WordCamp US 2026: Why I’m Already Planning My First Trip to WCUS

Disclosure: I'm compensated as an Automattic affiliate for this article, and I'm sharing my discount code AF26 below. Everything else here is my honest take.

I will not be in Phoenix this year. Visa timelines did not line up for me this time, so I will be watching WCUS 2026 via the live stream instead. But it is firmly on my checklist, and I fully expect to make the trip in a year or two. I wanted to be upfront about that before you read another word.

What I do have is a track record with flagship WordCamps on this side of the world. I volunteered and co-led the Marketing Contributor Day table at WordCamp Asia 2025 in Manila, and I came back this year as a Media Partner at WordCamp Asia 2026 in Mumbai, sitting at the Community Team table on Contributor Day and walking the sponsor hall talking to people from Kinsta, Bluehost, Yoast, and RankMath until my badge lanyard felt heavier than my laptop bag.

Between those two events, and the smaller WordCamps I attend both offline and online throughout the year, I have not found a better opportunity to connect and meet professionals in this space than an in-person flagship WordCamp. I know what that does to a person, because Asia did it to me twice now, and from everything I am reading and hearing from friends who have made the trip to the US edition, WCUS runs on the same current, just with its own American flavor.

So this is not a recap. It’s a case for why you should go if you can make it, written by someone who understands the pull of these events from the inside, even while watching this one from a screen.

The basics, quickly

WordCamp US 2026 lands in Phoenix, Arizona from August 16 to 19, at the Phoenix Convention Center. Contributor Day opens things up on Sunday, August 16, and the conference runs from there. Tickets sit at $100 for general admission, and if you use my code AF26 at checkout, you get $20 off, bringing it down to $80. If you’re a student, then you can get it at $25. You can grab a ticket at us.wordcamp.org/2026/tickets.

Sit with that price for a second. $80, or even $100, for four days that include sessions, workshops, meals, and a closing social. I have paid more for a single conference lunch elsewhere. This is one of the best value tickets in tech, period.

Why Contributor Day matters more than people think

If I had to pick one day to convince a first-timer to attend, it would be Contributor Day. This is the Sunday before everything else kicks off, when WordPress is actually built. Core, docs, marketing, polyglots, support, training, photos- every team has a table, and every table needs hands.

At WordCamp Asia, Contributor Day is where I had my most productive conversations of the entire event, not during the main sessions. It’s less performance and more workshop. You sit next to someone fixing a bug in Gutenberg, or someone translating strings for a language you have never heard spoken, and by lunch you know their name and what they are building next. If you are new to WordPress or new to open source in general, this is the gentlest, most rewarding way in.

Who this is actually for

The WCUS 2026 covers developers, designers, agency owners, bloggers, and store builders, and honestly, that is not marketing copy. That is just what a WordPress conference looks like once you are in the room.

I run partnerships and community for fdmedia, the team behind ClickWhale, AAWP, and MH Themes, so my lens is naturally partnerships and ecosystem. But at WordCamp Asia I stood next to freelancers negotiating their first retainer, agency owners scouting hosting deals for clients, and bloggers figuring out affiliate income for the first time. A flagship WordCamp does not filter for one type of person. It filters for one type of curiosity, the kind that wants to know how this whole open-source thing actually works and who is behind it.

Meeting the people behind the products you already use

Here is something I did not expect the first time I walked a WordCamp sponsor hall: the people behind the plugins and hosts you use every day are just there, standing at a table, happy to talk. No sales pitch, mostly just genuine conversation about what they are building and what you are struggling with.

WordCamp US 2026 has sponsors including WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Elementor, Bluehost, Google, Yoast, Hostinger, Kinsta, Nexcess, and Pressable, which means you get a real shot at meeting the people behind some of the products already running your site or your client’s site. At WordCamp Asia, I ended up in a proper conversation with folks from Hostinger, Elementor, Bluehost, Kinsta, PayPal, Automattic’s Jetpack, WordPress.com, and Woo teams, and it changed how I think about a couple of tools I use weekly. That kind of access does not exist anywhere else in this ecosystem, not at this scale.

The Phoenix factor

One detail I appreciate about this year’s WCUS: the new Sunday to Wednesday schedule leaves the weekend before free. If you are flying in from out of state, or from outside the US entirely, that gives you a couple of days to explore before the badge goes around your neck. And the Phoenix Convention Center is fully air conditioned, which, if you know anything about Phoenix in August, is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence. You are there for the community, and the sessions, not the weather, and the venue seems to know that.

What to expect if it’s your first WordCamp

If you have never been to any WordCamp, here is my honest advice from someone who remembers being the new person in the room. Go to Contributor Day even if you think you have nothing to contribute yet, you will find a table that needs you. Talk to the person next to you in the session hall before the talk starts, not after. Walk the entire sponsor floor at least once, even the tables you think are not relevant to you, because you do not yet know what conversation is going to matter six months from now. And stay for the closing social. That is usually where the real relationships get sealed.

I built my own network this way, one WordCamp at a time, starting local and eventually making it to the Asia flagship, twice now. WCUS is the US equivalent of that same flagship energy, and if you are anywhere near a position to attend in person, I do not think you will regret making the trip. I will be following along on the live stream this year, taking notes for the trip I plan to make myself in a future edition.

Grab your ticket

Use code AF26 for $20 off general admission at us.wordcamp.org/2026/tickets. Whether this is your first WordCamp or your tenth, Phoenix in August is shaping up to be a genuinely good one.