This edition is for everyone who builds and runs sites for other people. Two agency surveys this year say the gap between a profitable year and a thin one comes down to two numbers, and Casey went through the data. Also, building on last week’s release that adds support for migrating between different form plugins, GravityMigrate now fully integrates with your preferred AI assistant.
In this edition:
🌟 Product spotlight: Ask an AI assistant to run your migration
🪄 Coming soon: Visual Merge Tags
🤖 The prompt: Where plugin traffic comes from now
🎧 On the podcast: Vibe-coding a WordPress site, with Andy Peatling
✍️ From the blog: What decides whether a WordPress agency makes money
🧰 Updates to the ’Kit
🌟 PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT
GravityMigrate
The ultimate, all-in-one solution for migrating Gravity Forms data, including forms, entries, settings, Views, feeds, file uploads, workflows, and more.
Last week, GravityMigrate 2.0 learned to move forms between Gravity Forms and seven other form plugins. This week, GravityMigrate 2.1.0 lets you skip the wizard entirely: connect an AI assistant to your site and ask it to move your forms.
The whole migration, typed into Claude
Ask for a dry run and it reports what would happen without touching anything. Ask it to move forms between plugins and it does the same conversion the wizard does. Ask it to pack up a site's Gravity Forms data and it produces the bundle for you. If you would rather drive it yourself, the wizard is still there and unchanged.
GravityKit MCP 2.5.0 makes the connection part easier: Claude Desktop users can install it as a one-click extension and fill in four fields, with no config file to hand-edit.
These updates are part of our latest round of releases, which also includes updates to GravityEdit, GravityImport, GravityView and the Maps Layout, and more.
Visual Merge Tags can show you preview data, instead of the code itself; in this example, {Job Title:3} and {Company:4} show live entry data instead.
Finally, merge tags you can see 👓
Merge tags are the heart of essential Gravity Forms functionality like Notifications and Confirmations, but they get complicated fast. Inserting a merge tag is fine: you have the picker. Then, After that, merge look like code. Does your non-technical website user know what {Name (First):1.3:urlencode} means? No, and they shouldn't have to.
We built Visual Merge Tags to make them usable by people who do not think in curly braces. It is getting close, and I would like you (yes, you!) to give it a try before it gets fully released. The functionality provides:
Improved Merge Tag insertion;
Live preview of merge tag data;
and an interactive panel to configure the merge tag exactly as you want it.
Want an early look? Hit reply and we will add you to the list! 📋
🤖 THE PROMPT
Where plugin traffic comes from now
Katie Keith of Barn2 shared three years of her company's traffic data this week. It’s a fascinating look at how AI is changing who finds a WordPress product: Organic search fell from 39% of traffic to 30%. Direct grew to 41%. YouTube referrals halved year-over-year, from 5.8% to 3.2%. Trackable AI referrals remain at just 3.4%, staying flat since 2025.
If you write anything to sell a plugin or a service, you may want to start assuming the initial reader of your page is an AI model (like a "scout" reporting back to the human), and the human will arrive already decided.
At GravityKit, we’re trying to make sure that AI has enough content to make accurate decisions about our products (and how to use them). One thing AI kept getting wrong was information about our latest product updates, so we improved the ways our changelogs are formatted (here's GravityView’s). To implement better changelogs, check out this great new Changelog plugin from my friend Daniel at Code Atlantic.
🎧 ON THE PODCAST
Vibe-coding a WordPress site, with Andy Peatling
Andy Peatling is the founder of Miles, the AI design agent for WordPress that we covered here a couple of weeks ago. Before Miles, Andy spent 17 years at Automattic, where he built BuddyPress and later led WordPress.com's AI site builder. Matt Cromwell and I had him on WP Product Talk to talk through AI-powered site design.
Andy Peatling on WP Product Talk
We also asked Andy what happens to the theme and plugin business when an agent can assemble half of a site on its own. Andy's answer is more optimistic than you might expect!
Casey analyzed two agency surveys from 2026 that cover 832 owners and freelancers. He finds that agencies whose average project is $5,000 or more are consistently profitable 57% of the time, against 33% profitability for agencies charging less. Check out the article for more interesting findings!
🧰 UPDATES TO THE ’KIT
Here are the plugins that got updates since our last newsletter:
Do you manage sites for clients? We added new functionality to your GravityKit account that allows you to manage client licenses and billing. Here is how agency accounts work. Reply to let us know if you want access to this client management functionality!
Until next time, Zack with GravityKit
Get this every Friday
One short email a week: new releases, practical Gravity Forms tutorials, and subscriber-only discounts.
![A Gravity Forms notification form "Subject" field with the text "Your application for the [Web Developer] position at [Acme, Inc.]", where the items in brackets are live data placeholder chips.](https://www.gravitykit.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-18-at-10.13.05-AM-1024x190.png)
