The Everything Tool

Before ChatGPT, making code changes to my sites was something that either took a lot of googling or cost a hefty amount of money to outsource to others.

Since content and backlinks move the needle more than design and features, many ideas for improving my sites stayed ideas and never got the time or money to become anything else.

Now that GPT-4 is ChatGPT’s default model and the fifty-message limit has finally been lifted, things have changed: In the past thirty days, ChatGPT has helped me customize child themes, build custom plugins, and modify my websites in ways I hadn’t even thought about before.

WordPress developers—and plugin makers—are in trouble.

Take this one site in my portfolio, which had well-written roundup posts that just wouldn’t rank high enough in Google’s SERPs.

I had ruled out all the usual suspects. Backlink profile? Excellent. Topical relevance? In place. Technical SEO? Passing tests with flying colors.

But I had a hunch: Those posts weren’t making the top of the SERPs because they had too many ads on them. I had read on one of the SEO blogs I follow some time ago that Google counts product boxes and affiliate links as ad placements.

Assuming that this is true, and all other things being equal, when I’d add up the product boxes, the links in the descriptions below them, and the ads inserted by my ad network on each of these posts, the ad density wasn’t high—it was ridiculous.

So I opened ChatGPT, enabled the WebPilot plugin, and said, "I have a WordPress site. Some posts are informational and answer questions, others are commercial and round up products. I want to disable display ads on the commercial posts. Here’s the link to my ad network’s help section that explains the ways to do this: {LINK}. What are my options?"

Boom!

A few prompts later, and my site had a checkbox in the Gutenberg editor’s sidebar that enabled me to toggle display ads on individual posts on or off.

Why stop there? "Now help me create a custom template for affiliate posts. This is the code in my single.php file right now. I want the custom template to not have a sidebar."

An hour or so later, and a conversion rate-optimized template was live on all this site’s product roundups. I went to Google Search Console and requested a re-indexing of these posts. Several days later, they jumped—and have kept their positions since.

What’s remarkable about all of this is that I pay $20/month for ChatGPT, and these two chats in particular cost me no more than a few cents on the dollar.

We live in a time when we get access to the Everything Tool. It can write, it can edit, it can code, and it can even do data analytics. Don’t just use it to blast the Web with shit content. Find ways to use it that make your sites better, easier to use, more helpful.

ChatGPT has evened out the playing field. You can use it to create web-based tools, code custom features into your site, find previously untapped insights in your analytics data. Everyone’s paying the same monthly fee, yet most people don’t use even a hundredth of this tool’s capabilities.

Until next time!