The Cheltenham WordPress meetup is taking a summer break. Holidays, busy schedules, the general impossibility of finding a free Wednesday in July when half your members are somewhere on the Continent. It’s nothing unusual. Other meetups do it too. We’ll be back.
But the break has given me some time to sit with something that’s been nagging at me for a while: finding speakers has become genuinely hard. Not slightly tricky. Actually hard. And I think it’s worth talking about why.
Numbers Are Down. That Part’s No Secret.
Post-pandemic, attendance at WordPress meetups across the board has dropped. Ours is no exception. People got used to staying home. Online alternatives multiplied. The habit of turning up to a room full of strangers on a weeknight quietly faded for a lot of people.
I’ll be honest, it had started to feel a bit discouraging. Then I went to WordCamp Europe 2026. The turnout was genuinely encouraging. The enthusiasm was there. People are still showing up for this community in numbers when the occasion is right. That was a useful reminder that the appetite hasn’t gone away, it’s just become harder to activate at the local level.
The Speaker Spiral
The thing about meetup numbers is that they’re tied directly to the quality and variety of what’s on stage. Run two good sessions, one aimed at marketers and site builders, one aimed at developers, and you’ll draw a broader crowd. People come because the content is relevant to them.
The problem is that the pool of speakers willing to stand up and talk has shrunk since the pandemic. I don’t know exactly why. It’s possibly habit, possibly confidence, possibly the fact that people have filled that gap with online content and feel less need to present in person. Resources like WP Speakers exist, and if you’re a UK-based speaker who isn’t already listed there, it’s worth five minutes of your time to add yourself. The UK list is fine as far as it goes, but the shortlist is shorter than it used to be.
So you end up in a bit of a spiral. Fewer speakers means less variety. Less variety means fewer people have a reason to come. Fewer attendees makes it harder to attract speakers who want an audience. Round and round.
The obvious workaround is to draw on your own members, and I’ve done that. It works, up to a point. But it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, particularly in a smaller group. And my own interests, block themes, Full Site Editing, development workflow, don’t always map neatly onto what a room full of marketers, freelancers, and small business owners needs to hear. The WordPress community spans a wide spectrum. Talks need to reflect that.
Where I Think the Opportunity Is
During the break I’m going to spend some time thinking about how to approach this differently. Not just chasing down the same small pool of willing speakers, but thinking about the format itself.
Workshops might be more useful than talks for certain topics. Something like “how to start a business online” would land very differently with a younger audience than another session on Gutenberg. And that’s not a slight on Gutenberg, it’s just an acknowledgement that the world is changing. Jobs are harder to find. More younger people are looking at self-employment. They want an online presence. WordPress still powers a significant chunk of the web, whatever you think of the recent noise around it, and a meetup that can show someone how to actually use it to build something real might be more valuable than a talk they could watch on YouTube.
I think there’s a version of this that brings younger, entrepreneurial people into the fold. Not by watering down what the meetup is, but by being honest about what it can offer someone who’s just starting out. That conversation is worth having.
If you’re curious about why community events like this matter at all, I’ve written about that before: Community Meetups Matter.
One More Thing
If you’re based in the UK, you’re a WordPress speaker (or you’ve been thinking about giving it a go), and you happen to be passing through Cheltenham, I’d genuinely love to hear from you. Get in touch via elliottrichmond.co.uk. And if you’re not already on WP Speakers, get yourself listed. Meetup organisers across the UK are searching that list right now, and a short entry costs you nothing. The more voices we have in the room, the better the room gets.
We’ll be back in the autumn. In the meantime, I’ve got some thinking to do.
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