manager for Pinellas County Government, a producer at The WP Minute, and a WordCamp and Meetup organizer. Forming part of a veteran group of WordPress experts, Daniel tweets openly and honestly about coding (his code has been described as ‘chaotic good’). Have a look at this one about margins and padding not being available for every block in the WordPress editor. Also check out this tweet where he describes what he does professionally.
Daniel Schutzsmith The WP Minute WordCamp

	Dave Rodenbaugh Business Plugins Podcasting
Dave is the founder of Validar and Recapture, two SaaS products operating in the eCommerce space. Validar addresses the issue of unvalidated shipping addresses and helps “stores of any size across all major platforms (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, and more).” Recapture addresses the abandoned cart problem in eCommerce stores. Dave presents the Rogue Startups podcast with Craig Hewitt, which is about their experiences and lessons learned as two founders. Dave tweets about developments and his own exploits in SaaS and eCommerce and shares personal content such as this GIF about his daughter making a peanut butter, spinach, and pineapple smoothie yum 🤢.
Validar Recapture Podcast

	Florian Daugalies Solopreneurship Plugins Development
Florian — known around the web as flowdee — is a developer, entrepreneur, and creator of the Amazon Affiliate for WordPress Plugin and MH Themes. He actively tweets about his journey as a bootstrapped plugin developer, making him a valuable source of information (and inspiration) for anyone looking to get into the business. Have a look at this tweet, which sparked plenty of conversation after Florian announced that he still runs his WordPress websites on PHP version 7.4. Why? Because he doesn’t trust that version 8 is compatible with the plugins he’s installed.
Flowdee Amazon Affiliate for WordPress Plugin MH Themes

	Hauwa Abashiya Community Development Learning WordPress
Hauwa has quite the track record in both her career and volunteering work, which includes WordPress, project management, resource management, budget management, business analysis, and eCommerce, among others. She is a digital business consultant offering various services and has been working with WordPress since 2018. Hauwa is also a WordCamp Organizer, a WordFest Sponsor’s Lead for Big Orange Heart, and a Make WordPress Contributor. Check out her tweet showing a high-level map for learning about WordPress development.
Hauwa Abashiya Blog Big Orange Heart WordPress Training Team Reps WordCamp

	Igor Benić Development Plugins Freelancing Business
A self-taught front-end developer with experience across HTML, CSS, jQuery, JavaScript, ReactJS, PHP, MySQL, and WordPress. Igor discovered WordPress a few years ago and has since used it to build themes, plugins, and custom solutions. Over the years, he’s made his blog a popular home to business and development-related WordPress topics, with several eBooks focused on using WordPress, WordPress Customizer, WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and Freemius. He also offers paid and free courses for WordPress and WooCommerce, as well as members-only webinars on using JavaScript and AJAX in WordPress. As a passionate freelancer and developer, Igor freely shares his knowledge about being a successful solopreneur and regularly offers insightful coding and WordPress tips on his Twitter account.
Igor Benić eBook Webinars Podcast Learning Centre

	Jack Arturo Plugins Product
Jack is the founder of Very Good Plugins, a company that owns and manages six “handcrafted code products for WordPress”, including WP Fusion. WP Fusion has been hugely successful as a no-code solution that connects WordPress sites and plugins with CRMs and marketing automation systems. Jack has been involved with WordPress for more than ten years and has spent the last several of them as a digital nomad. As of late, his blog has focused mainly on the Block Editor, which is why he is one of our WordPress experts to follow online. He’s also been lamenting the need to constantly update WordPress since the release of 5.0 and Gutenberg, as shown by his reply in this thread.
Blog Very Good Plugins WP Fusion

	Jack Kitterhing Plugins Business Bootstrapping
Jack’s currently the Product Manager at LearnDash, an LMS (learning management system) plugin that powers “learning programs for major universities, small to midsize companies, startups, entrepreneurs, and bloggers worldwide.” Jack has experience in product to marketing, software development, quality assurance, and level 2 support. He blogs about business and software, and tweets about updates at LearnDash, developments in the WordPress community, and insights about doing business in the tech startup space.
Jack Kitterhing LearnDash

	James Kemp Plugins Marketing
Founder of Iconic WP, a UK-based company that helps over 16,000 businesses and online shops get the most out of WooCommerce with a range of plugins, support services, and tutorials. One of this list’s most experienced WordPress experts, James has been involved with WordPress since 2009 and moved into plugin development in 2011. In this interview, he discusses why he moved away from CodeCanyon and started selling his plugins exclusively on Iconic WP’s marketplace with Freemius. His recent tweet about how a simple CSS change in the WordPress admin plugins screen can make a huge difference to the UX received plenty of interaction and healthy debate.
James Kemp IconicWP

	James Laws Leadership
James is the co-founder and CEO of Saturday Drive, which counts the Ninja Forms plugin — downloaded 30,000,000 times — as part of its product suite. James is also the co-creator of Ciircles, a company that’s “on a mission to build and grow effective businesses of people-first leaders and fulfilled teams.” He presents the Leading to Fulfillment podcast, where he conducts interviews with leaders, entrepreneurs, and thinkers from all walks of life to get their input on what it takes to manage a team that feels content and empowered. James’s tweets are a valuable resource for WordPress entrepreneurs who want to bring the best out of their workers. Have a look at this video clip where he shares some thoughts on employee engagement vs. employee fulfillment.
James Laws Saturday Drive Ninja Forms Ciircles Podcast WordCamp

	Jamie Marsland Audience-building on YouTube Gutenberg Marketing
Jamie is the founder of Pootlepress and has trained 5000+ people on building websites with WordPress. Through Pootlepress, he also offers subscriptions to premium plugins aimed at improving the functionality of WooCommerce and Gutenberg. He is passionate about building businesses online and, as of late, has been running WordPress courses for The Guardian as part of their Digital Masterclass series to turn newcomers into WordPress experts. His blog and YouTube channel are treasure troves of up-to-date WordPress reviews and useful tips for plugin developers, specifically focused on Gutenberg. To understand why Jamie is so invested in Gutenberg as a site builder, watch this video of his daughters Meg and Lily pitting Gutenberg and Elementor against each other for a grand prize of £20.
Pootlepress Blog PootlePress Learning and SEO Courses Free Pootlepress Guides

	Jason Bahl Leadership
Jason has built over 100 WordPress plugins and more than 50 custom themes and is experienced with both front-end and back-end development, making him part of an elite group of WordPress experts on the leadership front. He is currently a Software Engineer at WP Engine and is the creator and maintainer of WPGraphQL, a free open-source plugin that allows you to build rich JavaScript applications and separate your CMS from your presentation layer. Jason has extensive experience in development and shares tweets like this one that bemoan the hurdles of being a “jaded principal engineer” as opposed to a junior developer, and this one about which plugin to use for static WordPress web development.
Jason Bahl WP Engine WPGraphQL WordCamp

	Jason Cohen Development
Founder of WP Engine and SmartBear. In addition to his success as a serial entrepreneur, Jason has been writing about startups for the past 15 years and is highly influential on the topic of development. Check out this tweet about an article of his on what he refers to as “exponential hypergrowth.” According to Jason, exponential hypergrowth is misleading since even companies that experience a hyper-fast growth rate — like Facebook — don’t actually grow exponentially.
SmartBear WP Engine Blog WordCamp

	Jennifer Bourn Marketing Branding
Jennifer is a micro-agency owner with 23 years of experience across various fields. She uses her experience in graphic design, web design, and copywriting to build brands, create content, and grow profitable online platforms for successful freelancers and small businesses. Most importantly, she specializes in creating unique branding for her clients’ businesses and offers interactive workshops — called content camps — about brand messaging, website copy, and content marketing strategies. Jennifer blogs and tweets about how solopreneurs and businesses can harness their content to drive greater engagement, like this one about using internal links to optimize your website’s SEO.
Jennifer Bourn WordCamp

	Joe Casabona Podcasting Business Marketing
Joe has 20+ years of experience as a web developer, 16+ years of experience with WordPress, and has been in the podcasting game for over seven years. He owns Good House Media, a company dedicated to technology and education. Oh, and he also holds a Master’s Degree in Computer Science and has taught at college level for more than 11 years. Did we mention that he’s published four eBooks too? In his podcast — How I Built It — Joe interviews WordPress experts, YouTubers, influencers, and other digital creators and entrepreneurs about how their ventures succeeded. Each episode zooms in on a specific topic that’s relevant to other creators and small business owners to ultimately help them drive sales. He also owns Creator Courses, which offers courses and toolkits to its members to help them optimize their content offering.
Joe Casabona Good House Media Creator Courses Podcast WordCamp Hands-on Workshops by Joe Casabona eBook

	Joe Howard Marketing Startups SaaS
Joe founded WP Buffs, a web management and support service, and recently co-founded Driftly, a no-code product tour tool that intuitively guides customers through SaaS platforms with frameworks that help them find the features they’re looking for. Joe’s marketing experience translates specifically into understanding user experience, which is a crucial skill for anyone who wants to maximize conversions and sell their WordPress products online. He posts highly valuable tutorial-style blogs about growing a SaaS business, like this one about promoting feature adoption and discovery, and this one on how to bill and price SaaS products in 2022. Check out this thread about his most recent blog post covering the difference between churn and retention.
Driftly WP Buffs Blog

	Karmen Kendrick Entrepreneurship Video Tutorials Interviews
Karmen got into the tech world by starting her own eCommerce company in 2012, soon followed by a freelance web design agency in 2016. Today she is a Product Marketing Manager at LearnDash and contributes to Weekend Website Course, an online learning platform, community, and resource that helps creatives build successful websites using WordPress. She also presents free video tutorials on The Changelog and has conducted video interviews with notable WordPressers for LearnDash. Check out this one featuring Jack Kitterhing where they chat about Gutenberg Blocks. Karmen was recently interviewed on Women in WP where she discussed her decade’s worth of experience in running an eCommerce site, freelance web development business, and WordPress beginner course. She is highly active on Twitter with regular day-to-day updates about business, useful new tutorials, and her personal life. Check out this one about how to quickly switch WordPress hosts.
Karmen Kendrick LearnDash Weekend Website Course The Changelog Blog

	Kimberly Coleman Marketing Business Plugins
Kimberly is a co-founder of the Paid Membership Pro plugin, which allows users to restrict content and manage member subscriptions with recurring payments. She is knowledgeable about marketing, business, and plugins, and she tweets freely about the functionalities and improvements that have been added to Paid Membership Pro to make it a successful WordPress product. She and her husband Jason Coleman founded open source and digital content agency Stranger Studios in 2006. They have a YouTube channel that focuses on eCommerce and membership sites, product tutorials, and one-on-one chats about what it takes to run a WordPress product business.
Kim Coleman Stranger Studios Paid Memberships Pro

	Lesley Sim Bootstrapping Product Marketing Plugins
A self-confessed active Twitter user, Lesley is the co-founder of Newsletter Glue, a WordPress plugin that helps users create newsletters with minimal effort. Lesley was a speaker at WordCamp US 2021, and regularly blogs about entrepreneurship, business, and online networking. She has a refreshing, straight-shooting approach to her tweets, like this recent one where she comments on the WordPress Project’s problematic leadership structures that often delay releases.
Blog Newsletter Glue WordCamp

	Maarten Belmans Plugins Business Bootstrapping Development
Maarten is the founder of Table2Site — an invite-only, code-free website building platform that was recently acquired — and creates and sells WooCommerce plugins via his online shop Wombat. His own Twitter bio states that he “tweets about growing SaaS, and a WooCommerce business.” Check out this thread where Maarten discusses how he learned WordPress plugin development.
Studio Wombat

	Mark Jaquith Technology
Mark is CTO at Strive Media (where he is described as passionately hating all code that he wrote more than three months ago), a Core contributor, as well as a WordPress consultant (“not a designer”) with more than 16 years of experience. Mark is an expert in technology and has a humorous way of tweeting it like it is. Check out this tweet about Google Adwords documentation, and this one about an open-source hardware/software radio receiver.
Mark Jaquith Strive Media Covered Web Services WordCamp

	Mark Zahra Marketing Business Plugins Bootstrapping
Mark is the CEO of RebelCode Ltd, the team behind Spotlight Instagram Feeds, WP RSS Aggregator, and WP Mayor. WP Mayor is one of the most popular WordPress resource sites and covers developments and updates on: Plugins WooCommerce Social media eLearning Themes and page builders Hosting WordPress services Articles that offer WordPress tips, solutions, and discussions Mark is also the producer of the Mastermind.fm podcast. He regularly tweets about what’s going on at WP Mayor — including new job openings — and frequently shares updates on cool new WordPress businesses, tools, and more.
WP Mayor Spotlight Instagram Feeds WP RSS Aggregator Podcast

	Matías Ventura Blocks Gutenberg Development
Matías is an Engineer at Automattic and the Lead Architect of the Gutenberg project in WordPress. I don’t think I need to clarify why you really, really need to follow the guy who is shaping the future of WordPress development and design as we know it.
Matías Ventura Automattic WordCamp

	Matt Cromwell Entrepreneurship Marketing
General Manager of Operations at Liquid Web and former Head of Support and Community Outreach at Impress.org (which was acquired by Liquid Web in 2021). Matt is also co-founder of the GiveWP plugin, which democratizes fundraising through WordPress and has raised more than $250,000,000 since 2015. Matt is an authority on WordPress marketing and entrepreneurship and actively posts about current events and developments in the ecosystem, like WordCamp Europe 2022. Have a look at this tweet and thread about why he thinks marketshare shouldn’t discourage independent product owners from scaling to SMEs. Also, check out this fascinating re-tweet about bionic reading and why it could make for a useful WordPress plugin to enhance blog posts.
Matt Cromwell Liquid Web GiveWP WP Business Reviews StellarWP Advanced WordPress

	Matt Medeiros Podcasting WordPress News Business WordPress Drama
Matt co-founded a freelancing WordPress software development agency called Slocum Studio in 2008 and started his popular WordPress podcast — The Matt Report — in 2010. Today he is known as a newscaster of sorts, relaying information and interviewing important WordPress experts about the state of the platform (with a bit of WP drama sprinkled in for good measure). He currently serves as Director of Podcasting Success at Castos. He is also a regular speaker at WordCamps and is responsible for The WP Minute, which is “a weekly WordPress news podcast delivered in under 5 minutes each episode.” If you want to know what’s up in the world of WordPress, you’ll want to tune into what Matt is saying.
Matt Medeiros Castos The WP Minute Podcast WordCamp PluginTut Learning Centre

	Michelle Frechette Design Community
20+ years of experience in higher education, owner of a web design and marketing company, Head of Customer Success at GiveWP, and Director of Community Engagement at StellarWP. Michelle has been a speaker at various WordPress conferences in North America. She is also co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, a company that helps individuals from underrepresented groups find jobs in tech. Females, people of color, LGBTQIA+ individuals, older professionals, people with physical disabilities, and neurodivergent individuals all form part of Underrepresented in Tech’s database.
Michelle Frechette Blog StellarWP Underrepresented in Tech Podcast WordCamp Coaching

	Michelle Schulp Design Community
Michelle works as an independent visual communications designer through her agency Marktime Media and specializes in UI design, presentation design, and WordPress theme development. Also, she has 34 WordCamp talks under her belt! Michelle bridges an interesting space that is becoming increasingly narrower with the advent of Gutenberg Blocks: the gap between WordPress designers and developers. Have a look at this tweet about Block Protocol. She is also passionate about something that does not receive nearly as much coverage as mental health in the WordPress space: the importance of physical health. Check out this podcast interview where she discusses how she managed to take care of her body while building a business.
Michelle Schulp Marktime Media WordCamp

	Mihai Iova Plugins Bootstrapping
Mihai is co-founder of Slice WP, an “affiliate plugin that makes it easy for you to run your own affiliate program.” Mihai’s tweets paint a picture of what it takes to be a (successful) bootstrapped plugin solopreneur, as well as the milestones his company has achieved. He also posts engaging content, like asking why WordPress.org doesn’t have a slow rollout feature for plugin updates.
SliceWP

	Mika Epstein Plugins WordPress.org Community
Mika is a WordPress Developer at DreamHost, and co-founder of LezWatchTV, “the greatest database of queer representation on television.” In addition to being WordPress.org’s Plugin Review Team Representative and Senior Administrator since 2016, Mika is also one of the main contributors to its Plugin Guidelines. She blogs about WordPress and technology, as well as her own personal experiences and daily life. Besides being a highly successful plugin developer, Mika is also a passionate champion of inclusivity and queer representation across all spheres of life, including the WordPress ecosystem. As per her recent tweet: “The nice thing about the world is there is room for all the wonderful, different, vibrant people in it. If you’re into the WP social things? Cool! If you’re not? Also cool! But whatever you do? Remember to be excellent to each other.”
DreamHost LezWatchTV WordCamp

	Miriam Schwab Static WordPress Security Community
Miriam is the CEO and co-founder of Strattic, “an all-in-one static site generation and hosting platform that instantly optimizes WordPress by converting it to a static architecture.” She is a static WordPress expert, as well as a highly successful entrepreneur in the ecosystem. In an interview with Freemius, Miriam speaks about discovering WordPress, starting Strattic, and shares her thoughts on the future of WordPress products. Where does she see the ecosystem going? “As long as WordPress continues to innovate, particularly on the user experience side of things, it will continue to lead the website space. The community aspect of WordPress is critical to its continued success. There are all sorts of new website builders and approaches popping up all the time, but without the massive community of builders and developers, like WordPress has, they don’t really stand a chance of getting close to WP’s market share.” Her company, Strattic, was just acquired by Elementor – congrats Miriam!
Strattic WordCamp

	Munir Kamal Gutenberg Development
In addition to creating and managing several WordPress products, Munir is involved with Gutenberg Hub, a web resource that features tutorials, tips and tricks, blocks, patterns, news and updates, and other resources to help users learn about the Block Editor. If you’re interested in working with the Block Editor, be sure to follow him on Twitter to get tweets like this one about a new app he created that “lets you easily create full-page layouts using patterns from the official WordPress Patterns library.”
Munir Kamal Gutenberg Hub ACF Blocks CakeWP Divi Sumo

	Nathan Wrigley Podcasting WordPress Drama News Products
Nathan is a podcaster at WP Builds and WP Tavern, with more than 300 combined episodes to his name. Basically, this man is up to speed with what’s going on in the ecosystem, and he conducts interviews with WordPress experts that are shaping the ecosystem and taking it to new heights. Check out this recent interview with Volodymyr Denchyk from Builderius, an innovative tool that helps you build WordPress websites faster. Builderius is an interesting web-building tool in that its user interface is more technical, which helps web developers better tailor websites to their liking.
WP Builds WP Tavern

	Nick Diego Development Blocks Full Site Editing
Developer Advocate at WP Engine and creator of the Block Visibility and Icon Block plugins. Nick is also part of the WordPress 6.0 Release Team and recently posted this tweet in reply to Joost de Valk’s semi-controversial article about WordPress’s shrinking market share. The reasons according to Joost? A lack of innovation and the lagging Full Site Editing project. Right now, the Release Team drastically needs more help from the community. If you have any expertise to contribute and you’re keen to get involved, go give Nick a follow. Even if you can’t contribute to the project itself, Nick imparts valuable insights about where the WordPress ecosystem and software are headed.
Nick Diego WP Engine Blocks Visibility Icon Block WordCamp

	Patrick Posner Development Plugins
Patrick is a solopreneur who builds static, security, and WooCommerce extensions. He also publishes weekly tutorials on WooCommerce, WordPress, and his own plugins. If you’d like to learn more about static WordPress specifically, tutorials like this one are a valuable resource to have on hand. Keep an eye on this WordPress expert’s Twitter account for interesting new product updates 😉
Patrick Posner Tutorials

	Paul Charlton Product Reviews
Paul is the owner and presenter of WPTuts, a platform with more than 700 free tutorials on WordPress, Elementor, Advanced Custom Fields, Crocoblock, dynamic web design, and more. WPTuts forms part of the PsmegTV group (also owned by Paul) which provides free, high-quality training videos on various software topics. Paul is ultimately the go-to guy if you want to learn about using WordPress, but his tutorials also provide helpful reviews on various WordPress products. Check out this recent tweet about Spectra for WP, a Gutenberg plugin that speeds up website building with advanced and powerful blocks. Specifically, Paul discusses why Gutenberg should take note of products like this if it is to address the shortcomings and problematic features that are frustrating a large proportion of the WordPress community.
WPTuts

	Pavel Ciorici Themes Business Marketing
Pavel is the owner of WP Zoom, a company that builds premium WordPress plugins and themes, with Recipe Card Blocks being the latest addition to its collection. He has also authored more than 100 premium WordPress themes. As a business owner who is flourishing by creating block-based themes, checking out what he’s up to on Twitter is well worth it if you’re a solopreneur who’s trying to gauge the future of WordPress products.
Pavel Ciorici WPZoom Recipe Card Blocks

	Peter Suhm Bootstrapping Product
Peter is the founder of Reform, a fully customizable and integrative form builder app. He hosts the Out of Beta Podcast with Matt Wensig, where they discuss their individual journeys of building and launching startups. Peter is also the founder and former CEO of Branch CI and WP Pusher, both of which were acquired in September 2021. Peter shares actionable insights/advice on Twitter, like how to boost both professional and personal reach by optimizing SEO for web pages and ways to gain more followers on Twitter.
Peter Suhm Reform Podcast WordCamp

	Rajendra Zore Entrepreneurship Marketing
Rajendra is co-founder of and WordPress Consultant at Host My Blog and CMO and Product Strategist at RunCloud. Rajendra hosts a complementary podcast called Smart Web Creators about cloud web hosting and describes himself as “an accidental entrepreneur who went on creating tech ventures and now proudly walks as a Serial Entrepreneur.” He tweets about WordPress, SaaS, marketing, and branding. He recently posted that he plans on sponsoring most of the WordCamps in India in 2022.
Rajendra Zore Host My Blog RunCloud WordCamp Podcast

	Rich Tabor Product Blocks Gutenberg Development
Head of Product at Extendify and co-founder of Iceberg, which is a writing editor for Block themes. Rich is an “entrepreneur, designer, and developer all wrapped up in one”, and — as is evidenced by his Twitter account — is considered to be one of the leaders of the post-Gutenberg era. Previously, Rich was a theme reviewer for Envato’s ThemeForest as well as the owner of Theme Beans — a notable theme shop that was acquired by GoDaddy — where he led block-related efforts as a senior product manager. This tweet about the rate at which the Block Editor is evolving shows that there are mixed emotions about its functionality and what it could mean for the future of WordPress.
Rich Tabor Extendify Iceberg Alana WordCamp

	Sabrina Zeidan Community Performance Optimization WordCamps
Performance Engineer at XWP, Content Team Lead at WordCamp Europe 2022, and organizer at WordPress Kyiv. Her WordCamp involvement means that she has her finger on the pulse of developments in the WordPress community and ecosystem. Sabrina is passionate about speeding up WordPress websites, as is evidenced by the videos she publishes on her YouTube channel about her free WordPress plugin, SpeedGuard. She recently shared this talk by Daisy Olsen, which is about building a fully functional theme in two hours with Gutenberg. Sabrina is also a Ukrainian who regularly shares updates on the situation and how she is supporting her country.
Sabrina Zeidan XWP WordCamp Europe 2022 WordCamp Kyiv 2019 Speedguard WordCamp

	Syed Balkhi Business Entrepreneurship Marketing
Founder and CEO of Awesome Motive. This list would not be complete without Syed Balkhi, whose role in spearheading mergers and acquisitions has been a hot topic in the WordPress world of late. If you’re serious about the business side of things — and value motivational tweets about personal and entrepreneurial growth — you’ll want to know what he is up to (and sharing). In December 2021, Freemius launched The Gamechangers video series with Syed’s episode. In it, he reveals the process behind Awesome Motive’s many acquisitions, among many other nuggets of M&A insight.
Syed Balkhi Awesome Motive WordCamp

	Vito Peleg Product Marketing Business
Vito’s a former international rockstar (yep, really) turned co-founder and CEO at Atarim, an “agency management system dedicated to web design and development”. Vito is a brilliant product marketer who managed to launch a plugin and make over $100,000 in 30 days He often tweets about his journey of growing a SaaS product, as well as his latest venture Bertha.ai (yes, the one that makes me worry) which he co-founded with Andrew Palmer. Needless to say, Vito is a pretty interesting dude.
Atarim

	Vova Feldman Entrepreneurship Leadership Software Development Open Source
Vova is the founder and CEO of Freemius, where he helps plugin and theme developers make a living while pursuing their passion. Vova is a serial entrepreneur who has founded several startups and has been a professional software developer since the age of 14. He has spoken at various WordCamps and is an advocate of generating money for open source software to ensure the longevity/success of the WordPress project. Vova often shares tips and best practices for pricing, business models, marketing, and other related topics on the Freemius blog. He recently posted this thread on Twitter about how he manages stress as a high-achieving entrepreneur, sharing the high-performance practices that have helped him to be happier and more productive. Also, check out this tweet referencing his recent interview with ThemeIsle, where he talks about entering the WordPress business space, marketing a product in 2022, and his personal mission.
Freemius GitHub WordCamp

	Zack Katz Plugins Business
Project Lead and Developer at GravityView and creator of TrustedLogin. Zack has been creating WordPress plugins since 2008 and is a WordCamp speaker and organizer. He recently tweeted about how the GravityView team planned to offset their emissions from traveling to WordCamp Europe.
Zack Katz GravityView Trusted Login WordCamp

That’s a wrap!

Hanging out on Twitter and exploring the online world of these WordPress experts reminded me of the value of networking. It also drove home why being part of the conversation is vital for WordPress entrepreneurs to stay in the loop and push progress in the space.

But even more importantly, the tweets and updates showed me what WordPress is really all about. It is a community of builders, makers, movers, and shakers, many of whom are determined to help make the web a better place for everyone. It’s a community that feels passionate about working together and sharing ideas to advance software and technology.

I hope that this list will not only inspire new and established WordPress entrepreneurs to get involved, but also realize that making their voices heard by offering helpful contributions and insights is the way to pay it forward.

If you want to swing with the best and join the tribe of WordPress experts — it can be as simple as posting a tweet 🙂