Being a newcomer to WordPress can be daunting, especially when you’re a writer, not a developer, and have no great knowledge of the space. As I started this journey (AKA new job), my imposter syndrome kicked in by reminding me of a scene in Disney’s Tarzan where Kerchak tells Kala: “It’s not our kind.”
I asked myself: Would this outdoorsy forager from South Africa be accepted into this new tribe? This is not to say that I think developers are primates. Actually, hold on — this analogy is failing miserably. Let me explain…
I’m Robert Nolte, a new Digital Copywriter at Freemius, and over the past three months, I’ve immersed myself in the uncharted world (for me) of WordPress.
As I tried to get a grip on the proverbial vines so I too could swing with the devs and other WordPress experts, I realized that WordPress is more than a piece of software, and what truly makes it unique is the diverse community — the tribe — that’s gathered around it. My focus then shifted from software to community; to the creators and makers that drive progress in the space together. Basically, I wanted to get to know you guys as much as possible 
For this article, I’ve curated a list of 53 WordPress experts that showed me their world through the content they share and the tweets they tweet. From entrepreneurs and engineers to founders and pioneers, from writers and podcasters to consultants and educators — this is a comprehensive starting point for new and established WordPress entrepreneurs looking to learn, connect, and make their voices heard.
Ready to meet them?
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Adam Preiser
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Adam is the founder of WPCrafter, and the co-founder of CartFlows. CartFlows is a sales funnel builder plugin for WordPress eCommerce sites, while WPCrafter is a platform that offers various paid hosting subscriptions along with free tutorials, blog articles, product reviews and comparisons, and resources for non-developers. Adam is a natural-born entrepreneur and authority on all things WordPress, as is evidenced by WPCrafter’s YouTube channel which – at the time of writing – has 234k subscribers and almost 20 million views. Adam tweets about his own business developments and sparked an interesting conversation about why especially experienced WordPress developers are not taking kindly to Gutenberg.
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 Adam Preiser
WPCrafter
CartFlows
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Adrian Tobey
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In 2018, at only 21 years of age, Adrian founded Groundhogg, a “marketing automation and CRM for agencies and small businesses using WordPress”, which today services clients that include WooCommerce and Amazon Web Services. Adrian is also the CEO of three plugins: MailHawk, FormLift, and WP Simple Chat. In addition to his success on the WordPress business front, he offers coaching to freemium WordPress plugin developers and companies who are looking to scale their businesses and glean valuable insights from new entrepreneurs like him. This young hotshot is making some serious waves in the ecosystem by paving the way for the next generation of WordPressers. Namely, by introducing tools and solutions that focus on web optimization by improving user experience, and exploring the possibilities of how data is protected and regulated by companies as a business avenue in and of itself. His journey as one of our WordPress experts to follow online is very much worth watching on Twitter.
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Adrian Tobey
Groundhogg
MailHawk
FormLift
WP Simple Chat
Coaching
WordCamp
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Alain Schlesser
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Senior Software Engineer at XWP, Maintainer at WP-CLI, WordPress Core contributor, Software Engineer and Consultant at Bright Nucleus, and Google Developers Expert. Alain started his career as a government agent in prison administration. Today, he has more than 25 years of experience working with various platforms and programming languages and is part of a subset of WordPress experts in software engineering (or as I like to call it, ‘really complicated stuff’). Alain is the lead contributor to the WP-CLI (WordPress command-line interface), a toolkit that speeds up workflows and introduces automation to building for advanced development teams. In this recent podcast interview, he talks about the toolkit’s roadmap over the past year and discusses how current issues around so-called backward-compatibility are being addressed. Check out this thread where he enquired about what makes WordPress users mad, and this one about a book that he strongly recommends for Google software engineering.
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Alain Schlesser
WP-CLI
XWP
WordCamp
WordPress.org
Google Developers Experts
Bright Nucleus
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Andrew Palmer
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Andrew is the founder of WP Plugins Plus, a company that does custom website and plugin development. He is also the co-founder of Bertha.ai, which is described as “the world’s first AI-based writing assistant that helps website owners to generate content that is engaging, creative and converting within WordPress” (and leaves this writer feeling slightly disconcerted *gulp*). He is a passionate WordPress speaker, coach, and advocate, and is also the host of Agency Radio, where lovers of music, WordPress, creativity, and web development can listen to his daily playlists and occasional live talk shows. Andrew is a well-known WordPress expert in the ecosystem and regularly tweets about updates, announcements, interviews, blogs, and podcasts that you’ll want to know about.
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Andrew Palmer
Bertha.ai
GridPane
WP Plugins Plus
Agency Radio
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Birgit Pauli-Haack
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Birgit works as a Developer Advocate at Automattic, and is the editor and publisher of Gutenberg Times, a publication that covers news and developments around all-things Gutenberg and the WordPress Block Editor. She is also a co-host of Gutenberg Changelog, a podcast that informs “designers, developers, DIY site owners and consultants” about the “newest features, community voices and designs of Gutenberg”. Unsurprisingly, her Twitter account is always up to date with new developments in WordPress and Gutenberg, which is why you’ll want to take note of what she’s posting about if you’re serious about Full Site Editing (FSE).
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Gutenberg Times
Automattic
Podcast
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Bob Dunn
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Somewhat of an enigma in the WordPress universe, Bob Dunn — known around the web as BobWP — is a former design and marketing agency owner who has dedicated the last thirteen years of his career to helping people get to grips with WordPress. Bob is the brains behind Do the Woo, a platform dedicated to helping the WooCommerce community via mini-tutorials, a blog, and a podcast where he interviews successful WooCommerce and WordPress experts ranging from business owners in the CBD and cannabis industry to passionate open-web and open-source experts.
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BobWP unplugged
Do the Woo
Podcast
WordCamp
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Brian Gardner
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Principal Developer Advocate at WP Engine, creator of Frost — a new FSE theme — and founder of very recently launched design studio/creative workspace Minimologie. Brian is a talented WordPress designer and developer, so it’s no wonder he’s passionate about innovating with the Block Editor. His crisp, modern approach to WordPress website layouts — I mean, just look at this — seems to be a prophecy of where the platform is headed from an aesthetic perspective. Moreover, his tweets convey a positive attitude about the industry and give valuable insights into opportunities worth exploring.
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Brian Gardner
WP Engine
Frost
Minimologie
WordCamp
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Bridget Willard
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Bridget describes herself as a self-confessed Twitter nerd, marketer, copywriter, product owner, keynote speaker, author, and CEO of her eponymous marketing agency. She’s also Chief Marketing Officer for Gatsby WP Themes and presents the Launch With Words podcast, which focuses on conversations with small business owners around the world about the importance of marketing and digital. The podcast supplements Bridget’s WordPress plugin of the same name, which “merges the experience of a small business writer with blogging prompts to help clients publish a blog post once a month.” Did I mention that she’s also written no less than six eBooks on business and marketing? Bridget is an authority on content marketing and social media, and understands how this knowledge and expertise translates into the WordPress ecosystem, which rightfully earns her a reputation as one of this list’s WordPress experts. If you want to learn about getting your name out there as a WordPress solopreneur, check out what Bridget is tweeting about.
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Bridget Willard
Gatsby WP Themes
Blog
Tech Blog
Podcast
eBooks
WordCamp
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Carolina Nymark
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Carolina is a WordPress Core contributor at Yoast and owner of Full Site Editing, a platform dedicated to revolutionizing how end-users use themes and how developers build them by utilizing features such as block themes, template editing, site blocks, and global styles. In this tweet, she shows how you can add patterns to your theme with WordPress 6.0. This recent thread she started about a comment on GitHub that says themes should not include their own patterns illustrates why she rightfully forms part of important WordPress experts to follow online. Her passion for Full Site Editing and blocks coupled with an open-minded approach means that she is eager to spark productive conversations between developers and designers about the future of the ecosystem.
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Full Site Editing
Yoast
WordCamp
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Dan Maby
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As per Dan’s WordPress profile, he is “a Director at Blue 37, a UK-based web design and development agency, and the founder of Big Orange Heart, a registered non-profit that supports and promotes positive wellbeing and mental health within remote working communities.” Big Orange Heart is a peer-support community that offers resources like live events, a blog, podcast, and live chat support. It’s also championed by big names in the WordPress ecosystem, such as GoDaddy and Bluehost. Dan’s updates about his day-to-day WordPress life receive plenty of engagement — like this one about the joys of traveling to WordCamp Europe 2022 — and he frequently sparks conversation by posting about the community.
A quick aside: I mentioned that I’m an outdoorsy kinda guy, which is why my remote job ticks many boxes — mushroom hunting or fishing before work, anyone? But I’ve also learned that having limited social interaction five days a week can take its toll, which is why being mindful of mental wellbeing is crucial to sustaining working from home or (occasionally) a seaside cottage in the middle of nowhere. Connect with Dan and Big Orange Heart on Twitter — you owe it to yourself.
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Dan Maby
Big Orange Heart
Blue 37
WordCamp
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Daniel Schutzsmith
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With a background in design, code, and strategy, Daniel has worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council and Amnesty International USA. Today he is a designer, developer, and entrepreneur, a Website and Digital Project Manager for Pinellas County Government, a producer at The WP Minute, and a WordCamp and Meetup organizer. Forming part of a veteran group of WordPress experts, Daniel tweets openly and honestly about coding (his code has been described as ‘chaotic good’). Have a look at this one about margins and padding not being available for every block in the WordPress editor. Also check out this tweet where he describes what he does professionally.
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Daniel Schutzsmith
The WP Minute
WordCamp
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Dave Rodenbaugh
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Dave is the founder of Validar and Recapture, two SaaS products operating in the eCommerce space. Validar addresses the issue of unvalidated shipping addresses and helps “stores of any size across all major platforms (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, and more).” Recapture addresses the abandoned cart problem in eCommerce stores. Dave presents the Rogue Startups podcast with Craig Hewitt, which is about their experiences and lessons learned as two founders. Dave tweets about developments and his own exploits in SaaS and eCommerce and shares personal content such as this GIF about his daughter making a peanut butter, spinach, and pineapple smoothie yum  .
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Validar
Recapture
Podcast
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Florian Daugalies
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Florian — known around the web as flowdee — is a developer, entrepreneur, and creator of the Amazon Affiliate for WordPress Plugin and MH Themes. He actively tweets about his journey as a bootstrapped plugin developer, making him a valuable source of information (and inspiration) for anyone looking to get into the business. Have a look at this tweet, which sparked plenty of conversation after Florian announced that he still runs his WordPress websites on PHP version 7.4. Why? Because he doesn’t trust that version 8 is compatible with the plugins he’s installed.
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Flowdee
Amazon Affiliate for WordPress Plugin
MH Themes
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Igor Benić
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A self-taught front-end developer with experience across HTML, CSS, jQuery, JavaScript, ReactJS, PHP, MySQL, and WordPress. Igor discovered WordPress a few years ago and has since used it to build themes, plugins, and custom solutions. Over the years, he’s made his blog a popular home to business and development-related WordPress topics, with several eBooks focused on using WordPress, WordPress Customizer, WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and Freemius. He also offers paid and free courses for WordPress and WooCommerce, as well as members-only webinars on using JavaScript and AJAX in WordPress. As a passionate freelancer and developer, Igor freely shares his knowledge about being a successful solopreneur and regularly offers insightful coding and WordPress tips on his Twitter account.
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Igor Benić
eBook
Webinars
Podcast
Learning Centre
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Jack Arturo
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Jack is the founder of Very Good Plugins, a company that owns and manages six “handcrafted code products for WordPress”, including WP Fusion. WP Fusion has been hugely successful as a no-code solution that connects WordPress sites and plugins with CRMs and marketing automation systems. Jack has been involved with WordPress for more than ten years and has spent the last several of them as a digital nomad. As of late, his blog has focused mainly on the Block Editor, which is why he is one of our WordPress experts to follow online. He’s also been lamenting the need to constantly update WordPress since the release of 5.0 and Gutenberg, as shown by his reply in this thread.
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Blog
Very Good Plugins
WP Fusion
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Jack Kitterhing
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Jack’s currently the Product Manager at LearnDash, an LMS (learning management system) plugin that powers “learning programs for major universities, small to midsize companies, startups, entrepreneurs, and bloggers worldwide.” Jack has experience in product to marketing, software development, quality assurance, and level 2 support. He blogs about business and software, and tweets about updates at LearnDash, developments in the WordPress community, and insights about doing business in the tech startup space.
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Jack Kitterhing
LearnDash
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Jason Cohen
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Founder of WP Engine and SmartBear. In addition to his success as a serial entrepreneur, Jason has been writing about startups for the past 15 years and is highly influential on the topic of development. Check out this tweet about an article of his on what he refers to as “exponential hypergrowth.” According to Jason, exponential hypergrowth is misleading since even companies that experience a hyper-fast growth rate — like Facebook — don’t actually grow exponentially.
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SmartBear
WP Engine
Blog
WordCamp
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Jennifer Bourn
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Jennifer is a micro-agency owner with 23 years of experience across various fields. She uses her experience in graphic design, web design, and copywriting to build brands, create content, and grow profitable online platforms for successful freelancers and small businesses. Most importantly, she specializes in creating unique branding for her clients’ businesses and offers interactive workshops — called content camps — about brand messaging, website copy, and content marketing strategies. Jennifer blogs and tweets about how solopreneurs and businesses can harness their content to drive greater engagement, like this one about using internal links to optimize your website’s SEO.
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Jennifer Bourn
WordCamp
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Joe Casabona
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Joe has 20+ years of experience as a web developer, 16+ years of experience with WordPress, and has been in the podcasting game for over seven years. He owns Good House Media, a company dedicated to technology and education. Oh, and he also holds a Master’s Degree in Computer Science and has taught at college level for more than 11 years. Did we mention that he’s published four eBooks too? In his podcast — How I Built It — Joe interviews WordPress experts, YouTubers, influencers, and other digital creators and entrepreneurs about how their ventures succeeded. Each episode zooms in on a specific topic that’s relevant to other creators and small business owners to ultimately help them drive sales. He also owns Creator Courses, which offers courses and toolkits to its members to help them optimize their content offering.
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Joe Casabona
Good House Media
Creator Courses
Podcast
WordCamp
Hands-on Workshops by Joe Casabona
eBook
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Lesley Sim
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A self-confessed active Twitter user, Lesley is the co-founder of Newsletter Glue, a WordPress plugin that helps users create newsletters with minimal effort. Lesley was a speaker at WordCamp US 2021, and regularly blogs about entrepreneurship, business, and online networking. She has a refreshing, straight-shooting approach to her tweets, like this recent one where she comments on the WordPress Project’s problematic leadership structures that often delay releases.
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Blog
Newsletter Glue
WordCamp
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Maarten Belmans
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Maarten is the founder of Table2Site — an invite-only, code-free website building platform that was recently acquired — and creates and sells WooCommerce plugins via his online shop Wombat. His own Twitter bio states that he “tweets about growing SaaS, and a WooCommerce business.” Check out this thread where Maarten discusses how he learned WordPress plugin development.
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Studio Wombat
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Matías Ventura
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Matías is an Engineer at Automattic and the Lead Architect of the Gutenberg project in WordPress. I don’t think I need to clarify why you really, really need to follow the guy who is shaping the future of WordPress development and design as we know it.
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Matías Ventura
Automattic
WordCamp
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Michelle Frechette
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20+ years of experience in higher education, owner of a web design and marketing company, Head of Customer Success at GiveWP, and Director of Community Engagement at StellarWP. Michelle has been a speaker at various WordPress conferences in North America. She is also co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, a company that helps individuals from underrepresented groups find jobs in tech. Females, people of color, LGBTQIA+ individuals, older professionals, people with physical disabilities, and neurodivergent individuals all form part of Underrepresented in Tech’s database.
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Michelle Frechette
Blog
StellarWP
Underrepresented in Tech
Podcast
WordCamp
Coaching
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Miriam Schwab
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Miriam is the CEO and co-founder of Strattic, “an all-in-one static site generation and hosting platform that instantly optimizes WordPress by converting it to a static architecture.” She is a static WordPress expert, as well as a highly successful entrepreneur in the ecosystem. In an interview with Freemius, Miriam speaks about discovering WordPress, starting Strattic, and shares her thoughts on the future of WordPress products. Where does she see the ecosystem going? “As long as WordPress continues to innovate, particularly on the user experience side of things, it will continue to lead the website space. The community aspect of WordPress is critical to its continued success. There are all sorts of new website builders and approaches popping up all the time, but without the massive community of builders and developers, like WordPress has, they don’t really stand a chance of getting close to WP’s market share.” Her company, Strattic, was just acquired by Elementor – congrats Miriam!
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Strattic
WordCamp
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Munir Kamal
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In addition to creating and managing several WordPress products, Munir is involved with Gutenberg Hub, a web resource that features tutorials, tips and tricks, blocks, patterns, news and updates, and other resources to help users learn about the Block Editor. If you’re interested in working with the Block Editor, be sure to follow him on Twitter to get tweets like this one about a new app he created that “lets you easily create full-page layouts using patterns from the official WordPress Patterns library.”
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Munir Kamal
Gutenberg Hub
ACF Blocks
CakeWP
Divi Sumo
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Nick Diego
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Developer Advocate at WP Engine and creator of the Block Visibility and Icon Block plugins. Nick is also part of the WordPress 6.0 Release Team and recently posted this tweet in reply to Joost de Valk’s semi-controversial article about WordPress’s shrinking market share. The reasons according to Joost? A lack of innovation and the lagging Full Site Editing project. Right now, the Release Team drastically needs more help from the community. If you have any expertise to contribute and you’re keen to get involved, go give Nick a follow. Even if you can’t contribute to the project itself, Nick imparts valuable insights about where the WordPress ecosystem and software are headed.
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Nick Diego
WP Engine
Blocks Visibility
Icon Block
WordCamp
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Patrick Posner
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Patrick is a solopreneur who builds static, security, and WooCommerce extensions. He also publishes weekly tutorials on WooCommerce, WordPress, and his own plugins. If you’d like to learn more about static WordPress specifically, tutorials like this one are a valuable resource to have on hand. Keep an eye on this WordPress expert’s Twitter account for interesting new product updates 
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Patrick Posner
Tutorials
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Paul Charlton
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Paul is the owner and presenter of WPTuts, a platform with more than 700 free tutorials on WordPress, Elementor, Advanced Custom Fields, Crocoblock, dynamic web design, and more. WPTuts forms part of the PsmegTV group (also owned by Paul) which provides free, high-quality training videos on various software topics. Paul is ultimately the go-to guy if you want to learn about using WordPress, but his tutorials also provide helpful reviews on various WordPress products. Check out this recent tweet about Spectra for WP, a Gutenberg plugin that speeds up website building with advanced and powerful blocks. Specifically, Paul discusses why Gutenberg should take note of products like this if it is to address the shortcomings and problematic features that are frustrating a large proportion of the WordPress community.
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WPTuts
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Pavel Ciorici
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Pavel is the owner of WP Zoom, a company that builds premium WordPress plugins and themes, with Recipe Card Blocks being the latest addition to its collection. He has also authored more than 100 premium WordPress themes. As a business owner who is flourishing by creating block-based themes, checking out what he’s up to on Twitter is well worth it if you’re a solopreneur who’s trying to gauge the future of WordPress products.
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Pavel Ciorici
WPZoom
Recipe Card Blocks
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Sabrina Zeidan
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Performance Engineer at XWP, Content Team Lead at WordCamp Europe 2022, and organizer at WordPress Kyiv. Her WordCamp involvement means that she has her finger on the pulse of developments in the WordPress community and ecosystem. Sabrina is passionate about speeding up WordPress websites, as is evidenced by the videos she publishes on her YouTube channel about her free WordPress plugin, SpeedGuard. She recently shared this talk by Daisy Olsen, which is about building a fully functional theme in two hours with Gutenberg. Sabrina is also a Ukrainian who regularly shares updates on the situation and how she is supporting her country.
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Sabrina Zeidan
XWP
WordCamp Europe 2022
WordCamp Kyiv 2019
Speedguard
WordCamp
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Vito Peleg
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Vito’s a former international rockstar (yep, really) turned co-founder and CEO at Atarim, an “agency management system dedicated to web design and development”. Vito is a brilliant product marketer who managed to launch a plugin and make over $100,000 in 30 days He often tweets about his journey of growing a SaaS product, as well as his latest venture Bertha.ai (yes, the one that makes me worry) which he co-founded with Andrew Palmer. Needless to say, Vito is a pretty interesting dude.
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Atarim
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That’s a wrap!
Hanging out on Twitter and exploring the online world of these WordPress experts reminded me of the value of networking. It also drove home why being part of the conversation is vital for WordPress entrepreneurs to stay in the loop and push progress in the space.
But even more importantly, the tweets and updates showed me what WordPress is really all about. It is a community of builders, makers, movers, and shakers, many of whom are determined to help make the web a better place for everyone. It’s a community that feels passionate about working together and sharing ideas to advance software and technology.
I hope that this list will not only inspire new and established WordPress entrepreneurs to get involved, but also realize that making their voices heard by offering helpful contributions and insights is the way to pay it forward.
If you want to swing with the best and join the tribe of WordPress experts — it can be as simple as posting a tweet ?
