WP Engine’s seventh annual DE{CODE} conference, subtitled Shape What’s Next, takes place on May 6, 2026 as a free virtual event. The broadcast runs in two separate regional streams: 10 AM BST for EMEA and 11 AM EDT for the United States. The organizers expect more than 7,500 developers, agencies, and digital leaders from over 100 countries. Sessions run across three tracks: Developers, Agencies, and Marketers.

The organizing theme is the “Intelligent Web,” a term WP Engine is using to describe the shift toward AI agents, machine-readable content, and structured data as primary drivers of how websites are built, discovered, and consumed. The agenda reflects that framing across all three tracks, with keynotes addressing strategic direction and breakout sessions covering practical implementation.

The previous edition, DE{CODE} 2025, took place on April 15, 2025 as a free global virtual conference. It featured 40 speakers across 12 sessions in three tracks. Keynote speakers included AI strategist Jeremiah Owyang and Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, then serving as Science Envoy at the US Department of Homeland Security. Sessions covered practical AI applications for WordPress development, AI’s impact on search traffic, and agency growth strategies.

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What Caught Our Attention

Here is what stood out from the programme, particularly for hosting providers, managed WordPress operators, and agencies.

The ACF Update That Makes Your Content Machine-Readable (Rob Stinson, Product Marketing Manager, WP Engine; Iain Poulson, Product Manager, WP Engine) covers changes to Advanced Custom Fields that allow structured content to be consumed directly by AI systems without additional configuration. For managed WordPress hosts, ACF is among the most widely deployed plugins across customer sites. A platform-level update that affects how content is indexed and retrieved by AI agents has direct implications for managed environments.

Good Bots, Bad Bots: How to Win with Bot Management (Krystal O’Connor, Sr. Product Manager, WP Engine; Jenna Menue, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, WP Engine; Bryan Becker, Director of Product, Cloudflare; PeterJohn Hunt, CTO, Useful Group) addresses one of the more operationally significant issues facing hosting providers right now. WP Engine’s own 2025 Website Traffic Trends Report, which draws on Cloudflare Bot Management data, found that AI crawlers are consuming as much as 70 percent of hosting, environment, and performance resources on some sites. The session brings together Cloudflare and WP Engine product teams to discuss where enforcement is practical and where it is not.

WordPress 7.0 Is Almost Here. This Is What It Will Actually Unlock (Weston Ruter and John Parris, both Principal Software Engineers at WP Engine) arrives at a moment when WordPress 7.0 has a confirmed release date of May 20, 2026, two weeks after the conference. This session gives hosting providers a preview of what the release will change in practice, including the PHP 7.4 minimum requirement that will block automatic updates for customers still on PHP 7.2 or 7.3.

How Headless Gives You an AI Head-Start (Francis Agulto, Developer Advocate, WP Engine; Teresa Gobble, Software Engineer, WP Engine) covers headless WordPress architecture and its relationship to AI agent compatibility. Sites built on a headless stack with a structured API layer are easier for agents to query than traditional rendered pages. For agencies and enterprise hosting customers evaluating architecture choices for new projects, this session addresses the trade-offs.

CTRL-ALT-DEL: Rebooting Business for the Intelligent Web (Brian Solis, Head of Global Innovation, ServiceNow) is the opening keynote and the only external solo speaker on the highlighted list. Solis has written extensively on digital transformation and customer experience. The session is positioned as a strategic framing rather than a technical one, examining how businesses need to restructure for an environment where AI agents mediate a growing share of web interactions.

A New Era: First Look at What’s Next (Ramadass Prabhakar, CTO, WP Engine) is expected to address WP Engine’s near-term platform direction and what “agent-ready” infrastructure looks like at the hosting layer.

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The Rest of the Agenda

The six sessions above are not the full programme. The Developers track also includes a session on AI-driven traffic conversion. The Marketers track runs parallel sessions on generative engine optimization (GEO), AI-powered ecommerce content strategy, and a Chief Digital Officer panel examining how media companies are adapting their growth strategies for AI search. Thierry Muller, VP Product at WP Engine, presents A New Era: The Future of the Intelligent Web, covering the longer-term product roadmap. The conference closes with remarks from Heather Brunner, CEO and Chairwoman of WP Engine.

The full agenda is available on the event registration pages. Registration is free and takes place online, with separate forms for EMEA and the United States (links in the sources below). Sessions will be available on demand starting May 7, 2026.