Mico

I hate CAPTCHAs. And so do your customers ... up to 40% of them abandon a form the moment they see one. But the alternative used to be worse. At one point, my @wpbeginner forms got 18,000 spam requests in a single night. So I tried everything. Honeypots, rate limiting, etc -- they worked for a while until they didn't. There are premium spam tools, but they're often slow & expensive. They flag real people without telling me why. So I asked my team to build something better. It's called ActiveLayer (@activelayerapi) - an AI-powered spam protection that blocks bots without ever asking your real customers to prove they're human. No CAPTCHAs. No tracking scripts. No friction. It runs server-side in milliseconds and returns a verdict with a confidence score, so you can actually see why something was flagged. It works with every WordPress form plugin you already use including WPForms (@easywpforms), @gravityforms, Contact Form 7, Elementor (@elemntor), etc. There's also a clean REST API for everything else, so you can use it on any application platform, not just WordPress. Think of it as a smart security guard for your forms. It welcomes real people, blocks the bots, and never asks anyone to prove they are human. Let's make the web a little less spammy together. Try it free → activelayer.com

Translating my brands with leading SaaS translation tools would have cost us 7 figures annually! For WPBeginner alone, six figures. So last year I tried every well-known WordPress translation plugin instead. Every single one slowed our admin to a crawl. Our post editor was practically unusable. On our WooCommerce / EDD stores, the lag hit the entire checkout. Bad for conversions. Worse for revenue. I kept thinking: why is this so hard? In 2026, AI is good enough that small businesses shouldn't have to choose between site speed and going global. So I asked our team to build the translation platform we actually wanted to use. Today I'm sharing it with you. It's called Universally. AI translates your entire website in minutes. Translations live on our cloud, not your database. So your site stays fast. Often faster, because we deliver from edge servers worldwide. Multilingual SEO is fully automated. Hreflang tags, translated metadata, clean URLs, RTL support. All of it. We've already translated 250M+ words during our private beta. WordPress is live today. Shopify, Wix, Webflow, and Squarespace are next coming very soon. The free plan is genuinely free. No credit card required. You can have your site running in a second language in under 10 minutes. If you've put off translating because it felt too expensive, too technical, or too fragile, this is for you. Try it → universally.com

Celebrating 30 million+ websites using our software 🎉🥳 It's truly an incredible feeling to see the impact our software is making on the web and the lives of our customers. Thank You for your continued support ❤️ of @wpbeginner and my team @awesomemotive. Excited about 2025 and what's to come 😍

NEW: Events & Ticketing Made Easy in WordPress 🤩 My team completely revamped the Sugar Calendar plugin, and the updates are exciting! Check it out: wpbeginner.com/news/introduc… This plugin lets you: - Create & organize events on your site - Display an events calendar on your website (multiple layouts) - Sell event tickets (seamless Stripe integration + @woocommerce support) - Automate your events workflow with @zapier to save time - Add a calendar feed subscription (syncs with Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, and more) - Bonus: Allow others to submit events on your website using the front-end (great for events aggregator type website) You can try the free version here: wordpress.org/plugins/sugar-… Or check out the Pro version: sugarcalendar.com/

It’s quite surreal to type that @WPBeginner turns 15 years old today! I am grateful beyond words for everything the WordPress community have made possible for me, my family, and our amazing team. THANK YOU 🙏 When I first started using WordPress at age 16 (2006), I had no idea where my journey would lead me to. Even when I launched WPBeginner blog in 2009 while in college, still had no idea that I would spend more than half my life in WordPress, but looking I'm back I wouldn't have it any other way ❤️ Like every year, I did a write up where I shared what's happening across our various businesses ... AND shared a major investment that we made which I haven't shared publicly before (TEASER ALERT) -- more on this in the blog post 😀 To celebrate this big milestone, we're doing a MASSIVE giveaway with over $50,000 in prizes. wpbeginner.com/news/wpbeginn… Aside from the giveaway, I shared some personal updates as well as product & investment updates in the blog post. Once again want to say THANK YOU to everyone in the WPBeginner and WordPress community who has supported us in this journey. I really do appreciate you and without you there is no WPBeginner. Looking forward to another AMAZING year ahead, and I have another VERY BIG announcement coming in two weeks 🤩 🚀