When people talk about personalization in WordPress, they usually mean token replacement: swap in a name, show a member’s profile image, maybe list a user’s last few comments.
That’s a start. But real personalization goes further. Personalization responds to the user’s salient facts. It almost isn’t personalization to just paste in the first name, because every user gets that exact same treatment, just with a different name thrown in.
It means showing different flows based on a user’s data and behavior. It means reordering priorities based on past actions, adjusting CTAs based on what the person hasn’t done yet, and updating what appears based on role, tag, or interaction.
True personalization doesn’t just decorate. It directs. It adapts the entire site—structure, logic, layout—to the person using it.
And WordPress is capable of that. It has all the necessary tools: users, metadata, REST endpoints, conditional logic. It’s just that most of us are still thinking in terms of content fields.
We should aim for a baseline that, if your site knows who I am, it should behave like it.
Most websites act like goldfish. Every time you return, it’s like the first time. Shortest memory in the natural world (at least according to Ted Lasso).
But a good site feels familiar. Recognizable. Maybe even a little empathetic.
That doesn’t require a complex recommendation engine. It just means:
Remembering a user’s name
Showing the next logical step
Adjusting copy or layout based on past choices
WordPress is more than capable of this kind of memory. Not right out of the box, to be sure, but the underlying capabilities are floating around in the mix, waiting for you (or some friend of yours) to retrieve them and put them to use. You’ve got users, metadata, cookies, sessions—everything you need.
So the next time someone visits your site, ask: “Does this feel like we’ve met before?”
Logged In?
This should really be the case if they are a user who has logged. Because if they’ve logged in, you absolutely do know who they are. You may very well have asked them about their interests or preferences.
How? With a form, to be sure. I know WordPress form plugins kind of give the impression that no one could make a form on their own, but it’s entirely doable, especially if you keep it simple. Have a look at this video for a good rundown. That said, it’s probably best to stick with a form plugin for the reason that follows:
Just because you have a form doesn’t mean your system knows what to do with it, and this is where things get trickier. You can shortcut the complexity by using a form package that integrates with Advanced Custom Fields. With that integration, you can store data from your forms into custom meta fields you’ve created in your users’ profiles.
Using the Knowledge
We’re still not all the way home with this, because you’ve now got to consider how to use this information. If you want to use it to personalize the user’s experience of your website, honestly, this was something PeakZebra blocks were built to do without extra fuss.
But this blog isn’t really about selling you on PeakZebra (though we hope you’ll have a look). To personalize the site from this point forward, you’ll need to write some code. Probably the simplest way to get something done in this regard is to write some code that creates a shortcode to spit out either the value you’ve stored or variations of text based on the value you’ve stored.
Let ChatGPT Loose on It
This is actually the perfect sort of task to use AI for, because it’s a very self-contained task you’re giving it. It’s easy to test the resulting shortcode to see if it does what you want. It’s very unlikely that it will wind up creating any kind of unexpected side effects, because the shortcode mechanism is pretty well unconnected to the other workings of your site.
Why do you want this kind of site personalization? It’s the easiest, most effective way to show a site visitor that the information you’re presenting is relevant to them and their specific use case. You may have a page that has more or less exactly the same text, but tailoring the headline (“Hot tips for Newsletter Creators” versus “Hot tips for Podcasters”) makes it clear that this should resonate with people who are just like they are.
Want to see an example of this in action? Pop back out to the home page of this site and answer the questions about what kind of creator you are and what platform you use…
If you’re a creator building an audience, platforms like Substack and Patreon may feel like the perfect solution. Yes, there are Substack costs, but they make the process dead simple. Yes, Patreon (and most of the other similar platforms) have percentage-of-revenue costs, but they make publishing simple and help you collect payments without much hassle.
It’s funny with Substack in particular, given that sending newsletters is essentially a commodity service. You can send a weekly newsletter to a thousand subscribers for chicken scratch, so convenience comes at a more-or-less ridiculous price. And if your creative enterprise grows to include other kinds of products–online courses, perhaps–you won’t even enjoy simplicity anymore, not if you try to make the various platforms look like one coherent brand.
The Platform Tax Problem
Substack charges 10% on everything you earn. Patreon takes 8%. And that’s before you factor in payment processing fees (typically 3%).
Here’s what that really means for your income:
$1,000/month on Substack → you lose $100.
$5,000/month on Substack → you lose $500.
Over a year? That’s $6,000 gone—money that could fund your next project, upgrade your tools, or give you breathing room to create more freely.
Or think about it this way: if you throw that kind of money into your retirement account instead of throwing it at your platform for thirty years straight, you can literally retire on the savings.
And It’s Not Just About Substack Costs
When you build your audience on someone else’s platform, you’re renting space. That means:
They set the rules.
They can change the fees at any time.
They control the algorithm that decides who sees your content.
To be honest, I think it’s fine, even necessary, to have a presence on platforms you don’t control. It’s even fine to get the lion’s share of your revenue from one of them.
But you need to have a “center” to your universe that actually belongs to you. Practically speaking, that means you need a website.
If you don’t own your platform, you don’t own your business.
The Alternative: Own Your Platform
Owning your own site means:
No platform tax on any capability you can add directly to your website.
Complete control over your content and pricing.
Freedom to customize your audience experience.
For most creators, that means WordPress, or it should. Yes, there are easy, “drag-and-drop” ways to build websites, but they limit your options. You can build a paid membership site using Wix, but you have to do it in their one particular way. With WordPress you have several well regarded and time-tested options. And not just for membership.
WordPress is the Internet’s Content Management System (CMS) of choice, by the way. Some 40% of the internet uses it. It’s not going to go belly up and leave you trying to claw back your own data.
The WordPress Challenge
That’s not to say that WordPress is without a few downsides. Substack costs you, but not until you try to monetize, but you’ll pay a flat fee for hosting WordPress (albeit a quite low one) from day one. For the most part, these things boil down to this: it’s hard to get started with WordPress and after you get started it can be hard to maintain.
WordPress is very secure, but only if you take the time to keep all your related software on track with a steady stream of updates.
Creators don’t necessarily want to turn into website administrators, but if you’re running WordPress on your own, that’s what happens. Or you can hire an agency or a consultant, but that can seriously undercut the price advantages WordPress offers.
Here’s a friendly admin-area screen. Let the fun begin!
That’s why so many creators stay stuck paying platform fees, even when they know they’re leaving money on the table.
This Is Where PeakZebra Comes In
PeakZebra takes the best of WordPress—ownership, flexibility, full control—and removes the headaches:
Instant Setup: Your site is live in minutes.
Fully Managed: Hosting, security, and updates handled for you.
Ready to Earn: Built-in tools for subscriptions, personalization, and audience engagement.
No coding. No hassle. Just your site, ready to earn from day one.
We’re launching September 15. Early access is open now.
I think the creator business is probably a little confused about itself, about where the edges of what’s a creator business can be found, but that’s fine.
What I like about the general concept is how most creators have some important web and online needs in common. Most other businesses have at least some parts of the same set of needs, but the scale and interconnection of the tools used to address those needs is actually fairly different.
It’s hard to imagine a creator business getting much use out of Salesforce (though no doubt somebody’s about to tell me otherwise). It’s too complex, requires too much interaction on a per client or per prospect basis, and so on.
Alright, maybe there’s even an argument to be made that Salesforce could make sense when dealing with the actual thousand true fans if that’s the way you’re thinking about what you’re doing. But even there I don’t really see it.
Home is where your home page is
You need a web home. You need your own mailing list of prospects and followers. You need a mailing service to get email campaigns sent out, possibly you need a drip campaign type of capability.
You need to be able to keep the books, possibly you need to track inventory, possibly you need to generate invoices. But you don’t, most likely, need the whole kit and kaboodle of a full-blown accounting package (even one targeting small businesses like QuickBooks). You may wind up using some of the more conventional tools, but you’ll just be using the outside edge of what they can do (which includes all the things you don’t need).
You may have paid subscriber needs, or you might want to be supported by a more Patreon-like (pay by the work product item, for instance) approach, and so on.
Build by plugging things together
What you need is a sensible platform where you can maintain your own web presence and, ideally, layer on the tools you need in a way that keeps things minimal and manageable by a solo operator or a small team. Almost all the things you need to do can be handled by a seeming universe of SaaS operations with annual subscriptions, but it you’re not careful you wind up paying a big stack of monthly fees for things that you wind up figuring out how to interconnect into a system on your own.
While PeakZebra’s initial product vision wasn’t targeted specifically at creators, it’s use in the creator economy became increasingly obvious as we moved forward building our toolset. You want newsletter signups, but not lots of extra baggage managing your lists. You’d like interactions with users that let you learn more about them individually, but in a way that allows you to mass customize the content you present each one.
You need subscriptions? We do it by harnessing one of the most-used WordPress plugin options (but you see it as part of our offering–no setting up, configuring, and learning to navigate completely new systems). You need reminders sent to members whose subscriptions will expire soon? It’s in there and it’s dead simple.
We’ve got some things to add before this makes total sense as a use case for PeakZebra, but we’re well on the way, so if you’re a creator, you might want keep an eye on us.
I don’t love the name, but I think the creator economy is a real-enough thing. There are at least a couple million creators on the web, I read somewhere, who make a living at it.
My impression is that they either go with something like Patreon or Substack as a way to platform themselves, or use Gumroad to sell things, or exist more or less entirely on YouTube, raking in the ad money. Maybe you can run your whole shop on Patreon (they’re introducing a community capability, founder Jack Conte even has a whole theory about how this makes sense and indeed, he does make some sense).
Creators and cobblers
It seems like most creators cobble both their online presence, the tools they use to manage that presence, and the back-end tools for accounting and stuff out of various pieces.
I suspect a lot of time gets wasted in the cobbling and the learning involved with these tools. Fact of the matter is, for most creators, they typical tools are just way to feature rich and, as a result, complex.
I’m not a creator in the sense that I’m talking about in this post, but I have done some of my own cobbling, enough to notice that, for instance, Quickbooks is just way, way, way more capability than I need, because all I need is to send out and track a few client invoices. And at nearly $40 a month for Quickbooks, I’m paying way too much for the privilege of letting them email my invoice forms.
So I’m dropping Quickbooks in the new year and the general plan is to eat my own dog food. (I hate that expression, I think because I find life analogies that use food inherently coarse. But I can’t think of a better alternative–send help.) I’ll use PeakZebra to knock out a dead-simple invoicing system.
PeakZebra(s)
Whatever I pull together using PeakZebra, my plan is to evolve PeakZebra to support a “twin site” scenario where one site (PeakZebra.com) is the public facing site and another site (PeakZebra.something_else, presumably) will handle the back end things.
This means that some elements will reside on the front-facing site, things like newsletter signup forms, to pick the simplest example. But when that signup form is submitted, it will be sent via an API call to the PeakZebra code on the backend server. The data from the form will be stored in the backend server’s SQL database, and when it comes time for me to do something with the data stored there, I’ll log in and use apps on the backend, while the front end site hums merrily along.
Enhanced security
With the right setup, this is a more secure approach to managing things like subscriber data, because you can put a lot of controls in place around who access that site than you can on a site that you want anyone and everyone to be able to at least see. And while WordPress is secure when properly configured, it’s safer still if the data isn’t even on the visible site.
We’ll see how this goes–it’s not an immediate priority to have a “twinned” site arrangement, but I can still work on the sorts of simple tools I want, running them for now on PeakZebra.com but eventually migrating the backend stuff to a backend WordPress install.
Is a twin site actually more secure? I think so, but I also think the crux of the question comes down to how secure you think the API calls that the front will make to the back will be. For my money, those can be locked down pretty darned tightly.
You wind up with an arrangement that most attackers won’t have encountered before, with API calls being made from server to server. The attacker will not ordinarily have any way to see the API request data, nor will they be able to see the second server on the net unless they find themselves within a fairly narrow IP address range.
