With just a month to go before WordCamp US 2025 kicks off in Portland, Oregon, organizers have unveiled the first round of speakers and announced that Google’s Danny Sullivan will deliver this year’s keynote.

Sullivan has been explaining how search works for nearly three decades, first as a journalist, now from inside Google. He joined the company in 2017 as its Public Liaison for Search, following a long career covering the industry from the outside. Along the way, he founded Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land, coined the term “search engine marketing,” and became a well-known translator between search engines and the people trying to make sense of them.

His keynote comes at a time when AI is transforming how information is surfaced, and how open platforms like WordPress stay visible in a changing web.

The first group of speakers includes a mix of educators, engineers, and familiar faces from across the WordPress community. Topics range from block themes and contribution to AI, business, and site-building — hinting at a wide-ranging program still to come. Confirmed so far are Mary Ann Aschenbrenner (President at Waterlink Web), Jonathan Bossenger (Developer Educator at Automattic), Katie Keith and Matt Cromwell (hosts of WP Product Talk), Jamie Marsland (Head of WordPress.org YouTube at Automattic), and Evan Mullins (WordPress Engineer at Bluehost).

Other speakers have also been listed on the WCUS 2025 Speaker page but haven’t been formally announced. These include Harper founder Elijah Potter, whose grammar checker for developers was acquired by Automattic, and Dr. Jai Ranganathan, a conservation biologist, data scientist, and co-founder of #SciFund Challenge. 

Also listed, though not yet announced, are Josh Bryant (Senior Software Engineer at Dow Jones), Michelle Schulp Hunt (Director of UX Engineering at Lone Rock Point), Joeleen Kennedy (Senior Web Engineer at Human Made), and Seth Rubenstein (Head of Engineering at the Pew Research Center), among others.

The full event schedule isn’t out yet, but the format mirrors last year’s: four days starting Wednesday, August 27, with a Contributor Day, followed by a Showcase Day and two days of sessions. A social event is planned for Friday night.

Notably, it looks like Contributor Day is changing. Last year, it was billed simply as a day to “bring WordPress users together to contribute to the WordPress open source project.” This year, the description calls it “an all-day hackathon and networking event” — hinting at a shakeup in how Contributor Day has typically been run in past years as a way to onboard new contributors.

Several WCUS organizers have posted about the new “hack-a-thon style approach” in Make team channels on WordPress Slack. While details are scarce and there’s been no formal announcement yet, the change could mean a new format inspired by the successful CloudFest Hackathon.

Meanwhile, ticket sales remain slow. As of this week, only 666 tickets have been sold — about half the number sold by this time last year. In 2024, WordCamp US sold a total of 1,928 tickets, with 1,297 purchased by the end of July.

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