I’m Head of WordPress at Hostinger, responsible for the WordPress products used across more than six million installations. I got here the long way round.
Being Head of WordPress means owning the roadmap, setting strategy with the teams who deliver it, and spending a lot of time on the least glamorous question in product work: is this actually worth building? Right now most of the answers involve AI — generative site building, and agents that can act on a WordPress site directly over MCP.
At Hostinger
Since 2023 I have owned the WordPress product line end to end — what gets built, by whom, and in what order. Eight products, more than eighteen million installations, on a platform hosting over six million WordPress sites.
The two I am most interested in right now are the ones where AI stops being a feature and starts being the interface: the AI Website Builder for WordPress, which turns a description into a structured, themed site you can edit in Gutenberg, and the Hostinger AI plugin, which puts an agent inside the dashboard and an MCP server on the site so tools like Claude Code can operate it directly. This site was built through the second one.
The rest of the line covers the unglamorous work that decides whether people stay: onboarding, site tools and security, automatic updates, email marketing, ecommerce and affiliate tooling — plus a long tail of smaller features across the hosting experience. Each one is listed, with what it does, on the resume.
At Black Studio
Before Hostinger I spent two decades at Black Studio, an Italian web agency, from web developer to Head of Technology. Custom WordPress builds and, before WordPress was the obvious choice, BlackRay — our own CMS, used for dozens of client sites. By the end I was running the technical side of the business: the hosting infrastructure behind 400+ sites and 1,000+ mailboxes, a fully remote development team, and the customers who depended on both.
Alongside the agency I worked as a freelance WordPress expert through Codeable, the hand-picked outsourcing platform for WordPress work: 250+ projects for 50+ clients, rated 4.98 out of 5. Seven years of other people’s codebases, deadlines and definitions of “done” — the best product training I could have had.
One thing from those years outlived all of it. In 2011 my team needed a WordPress text widget with a visual editor. None of the existing ones worked properly, so we built one in an afternoon and published it. Black Studio TinyMCE Widget has since passed ten million downloads.
At its peak it was running on close to a million sites and sat in the top fifteen plugins in the WordPress.org directory. Then WordPress 4.8 added a visual editor to the core text widget — precisely the thing the plugin existed to provide — and the long decline began. That is the right outcome, even when you are the one it happens to: a plugin that fills a gap in core has done its job the day core closes it. It still runs on 200,000 sites, which says as much about how long WordPress sites live as it does about the plugin.
The rise and the fall turned out to be a better talk than the code ever was. Francesco Canovi and I told the story at WordCamp Rome in 2017 and again at WordCamp Europe 2018 in Belgrade.
It is also the clearest lesson I have had in how open source compounds: a small, well-scoped fix for a problem we personally had, given away, reaching further than anything I could have shipped on my own.
Those twenty years taught me what it really costs to ship and maintain software other people depend on. That background still shapes how I make product decisions; it is just no longer the job.
The WordPress community
I have been part of the WordPress community since 2010, and most of what I know about the project I learned by helping run it rather than by reading about it.
Speaking. I have spoken at WordCamps and Meetups for over a decade: WordCamp Rome 2017, Turin 2018, London 2018, Bologna 2018, Europe 2018 in Belgrade, Rome 2018 and Bari 2019 — most of them in Italian. The talks started out technical and moved outwards over the years: from building and maintaining plugins and automating a developer’s workflow, to what it actually takes to keep a free plugin alive once other people depend on it, and to the parts of this work that are not development at all. The write-ups, slides and session videos are collected under WordCamps on the blog.
Organising. Organiser and team member for Italian Meetups and WordCamps, including WordCamp Italia 2020 — the first national Italian WordCamp, held online — and WordCamp Europe 2024 in Turin, one of the largest WordPress events in the world. In 2018 I also founded the WordPress Meetup in Teramo, my local group, and ran it until the pandemic put an end to meeting in person; it never properly recovered afterwards and is no longer active.
Contributing. Translation editor for Italian, a handful of core contributions, and 30+ WordCamps attended across three continents — plus the conferences and hackathons in between, including two CloudFest Hackathon projects. In 2023 I was selected for the WordPress Community Summit in National Harbor — the invitation-only event, held just before WordCamp US, where contributors from every team spend two days on the problems that do not fit in a ticket.
Before the web
I started writing software in 1994, years before I had any professional reason to. C++, a compiler, and video games given away as freeware and shareware. The one that got away from me was Biliardo, a free billiards simulation: several million downloads, reviews in specialised magazines, and a long tail of letters from people who played it. Its site is still online, which tells you something about how long a small useful thing can last. Off the back of it I did consultancy on billiards game development for a company that wanted one, and built promotional games and small management applications for corporate clients.
I am an engineer by training rather than a computer scientist: a five-year technical diploma in electrical engineering, and later a master’s in software engineering from the University of Bologna. For a year I also went back to the “C. Cattaneo” technical institute — the school where I had been a student — as the electrical engineering teacher, in charge of the chair, teaching teenagers the fundamentals of circuits and machines. Standing in front of a class that has not decided yet whether to care is an education in explaining things, and I have used it more than the circuit theory.
The tools changed completely. The interesting part did not: find a real problem, build something useful, see what happens.