Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋
Welcome to Issue #201 of Loop WP!
Last week was a bit of self-indulgence as I look back on 200 issues and 4+ years of Loop WP and reveal my most popular newsletter of all time.
This week is all about Miles, which I took for a spin whilst it is in beta. Miles is your AI Design Partner for WordPress.
Let’s go! 👇
Easily Diagnose Page Speed Issues
DebugBear synthetic monitoring can tell you how to speed up your website, alert you to regressions, and tell you exactly what change caused the metric drop.
Sign up for a free trial or check out our free website speed test.
Miles AI
Miles was created by Andy Peatling (formerly Engineering Lead at Automattic).
Miles is described on its home page as “your AI design partner for WordPress. Build a custom design with blocks in minutes, then refine it together. No templates, no page builders, no shortcuts.”
💡 Whilst Miles currently claims to get you to your first design in less than 10 minutes, it took a few minutes longer for me.
Onboarding and Testing
🎉 Miles does have an excellent conversational, guided build process, and the conversation begins with “Hello! What site should we build together?”, which is wonderful.
I tested both:
Designing by conversation with Miles, but providing either basic answers or skipping answers altogether.
Providing a detailed brief, a logo and answering all of Miles’ questions.
I’m sure you can guess which had the better outcome. 😊
🚨 I’ve always had very mixed experiences with WordPress Playground, which powers part of the Miles platform, and the same goes for how long it takes to preview shareable URLs.
(However, this is a Playground issue, not Miles.)
After the initial brief process, you get four concepts to choose from, and then Miles gets to work refining the design. 👇
⛑️ For me, this next step added a good few minutes to the process (especially in the first test that contained no brief), and I encountered a few bugs in my testing, and I don’t know if it was my VPN on public WiFi, but:
Test One, “Design 3”, took an eternity despite Designs 1, 2 and 4 being ready.
Frequent disconnect and reconnect issues with the AI (although these were on-screen notifications, and they didn’t appear to have a real impact).
In my first test, I asked Miles to make the header sticky, which it was unable to do so, despite confidently stating that he had (interestingly, in my second design test, the header was sticky without me asking).
I did get a random message in my first test after I had chosen my first design, and Miles moved to iterate on the design “Sorry, an error occurred. Please try again.”
However, in the second test, which contained the brief, assets, and I answered all of Miles’ questions, the process was much faster:
🚀 Andy recently announced that the latest beta of Miles (launched after my tests) reduces generation time by 40% and CSS by 85%, which is great to hear!
What Miles Actually Builds
💡 You don’t get a full website with Miles (yet); instead, you get something very close:
A vanilla WordPress install, with default content for the Sample Page and Privacy Policy page.
Plugins installed Miles and Hello Dolly (I would love to see the latter removed).
Themes installed are Twenty Twenty Five and whatever Miles has just created for you.
🚨 And that designed theme that Miles creates for you includes:
A home page with full content.
Styles - although not elements populated (some of which should be).
Navigation (this will not be linked up)
Templates:
All Archives
Blog Home
Front Page
Index
Page 404
Pages
Search Results
Single Posts
Some patterns (variable-based on design brief, etc.).
😎 So whilst you initially don’t get a multi-page website with fully populated content, the template designs are there for you to create pages and posts and populate them with content quickly.
Pricing
For the beta, I am currently on the Free plan and burned through my 1,500 credits in one sitting (two designs). 🔥
There are pay-as-you-go Top Up Plans, and credits never expire:
2,000 for $19
5,000 for $45
12,000 for $99
There are also monthly subscription options:
Pro: 5,000 for $39p/m
Business: 18,000 for $129p/m
Agency: 65,000 for $449p/m
Closing Thoughts
Whilst the Free Plan has enough credits to test the platform at a basic level, you will need to purchase credits or a monthly subscription to test more extensively and iterate on your designs.
Based on looking at real design examples on the Miles home page and my own experiences creating two sites, the designs in both my tests share similar layouts and look.
As the saying goes, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, and you may have different opinions from me {{first_name|friend}}.
Still, while there are some very nice designs on the Miles home page, looking at everything holistically (rather than in isolation), it feels a bit “samey” at this point; however, there is a lot of potential.
I really like the home page of my softball website and some of the template parts Miles created ❤️.
🚀 Miles is still in beta, and I know a lot of these features will be coming in the future, and Andy is shipping updates fast, but I would love to see:
More pages designed than just the Home page.
More design options (currently four).
The ability to influence the style of alternate design options.
Documentation on how to maximise use of the platform (although it’s mostly apparent).
🚨 One cool feature I didn’t get to try during my initial testing, and something I think is an awesome idea for workflow, is using AI Agents to work with Miles to create and manage sites on your behalf.
The current supported agents are:
Claude Code
Codex
OpenClaw
Open Code
If you use a Pagebuilder, then Miles is not for you, but it’s a great showcase of what can be achieved with Blocks, and it’s great to get the design cogs turning and the foundations set for you to build on.
💡 Have you tried Miles yet, {{first_name|friend}}? I would love to hear your thoughts.
That’s it for this week. 👋
Are you tracking agent views on your docs?
AI agents already outnumber human visitors to your docs — now you can track them.
Sponsorship Opportunities
🚨 The Google Doc contains all the details if you’re interested in sponsoring the Loop WP Newsletter.
Classifieds
Managed WordPress Hosting redefined. Dynamic autoscaling with high-frequency CPUs & CDN pre-cache for always-fast performance. Easy migration, any time.
Kinsta, a reliable hosting partner for your WordPress sites. Everything you need: edge caching, CDN, WAF, 24/7 support, free migrations and much more.
Weekly WordPress News & Tips
This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:
2026 Edition - Metorik Insights for WooCommerce. (Metorik)
Introducing EmDash - The spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security. (Cloudflare)
The CMS is dead - Long live the CMS. (Chris Reynolds)
OpenClaw? - EmDash Feedback. (Matt Mullenweg)
Reality Check - WordPress is NOT cooked. (WPTuts)
EmDash - First thoughts and takeaways for WordPress. (Brian Coords)
Just Another CMS - New projects like EmDash are a reminder that complexity has a cost. (Rich Tabor)
@wordpress/build - The next generation of WordPress plugin build tooling. (WordPress)
A Debrief - Payment gateways have always been enabled. (WooCommerce)
3 - 4 Weeks - WordPress 7.0 Release Team Pauses Schedule to Finalize Real-Time Collaboration Database Table Design. (The Repository)
With Examples - High-converting landing page design for ecommerce. (WooCommerce)
WordCamp Asia 2026 - From AI to Open Source. (WordPress)
2026 Edition - WooCommerce Data Insights. (Studio Wombat)
More Than A Year - It turns out Google has been accidentally inflating impressions in Search Console reports. (Chris Long)
Don’t Redecorate - WordPress needs to refactor. (Joost de Valk)
🔥 Announcing - Fathom V4. (Fathom Analytics)
If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.
👋 Until next time,
