Automating WordPress with PHP, CSS & AI
Published on September 9, 2025
Published on Wealthy Affiliate — a platform for building real online businesses with modern training and AI.
Today, I spent some time diving into the programmability of WordPress, and I love it.
I had GPT generate the PHP for my child theme to add affiliate banners to my informational posts. Sure, there are probably plugins that could do this in a fraction of the time—but I have a trust issue with devs. Plugins can get abandoned, or worse, released as “freemium,” where the free version is barely usable unless you pay for the upgrade.
So I handled it myself with the help of AI. And now I have banners automatically inserted at 20% and 50% (eventually another at 80% when I find a decent program) of each post’s content length. Every future post—except those in my review category—will display these banners without me manually adding them each time.
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The banners aren’t perfect yet (one’s a gif in WebP format, another’s static), but it’s a bit of a relief knowing that even my search traffic posts—which exist mainly to funnel readers to my money pages—have the potential to present affiliate products that might actually be of interest to visitors.
It’s a reminder that if you don’t try, you’ll never know.
What’s your best WordPress automation cheat?
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