Osom Studio - WordPress and WooCommerce Agency

What took you here won't take you there After coming back from WordCamp Europe I had to digest for a while what I heard and felt. I've been reading attendees' posts here on LinkedIn about plugin studios losing sales even though everyone was radiating optimism outside. Only when you talk in private and poke deeper does the nervousness show. A typical encounter: Me: -Hi XYZ, how are you? Him/Her: -Great! -How's business? -Very good -Hm… then why have you lost/fired 5%/8%/30% of the headcount? (nah, I am not rubbing any wounds today) Me (instead): -What are your [product/service] plans for the near future? -We are planning to… To say the conference was dominated by AI would be an understatement. One thing is that there were a dozen AI-focused talks, and the other is that you would barely talk about anything else in the corridors. And this brings me to a proverb as old as the history of entrepreneurship: What took you here will not take you there. 1. If you are a plugin studio with a plugin that contains logic/functionality that wraps up in a couple of dozen lines of code, then get prepared to be replaced by an AI-generated solution by someone who just wants to get their problem solved. They will not plough through a plugin repository with 60k plugins and sort out which one is supported, which is buggy and which is already abandoned. 2. The other group of affected plugin businesses may be vendors of „All in one" a.k.a. HUGE plugins. Trying to cover too much. People will drop them in pursuit of performance and intentionally replace them with their own vibecoded subset, or will never learn about their existence because of point 1 above. We know about it very well at the agency level, because salvaging hopeless websites is what we specialize in. We would typically inherit an ecommerce platform of a big manufacturing company and (among many different things) replace many bloated plugins with lean custom code that matches the required logic. Not a line of code more than strictly necessary. What now? The only thing that works for us as an agency so far is deep specialization. We have this deep expertise in building WordPress platforms for deep tech, manufacturing and consumer electronics companies. We understand their processes, problems and challenges and solve them with WordPress. Unless you choose narrow but deep, you are indistinguishable from every other Joe, and by definition you will be indistinguishable from the AI slop. Or maybe even worse, because your human errors will be cute but not so easily fixable with a prompt ending in „make no mistakes". And not only is tech stack expertise important, but so is the understanding of the sector you serve. We've been building this expertise since 2011, but we made a bet and narrowed it to only tech industry 6 years ago. It has worked great ever since. I want to leave you with this seed of an idea: what if my business could be expertly positioned in WordPress for X industry?

WordCamp Europe 2026 in Kraków is a wrap, and it was a good one. Best venue, energy on the corridor, food and stuff. A dozen AI talks on stage, even more AI in the corridor conversations, which is where the real program happened anyway. Our co-founder Maciej Nowak came back with one observation that stuck: the mood on stage and the mood in private conversations don't quite match. He wrote down what that gap means for plugin businesses and for agencies like ours.

Three days to WordCamp Europe 2026 - Kraków, June 4-6. The Polish WordPress community has home-court advantage this year, and a few of us from Osom will be there for all three days. We're as interested in the hallway track as in the schedule itself - these events are where most of the real WordPress conversations happen anyway. On our agenda: Gutenberg performance work, security sessions, anything on the future of the block editor. If you're going and want to talk WordPress takeovers, code audits, WooCommerce performance, or just compare notes between sessions - DM us or drop a comment here. Coffee's on us. https://lnkd.in/gWQJZbaS #WordPress #WordCampEurope #WCEU

A natural question with any multi-theme WordPress setup: "do I need a plugin, Multisite, or custom development?" Honest answer: depends on what you're actually separating. If you have one WordPress site with one content and admin model, but selected pages, post types, URLs, or shop sections need a different theme, a per-page theme plugin is the right size of tool. If you need separate sites with their own admin areas, domains or subdomains, content ownership, and per-site theme management, you're in Multisite territory. And for the edge cases - frontend per-user switching, serious A/B testing, performance-aware routing, or theme rules tied to business logic - custom development is usually cleaner than forcing a plugin to behave like an application framework. We built Multi Theme Switcher specifically for the first scenario because we kept hitting it on client work: one WordPress installation, multiple visual rules, no need to split the site into a network. If that sounds like your situation, give it a try:  https://lnkd.in/dgUZD3hM #WordPress #OpenSource

When a 25-year-old US B2B news platform came to us with Google flagging the site as slow, the first instinct was to scope a rewrite. We didn't. We ran a 60-page audit instead - security, caching, PHP blockers, theme debt, performance bottlenecks - and that audit became the engineering plan. Eight weeks later, mobile LCP is at 2.49 seconds, which means the site has crossed Google's 2.5s "Good" Core Web Vitals threshold for real Chrome users. 15× more readers are landing on fast-loading pages than at the audit baseline. Active users, page views, and events are all up 40%+ in the same window. Google Search Console shows zero URLs in the "poor LCP" bucket. No rewrite, no migration, no CMS swap. What we keep finding in these audits: a stack that worked five years ago and then quietly stopped working as hosting moved, PHP versions changed, and plugins kept getting installed without anyone owning the whole picture. The path to recovery starts with diagnosing what's still load-bearing and what's drag - and that takes auditing, not rebuilding. Full walkthrough in the carousel, including the client's own words on slide 9. Link to the full case study in the first comment. #WordPress #WebPerformance #CoreWebVitals

A pattern we often see in WordPress site takeovers: the plugin ecosystem grows without an owner. Two to three years after launch, the site has 20+ active plugins. Some were installed once for a one-off task and never removed. Several duplicate functionality of another plugin or something WordPress core already offers natively (classic: two redirect plugins running side by side). A few may still be active in production even though nobody remembers when they were last reviewed. Nobody did anything wrong - after go-live a website stops being a project and becomes a system, and a system without a clear owner drifts faster than anyone notices. Quick check, 5 minutes: go to Plugins → Installed Plugins, filter active plugins, and ask for each one you don't immediately recognise: who uses it, what breaks if it is disabled, and who owns the license or account behind it. If three or more answers come back as "not sure", the site has started its post-launch drift. More on what happens to WordPress sites after launch: https://lnkd.in/det9G8ka #WordPress #WooCommerce

We're sponsoring WordCamp Europe 2026 in Kraków, June 4-6. 2500+ people, three days at ICE Kraków, the biggest WordPress community event in Europe. If you're going - let's meet up. Drop a comment 😊 #WordPress #WCEU26 #WCEU #WordCamp

Łukasz just published a summary of all 12 talks from #CheckoutSummit 2026 in Palermo. Osom Studio sponsored the event. Looking back at the two days - the talks, the hallway conversations, the format itself - that turned out to be a good call 😉