#184 – Rachel Cherry and Alex Aspinall on the State of WordPress in Higher Education

Transcript

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the state of WordPress in higher education.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Rachel Cherry and Alex Aspinall.

Rachel is the founder of WP Campus, a nonprofit organization she launched a decade ago to support professionals using WordPress in higher education. Under her leadership, WP Campus has become a community hub, hosting conferences, and leading research projects tailored to the unique needs of its members. Currently, Rachel serves as the organization’s Director of Technology, and sits on its board of directors where she continues to drive innovative projects.

Alex is part of the globally distributed team at Human Made, an established WordPress Enterprise Agency founded in 2011. At Human Made, Alex helps deliver large scale web platforms for major organizations, including names like Harvard, Standard Chartered and PlayStation. In recent years, Alex has developed a strong interest in how WordPress can uniquely serve the higher education sector, and he’s become especially passionate about exploring and supporting this use case.

During the podcast, we get into the story behind WP Campus, which has for the past decade been empowering people who use WordPress in colleges and universities. We explore Human Made’s growing interest in the complexities of higher education projects, from large multi-site networks to the strict accessibility and governance requirements such projects increasingly require.

The heart of the conversation is the just released State of WordPress in Higher Education 2025 report. We dig into the reports key findings, such as the slow adoption of the block editor and full site editing, the challenges of managing hundreds of university websites with small teams, and why enterprise level tools are in such high demand.

Whether you’re a WordPress professional, agency, educator, or are just curious about the unique needs and opportunities the higher education space offers, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Rachel Cherry and Alex Aspinall.

I am joined on the podcast today by two fabulous guests. I have Rachel Cherry and Alex Aspinall. Hello both. How are you doing?

[00:03:36] Rachel Cherry: I’m lovely, Nathan. How are you?

[00:03:38] Nathan Wrigley: Good, thank you. And Alex, you all right?

[00:03:40] Alex Aspinall: How are you doing? I’m great.

[00:03:41] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. So we’re going to be talking today about the higher ed space, the higher education space, and WordPress. Specifically about WP Campus. In order to establish both of your credentials in this space, I wonder if we could get a little biography from you both, maybe 30 seconds, something like that, just explaining who you are, where you work, what your connection is to WordPress and specifically WP Campus.

So let’s go with Rachel first, if you don’t mind.

[00:04:05] Rachel Cherry: Hi, yes. So I am the founder of WP Campus, which has been around 10 years as of last month, which is kind of wild. And so we are a nonprofit organisation that supports people that use WordPress in higher education. And we host conferences, we host research projects like the one we’re going to discuss today.

So currently I am just one of a board of directors and I’m the director of technology specifically, but I was the lead for this project.

And then by day I am the accessibility developer at the University of Rochester. And so I’ve worked in higher ed and other enterprise organisations for the last 18 years.

[00:04:43] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. That’s great. And Alex.

[00:04:46] Alex Aspinall: I mean, I have way less credentials in terms of my WP Campus presence. I work for Human Made, which is an enterprise WordPress agency. We’ve been around since 2011, I think.

We’re a globally distributed team, people across all continents. And we specialise in building larger scale web platforms for organisations such as Harvard, Standard Chartered, PlayStation, few other names I could throw in there.

We also have an enterprise hosting solution too. We, probably about a year, two years ago started, well, I personally started becoming really interested in the higher education use case for WordPress. I think it’s really interesting. I think it’s quite unique. And that’s really why Rachel and I started speaking, I don’t know, maybe 18 months or so ago, and that led us to I guess this podcast.

[00:05:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. So the podcast is going to be framed around a freely available resource, and it’s called The State of WordPress in Higher Education. I will link in the show notes rather than try to butcher a URL in an audio podcast. I’ll link in the show notes over at WP Tavern to that and you can freely download it.

It’s billed as a research report in the year 2025. I confess, I don’t know if you did a 2024 version and beyond, but we’re going to concentrate on the 2025 version.

But I guess some more preamble, I’m afraid, but I guess we probably should establish what WP Campus is. And I just want to be clear, we recently released an episode about WP Campus Connect, and so I just want to draw a distinction there. These two things are not the same thing.

So I’m going to toss that one to Rachel. Will you just tell us what the endeavor is at WP Campus, why it was set up? What need is it trying to satisfy?

[00:06:22] Rachel Cherry: Yeah, so about 10 years ago I was working in higher education, building WordPress websites, and I wanted my own community. And I was going to a lot of WordCamps and no one was talking about the work that I was doing, the kind of work that I was doing. There wasn’t a space for my kind of work at camps at the time and so I started this organisation.

And so for the last 10 years we have worked to build a community of people, of like-minded people, that are using WordPress to support the mission of higher education. And we support each other with professional development, with resources, with connection, and every now and then some advocacy. Years ago we raised funds to do the audit of Gutenberg, accessibility audit to be more specific.

And so because accessibility is very important in our space, and here was this editor coming round going to cause a lot of change, as it has, and there was this huge unknown of whether or not it was accessible. And that was a very big deal to our group. A lot of our group has policies and such. And so every now and then we do work like that.

This type of research is very important to our mission as well, to provide data, to provide insight to our community members and our institutions.

And I think one of our kind of ideals that we stand on is that we want to give people data to inform their own decisions, kind of like with the editor audit. Like, we didn’t tell people it was inaccessible or accessible, we gave them data so that they can decide for themselves. And so this research, you know, is a big part of that as well.

There’s a lot going on in our community right now. And we wanted to pull out this data, and one of our objectives was to better understand the needs and challenges of people using WordPress in higher education.

[00:08:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you for that, Rachel. I’m going to advise that everybody goes over to the following URL. In fact, pause the podcast right now. If you’re sitting at a computer or you’re on your phone, go to wpcampus.org and over there you’re going to be able to see more about the mission.

At the moment, the membership numbers are displayed on the website. Whether or not that’s true when you visit, I don’t know, but 1,763 members, 688 institutions. That is an impressive number, by the way. I mean, the membership is great, but the institutional count is utterly fabulous. That’s really impressive.

But the idea is to juxtapose WordPress and higher ed. We don’t really use that word in the UK too much. We just kind of generically call things, I think university, so I just want to clear that up. Does higher ed basically service the needs of anybody that’s left traditional school? So I don’t know, 18 plus who’s going through some degree program or something like that?

[00:08:58] Rachel Cherry: Yes. Our mission is really to support kind of that, and I apologise, I can’t think of the general term. There’s a kind of a general term that we do use across, that’s more of a global, because higher ed is very specific to the United States in a lot of ways.

So we do support kind of that further education. We do have a lot of UK institutions and universities that participate in the work that we do. I would say that our group is largely United States, a lot of UK, a lot of Canadians as well. But we do have folks from all around the world. So it’s really just that spirit of wanting to support that mission of education.

Over the years have had a lot of people, even in the kind of K through 12 or early education people, wanting to be involved. And a lot of the things that early education and higher, or later, education have in common, but they’re also very different. So we haven’t quite merged with the early education group in that way. But yes, we do support largely this kind of university, higher education context.

[00:09:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. Yeah, that clears that up. I mean, you’re really busy over there. You’ve got loads of, I mean, an awful lot going on. There’s a whole thing about governance. You’ve got a newsletter, you put on real world events as well as online based events, and a Slack community. And there’s just a lot going on. It seems like, I don’t know if this has taken over your life, but it seems like it could well have done.

[00:10:17] Rachel Cherry: It did for a long time, and these days I have a lot more help. For a long time I was really the only director and then a few years back we did the work to implement more of a fleshed out kind of board of directors. And so I’m just a member of that board now. I am not the director in charge.

[00:10:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, all of that, again, is freely available on the website. You can see who the current custodians of the project are.

So where does Human Made, Alex, where does Human Made fit into this piece of the puzzle? How, have you become involved?

[00:10:45] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, I guess it goes back to what I was saying a little bit before about, I was just personally really interested in the higher ed use case of WordPress, and started digging around into learning a bit more about what kind of projects people had on the go, and what kind of platforms were being built in the space. They’re diverse, they’re complicated, they’re multi-site, you know, interesting, I guess is why I started getting involved.

Human Made is one of the agencies that builds complex, larger projects, so there’s a fit there as well. So we started looking around the space, seeing who it might be interesting to talk to, just in terms of learning a bit more. Obviously Rachel and WP Campus. We started talking informally about just the experience of being in WordPress in higher education.

I think the first thing we collaborated on over a year ago now was we did an online conference in the run up to WP Campus’ IRL conference a couple of weeks later. And then after that we enjoyed working together, we thought there was a lot more material we could work on, and this research project, I suppose was the biggest idea that came out of those discussions following that.

[00:11:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So I’ve downloaded the report and I’ve had a thorough look through it. There’s an awful lot in here actually. It is available, like I said, I’ll link to it in the show notes. However, I have to say, it’s a very graphical thing that we’re going to be talking about. There’s loads of charts kind of explaining the percentages in many cases of one thing versus another. So you will probably get more out of this podcast if you have downloaded it, and had a little peruse.

It doesn’t really matter who wants to take this, but I’m going to ask one of you to sort of explain what are some of the curious findings that you’ve got? Maybe the one, two, or three top level items that you think might be of great interest, and then we can maybe dig into the weeds of those particular things. So anything that your intuition suggests as something our audience might be interested in.

[00:12:32] Rachel Cherry: I’ll start with like my key takeaways, which are very broad, and then dive into a few of the data points. But my two key takeaways that I reported on was that our higher ed teams need more resources, and a way to share more resources, and that higher education needs more enterprise features in the WordPress product. Those were kind of my two, like looking at the data, my two takeaways. And at our report presentation that we had recently, we talked about that with folks in the community.

But some of the really interesting questions that we asked were around usage of the block editor and full site editing. And so nothing super surprising. But let me pull up that particular chart really quick.

So we asked folks, how fully have you adopted the block editor and full site editing? And only 40% of the respondents are using it on all of their sites. And there was a range there. Like we asked, are you using it on all of them? Are you using it on like most of them? Alex touched on this earlier, higher ed is a very interesting space, and the thing that I, people used to hear me say frequently was that WordPress and higher ed is WordPress in the enterprise on a budget. And what that usually means is a lot of under-resourced teams having to use WordPress to solve these large scale enterprise, high user environments.

What comes out of that is very creative, very custom, very interesting, complex solutions. This is kind of tying back to my takeaway of people need more resources and they need ways to share them. Because something that is also interesting in our space is how much custom work there is. How much people are solving the same problems, but they’re solving them on their own, and they don’t have a way to really share them. It takes a lot of energy to like maintain a public plugin that gets used around. And so because these plugins are usually so custom that creates this whole challenge.

So anyway, back to the block editor. So when you’re trying to introduce new functionality in these complex enterprise environments, it can take a while. Higher ed is usually, it’s usually a pretty slow train of adoption, and there are reasons. And a big reason for that is resources. And you’re not just going to turn around and add the block editor on because you’re probably managing like 300 websites, and you can’t just change the editing experience without changing all of your training materials, and without changing your governance.

So yeah, so there’s context to why, and there’s lots of reasons. There’s other reasons that we don’t really dive into in these numbers, but there’s context that goes into why only 40% are actually using it on all their sites, even though Gutenberg came out in 2019.

[00:15:28] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask you a quick question? You said something which took my breath away there. You said these people are managing probably 300 websites. I didn’t see that in the report anyway, and that seems like a really surprising number. How does that map to an institution? Is it because there’s a website for, I don’t know, the geography department, and then there’s another one for the sociology department? Is that what’s going on there? Because 300 seems like, well, I mean you could run your entire agency and not have 300 websites under your custodianship. So what’s going on there? You dropped that number and I was really surprised by it.

[00:16:01] Rachel Cherry: Yes, in higher ed, there is a website for everything. And there is the notion of, if you’re familiar with domain of one’s own, which is a concept actually introduced in, or invented in, higher education in the States. And what it really means in our context is that people will set up WordPress multi-sites and then let people create their own sites on it.

And they’re largely blogs, like a faculty member’s blog or a research lab’s blog. But it’s a way to allow the sharing and the spreading of information and research in higher ed with kind of a low service effort.

So like you can log on and you have like two template choices or two theme choices, and then you’re responsible for kind of managing a site on there. And then they try to, you know, build this domain in a way that’s kind of reusable code and plugins, like you do in WordPress. So yeah, you can get a lot of sites going.

[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s absolutely fascinating. I hadn’t really thought about it as, well, for example, if I go to a university website here and I end up at the Department of Geography, I’m kind of thinking it’s the same website, but I imagine, you’re right, it’s a whole different team of staff that are logging in and doing the geography stuff than they would be elsewhere.

Okay, so that’s curious. Right, back to the points that you mentioned, the resources. When you say that universities, I’m just going to use the word university, when you say that these institutions have limited resources, it kind of feels like the funding model in the US is very different to one that we have in the UK, and possibly different parts of the world.

And it always feels as if the US institutions probably have more money, but I’m probably thinking of things like the Ivy League universities where the fees are very high, but that probably doesn’t map all over the place.

So when you say resources, are you talking about cash, them being strapped for cash, or are you talking about human beings? You know, there’s not enough boots on the ground, if you like, or maybe it’s a confection of both.

[00:17:50] Rachel Cherry: Probably both, but largely headcount. I mean every university or institution’s different and some might actually be more cash strapped than others. But it’s largely a headcount. It’s largely the fact that in a lot of these institutions, you’ll have a web team of like three people managing 300 websites. And what that means, how they have to kind of manage how they spend their time and what they do with it.

[00:18:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so it’s a bit of both. There’s less human beings than there might be in the corporate space, but also they’re probably fairly strapped for cash.

And then moving onto the block editor, I’ll come to you in a second, Alex, if that’s all right. But staying with Rachel for a moment. I’m looking at the chart now, 40% adoption of the block editor entirely, using them on all the websites, so point four, 40%. Then we drop down to 23% using it on some of them. 19% using on most, and then the last one really of interest here is 16% who are not using the block editor at all.

Has that adoption just sort of slowly ramped up, because 40% in higher ed feels like, to me, it doesn’t seem like a bad number in all honesty. I know that in the real world probably it is higher adoption than that, but I’m guessing that there are many more constraints on universities just switching out to the block editor. So is that number slowly but inexorably rising? It feels like it’s going in the right direction, but with the caveats that it has to happen slowly.

[00:19:11] Rachel Cherry: We don’t have data from the last, you know, four or five years to truly answer that question. But the vibe, or the sentiment, in our space is that, yes, it’s been slowly increasing. And part of that is just people, you know, there’s lots of factors, right? There’s people waiting for maturity. They’re waiting for it to grow more before they adopt. Or because of said resource discussion, people are waiting for the next redesign, for example.

In our space, I think we even asked, how often do you redesign? Is one of the questions that we asked in our survey. I think it’s on average like every three years or so, three to five years, something like that. And so people in our space tend to wait for that to really implement large scale changes because it’s just easier to do it then than it is, you’re already doing a bunch of work, you might as well do it then. And so that’s another factor involved.

[00:20:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there’s a little corollary to the chart that I’ve just described, underneath it, where the question was asked, how long did you wait before implementing the block editor? And basically the data skews towards, we’re trying to wait as long as possible. You know, more than two years is 35%. So it feels like, because of the nature of the audience, and I guess accessibility is a really crucial part of this, you’ve got to put the brakes on. You can’t be all that agile in the same way that maybe a corporate would, because you’ve got lots of stakeholders, lots of editorial teams that need updating and so on and so forth. So that’s kind of interesting.

And then I know that you didn’t mention this, Rachel, but it’s tantalizingly underneath the question that has just been mentioned. We move on to full site editing and it feels like, whoa, the brakes are really on for that. 62% of respondents said that they’re not using full site editing at all, and the numbers are kind of into low single figures where they’re describing whether or not they’re using it on all their sites.

So the block editor, in terms of content creation is on the rise, but it would appear that full site editing, the ability to, you know, modify themes and customise that kind of thing inside of WordPress, not so much. It feels like the breaks are really on there, probably as a result of the resources that you mentioned earlier.

[00:21:15] Rachel Cherry: It’s probably following the same trajectory. Full site editing is newer and it will grow with time. But I think with full site editing, it’s very similar concerns to the block editor, but it’s more about governance and control. When you do set up these WordPress websites where you do have a lot of governance over accessibility or over branding, it’s really scary.

The full site editing without fully understanding what it does, and how you can control it and set boundaries, there’s that concern about governance of, we don’t actually want people using our websites to be able to customise the site. We want a lot of control over that, most of the time, not everyone, but most people. Because in our space, a lot of the users that are coming in and kind of admining their site, or editing their site, are not trained web professionals. They are biology professor who’s kind of doing job as needed.

And so we want them to have flexibility to go in and publish content. We want them to be able to share their research, share their information, but we don’t want them to be able to have free reign to kind of break our governance rules, and potentially create risk to our brand or to our accessibility and things like that. And so the full site editing, there’s a lot of people that are kind of hesitant and being patient for the full site editing implementation.

[00:22:43] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you for that. So we’ve got a picture then of how WordPress is deployed. It seems like it’s the CMS of choice over in the education, higher ed landscape anyway.

So moving over to Alex, I’m talking more about the implementation of this now. Presumably agencies such as yourself, Human Made, you are getting requests from these institutions to build these websites.

How does that process work? Do you generally tend to work with like the web team over there and you, you know, backwards and forwards with them? And then the bit that I’m most curious about, talking about what Rachel just said, how on earth do you get these people so that they can use the website that you’ve built? Because, in many institutions it may be one or two people have got their hands on this, but it sounds like there may be several hundred people who need to access the WordPress website. So training.

So there’s two parts to that question really. How are you interfacing in terms of building the things when you are approached by these institutions? And then how do you get to hand it off and provide a good level of support and training to them?

[00:23:37] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think the main back and forth we have would be with, typically the web team of course, as you guessed there. I think each institution is set up differently. I think Rachel probably could testify to the fact that, you know, the challenges and benefits of being set up one way is not mirrored and how it’s done elsewhere. So I do think agencies generally have to be flexible, and work within the parameters that they’re asked to, you know, that’s kind of our job.

I think there are also, particularly with the biggest implementations in higher ed, there’s often other agencies involved or other specialists involved as well. You might be working with someone, you know, we might be bringing design and platform expertise and you might be working with someone that’s looking after the marketing and the wider brand of the university as well.

So I think there’s quite a lot of collaboration indeed, like the amount of time I’ve spent within higher ed, I think collaboration is a really big theme, and I think that the successful projects that we see getting delivered are very collaborative in nature.

And then yeah, in terms of training and handover, I imagine on the ground in the universities in question, they have a bigger challenge than perhaps we do, because we’ll be handing it over to a smaller percentage ultimately of the wider institution. We don’t run 300 separate training sessions or anything like that. We provide detailed documentation, videos, follow up sessions, and we make sure that the team that are receiving the product are fully versed in it.

I think a lot of the time those people are. I think it’s handing it over to the editors that then the work will have to be done on a one-to-one basis in terms of what they’re allowed to do, going back to the FSE point. Not everyone can edit everything.

[00:25:08] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of curious because when I see a website for, again, I’m going to use the word university. When I see the website for university, I’m just seeing this kind of brochure site, really. In other words, here’s the university, look at all the magical things that we do. But my daughter has just been at university, and there’s so much more to it than that. So there’s like this portal where my daughter goes, logs in, and now the expectation is that much of the work will be carried out in that format. You know, you’ll submit content, there will be lesson plans and all of that kind of thing.

So essentially the question is leading me up to, what kind of things are being built into this website apart from the public facing bit, which we might call a prospectus, really? You’ve got this online prospectus, the world can see it, we can marvel at how great the university is, but it seems like there’s a heck of a lot more. Each department has its own stuff. Presumably the students, increasingly being expected to log in, especially post COVID, I imagine as well. So again, that one probably to Alex. What kind of curious things are built inside these WordPress websites, LMSs, brochure sites, and so on?

[00:26:10] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, I mean, no, you listed off a lot of the options there really. I mean, the main three or four pages you might think of as being the university site are very much that, just the brochure. But there’s all kinds of different requirements for different departments. We’ll have different kinds of products that they want to build in there. You’ve got archives of hundreds and thousands of different reports and pieces of information from the past that will be needed to be upheld.

We rebuilt Harvard Gazette, which is, you know, obviously part of the wider infrastructure at Harvard. So that’s a massive publishing site. That’s essentially the same as any magazine or newspaper would have. It’s what it is. As you say, the student logins, all the complexities of multi-site. Rachel, I’m sure you’ve probably got a list longer than that.

[00:26:53] Rachel Cherry: It’s a lot, right? In my role as an accessibility professional, do a lot of governance work and it’s trying to tie together all these different types because there’s WordPress at my university, but there’s tons of other stuff. There’s front end brochure websites, and there’s research lab sites, and there’s marketing websites, and then there’s all the academic focused, as Alex mentioned a few. There’s a lot of web applications. There’s a lot of people doing a lot of different types of content in different ways. And how does that all tie together?

We talk a lot about things like data sharing and a lot of the work that we do is also just trying to keep all this content in sync and trying to not have duplicates or not have outdated content, things like that. So when we talk about governance is like a big word that means a lot of things to different people. But a lot of it is really just kind of managing quality and the expectations of how websites are managed and how our mission as an institution is kind of presented to the world.

So it’s interesting, Nathan, that you say, like to you, it’s like you just see this brochure site, and that’s a common conversation about kind of the challenges of enterprise. We have all this internal knowledge and we also have, you know, there’s a funny common conversation in universities about acronyms. We have all this internal terminology that we use, but does that come across to the end user? Does the work that we do translate? And it’s a complicated question to solve.

[00:28:22] Nathan Wrigley: I’m kind of curious as to whether or not WordPress can service the needs of the entire IT department, if you like, within a higher ed institution. So I’m imagining that the legacy is that there’s many, many pieces of software that are being used throughout the university. You know, there may be some sort of portal where people log in and check in that they’re actually at work. There may be other things where people log their essays that they supply to their tutors and things like that. Plus then there’s the brochure on the front end.

I’m curious as to whether or not WordPress in the future can handle most of those, and whether there’s an appetite from the higher ed institutions to have everything in one platform. They may see that as, you know, maybe that presents an Achilles heel to them. If there’s one systemic failure, then the whole thing goes down. But I’m curious as to whether or not WP Campus is trying to pitch WordPress as the answer to all the things, or is it a much more limited subset of things? You know, it’s the website, and it’s the LMS and that kind of thing. So that’s more of a kind of roadmap question, whether you’re trying to push WordPress as being the answer to everything.

[00:29:20] Rachel Cherry: As an organisation, we don’t really push for WordPress to be used. It’s not really our mission. That’s not how we think or how we work. It’s really more just to support people that have, that are using it, and to help each other in our roles.

To answer your broader question, I mean I kind of, it depends. Can WordPress be used for all these things? Sure. I’m sure you could finagle it to do a lot of things. Should it do all those things? Probably not. Not in its current state, no. It, in and of itself, is a database with programming and you can get it to do all kinds of things.

[00:29:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there was one of the questions which I’ve just refound and it was, what challenges do you face with the WordPress plugin ecosystem? And bloat was one of the things that was mentioned. So yeah, this is specifically to do with WordPress plugins. It’s not WordPress Core. I thought that was kind of curious.

And then in second place, just by a whisker, was accessibility requirements as well. And you’ve touched on accessibility a lot, Rachel. You’ve mentioned the word tangentially, and obviously that’s your kind of area of expertise.

I’m guessing, but I’m not sure for certain, does the US compel certain things to be done in certain ways? You know, if you’re a university and you launch a website, does it have to comply with things? And do those things map across the globe? I know that we’ve got the European Accessibility Act, which just dropped earlier this year. So the question is pretty broad, but just tell us about the accessibility requirements and how stringent they are in higher ed as compared to just, I don’t know, if I’ve got a brochure site online selling widgets into the community.

[00:30:51] Rachel Cherry: So unfortunately the US does not have as strong accessibility laws as Europe does, or many countries in Europe, like the UK and others. We do have some though, and we do have something called section 508, which basically means that if you receive federal funding or federal service, you do have to meet certain accessibility requirements.

And so universities in the US largely fall under that. Not always. Universities are probably the only real kind of ecosystem in the US that does have more accessibility rules than other industries like general business. And so that’s why we did that accessibility audit of Gutenberg to help support our community in that time.

And so it is very important, accessibility is very important. And it kind of touches on something that I said earlier about, a lot of universities in the US especially build custom plugins because they have to meet accessibility guidelines and it’s really challenging sometimes to find general use plugins available in the ecosystem that meet those guidelines. And so a lot of teams just kind of build their own stuff.

And so I would say that those top two challenges, when it comes to bloat and accessibility are really, like that was not surprising in any way. That is the common struggle. It’s finding plugins that meet our accessibility requirements, especially with the front end. And then having plugins that do a lot of functionality that people don’t need. And so I think a lot of these times will lend people to kind of build their own plugins.

They won’t rebuild like complicated plugins, any kind of administrative plugins or like form builders and things like that. Like, people largely will use plugins from the ecosystem. But there’s a lot of custom functionality in the work that we do.

So once again, I think the common theme is it’s complex, and because of that complexity, there’s all kinds of interesting challenges. And so plugins are hard to kind of maintain. It feels like, I hear a lot of people expressing to me, you know, how often they have to kind of update them and keep them up to date, and manage and do all that. And so it’s not enough to stop people from using WordPress, like they’re using it, but having better solutions for some of these challenges would be an example of kind of supporting these higher ed institutions using WordPress.

[00:33:12] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Alex, back to you. A question around just higher ed in general, is this like an area which Human Made is drilling down on? Is this an endeavor that you are trying to grow the pie, if you like? There’s thousands, I would imagine, maybe tens of thousands of institutions which come under the banner of higher ed. And at the moment, I don’t know what percentage of them are using WordPress. If we were to ask every single one of them, I would imagine it’s a significant percentage.

But the idea of WP Campus, I guess, is to have a central place where people can go and learn about it. And Human Made being involved, presumably there’s some advantage to you as an enterprise agency. The question basically boils down to, is this an area that you are going to be working on, pitching towards, trying to grow in the near future?

[00:33:55] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, for sure. I think like I said at the start, we’re generally the kind of agency who works on larger platforms, maybe more complicated platforms. And I think we’re interested in, you know, a broad range of industries. Probably higher ed is one of four or five, probably publishing, finance, enterprise generally, entertainment, higher ed. I think those industries tend to provide very interesting use cases for WordPress. We’re interested in all of them.

I think we’ve seen, in the last couple of years, a lot of interesting higher ed projects being worked on by us and obviously by lots and lots of other people. And yeah, like we’re definitely part of that world, and really interested in it and, you know, yeah, definitely keen to continue being part of it, a hundred percent.

[00:34:45] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting, towards the bottom of the survey, so right near the bottom, probably nine tenths of the way through, there’s a whole series of kind of roadmap questions, if you like, things about the future of WordPress. And the fairly, I don’t know, blunt question, let’s put it that way, because it could have gone in the other direction it turns out, it’s hopefully gone in the right direction, but the question was asked, would you move to another CMS if you had time and resources?

And gosh, that could go the wrong way. The answer was a strong 49% no. Which, when you say it like that you think, hang on, only half of the people wouldn’t move. But then you ask, then the other bit was only 23% are looking to move at all, and 28% are unknown. So really you’re up into the sort of seventies really, who either are not sure or want to stick around.

That seems like an amazing statistic to me. And obviously, Human Made have kind of put their flag in the ground in higher ed, WP Campus, the same. It feels like you’ve got quite a lot of runway with these institutions in the future. Unless things go horribly wrong within WordPress, it looks like you’ve got an audience long into the future.

[00:35:43] Alex Aspinall: I think the report offers a really positive view of WordPress. As a technology choice, I think on the whole, most people are saying it was delivering what they needed it to. I can’t remember if it’s 70, 75%, something like that, it was said that it was either meeting or exceeding their expectations, which I think is a large number. Again, it’s not like 90, but if you think about the amount of ways you can complain about software, particularly people that know a lot about the software, I think 75% is pretty good.

And yeah, you’re right, whilst people are perhaps saying, oh, they’re looking around or they’re always considering alternatives, I think we’ve seen repeatedly that the platform, its security credentials, its extensibility, some of the core features, are all spoken about really, really favorably from the people that responded to the survey.

And I think really we saw a passionate group of people responding to a technology they know a lot about. There are a lot of ways it could improve, we all know that, and the people that completed the survey know that as well, and they’ve, you know, they weren’t shy about listing them out. But I think you’re right, overall, the level of satisfaction is good, and I think with further adoption and the adoption of newer features, I think that that satisfaction should continue to grow.

In fact, one of the things I was actually kind of wanting to ask Rachel actually was back to the point about FSE earlier on. I actually think WordPress needs to do a much better job of marketing itself, particularly around newer features, and particularly perhaps at the enterprise level, or where there’s complex use cases, or where a lot of the users aren’t developers. The benefits of FSE, for example, are numerous. And we’ve seen clients and indeed we’ve used it ourselves, and the people using it really like it, and I think that’s reflected in the report as well.

So I was going to ask Rachel, as well as the other examples of why adoption might have been slow in higher ed, do you think that there’s actually a case for people in, maybe agencies, maybe WordPress Core doing a better job of the selling and the pitching? Because I actually believe that there are worse solutions that do a better job of convincing people that they should work in a certain way.

[00:37:51] Rachel Cherry: I think there’s always room for more marketing and kind of communication about what’s going on, and there’s always improvement for that. And I do feel like Core could do more towards the enterprise ecosystem as well. That, you know, I don’t know what their primary use case that they’re focusing on is. But I would be surprised to find out that enterprise is higher up on that list. And so paying attention to our community and having open conversations with them, and there has been some efforts at that. There’s not like a non amount of effort on that.

But yeah there’s, I think a good way to kind of describe how a lot of our community works is just kind of, it’s cautiously optimistic, but cautious. And having to manage risk and having to manage their time and energy, and so they’re not going to jump into anything. They’re going to do a lot of research. They’re going to try to find out who else is doing it, and is it working well for them?

So there’s a lot of, we do a lot of case studies and try to encourage our community to share about the work they’re doing. Because really that goes a long way too. If a university sees another university using full site editing and that it’s successful, then that goes a long way.

And when you have an absence of that, when you have an absence of examples, then it’s a struggle, right? Because our environment is so complex that an article about full site editing and what it can do doesn’t really go super far. We need to understand, not just what it does, but the long-term implications. Because once we implement it, that’s it. It’s very hard to back up, especially in our, these 300 website multi-site instances where we’ve got to train people and do all these things. We can’t rush into it.

So there’s a lot of cautious waiting and seeing. So the more that universities can share about how they’re using the tools and how it’s working for them, and what’s not working for them. Being genuine in the reality of what we’re doing goes a long way. So there’s pros and cons, like, here’s how it worked, here’s the roadblocks we hit, here’s how it could be better. Having those kinds of conversations can really go a long way towards adoption.

[00:39:59] Nathan Wrigley: I have a few things to add to this, and the first one would be that my expectation when a survey is put out is, broadly speaking, the expectation is that negativity is going to be the thing driving them to the survey. And that’s not what you find here. People who’ve got an axe to grind are frequently more likely to open up a survey and grind the axe, and that isn’t the case here.

You know, it’s remarkably sanguine. Everybody seems entirely optimistic. And even the data which may be not quite as favorable, is not unfavorable. It’s just maybe not as shiny as it could have been.

But then I’m looking at the second question here about what the favorite things are and it’s all the stuff that we lean into all the time. The extensibility, the fact that it’s free, otherwise known as cost, the fact that it’s multi-site capable, the fact that there’s plugins and what have you that you can extend it with.

And the editing experience, so we’re talking about full site editing, I guess there as well as the editor, is low on the list of priorities, which is quite interesting. Only 36% of respondents thought that that was their priority.

And then talking to the broader, I don’t know, the marketing piece, I think WordPress as a whole, it is really difficult to market something to the entire world. And that’s what WordPress is. So for the, like the Core community and things like that, to try and figure out where to put their best efforts, you know, how to convince people that WordPress is the solution for them, is really difficult, because it’s everybody. It’s literally anybody who might want a website.

And so I think that’s where endeavors like WP Campus really pull out all the stops. You know, you are out there shouting loudly that this is the credible solution, if you’ve got a need for a website in the higher ed space. You are making it so that, I guess if we were to Google higher ed CMS, WordPress is going to come up fairly high. So you are growing that pie.

But I guess the audience is fairly small, isn’t it? You know, at each institution, how many people are going to be making those searches? It’s not going to be the 300 people that you mentioned. It’s probably going to be the web team.

So I think you’re doing great work. You know, you’re definitely finding those people and the important decision makers are probably the people. that you need to find.

I keep coming back to the phrase, growing the pie. That’s what I think WP Campus is basically about. You know, of the 10,000 institutions out there that might use WordPress, it’s about making sure that a growing proportion of them know that it’s a credible alternative to whatever they’re using now. And from the numbers in the survey, it looks like once you’ve onboarded them, it’s easy to keep hold of them, which is pretty cool.

[00:42:21] Rachel Cherry: For WP Campus as an organisation, we wanted to use the survey to really surface the needs. And so there’s questions in this survey that talk about what plugin needs exist.

You know, one of my takeaways from this survey is how WordPress does need more enterprise functionality. And that’s covered a lot in the questions about plugin functionality. There is a big need and a gap for a lot of enterprise functionality in the WordPress ecosystem and higher ed needs it. So if there are people out there wanting to build it, we are ready for it.

And so, you know, I want to surface those needs to kind of help bring more resources to our community and to what they’re doing. And so anyone out there looking to help fill that gap, please check out the survey and I’m open to have a conversation at any time, and we’d love for you to join our Slack and ask us questions and get us involved.

[00:43:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s an interesting call to action because you know, if you’ve got space in your calendar to build a new thing, you now have a brand new audience potentially, if you’ve not considered the higher education space, there’s a ton of data in this report which you can download. So maybe this is a whole new audience that you didn’t realise that you could tap into. Alex, was there anything, it sounded like you had something.

[00:43:33] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, no, I was just going to echo really to what Rachel was saying there. I think the idea with this report was to, as Rachel said earlier on, provide data that has been missing. There’s no cynical play, it’s a collaborative report that’s designed to help other people understand how their peers are working, what their challenges are, how they’re trying to solve them, what kind of environment they’re doing it all in.

It’s a really fascinating area, as I said earlier on, and we are really excited to see it develop and help it develop. And, yeah, we will be certainly collaborating with WP Campus and Rachel going forward.

[00:44:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so whether or not, it really doesn’t matter which bit of WordPress you are attached to, whether you’re a hosting company or a plugin or a theme developer or an agency, just building out websites, there really is a bit of this which will map to whatever it is that you are doing.

The website URL I mentioned earlier, wpcampus.org is where you’re going to find this out. I presume that they’re somewhere, if I was to explore, I would probably find a contact form. But beyond that, let’s go to Rachel first, how could people reach out to you if they’re curious about what you’ve said to today? Where would they best find you?

[00:44:36] Rachel Cherry: Yeah, so you can join our Slack, which is accessible from wpcampus.org. There is a Slack page and you fill out a form and you get an invite, and feel free to join and start some conversations. There is a contact form on wpcampus.org, and I do receive those emails along with other people in our organisation. So that’s another great way to get in touch with me as well.

[00:44:59] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. And Alex, same question.

[00:45:01] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, for us, obviously website, humanmade.com. There’s a contact form on there. But also Twitter and LinkedIn tend to be our main sort of points of contact for people getting in touch with us.

Might also be worth flagging out, we’ve got a Word on the Future newsletter, which goes out once a month. You can sign up for that on the website. That generally has this kind of content, not always about higher education, but about the enterprise WordPress space in general. So that’s quite a nice touch point too.

[00:45:24] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll just mention before we finish off that the WP Campus site not only links to, you know, the bits and pieces that are going on right now, but there’s the blog and there’s also links to the events as well as the Slack channel and things like that, oh, and a newsletter. There’s a whole load of opportunities to keep in touch with what’s going on over there.

So, yeah, what I would also say is it’s very hard in an audio podcast to do justice to a report, which is primarily graphics. So please, if you’ve any curiosity around what we’ve been talking about, go and download that and you’ll be able to get the full detail of what we’ve been talking about. You’re going to find that on the Human Made website, and I will link to it in the show notes.

Okay, Rachel Cherry, Alex Aspinall, thank you so much for chatting to me today. Really appreciate it.

[00:46:05] Alex Aspinall: Thanks for having us.

[00:46:06] Rachel Cherry: Yes, thank you.

On the podcast today we have Rachel Cherry and Alex Aspinall.

Rachel is the founder of WP Campus, a nonprofit organization she launched a decade ago to support professionals using WordPress in higher education. Under her leadership, WP Campus has become a community hub, hosting conferences and leading research projects tailored to the unique needs of its members. Currently, Rachel serves as the organization’s Director of Technology and sits on its board of directors, where she continues to drive innovative projects.

Alex Aspinall is part of the globally distributed team at Human Made, an established enterprise WordPress agency founded in 2011. At Human Made, Alex helps deliver large-scale web platforms for major organizations, including names like Harvard, Standard Chartered, and PlayStation. In recent years, Alex has developed a strong interest in how WordPress can uniquely serve the higher education sector, and he’s become especially passionate about exploring and supporting this use case.

During the podcast we get into the story behind WP Campus, which has, for the past decade, been empowering people who use WordPress in colleges and universities. We explore Human Made’s growing interest in the complexities of higher education projects, from large multisite networks to the strict accessibility and governance requirements such projects increasingly require.

The heart of the conversation is the just released ‘State of WordPress in Higher Education 2025’ report. We dig into the reports key findings such as the slow adoption of the block editor and full site editing, the challenges of managing hundreds of university websites with small web teams, and why enterprise-level tools are in such high demand.

Whether you’re a WordPress professional, agency, educator, or are just curious about the unique needs and opportunities the higher education space offers, this episode is for you.

Useful links

WP Campus

The State of WordPress in Higher Education report

Human Made

Harvard Gazette

WP Campus Slack

Word on the Future newsletter