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.