Category: Personalization

  • Personalization Isn’t “Dear [First Name]”

    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.

  • Your Site Should Feel Like It Remembers You

    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…

  • The Future of WordPress Is Adaptive

    What we used to call “responsive design” was all about screen size.
    Now, “responsive” should mean adaptive to context—not just devices.

    • A first-time visitor sees one thing.
    • A returning customer sees another.
    • A logged-in user sees something tailored entirely.

    And all of that is achievable in WordPress.

    Adaptivity isn’t about complexity—it’s about relevance.
    The right interface for the right person at the right moment.

    Design isn’t static anymore. Your site shouldn’t be either.

    So how?

    If you’re up for a little coding, it’s not too hard to set up some basic condition/response scenarios. You can ask a question or two to segment your users, store the answers in user meta (using ACF, perhaps), and you just need a bit of code that references those fields and then spits out the needed page content.

    When boiled down to a short paragraph, it sounds fairly easy, but this is not easy for the vast majority of WordPress users.

    Dynamic block bindings will definitely make this a bit more approachable, at least for those using the block editor. The WordPress Block Bindings API, introduced in WordPress 6.5, allows developers to connect dynamic data sources to core block attributes without requiring the creation of custom blocks. This means you can display information from various sources, such as custom fields (including those managed by plugins like Advanced Custom Fields), site settings, or even custom data sources, directly within existing WordPress blocks like Paragraph, Heading, or Image.

    It’s probably no shock to learn that this kind of adaptive behavior is something that PeakZebra’s toolset of block enables. Just using blocks, you can dynamically turn sections of a page on and off. Pretty much any personalization can be achieved with just that one simple mechanism.

    If you’d like to learn more about it, probably your best move at the moment is to sign up for updates on early access, which will be coming along in the next few weeks.

    Sign up for updates on PeakZebra’s early access release.

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