The Human Made blog
The latest thinking on enterprise WordPress, open source technology, and life at Human Made.
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Why critical thinking matters in agencies
Critical thinking in agencies means questioning assumptions. It means weighing evidence. It means reasoning through a decision before committing to it, rather than accepting the first plausible-sounding answer just because it arrived quickly. And it matters more now than it did five years ago. Templates, automation, and AI-generated drafts increasingly shape the daily judgement calls…
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How WordPress Agencies Use AI — and What Clients Should Ask About It
Most WordPress agencies now use AI somewhere in their workflow. But the real question isn’t whether an agency uses AI. It’s where, how carefully, and what still requires a human to sign off. This matters more than it might seem. AI genuinely reduces repetitive work, but it doesn’t replace judgment. The agencies worth hiring can…
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How to Evaluate an Enterprise WordPress Agency: The 4 Key Pillars
Knowing how to evaluate an enterprise WordPress agency comes down to four things that rarely show up clearly in a pitch. Those four things are technical capability, delivery maturity, security and governance, and strategic alignment. A visually impressive site means very little if the platform becomes difficult to scale, maintain, or govern six months after…
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Questions To Ask When Choosing A WordPress Agency
Choosing the wrong WordPress agency rarely looks like a mistake at the time. It looks like a great pitch, a polished proposal, and a shortlist of impressive client logos. The problems don’t surface until months into delivery — and by then, switching agencies costs time, money, and momentum. The right questions can surface most of…
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The Total Cost Of Choosing The Wrong Enterprise WordPress Agency
The cost of choosing the wrong WordPress agency rarely shows up at launch. It surfaces quietly, months or years later. A platform that once felt like a win starts costing more with every release. The financial cost of a bad agency choice is the easy part to calculate — it’s on the invoice. The total…
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Enterprise WordPress Security Is Really About Decision Making
Enterprise WordPress security is often discussed in technical terms. Keep software up to date. Strengthen authentication. Monitor vulnerabilities. Choose secure infrastructure. Follow security best practices. They’re all sensible recommendations. The difficulty is that very few enterprise platforms become more or less secure because of a single technical decision. They change gradually as the organisation around…
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WordPress Security and AI: the Attack Surface Is Expanding
Every month, enterprise organisations connect more AI systems to their digital estate. For organisations running WordPress at enterprise scale, these new services are changing the security landscape. AI assistants, content generation tools, developer agents, search experiences, and workflow automations increasingly interact with WordPress content, APIs, and business systems. Each new integration creates opportunities for innovation…
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Why Enterprise WordPress Is Built for the AI Era
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming part of enterprise operations, and enterprise WordPress is no exception. Marketing teams are using AI to accelerate content production. Editorial teams are experimenting with summarisation, tagging, and content enrichment. Customer experience teams are exploring personalisation and recommendation engines. Internal teams are using AI to improve search, knowledge management, and workflow…
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Pride at Human Made: what we did, and why it matters
June is Pride Month. For some, it’s a celebration. For others, it’s still a protest. At Human Made, we wanted it to be both, and we wanted to engage with it in a way that went deeper than a logo change. We’re a fully remote company with humans in more than a dozen countries. That…
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Why Enterprise WordPress RFPs Often Miss What Matters
Choosing an enterprise WordPress agency should be a straightforward process. Define your requirements on the RFP, invite proposals, compare responses, and select the partner that best fits your needs. In reality, it’s rarely that simple. Most enterprise buyers aren’t choosing between obviously good and obviously bad agencies. They’re choosing between several capable teams with strong…
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Enterprise CMS Costs: What Total Cost of Ownership Really Means
Enterprise platform discussions often begin with software costs. Licence fees, subscription models, implementation budgets, and support agreements are relatively easy to compare during procurement. They are visible, measurable, and usually well documented by vendors. The challenge is that software costs represent only one part of a platform’s economic impact. Once a platform is embedded across…
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Why AI Is Exposing Weaknesses in Enterprise Platforms
AI pilots for enterprise platforms are easy to start. A team picks a tool, tests a few prompts, generates summaries, drafts metadata, experiments with search, or explores content recommendations. Results arrive quickly. The demo looks promising. Everyone can see the potential. Then the harder questions begin. How does this fit into existing workflows? Which content…
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AI Coding Agents: Claude Code Isn’t the Only Game in Town
A practical guide to the terminal coding agent landscape in early 2026. Just a year ago, most conversations about AI-powered development tools started and ended with Claude Code. Today, every major AI company has a coding agent, open source alternatives are flourishing, and new entrants seem to appear every week. That’s exciting for developers. It’s…
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WordPress + GA4 + AI = less content, more performance
In 1985, Microsoft shipped Goal Seek in Excel. A few years later came Solver and Monte Carlo simulations. Instead of guessing outcomes, you could define success and let the software search for the variables that produced it. I remember using these tools during my years in banking, often grinding the CPU to a halt. Solver,…
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How to code with AI agents
What does it actually look like to work with AI every day as an engineer? In this piece, Human Made Senior Engineer Ivan Kristianto shares a practical, battle-tested workflow for building with AI agents. From spec-first thinking and parallel execution to disposable code and “vibe user” testing, this is a candid look at what works,…
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Awards Spotlight: Technical Wizardry
We recently announced the winners of our inaugural Human Made Awards. Of all the categories we celebrated, there’s one we wanted to come back to and give a little more space: Technical Wizardry, won this year by Samantha Miller. Technical excellence sits right at the heart of what we do at Human Made. It’s why…
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The Human Made Awards 2026
As a globally distributed company, our work typically happens across time zones, async, on video calls, and in pull requests. We love working this way; it means we can build the best teams possible. But it does come at the expense of face-to-face time with other Humans. That’s why our annual company-wide retreat is always…
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Human Made retreat roundup – Croatia 2026 🇭🇷
It had been nearly two years since we were last on retreat together in Greece, which, in a company like ours, feels like a very long time. Last week, we brought Human Made back together again, this time on the Croatian coast, surrounded by mountains, sea air, and the kind of setting that invites both…
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AI is changing publishing. Most platforms aren’t ready
AI is already part of how enterprise teams work. Quietly in some places, more visibly in others. Editors use it to summarise long-form content. Marketers lean on it for campaign copy and optimisation. Content teams use it to analyse performance and spot gaps. What started as experimentation has moved into daily workflow faster than most…
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Evaluating the Technical Skills of a WordPress Agency
For non-technical stakeholders, choosing a WordPress agency can feel like guesswork. Most agencies sound convincing. Many have polished portfolios. Pricing varies wildly. And without a technical background, it is difficult to separate genuine engineering expertise from surface-level competence. That gap matters. The technical decisions made early in a WordPress project shape everything that follows: performance,…
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WordPress 7.0: Enterprise-Grade by Default
After a couple of delays, WordPress 7.0 is scheduled to land on May 20th. We’re looking at this through the lens of the beta releases and recent core updates, so some details may still shift. But the overall direction is already clear, and it’s one enterprise teams have been waiting for. This is the release…
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