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WordPress Site Maintenance, Enhanced By AI Powered Visual Regression QA

Keeping a website healthy isn’t as simple as pressing “update.” A small plugin tweak or theme change can break a layout, hide a button, or cause other subtle damage to the user experience. For the teams that trust us to maintain their sites, those risks are unacceptable.

Our SiteWatch program delivers proactive, premium maintenance for WordPress-powered sites. Every update passes through version control, peer review, and structured QA. This process ensures reliability at scale. And now, we’ve added a new tool to make that process even smarter: an AI-powered Visual Regression Testing (VRT) platform that knows when something looks different but isn’t actually broken.

Read the full blog post on the Fueled blog. 10up is now the WordPress Practice of Fueled.

From the Fueled Blog: Contributing Over 140 Accessibility Improvements to WooCommerce Core

Jeff Paul on August 21

As part of a larger effort to improve the accessibility of WooCommerce, the flagship open source eCommerce solution for WordPress, Fueled helped deliver over 140 accessibility improvements, impacting the 7 million+ websites that WooCommerce powers. This achievement comes after a year-long initiative in partnership with WooCommerce and Equalize Digital, bringing WooCommerce Core into compliance ahead of new regulations like the European Accessibility Act (EAA). The result is a more inclusive shopping experience and a WooCommerce Core that meets modern accessibility standards.

Ahead of the EAA deadline in June 2025, WooCommerce engaged us to spearhead the remediation of a WCAG 2.2 compliance audit, working hand-in-hand with WooCommerce’s core development team to implement fixes across virtually every part of the plugin. Over a year, contributions from WooCommerce, Equalize Digital, and Fueled’s WordPress specialists were coordinated to methodically resolve issues in both the classic and block-based interfaces.

To learn more about the key improvements we made to WooCommerce accessibility, read the full post at the Fueled blog.

Fueled Heads to WordCamp US 2025 in Portland

Jeff Paul on August 18

Fueled is heading to Portland, Oregon for WordCamp US (WCUS) 2025, taking place August 26–29. WCUS is the premier WordPress conference in the United States, drawing thousands of developers, designers, and digital leaders each year.

We’re returning to WordCamp US as a Contributing Sponsor, marking our first sponsorship of a major WordCamp in years and our very first WordPress event sponsorship under our newly unified and refreshed brand, Fueled. Our support celebrates our evolution as an agency and underscores our deep commitment to WordPress and open source. 10up has long been the professional services (agency) leader in the WordPress space, and carries on that legacy as part of Fueled, augmented by industry leading mobile app development and product strategy and design capabilities. We’re bringing more to the table for the WordPress community and our clients.

Read the full post at the Fueled blog.

WP Framework: A Better Starting Point for WordPress Site Builds

Daryll Doyle on July 15

At Fueled, our wp-scaffold framework has long helped to jumpstart new WordPress projects by automating boilerplate setup, enforcing foundational engineering best practices, and keeping structure consistent across teams. As our codebases grew, we realized that sharing lower level updates and improvements across projects could be easier.

To solve this, we introduced a new Composer package called WP Framework at the start of the year, which we have subsequently open sourced. By moving the common scaffold logic into WP Framework, our project starter becomes leaner and more maintainable, while every project still benefits from shared upgrades over time.

From the Fueled Blog: How We Sped Up WordPress and the Open Web

Joe McGill on July 11

WordPress powers over 40% of websites. When its core gets faster, the larger internet benefits. That’s the ambition behind the WordPress Performance Team: a cross-company initiative focused on improving speed, efficiency, and thus user experience across all WordPress sites.

At Fueled, our 10up WordPress Practice has been part of this effort from the start, helping institute improvements that are now baked into WordPress core. From how scripts and images are handled to how WordPress loads configuration data, our work has made the platform faster out of the box, and made millions of websites deliver better digital experiences.

Read the full blog post on the Fueled blog, or skip ahead to my more technical deep dive into the changes on LinkedIn.

Behind the WordPress Block: Fueled.com’s Animated 3D Objects

Jon Christensen on June 24

One of the more ambitious design goals behind the new Fueled.com involved bringing to life animated 3D objects in the browser—without relying on WebGL or heavy, real-time rendering.

The solution was a custom animation system that simulates 3D using optimized image sequences, built leveraging WebP image formats, Motion.js, and Intersection Observer techniques. The final product offers smooth, high-quality animation that works reliably across devices and browsers.

Packaged within a custom Gutenberg block, editors can easily select from multiple 3D objects, customize styles with blend modes, and see a preview directly inside the WordPress editor.

I’ve published a deep dive article breaking down the path to the final product—from early experiments with videos and sprite sheets to lightweight image sequences and smart rendering logic to our approach to the custom WordPress editor block.

Read the full article on LinkedIn, and get in touch if you’d like help creating this kind of experience for your own digital properties.

How We Evaluated Modern Front-End Frameworks for a High-Traffic Publishing Platform

Sam Brodie on June 18

When our partners at Minute Media set out to modernize the front end behind their publishing platform—powering brands like Sports Illustrated and SI Swimsuit—their goals were clear: improve performance, streamline developer experience, and make the stack easier to evolve over time.

Their internal team had been working with React, but was hitting performance ceilings—especially when it came to JavaScript execution and time to interactive. While React and Next.js remained options, they were open to exploring newer frameworks that might better support their long-term goals.

White Paper: Digital Accessibility Strategies for Government Efficiency and Trust

Brian Bourn on June 11

Government Accessibility Pillars: Architecture, Assistive, Preventative, and Auditing.

We build websites and digital experiences that help people access the services and information they need. Nowhere is this more important than in the public sector, where inaccessible websites and apps can shut out millions – and often those most in need of public services.

Fueled’s new white paper, Accessible by Design: Digital Strategies for Government Efficiency and Trust, offers a framework for turning legal requirements into opportunities for innovation, efficiency, and inclusion. You can download it over on the Fueled website (10up is now the WordPress practice of Fueled).

Getting Basic Styles From Figma to WordPress in Minutes: A New Figma Plugin

Fabian Kaegy on June 5

At Fueled, we aim to close the gap between tools designers love and platforms developers trust, while automating repetitive busy work. That philosophy inspired the creation of the Figma to WordPress Automation: a new open source plugin for Figma that streamlines a tedious, time-consuming step that’s a part of every modern WordPress project.

This tool exports design tokens from Figma directly into a WordPress theme.json file, which defines a theme’s global design system—like colors, typography, and spacing—so styles are consistent and selectable in the content editor. This automation transforms what was once a tedious 10–15 hour task into a process that takes about an hour.

Read the full story on the Fueled blog.

WordPress Launches AI Team Chaired by Google, Automattic, and Fueled’s 10up Practice Leaders

Jeff Paul on June 3

This post has been cross-posted on the Fueled website.

I’m excited to share that I’ve joined the newly formed WordPress AI Team, working alongside Felix Arntz and Pascal Birchler from Google, and James LePage from Automattic. Together, as the launch team, we aim to shape how artificial intelligence is integrated into the WordPress ecosystem—not just abstractly, but through practical tools and features that help WordPress evolve and remain competitive.

My participation follows more than 6 years of investment into open source AI integrations for WordPress at Fueled (in case you missed it, 10up is now the WordPress practice of Fueled), in addition to a decade of varied contributions to WordPress. As the Director of our Open Source Practice, I’ve collaborated with engineering to advance our open source Artificial Intelligence plugin for WordPress, ClassifAI, and project managed client engagements using it as the foundation for custom AI integrations. I’m honored to bring that experience into this next chapter for WordPress.

Read the full story on the Fueled blog.