Kinsta®

Did you miss Marcel's impactful session at WordCamp Europe? The full recording is now live! In his talk, "Open Source is Democratic Infrastructure - Support it!", Marcel dives into why investing back into open-source is an essential business strategy, not just a goodwill gesture. Discover how we can better support the contributors who keep #WordPress running. Watch the full session on YouTube and join the conversation: https://lnkd.in/gaUydyaB #WCEU #OpenSource

Most bot policies are written once and forgotten. But traffic patterns have changed. GPTBot grew 305% between May 2024 and May 2025. AI crawler traffic also moved from 2.4% to 6.4% of all HTML requests in that same period. So if your bot rules were set in 2023 or early 2024, they were built for a different web. Our AI and bot traffic report can help you review what to allow, restrict, and update. ⬇️ https://ow.ly/YfuI50Z3OHQ

Bot traffic is getting harder to make sense of. AI crawler behavior has changed quickly, and the simple “block the bad bots, allow the good ones” approach doesn’t always hold up anymore. That’s what we’ll dig into during Kinsta’s free live event on June 24, based on our 2026 bot traffic insights report and more than 10 billion requests across WordPress sites. We’ll talk through what’s changed, what’s actually causing performance issues, and how to think about blocking, allowing, or managing crawlers more carefully. Bring your questions for the live Q&A. 💡 Register here: https://ow.ly/lRrZ50Z9Hf5

At the start of 2025, 1 in 200 web visits was an AI bot. By year-end: 1 in 31. We analyzed 10 billion requests to understand what that shift means for site performance and what to actually do about it. Join Kinsta CTO Daniel Pataki for a free live discussion of the findings.

"Free to download is not free to maintain." 💡At #WCEU, Kinsta’s Marcel Bootsman took the stage to address the number one systemic threat to the WordPress ecosystem: contributor burnout. Supporting open-source maintainers is strong strategic risk management for every business built on WordPress. To ensure sustainable infrastructure, Kinsta backs this up by: ⏱️ Pledging 282 paid hours every week 🤝 Sponsoring 27 WordPress contributors Marcel’s Challenge: Look at the open-source tools your business relies on daily. Consider sponsoring a contributor to keep our collective ecosystem stable and secure. #WCEU2026 #WordPress #OpenSource #Sustainability

If you run a WooCommerce store, your bot problem is different from everyone else’s. And usually worse. Static content sites can absorb a lot of bot traffic because most requests hit cached pages. The cost per request stays relatively low. WooCommerce does not work that way. Some of your most-visited pages are also your most expensive: → Cart and checkout pages create sessions on every visit, even for bots that will never buy → Filtered product pages can generate near-infinite URL variations that bots treat as unique pages → Add-to-cart endpoints trigger PHP execution and database queries every time In one case, we saw 3.75 million add-to-cart hits from a single bot in 24 hours. That is roughly one request every 23 milliseconds, all day and all night. And every request was treated as new and uncached. The fix is not to block everything. It is path-level control. Let crawlers access the product pages where visibility matters. Restrict them from cart, checkout, and other paths where they create cost without creating value. More detail in the report ⬇️ https://ow.ly/J8Gf50Z3Ozr

Watering the garden: Why we must sponsor open source. Last Friday I was on stage at WordCamp Europe, where I shared a message that is very close to my heart: Open source is democratic infrastructure, and it is our collective responsibility to support it. During my talk, I asked the audience a simple question: Do you make money with WordPress? If the answer is yes, then we must acknowledge a critical truth: while #WordPress (and other Open Source software) is free to download, it is not free to maintain. I often compare our ecosystem to a shared community garden. We all enjoy the space, but if no one steps up to water the plants or fix the fences, the garden will eventually disappear. Currently, much of the modern web relies on "hidden giants", critical tools often maintained by just a handful of people. Relying on volunteer labor for professional-grade infrastructure is not just unfair, it is a systemic threat to our industry. At Kinsta®, we view sponsoring contributors not as charity, but as insurance. It is a strategic investment in the survival of the ecosystem we all rely on. We currently sponsor 27 WordPress contributors and pledge 282 paid hours every week to ensure this work is sustainable. You don't need to sponsor dozens of people to make a difference. My challenge to you today is to water just one seed: Sponsor one person who maintains a tool you use. Pledge one hour of contribution per week or month. Support independent publishers who cover the project. Code builds the product, but community builds the future. If you and/or your company are ready to start sponsoring or have questions on how to begin, I'd love to hear from you. #WCEU #WCEU2026

When bot traffic spikes, the instinct is to block everything. That can backfire fast. One team we spoke to blocked an aggressive crawler and lost 30% of their referral traffic in two weeks. They had no idea the two were connected. That’s the risk because not all bots are bad bots. Googlebot alone accounts for around 4.5% of all HTML traffic and crawled 11.6% of unique web pages in 2025. GPTBot, by comparison, crawled 3.6%. Blocking Googlebot to reduce server load can hurt the very visibility your site depends on. At the same time, 80% of AI crawling activity is purely for model training and sends no referral traffic back to your site. So the real question isn’t “should we block bots or allow bots?” Instead, it’s “which bots should access which parts of our site, and under what conditions?” That’s where smarter bot management starts. More here ➡️ https://ow.ly/5skZ50Z3Osk

WordCamp Europe 2026 in Kraków was awesome! Countless WordPress conversations, great connections, new ideas, and plenty of laughs at the Kinsta® booth. It was fantastic catching up with familiar faces and meeting so many passionate people from the WordPress community. A huge thank you to everyone who stopped by to chat. See you next year in Málaga! 🚀 #WCEU #WordPress #Kinsta #WordCampEurope