There’s an old saying that “WordPress plugins are what makes the world go round.” Okay, so maybe that’s not an actual saying, but it’s still true in our hearts. 

In this roundup, we’ve gathered the top ten most frequently installed plugins from 2023. (FYI, our WordPress.com marketplace offers 50,000+ plugins on the Creator plan and above.) Take a look and see how many you have on your site, get inspiration for plugins to try out, or simply satisfy your curiosity.

Though we’ve randomized the order, you can rest assured each one is well-loved for a reason.

Try the Creator plan to install any of the other plugins listed below and take your site to the next level.

A final note before jumping in: These plugins represent a curated selection of the most popular plugins based on installs by WordPress.com users over the course of 2023. While WordPress.com maintains partnerships with vendors, these placements are not paid, nor should they be taken to mean that other plugins aren’t also great. Without further ado, enjoy!

Table of Contents

1. Yoast SEO
2. WooCommerce
3. Contact Form 7
4. Google Site Kit
5. Elementor
6. All in One SEO Pack
7. WPForms
8. WP Headers and Footers
9. Astra Pro
10. Jetpack Boost
11. Plugins that come built-in to WordPress.com
12. How many of these plugins have you tried?

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Yoast SEO

Yoast has been helping WordPress site owners drive more traffic from search engines since 2010. While WordPress.com sites are set up for SEO success out of the box, Yoast enables more control over key SEO considerations on your site, while remaining so simple that anyone can use it. That balance between power and ease of use is just one reason why our users frequently choose this plugin. 

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WooCommerce

If you ask us, there’s no better way to build an online store than with WooCommerce. It turns out a lot of our users agree. WooCommerce offers everything you need to quickly launch an online store and keep it growing for years. That’s why it’s the world’s most popular open-source eCommerce solution—and one that works great with WordPress.com hosting.

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Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is a simple but flexible form builder plugin. It makes it easy to build, customize, and manage contact forms so readers and potential customers can reach you.

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Google Site Kit

Google services can enhance several aspects of running a successful WordPress website. Site Kit by Google bundles several integrations together—Google Analytics, Search Console, AdSense, and Speed—into one plugin. It’s a practical and elegant solution for site owners that want to measure and optimize performance without installing multiple plugins. 

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Elementor

Elementor is a popular website builder that simplifies page creation with a drag-and-drop interface. This plugin is versatile and user-friendly, offering an array of customizable widgets and pre-designed templates. For beginners, it can be a good way to jump into website design with zero coding knowledge necessary. 

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All in One SEO Pack

SEO is as important as ever for driving website traffic. It can also be mysterious (at least until you learn how it works), especially for newcomers. And hey, not everyone has the time—which is why this plugin promises to deliver improved results and new SEO opportunities in just 10 minutes.

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WPForms

We have another great form builder in WPForms. Build all kinds of different forms—contact forms, payment forms, custom forms, and even surveys and polls—with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

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WP Headers and Footers

Need to insert Google or Facebook tracking codes, customize some CSS, or add inline Javascript in your site’s headers or footers but you don’t want to touch your theme files? This is exactly where WP Headers and Footers comes in. 

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Astra Pro

Astra isn’t just one of the most popular themes in the WordPress ecosystem, it’s also easily extensible with Astra Pro, which allows you to add premium features like pre-built templates (including options that work with WooCommerce). 

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Jetpack Boost

Have you heard about Core Web Vitals? They’re a set of metrics that Google uses to assess “real world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability.” In plain English, that means your website needs to load fast and offer users a great experience. Jetpack Boost does just that by analyzing and boosting you site’s speed and performance.

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Plugins that come built-in to WordPress.com

Every WordPress.com website comes bundled with several pre-installed plugins that ensure customers have an excellent experience building, designing, and maintaining their online real estate. These include:

• Jetpack. Protects your site with top-tier security, anti-spam, auto-backup, and more.
• Akismet. Defends your site from spammers.
• Gutenberg. WordPress’s built-in site editor that offers a flexible and modern editing experience.
• Crowdsignal. Makes it simple to create polls and surveys.

How many of these plugins have you tried?

Hopefully, you’ve found a new plugin or two to try. Were there any entries that you found surprising? Are there any particular plugins that you discovered that you think deserve a shout out too? Sound off in the comments!

Our team here at WordPress.com, comprised of hundreds of people spread across the entire globe, accomplished a lot in 2023. On the blog, we published over 90 posts, from product upgrades, to brand new features, and even new additions to the Automattic family of products.

If you missed anything, here’s a recap of this year’s most important launches, announcements, and new features.

Table of Contents

1. 2023 Video Recap
2. An all-new mobile experience
3. Launch your newsletter, from any plan
4. Ignite your growth with Blaze
5. ActivityPub for WordPress joins the Automattic family
6. Happy 20th anniversary, WordPress!
7. Revamp your site seamlessly with staging sites
8. A tour of the all-new Stats page
9. Custom theme designs just got easier
10. Managing and purchasing domains on WordPress.com has never been better
11. One inbox to rule them all
12. The all-new WordPress.com learning hub
13. Jetpack’s AI Assistant is here to help
14. Continuous site editing, writing, and design improvements
15. All. The. Themes.

2023 Video Recap

An all-new mobile experience

This year the Jetpack mobile app has made huge strides as the preferred mobile experience for WordPress.com customers. The team is continuously improving the app, making publishing, reading, and monitoring engagement easier than ever. If you haven’t tried it yet, now is the time!

Launch your newsletter, from any plan

Newsletters on WordPress.com have seen a huge number of improvements in 2023—from features like paid subscriptions on any plan and the introduction of a Paywall Block, to fresh resources like our Newsletters 101 course. No matter how you want to reach your audience, WordPress.com has you covered. Get started here.

Ignite your growth with Blaze

Early in the year, we launched Blaze—our self-serve advertising tool. This cool new feature allows anyone with a WordPress blog to advertise on WordPress.com and Tumblr in just a few clicks. How? By turning your site content into clean, compelling ads that run across our millions-strong network of blogs. Here are 5 tips for making the most of your ads.

ActivityPub for WordPress joins the Automattic family

This innovative plugin brings a whole new level of social networking to your website by integrating it with the wider federated social web. When installed, the plugin allows you to easily share your content and interact with users on Mastodon and other platforms that also support the ActivityPub protocol. Just as Automattic aims to do with all of our products, this plugin helps to decentralize the web, break down silos, and foster a more connected online ecosystem. Click here to learn more about getting started with ActivityPub for WordPress.

Happy 20th anniversary, WordPress!

On May 27, 2003, co-founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little announced that WordPress was available to the public. Their vision, as you can still read in their original post on WordPress.org, was to foster a means by which anyone could easily share and discuss their ideas with the world. What started as a humble open-source blogging platform is now the driving force behind over one-third of the internet’s most popular websites, including The New York Times, Salesforce, and Disney. 

Revamp your site seamlessly with staging sites

In May, we announced the availability of staging sites, which made it easy to experiment with changes to your site. A few months later, we added to its capabilities with a synchronization feature that allows you to push changes from your staging site to your live, or “production,” site. You can now fearlessly try out new ideas and designs before publishing them to the world.

For all the developers and professional site creators out there, we’ve also launched SSH and WP-CLI access, site preview links, and global edge caching. Be sure to stay up to date with these technical tools at our WordPress.com Develop Blog.

A tour of the all-new Stats page

In addition to launching a new and improved mobile app, our intrepid Jetpack team also made significant changes to the Stats page. This all-new experience enhances your ability to analyze and optimize your site’s content. We’ve restructured the layout in a friendlier way, introduced new modules that reveal crucial data points, and revamped the overall look of this powerful analytics tool. Check it out for yourself.

Custom theme designs just got easier

Whether you want a simple blog that highlights recent posts, a visually stunning portfolio, or an online home for your small business, your website should be just as unique as you are. Our new site design tool guides you through the process of creating a memorable custom homepage, utilizing a library of hundreds of patterns, colors, and fonts that you can mix and match for whichever distinctive vibe you’re going for. Try it out for yourself right here.

Managing and purchasing domains on WordPress.com has never been better

Your domain is the lifeblood of your online presence. This year, we’ve been hard at work building a number of exciting features to ensure a world-class domain name experience on WordPress.com whether you have one domain or one hundred. We’ve introduced an all-new domains-focused dashboard, multi-year registrations, domain forwarding, convenient transfer, simple DNS imports, and more. Oh, by the way, if you’re coming from Google Domains, we’ll cover your transfer fees. Grab your piece of online real estate today.

One inbox to rule them all

In October, Automattic welcomed Texts.com to our growing family. This handy app brings all your chats into a single dashboard: iMessage, Slack, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, Messenger, LinkedIn, Signal, Discord, and X, with more services on the way.  Beyond the unmatched convenience, Texts.com also offers end-to-end encryption, as well as some delightful features that other messaging apps can’t seem to figure out, like scheduling messages to send when your recipient is awake, or the ability to mark as unread on services that still don’t have it. Sign up today. (Psst, be sure to check back for news on the iOS app!)

The all-new WordPress.com learning hub

Our incredible design and education teams moved all of our learning resources—courses, webinars, tutorials, forums, and more—into one convenient and beautifully-designed place at WordPress.com/learn. Our mission with the learning hub is to have one spot for all your WordPress.com questions and learning opportunities. Spend some time with this resource center and come away more confident than ever.

Jetpack’s AI Assistant is here to help

Jetpack AI Assistant is seamlessly integrated as a block within the WordPress.com editor. Whether you’re checking your spelling and grammar, need ideas for better titles or headings, or simply in need of an outline for your great idea, this incredible feature can help jumpstart your creativity. Give it a shot in the editor today by using the AI Assistant Block.

Continuous site editing, writing, and design improvements

WordPress is constantly improving and making it easier than ever to write, publish, and design your site. This year, we’ve seen the addition of the Details Block, footnotes, distraction-free mode, a style book (which lets you preview design variations), customizable button styles, sticky headers, Openverse integration, the Time to Read Block, and so much more.

All. The. Themes.

Our amazing themes design team released more themes in 2023 than any previous year in our history. Whether you’re a business owner, a community leader, a hobbyist, a blogger, or anything in between, you’re guaranteed to find a theme that matches the vision you have for your website. Check out the entire theme showcase to get a peek at the incredible variety of our design offerings. And there’s plenty more to come in 2024 and beyond; if you’re looking for something specific and can’t find it, let us know in the comments.

With just one week left in 2023, time’s running out to lock in a 25% savings on making those New Year’s resolutions happen for your site in 2024. If you saw our last announcement, you’ll know that we’re offering 25% off all annual paid plans until the end of year. So now’s the time—as soon as the clock strikes midnight on January 1st, this deal will be as done as 2023.

Whether you’re starting your first blog or launching an ecommerce empire, there’s a plan that will help you make it happen. Our upgraded plans are designed to help you take your site to the next level, opening up features that let you:

• Give your visitors an ad-free experience
• Reach new audiences around the world with unlimited social sharing
• Give your site some extra style with expanded customization options and third-party themes
• Open up new ways to earn with our exclusive ad network, WordAds, and advanced but intuitive commerce and payment features
• Add superpowers to your site by unlocking access to 55,000+ plugins that handle everything from next-level SEO to interactive forms and integrations with the tools you already use

Need a little inspiration for that resolution? How about:

• Writing a blog post every week for an entire year
• Starting a newsletter to share your passion, hobby, or cause
• Launching that new business website or portfolio you’ve been thinking about

Wherever you want to take your site in 2024, we want to help you get there, and save some cash along the way. Lock in your savings now before this deal expires on December 31st.

We’d love to hear what you have planned for 2024 in the comments below.

As you look ahead to 2024, if you’ve been thinking about launching a new business, sharing your passion with a blog, or building an audience with a newsletter, now’s the perfect time to get started. 

To give you a jump start on your goals for the new year, we’re offering 25% off every annual paid plan when you create any new site or upgrade an existing free site before Dec. 31, 2023. Whatever you’re planning to build, there’s a plan that will help you go further, faster—from adding a personal touch with a custom domain to taking your monetization options and site design to the next level.

We’re all about making WordPress.com the best platform to launch and grow your projects on the web. Whatever plan you’re on, with WordPress.com you get:

• Intuitive design and publishing tools so you can go from idea to launch in no time
• Unmatched performance so your site is blazing fast and always available
• Fully managed hosting so you can focus on your goals instead of maintaining your site 

And when you choose a paid plan, new opportunities open up, too:

• Give your visitors an ad-free experience and set your site apart with a custom domain
• Take monetizing your content further with our ads program and range of payment and shipping features
• Or unlock a universe of 55,000+ plugins and themes that cover everything from ecommerce to advanced SEO

Whether you’re ready to start a new website, migrate a site from elsewhere, or upgrade a free site you’ve already been working on, we can’t wait to see what you’ll make happen with WordPress.com in 2024. We’d love to hear what you’re planning to build in 2024 in the comments.

And be sure to grab your 25% discount any time from now until the end of year to make it happen for less. Pick your plan and get started now.

This year has been a big year for domains on WordPress.com, from offering free transfers for Google customers to an all-new dashboard for managing your domains. We have one more bit of good cheer to spread before the year is through: today we’re excited to share the addition of two new country-specific domain extensions to our domain offerings on WordPress.com. 

Now, you can elevate your online presence with the official domain extensions of two of the most important and influential countries in the world: Brazil’s .com.br and Germany’s .de. Country-code domains like .com.br and .de resonate with local consumers, bringing both authenticity and authority to your online presence. 

For both of these newly available extensions, we provide our own trustee, so you don’t need to be physically located in Brazil or Germany to register either of these country-level domain names. 

Unlock your potential in Brazil with .com.br

The official .com.br domain extension is now available for purchase on WordPress.com for just R$ 99 a year (US$20). Business owners, students, artists, and bloggers alike can harness the power of .com.br to connect directly with Brazilian consumers in one of the Americas’ fastest-growing economies.

With millions of .com.br domains already registered, it’s one of the booming country-level domain extensions in the Western hemisphere. 

Make your mark in Germany with .de

Let’s depart Brazil for now and head north and east across the Atlantic. The official .de domain extension is now available on WordPress.com for just 8€ a year (US$8). Whether you’re a business owner or a content creator, a .de domain is the perfect choice to appeal to German consumers in one of Europe’s strongest economies.

With tens of millions of .de domains already in use, it stands as one of the most popular and respected domain extensions in the world. 

Why you should choose WordPress.com for your domains 

Every single day, our team is working hard to ensure that there’s no better place on the internet to purchase and manage your domain(s). Here are a few reasons to choose us: 

• First Year Free: Secure your domain for free for the first year with the purchase of any annual plan.
• Geographic Convenience: Own a .com.br or .de domain without being physically located in Brazil or Germany, thanks to our trustee service.
• Powerful & Convenient Domain Management: Enjoy features like domain forwarding, multi-year registrations, lightning-fast DNS speeds, and free SSL protection.

Elevate your online presence with these impactful domain extensions. Register your new .com.br and .de domain names at WordPress.com today. 

The WordPress.com team is always working on new design ideas to bring your website to life. Check out the latest themes in our library, including new release Twenty Twenty-Four, as well as a number of other beautiful and versatile designs.

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Twenty Twenty-Four

Twenty Twenty-Four (aka TT4), WordPress’s brand new default theme, is now available! TT4 is designed to be flexible, versatile, and applicable to any website—whether running a business, writing a blog, or showcasing work.

This beautiful theme comes with a number of style variations and full-page patterns to help speed up the site-building process; it is fully compatible with the Site Editor and takes advantage of all the new design tools introduced in WordPress 6.4.

Click here to view a demo of this theme.

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Issue

Issue is a magazine-style theme designed to make blog content more inviting. Its simple homepage displays large featured images and post titles only, with sticky menu navigation that allows users to access pages (or lists of posts) independently. The minimalist layout and generous white space on individual posts gives this theme a modern feel, while still being visually striking.

Click here to view a demo of this theme.

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Carnation (Premium)

Carnation is a minimalist blog theme featuring a classic two-column layout, designed to showcase your content with understated elegance. The homepage emphasizes big featured images to draw in visitors. In the single post/page view, we decided to do something different and not include the featured images at all. Large images often take over the most valuable space near the top of the post/page, which we really wanted to dedicate to content alone in this theme. For any writers tackling Bloganuary this year, Carnation is a great option for your site.

Click here to view a demo of this theme.

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Ritratto

Ritratto, Italian for “portrait,” offers the perfect design for any kind of showcase, be it for yourself or your favorite historical figure. The prominent header area offers a headshot, large title, brief description, and links. Below that is a grid of posts that’s especially noticeable for its lack of featured image; perhaps counterintuitively, the text-heavy layout helps this theme stand out.

Click here to view a demo of this theme.

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Sunderland

Sunderland is a simple theme designed for announcing upcoming events in a visually captivating way. Sunderland’s character lies in its immersive landing page, with an easily replaceable full-width background image. Sunderland is the ideal choice for bands, musicians, artists, or event organizers who want a sleek and eye-catching website to inform and engage their audience.

Click here to view a demo of this theme.

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To install any of the above themes, click the name of the theme you like, which brings you right to the installation page. Then click the “Activate this design” button. You can also click “Open live demo,” which brings up a clickable, scrollable version of the theme for you to preview.

Premium themes are available to use at no extra charge for customers on the Premium plan or above. Partner themes are third-party products that can be purchased for $79/year each.

You can explore all of our themes by navigating to the “Themes” page, which is found under “Appearance” in the left-side menu of your WordPress.com dashboard. Or you can click below:

Yesterday, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg and Gutenberg Lead Architect Matías Ventura took the stage in Madrid, Spain and offered the WordPress community a recap of 2023’s progress as well as a look ahead to what’s coming in 2024 and beyond. If you missed the livestream, it’s well worth watching.

Below, you’ll find the State of the Word video, a short recap of the keynote address, and finally the Q&A session video.

Watch State of the Word 2023

Highlights from 2023

Before getting into the future of the WordPress project, Matt and Matías shared a bit about the progress made in 2023. The high points, especially as they relate to WordPress.com:

• On May 27th, WordPress turned 20. What a milestone to celebrate! How rare it is to find something that has lasted on the internet for 20 years.
• The WordPress community hosted 70 WordCamps in 33 countries. WordCamps are events for anyone using or building with WordPress—which includes you! Read our team’s recap of WordCamp US.
• Openverse won the Open Education Award for Excellence. Openverse is an open-source media library where you can easily access free-to-use images, audio, and more. This library is available right from WordPress.com whenever you insert an image.
• WordPress launched its incredible Playground tool. This feature allows you to deploy a WordPress environment right within your browser. This is a game-changer for developers and in the future may help beginner WordPress users test new plugins or features. Learn more about WordPress Playground here.
• Twenty-Twenty Four, WordPress’s new default theme, is now available. Fully customizable, this theme was designed to be flexible, versatile, and applicable to any website. 
• The Site Editor’s capabilities soared this year. On the writing front, we saw the addition of footnotes, distraction free writing mode, and much more. On the design front, we saw more intuitive styling, easier customizations, and a huge number of new themes available. Scroll through our blog archives to explore these various updates.

Where WordPress is headed next

• Seamless migration. In 2024, WordPress will seek to “unlock the web” with a focus on migration tools. Whether coming from another WordPress host or another platform altogether (like Wix or Squarespace), WordPress is working to make those transitions as painless as possible. Learn more about the Data Liberation project here.
• Real-time collaboration. Multiple users will be able to edit content and design at the same time, with changes synced in real-time.
• Next-level patterns. The work on patterns accelerated in 2023 and will grow to new heights in 2024, which includes features like more powerful syncing, more customization, and improvements to the site-wide implementation of patterns.
• Performance improvements. Typing, uploading media, publishing—all of these actions will happen 2-3 times faster in the upcoming WordPress releases.
• Dashboard/admin refresh. The backend of your site will get a makeover, taking on more of the look and feel of the Site Editor throughout the course of 2024.

Q&A session

After the main presentation, Matt took a number of questions about WordPress and the open source project as a whole:

There were a number of questions that came in during the Q&A portion that Matt wasn’t able to address due to time constraints. Matt instead answered those in a blog post yesterday, which you can check out here.

Dan Alatorre murders people for a living. Not literally, but literarily: His thrilling mystery novels have captivated audiences around the world, landing him on multiple bestseller lists. 

Like so many authors of the internet age, Dan started his writing journey with a blog. Back then, his posts were focused more on the day-to-day happenings of his life, and they eventually provided the fodder for his first book: a silly autobiographical tale about a father and his daughter. 

Dan has always had many different stories to tell. He published titles in a variety of genres, such as horror, romance, humor, and science fiction, before he tried his hand at murder mysteries. It didn’t take long for his unforgettable characters and unique storytelling to captivate audiences. 

“It is great when some stranger you’ve never met picks up your book and reads it. You wrote words down, they read it, and it changed their life.”

For inspiration when writing his novels, Dan looks to what has piqued his interest throughout his life–1950s film noir classics, modern-day crime shows, and mystery authors like Agatha Christie–and then puts his unique spin on things. In his most popular series, Double Blind, he’s found an equation for success: two detectives, with an underlying current of romantic tension, working to solve a murder. Each case is its own self-contained story, so it not only works as part of the series, but it also makes a good standalone novel. “Good ideas were and are everywhere for an author, so I have about twenty additional story ideas for the characters,” he says. “As long as readers enjoy reading them, I’ll keep writing them.”

His creativity unlocked, Dan was able to concentrate on that all-important but oft-ignored aspect of any creative business: marketing. His website, danalatorre.com, was already his personal space on the web but it also gave his fans a VIP entrance to interact with him. With his Readers Club, Dan is able to go above and beyond simply promoting his books, building an active community of engaged readers. That sense of connection—with other murder-mystery fans as well as with him, the author—makes each new novel even more likely to be a success. 

“It’s a great way to build that rapport with your fan base. If they’re interacting with their favorite author, they’re a fan for life.”

But don’t just take his word for it. If you’re an active (or aspiring) author, there are many other reasons to carve out a corner of the internet just for yourself and your fans. 

Always be writing

Since writing is already something you do, an active blog can help provide insight to your audience about your writing process, upcoming events, story ideas, and so much more. It will position you as a valuable resource for readers and potential collaborators, leaving them eager to hear more from you.

Build your brand

Your website is a distillation of your personal brand, reflecting your unique literary style, voice, and identity. Choosing the right theme for your site—from colors, to fonts, to layout, and more—can help reinforce your work as an author. A good website builds trust, and it can help you stand out like a literary beacon in the vast sea of books.

Control the story

In an age of online reviews and social media commentary, other voices can often shape the narrative. A personal website provides a platform for you to tell your own story, highlighting your work in the way that you want.

Ready to write your success story? Use coupon code wpsuccessda for 25% off annual plans. Visit WordPress.com/pricing or click below to get started:

It’s almost time for State of the Word 2023! Join us for this live stream event on December 11th at 10am ET.

State of the Word is the annual keynote address delivered by the WordPress project’s co-founder and Automattic CEO, Matt Mullenweg. Every year, the event shares reflections on the project’s progress and the future of open source. Expect all that and more in this year’s edition.

For the first time ever, this event is venturing beyond North America, bringing the WordPress community to a new and vibrant city: Madrid, Spain! The event will be live-streamed to WordPress enthusiasts and newcomers alike via the WordPress YouTube channel.

Join Matt as he provides a retrospective of 2023, demos the latest in WordPress tech, and comments on the future of the WordPress open source project.

Watch State of the Word 2023 live!

What: State of the Word 2023

When: Monday, December 11, 2023 @ 10:00 am ET (15:00 UTC)

How: The live stream is embedded in this post, just above, and will go live at the time of the event. It will also be available through the WordPress YouTube channel. Additionally, there are a number of locally organized watch parties happening around the world if you’d like to watch it in the company of other WordPressers.

Don’t worry, we’ll post the recorded event early next week if you aren’t able to catch it live.