In this episode of WP Legends, we welcome back Raitis Sevelis, head of product at WPBakery, for the show’s first-ever returning guest. Raitis has steered WPBakery since December 2013, close to thirteen years on one product, which in this industry is practically geological. He is also a university lecturer in Riga teaching AI, digital marketing, and e-commerce, a WordCamp organizer and speaker, and a champion of the four-day work week his team adopted years ago and never abandoned. This time the ground has moved, because WP Bakery 9.0 is about to land.
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Fifteen Years and the Biggest Release Yet
WPBakery turned fifteen this year and now runs on six million live websites, which makes shipping a major release a genuinely high-stakes engineering problem. Break something on sites running abandoned add-ons or built by agencies that no longer exist, and it is not a bug report; it is someone’s business. So 9.0, almost a year in the making, is the biggest release in years, and the team ran it through more than five hundred beta testers before launch.
The headline change is a redesigned CSS loading system. Over time, custom CSS piles up across the many places a page builder lets you add it, and much of it ends up loading on pages that never use it. WPBakery now splits the CSS into logical blocks and loads only what a given page needs, which means fewer resources and faster sites, without a developer having to manage it by hand. Raitis is proudest, though, of the new developer attributes, which improve the API for building custom elements, alongside a redesigned interface that brings the editing experience closer to something like Figma. After fifteen years, some of the interface had become legacy, and the team decided it was time.
Why Page Builders Still Need Professionals
Raitis is firm that page builders are tools for professionals, who then hand a manageable site to their client, and that neither page builders nor AI should replace developers. His analogy is that getting a Formula 1 car does not make you a Formula 1 driver. You still need a human in the loop. Even someone building their own site on a budget, he argues, should allocate something to have a professional check the end result. This is exactly the space where experienced custom WordPress development earns its keep, because you are really paying for experience.
He is pointed about competitors who launch AI features by telling customers they no longer need a developer. Selling “prompt to website” is, in his view, a bit ridiculous, because it tells your own professional users that you have built something to make them redundant.
How WPBakery Works With AI
Rather than replace the professional, WPBakery leans into what Raitis calls practical AI. Because the product has been on the market for fifteen years and has a deep, well-indexed knowledge base, major AI platforms already understand how to build optimized layouts with WPBakery, so using it as the background builder yields higher-quality AI-generated sites. Its PHP-focused element development helps too, since AI works well with that code. This is also part of why newer products struggle, as there is little information for AI to learn from.
Inside the product, AI already handles text generation, translation, SEO help, and custom CSS adjustments, with more ambitious editor features in development. Raitis frames AI as a general-purpose technology like electricity, and jokes that resisting it is like insisting on riding a horse after the car arrived.
Support Plus and the Lifetime License Promise
WPBakery has always been known for lifetime licenses, and Raitis is committed to honoring them. To keep the business sustainable for the next decade and beyond, covering support, cloud costs, and AI credits, the team introduced Support Plus, a subscription that sits alongside those lifetime licenses rather than replacing them. Because nothing is forced, there is no backlash, and with add-ons packaged in, churn is extremely low more than a year after launch. He notes that over forty percent of professionals across the industry choose subscriptions anyway, simply for guaranteed access to support.
That same DNA explains why 9.0 took longer to build. Honoring lifetime licenses and backward compatibility is a huge part of the work, because nobody wants to update their website just to fix their website. The best tools, Raitis says, are the ones you never have to think about, the same way good hosting only crosses your mind when the monthly bill arrives.
Community, Education, and the Long View
Beyond the product, WPBakery supports smaller WordCamps, meetups, and local communities that struggle to find sponsors, and provides free licenses to higher education institutions on request. Raitis carries this into his own teaching, where he covers AI for MBA students from a finance and economics angle, using real cases like Siemens running a digital twin of its factory to test improvements in a preview environment before deploying them for real.
Fun Rapid Fire Round
On the four-day week, yes, WP Bakery still runs it for the team, though Raitis admits he personally does not count the hours he spends on work he loves.
On where WP Bakery will be in five years, he does have a roadmap, and he believes we are heading toward a world where everyone has a personal AI agent and buys skills for it, much like loading abilities in The Matrix. Asking Siri to launch a website, with your WP Bakery license and managed hosting already in place, is exactly the kind of future he expects, and page builders with deep accumulated knowledge are well positioned for it.
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