WordPress wins top CMS + outreach fails attention spans

How many pings do you receive daily?

I got over 850 push notifications alone in the past 24 hours.

If you’re using Android, there’s a log under “Notification settings” that gives you a real breakdown per app.

• 497 emails.

• 125 slacks.

• 38 Google now.

• 53 vibers.

and dozens more across WhatsApp, LinkedIn, calls and texts, voice wake ups, Chrome, Outlook.

I’ll touch on the principles of ignoring noise with journaling (thanks to WordPress) further in the email, but let’s start with outreach and cold emailing first.

🏆 Note: We just won the Pagely Performance Optimization award!

Outreach efforts disappear among the constant interruptions

I wrote about attention spans last year after a long and busy year with the European football tournament, the Olympics, the presidential noise in the US, wars news, tension around layoffs and many more.

But despite the seasonality, adults often juggle with busy schedules - between work and family errands, shopping, kids or elderly parents, upcoming celebrations or holidays, travel plans, taking care of houses/cars/insurance, health check-ups, plans with friends, PTA meetups - where does that end?

I’ve been running around all month between major work events for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Christmas school celebrations, multiple renovations at our building, office Christmas party, family arrangements for the holidays, a rough wisdom teeth surgery I went through 10 days ago, contract renewals and staffing for Q1, and consistently ignoring the hundreds of promotional emails, texts asking to meet, discount FOMO direct messages, robocalls and AI voice memos on Telegram.

And yours truly is contributing to this conversation:

Outreach campaigns forget that receivers are humans

Whenever I discuss low LinkedIn reach, lack of responses in email campaigns, or ignored direct messages and texts, I always bring up the human conversation in the mix.

Cold callers/emailers/texters aren’t blasting career professionals with nothing better to do during their business hours.

Receivers are:

• Workers worried about their jobs in a realm of mass layoffs

• Founders trying to secure payroll or funding in a down market

• People with relatives in insecure areas going through military cycles or protests or strikes

• Folks stuck at airports during a handful of different travel disruptions (from strikes to software malfunctions to weather crises)

• Parents running around kids and juggling with parenting and flus

• Sons and daughters taking care of elders

• Neighbors dealing with miscellaneous items and communal operations

• Friends helping others out (moving out, buying or driving or assembling furniture, assisting with personal drama)

• Concerned citizens following the news or participating in local events

• Community members involved with hobbies, team sports, group hikes

• Travelers trying to squeeze some time and mix in life, work, and tourism

No wonder do most emails and texts fall on deaf years. Climbing up anywhere high enough on the priority list to receive attention is harder than ever.

This is how AI accelerated that slop-ness that was already through the roof in the levels of spam online. Robocalls and high-volume spam existed well before the LLMs era. Now we’re adding more of that, plus social programmatic content and even AI comments, completely ruining both SEO and social in one go.

If 15 years ago tech was king in products were still innovative and disruptive, now that’s commoditized in favor of groundbreaking discoveries and distribution.

Owning distribution is the ultimate moat. This is why I prioritize events with active audiences, and meetups with active communities, and interviews at newsletters/podcasts/media networks with active readers and listeners.

And platform-wise - WordPress is still king

And distribution is still best managed via a web system - with WordPress just winning the charts in yet another study.

Especially with the demise of social networks across most B2B channels, the open web is just sitting on top of the food chain.

Cloudflare runs a year in review and analyzed the top 5,000 domains, with WordPress discovered on 47% of them.

I may be biased as a WordPress contributor myself, running a company that has scaled some of the largest web properties online (on WordPress), but most stats you’ll find clearly state that 40%+ of the web runs on WordPress.

I was even involved in pushing 2 patches to the WordPress AI SDK a few weeks back - since AI integration adjacent to the WordPress core is getting closer to reality, too. With MCPs available to integrate in WordPress systems, used as a control center, a power house, a common implementation scenario over the past few years.

Where does WordPress stand in 2026?

When I first discovered WordPress in 2006, it was a blogging platform, slowly progressing toward a CMS. After its core CMS phase, it was advertised as an “application framework” at a San Francisco event (a keynote by Matt Mullenweg), undergoing through the REST API phase and the Gutenberg transition in the past few years.

While the open web had been challenged by hosted SaaS and site builders, and free content itself challenged by AI scrapers and programmatic content (and AI search now), finding the golden balance will be closer to normality in the next 12 to 36 months.

Meanwhile, platforms and principles have been “disappearing” forever.

• “Social was king” when Facebook was rising in 2014

• “SEO is dying” has been going on for ages, especially as paid ads started to ramp up

• “PHP is dying” I’ve been hearing for 15 years as well, even though it’s still powering WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Laravel, and a handful of top profile websites

• Audio search is killing text, I recall my first Alexa device and Google Assistant-supported headphones about a decade ago (never happened)

• Video is killing text (due to Gen Z and browsing behavior - and granted, it’s becoming more prevalent, but not nearly as much)

• The Metaverse promised virtual worlds (we even build 360 interfaces for Oculus on top of WordPress)

For a deeper dive on what the foundational future of WordPress looks like from a co-founder’s perspective, watch the latest State of the Word by Matt from earlier this month.

And personally - as a founder of a WordPress-powered RevOps agency, a business advisor with 25 years in tech, and an investor in AI startups - WordPress can and will absolutely shine in:

1. Serving as a protective mechanism against fears of private SaaS companies - for data privacy reasons or fear of disappearing, expensive licenses, random regulations (banning and blocking sites), just as social media accounts or gmails are occasionally getting banned beyond recovery (or hacked for good)

2. Solving enterprise-grade problems with data ownership and self-hosting, adhering to regulations on data access and privacy

3. Protecting against unpredictable LLM behavior with non-deterministic actions from vibe coding or platform leakage (lack of established boundaries or frameworks to follow basic security protocol or accidents)

4. Building on top of an already leading community (about 10X ahead of competitors), with hosting companies, plugin and theme developers, businesses working together to ensure integrity and consistency in web solutions

5. Defining web standards as was the case with different principles around responsive web design, accessibility, or the REST API

6. Serving as a control center / master dashboard between other systems, consolidating data with existing solutions like Google SiteKit, integrations with CRMs and ERPs, and additional MCP-driven solutions within the core WordPress platform

Bottom line, WordPress isn’t going anywhere. What the future web will look like and how future generations will operate are still up for discussion. I’m waiting for a couple of pairs of XR glasses for starters, since “browsing from a smart watch”, a fad that was also promoted many years ago, didn’t materialize either.

What are you betting on for the future of web?

Mario

👨‍🏭 10 vibe coding lessons for non-developers - since tools like Lovable and Replit make app/platform development easier on the surface for non-engineers to “vibe code” with plain English, here’s my top 10 list of lessons.

💼 Hiring Marketing and Account Managers in Sofia - we have several open roles for account and marketing managers, if you’re in Sofia, check this out.

🏴‍☠️ Your career will go smoothly if ROI is your North Star - most of the caveats with job loss and fad companies is about chasing unrealistic goals in shady or funded companies. Tracking down ROI is easy - it’s a matter of prioritizing professional development and following public data.

 Books I read this month

• “The Algebra of Wealth” by Prof. Scott Galloway (65% in)

• “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz (80% in)

• “The Sweaty Startup” by Nick Hueber (85% in)

• Ray Dalio’s “How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle” (55% in)

• The FP&A Handbook: Mastering Financial Planning & Analysis (40% in)

• “Revenue Architecture” by Jacco van der Kooij (55% in)

• “The Sales Acceleration Formula” ✅ 

• “Hooked” - on habits and cues and product alignment ✅ 

🔖 Faster sentiment analysis shapes brand strategy. Learn how a hybrid AI approach is helping teams speed up insight generation while preserving nuance.

🔖 Real-time tools help spot brand risk early. Use these online reputation systems to reduce damage from emerging customer complaints.

🔖 Stakeholder alignment improves delivery success. These engagement strategies help tailor messaging across executive and frontline levels.

🔖 SAFe rollouts often stall without leadership clarity. This guide to addressing transformation barriers shows how to streamline value delivery.

🔖 Software isn’t a tool, it’s the operating model. This view argues software-centered work is outperforming isolated pilots.

🔖 Co-ownership forces objectivity in media. The AP’s structure shows how a shared ownership model can limit bias through design.

📰 Conduent breach exposes SSNs. More than 10 million people are impacted in the latest breach disclosure.

📰 Governance becomes AI scaling hurdle. IT operations gains run into policy gaps in governance focus.

📰 Enterprises rethink cloud AI placement. Hybrid and cost controls shape deployments in cloud findings.

📰 Confidential AI emerges as adoption barrier breaker. Vendors pitch privacy-first deployment paths in trust layer.

📰 Cloudflare flags 2025 internet shifts. Traffic, bots, and PQC adoption appear in trend list.

📰 Google says AI search still follows SEO basics. Content quality stays central in exec comments.

📰 Lightspeed closes $9B across new funds. Capital targets expensive AI bets in fund raise.

📰 Nvidia buys SchedMD and ships Nemotron 3. Open offerings expand for developers in release details.

📰 Global M&A hits about $4.5T in 2025. Regulation and cash fuel consolidation in deal totals.

📰 Workplace AI use spreads unevenly. Nearly half of U.S. workers now use it in industry snapshot.

Let’s see the latest offers from Flippa. Don’t forget to sign up for their newsletter for daily/weekly/monthly offers like these.

Eyewear eCommerce Brand: An eight-year-old, multi-channel eyewear store selling via Amazon, eBay, and Shopify with 64% profit margins. Strong SEO and advertising potential make it an attractive buy - priced at $289,216.

Electronics eCommerce Brand: A four-year-old store leveraging LinkedIn-driven growth to deliver $12K monthly profit at 32% margins. Known for stable performance and efficient operations, it’s available for $299,997.

Custom Print eCommerce Brand: A high-margin online printing business with Fortune 500 clients and $500K annual revenue. No paid marketing and multiple growth levers make it a rare find - selling for $946,500.

Trading Education Business: A reputable high-ticket coaching operation generating $28K in monthly profit and fully systemized for scaling. This established brand is offered at $1,200,000 (reduced 50%).

Talent Booking Marketplace: A five-year-old platform connecting fashion models and creators with top brands, driving $3.4M GMV and zero marketing spend. Profitable and retention-driven, this business is listed at $3,810,000.

Working with me

Here are the main initiatives I focus on:

🌐 Scaling $50M - $500M+ companies on top of WordPress. DevriX provides full RevOps consulting + delivery with GTM enablement for PE-backed portfolio companies, traditional tech, healthcare, finance, and professional service businesses pacing toward revenue growth initiatives. Our standard monthly retainers between $10K and $100K include revenue lifecycle services for marketing and sales leaders, FP&A for financial teams, pipeline enrichment through websites and dozens of lead sources, automations and delivery integrations, CRO and ongoing testing, product delivery and platform integration solutions, and more through our consulting solutions.

🚀 1:1 Consulting. At Growth Shuttle, I run two popular plans: Async Advisory ($3,500/mo) for $5M - $50M founders and executive teams and the smaller Strategic Growth Circle ($997/mo) for $100K - $1M entrepreneurs, agency founders, and scale ups.

📈 Building US LLCs from Europe. I help European and Asian founders scale faster through doola and their “Business in a Box” model. Also suitable for US citizens (given their bookkeeping solution), but in very high demand across Europe.

📊 Post-Merger Integration. I support M&A initiatives through Flippa’s marketplace. Working closely on PMI initiatives for PE companies and fast-growing startups integrating new companies within their portfolios, enabling data pipelines, and securing more deals through my personal network.