A hosting company we use called SiteGround put out a 31-page report: “AI in WordPress: The 2026 Landscape for Small Businesses.”
This is a solo episode. No guest this time. Just me, that report, and a (mental) highlighter.
Some of it is genuinely useful. Some of it I want to push back on. And the whole way through, it’s worth remembering who wrote it. SiteGround sells hosting, and they sell their own AI tool. A report that lands on “you can do most of this yourself now” is a report with an interesting incentive behind it.
So here’s the honest version, from someone who manages 500-plus WordPress sites for a living: what AI in WordPress is actually good at, where it falls apart, and what a normal business owner should do about it.
Key Takeaways
- WordPress runs about 43% of the entire internet. Roughly a third of the people running it are small business owners, not developers.
- The number one struggle isn’t a feature. It’s understanding how WordPress works at all. Almost 60% of owners said so.
- Bolting an AI button onto a confusing dashboard doesn’t fix the dashboard. You still have to know where to click and how to ask.
- Over half of business owners now use AI daily, mostly for research and content. Only about 21% use it to actually build or edit sites, because that takes real context.
- AI saves time, but 41% say it takes multiple tries and 22% don’t trust its accuracy. Somebody still has to know whether the answer is any good.
- 96% of WordPress security problems come from plugins. Stacking AI plugins to feel modern is how sites get slow, fragile, and hacked.
- AI is great at structured, repeatable work. It does not replace strategy, brand decisions, or knowing what your homepage should say. That’s still a human job.
Episode at a Glance
A walk through SiteGround’s 2026 AI-in-WordPress report, read with a practitioner’s eye. The data is solid: AI adoption is real, most owners are using it for content and research, and the friction is the same as it’s always been. The takeaway isn’t “do it all yourself for cheap.” It’s “use AI to clear the tedious work, and keep a human in charge of the decisions.”
Action step: Before you install a single AI plugin, look at where your website time actually goes. Start with the workflow, not the tool.
Main idea: AI doesn’t make everyone a pro at everything. It makes the pros faster. The judgment, the strategy, the “is this any good” call, that stays human.
Why it matters: Your website isn’t a hobby. It works for your business 24/7. Your time is the expensive thing, not the site.
Quick tool: The report itself is free to read. The rule it accidentally proves: keep a human in the loop on anything that touches customers, pricing, or your live site.
Listen & Subscribe
Podcast page: https://artillerymedia.com/podcast/
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/slow-steady-a-podcast-by-artillery/id1840249614
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/37ZzVcI8N7xnEDqkap2vCW?si=70b138e65b8c42ca
Follow along:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artillery_media/?hl=en
Jake on X: https://x.com/jakekramer15?lang=en
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/artillerymedia
Contact us: https://artillerymedia.com/contact/
Highlights & Timestamps
00:00–02:25. Why a Hosting Company’s Report Is Worth Reading (Skeptically)
SiteGround powers all 500-plus of our sites, so when they publish, we read it. But they sell their own AI tool, so we read it with one eye open.
02:25–04:20. Half the Internet Runs on WordPress
NASA, the White House, Taylor Swift. About 600 million sites, and a third of them are run by small business owners who never signed up to be web developers.
04:20–09:15. Why WordPress Feels Like a Spaceship
Almost 60% of owners say the hardest part is just understanding how WordPress works. The dashboard is a cockpit full of knobs, and AI buttons don’t change that.
09:15–17:00. How Business Owners Actually Use AI
54% use it daily. Research and content lead by a mile. Building sites is barely on the list. And 72% say it saves time, while 41% say it takes multiple tries to get right.
17:00–20:55. The Plugin Monster
There are 3,500-plus AI plugins now. 96% of WordPress security problems come from plugins, up 34% this year. More tools is not more results.
20:55–23:05. Where AI Is Great, and Where You Still Need a Human
AI wins at structured work with clear inputs and outputs. Strategy, brand, and architecture still need human judgment. The report says so itself.
23:05–27:14. Start With the Workflow, Not the Tool
Your website isn’t a hobby. Figure out where it’s costing you time, decide what to hand off, and keep approval over anything your customers see.
Half the Internet Runs on WordPress
Quick gut check on why this even matters.
WordPress runs something like 43% of every website on the internet. NASA’s Artemis launch updates. WhiteHouse.gov, both parties, for twenty years. Taylor Swift’s site. About 600 million sites total.
The way we explain it at ARTILLERY: a website is like a car, and the internet is the interstate. WordPress sites are the unleaded vehicles. They’re the majority of what’s out there driving around.
Here’s the part that matters for this conversation. About a third of the people running WordPress are small business owners. Not developers. Not agencies. Shop owners, consultants, freelancers.
So when we talk about AI in WordPress, we’re not talking about some niche tech thing. We’re talking about half the internet being run by people who signed up to run a business, not to become web developers. The website is one more thing on the pile.
That’s probably you. So let’s talk about how AI fits into your world.
Why WordPress Feels Like a Spaceship
SiteGround surveyed 7,000-plus of their own users. Two numbers jumped out.
67% of small business owners manage everything on their site themselves. Updates, content, security, all of it. Only about 11% hire an agency or freelancer to handle it.
And the biggest challenge? Almost 60% said it’s just understanding how WordPress works. Not one feature. The whole platform.
I get it. You log in and the dashboard is a spaceship. Posts, pages, media, projects, plugins, settings buried under settings. I have friends who are audio engineers, and walking into their studio is like walking into a cockpit. How does anyone know what every knob does?
That’s WordPress for most people. And it’s why we love tools like the Divi visual builder, which let you edit the front of the site without touching code. But even those only get you so far. Sometimes you still have to go into the back end and tweak.
Here’s the honest version of where most owners are with AI and WordPress. It’s not “AI is going to change everything.” It’s “I still can’t find the menu.” Bolting an AI button onto a confusing dashboard doesn’t fix the dashboard. You still have to know where to click and how to ask.
Learning WordPress is like learning an instrument. It takes time. That’s a big reason agencies like ours exist.
How Business Owners Actually Use AI
The adoption numbers are real, and they track with what we see every day.
54% of business owners use AI tools daily. Another 24% use them several times a week. So roughly three out of four are in these tools regularly. Two-thirds use ChatGPT as their main one.
What are they using it for? Research, 66%. Writing and content, 65%. Those two dominate.
That makes sense. Research is great with AI. Pulling competitor info, local times and distances, wrangling messy data. And content used to be our single biggest bottleneck at ARTILLERY. Getting words out of clients is the hard, thinking part. AI turns a blank page into a first draft you can actually edit.
Now look at the bottom of the list. Actually building or editing websites is only about 21%. Almost nobody uses AI for that, because it takes real context. A chatbot in another tab knows nothing about your actual site. You can’t one-shot it.
Then there’s the catch that matters most. 72% say AI saves them time. Great, I agree. But 41% say getting a usable result takes multiple tries. And 22% flat out don’t trust its accuracy.
Read those together. A lot of the people saying “AI saves me time” are spending that saved time checking the AI, re-prompting the AI, and fixing the AI.
That’s not a knock on it. We use AI constantly. We used to have a hammer, now we have a power drill. But it’s a tool, not a finished result. When we write content with it, a human reads and edits it, then the client reads and edits it. Two humans in the loop. It saved us time, and somebody still has to know whether the answer is any good.
That’s the whole game.
The Plugin Monster
There are now over 3,500 AI plugins in the WordPress directory, with more every day. One does AI SEO. One does translations. One does something else.
Stack four of them and you’ve got four subscriptions, four logins, four things to learn, and four new ways for the site to break.
Here’s the stat to sit with. 96% of WordPress security problems come from plugins. And that number grew 34% this year.
Why does WordPress get a bad security rap? Part of it is that WordPress is open source and community-built. There’s no private equity war chest to fund a PR campaign when something goes wrong. That’s a feature, not a bug, but it means the plugins bolted onto it are where the risk lives.
The attack is simple, and AI made it easier. A plugin author publishes a changelog: “we fixed this security hole in version 1.5.” That note sits online for months. Hackers read it, find every site still running 1.4, and walk right in. AI lets them do that at scale.
So plugins have to be kept updated, constantly. Which is exactly the kind of boring, ongoing work most owners skip.
If you take one thing from this section: don’t go to the plugin directory, search “AI,” and install whatever looks cool. Every plugin is another thing that can break and another back door into your site. More tools does not equal more results. Usually it just builds a plugin monster.
Somebody should be deciding what belongs on your site and what’s going to bite you in six months.
Where AI Is Great, and Where You Still Need a Human
The report’s own words: AI is best at “structured WordPress operations with clear inputs and outputs.”
And then, in the same breath: “creative strategy, brand decisions, and novel technical architecture still require human judgment.”
I couldn’t have said it better, and I appreciate them putting it in writing.
AI is genuinely great at the tedious, repeatable, bounded stuff. Resizing 200 images. Writing alt text. Filling in the same field across 100 pages. Cleaning up metadata. The death-by-a-thousand-clicks work. Let the machine do that.
But the decisions? What your site should say. Who it’s for. What the homepage promises in the first five seconds. Whether it answers three questions in two seconds. How the whole thing is structured so a real human can find what they need. Websites are for humans.
That’s judgment, and it doesn’t come out of a prompt. The strategy and the message are what make someone call you instead of the competition. AI doesn’t replace that. It just clears the desk so the pros can get to it.
The report’s advice to agencies says it perfectly: keep a human in the loop, and be the strategy layer, not the execution layer. Thanks, SiteGround. That’s the job.
Start With the Workflow, Not the Tool
So what do you actually do with all this?
Start with the workflow, not the tool. Look at where your website time actually goes before you go shopping for AI. Then keep a human in the loop on anything that touches your customers, your pricing, or your live site, so a person reads it before the world does.
Here’s the reframe I keep coming back to. AI tools aren’t going to make everyone a pro at everything. They’re going to make the pros faster. I can manage WordPress sites far faster now because I know exactly what to ask the machine and exactly how to check its work.
Could you do it all yourself? SiteGround and the GoDaddys of the world would love to tell you yes. And technically, sure, you always could. You could have used Squarespace or Wix too. But your website isn’t a hobby. It’s working for your business 24 hours a day, whether you’re watching it or not.
Your time is the expensive thing here, not the website.
The businesses that win with AI aren’t the ones using the most of it. They’re the ones who stayed intentional. They know what changed on their site and why, and they kept a real human in the loop the whole time.
Use the tool. Don’t hand it the keys.
Call to Action
Want help turning a website that’s more headache than asset into something that actually works for your business?
Start here: https://artillerymedia.com/contact/
Show Credits
Hosts: Jake Kramer
Produced by: ARTILLERY, Lincoln, Nebraska
Slow & Steady, a podcast by ARTILLERY 🎧
https://artillerymedia.com/podcast/
