Benjamin Zekavica shows how companies can use WordPress as a serious digital infrastructure instead of treating it as just another website. As the founder of Kreo Pulse and UnleashWP and a member of the WordPress Core Team, he combines strategic perspective with technical depth.
Q&A with Benjamin
Who or what helped you find your footing in WordPress, and how do you try to pay that forward today?
My older brother, without knowing it. He made music on his computer and played with Photoshop, and at eleven I watched him until he let me try myself. I built my first sites with HTML and CSS, but copying files around for my game review site got annoying, and that’s how I found WordPress. What gave me my footing after that was the community: people answered my questions, and later people like JB Audras trusted me with real responsibility. Today I give that back with UnleashWP, packing 17 years of experience into a book, a blog, and tools for developers and agencies.
If you could engineer one connection at WCEH 2026 — a conversation, an intro, a collaboration — what would it be?
Canadian agency owners who already sell custom blocks profitably. I know the Core side well, but I’m missing the view into their daily practice: how they price the work, where projects get stuck, and what makes the model sustainable. Every one of those conversations makes my talk better, and everyone in the room benefits from that.
WordPress powers 43% of the web, but it’s the people who keep it alive. What’s a moment in this community that reminded you why you stay?
The calls as Design Lead for WordPress 6.5. People from a dozen countries put in their evenings, no contract, no salary, simply because they cared about the result. I had never seen that kind of collaboration in another tech project, and it changed what I expect from teamwork. It’s the reason I built my career around WordPress, and that standard still holds for me today.
What does the WordPress community get right that other tech communities don’t. What could we still do better?
The door is open. From forum user to release coordinator, without anyone asking for a degree or a job title first: I know few projects where that works. Where we need to get better is visibility for the work beyond code. Documentation, support, translation, and teaching carry the project just as much, but the stage almost always goes to the code. The start is simple: name these people, on stage, in release posts, and in talks like the ones at WCEH.
What’s a form of contribution you think is undervalued, and why does it matter?
Packaging knowledge. A merged patch improves the project once, directly. A good tutorial or a tool works for everyone who hits the same problem later, and at WordPress scale that means thousands of developers. With my agency clients I see it every day: projects rarely fail because of the code. They fail because the practical knowledge around it is missing.
A lot of people want to contribute but feel they’re not technical enough. What would you say to them?
A large part of the project needs no code at all: support forums, translation, testing, documentation. My own start was small too. I fixed the bugs I used to complain about in forums. As a trainer I have seen many people who thought they weren’t good enough, until their first contribution proved them wrong. Start small, the rest follows.