WordPress Meets AI: Building Smarter Content Workflows with Make

Would you like to increase the volume of publications on your website without losing quality, but don't have the resources to expand your copywriting staff? In that case, you might want to consider outsourcing this task to Make (with AI, of course), as this sweet duo is capable of handling everything related to copywriting and editing.

Introduction to AI-Driven Content Automation

Content creation using artificial intelligence is a real lifesaver for businesses that don't have the ability or desire to overstaff their copywriters. Indeed, in an era when artificial intelligence can completely take over topic research, SEO, and even content adaptation for different platforms while maintaining a consistent tone of voice, the original option of using human specialists seems somewhat outdated. Considering that all of this is completely consistent with Google's official policies, it becomes clear that businesses can only benefit from this.

Why Automation Matters 

For many content marketing teams, when it comes to constantly taking a fresh look at specific topics and producing new ideas, workflow automation is becoming the only tool for winning audience attention. Specifically, it offers:

• Unlimited scalability, as AI can create dozens of high-quality posts, analytical reviews, and news reports daily;
• High speed to market, by reducing the time from idea to publication to several minutes;
• Maintaining high content quality, from SEO to volume and tone of voice;
• Reducing cognitive load by freeing human specialists from routine tasks.

The Role of Integration Platforms in Workflow Optimization

Integration platforms like Make can handle all the intellectual labor associated with building a content strategy. Specifically, Make provides an intuitive interface for performing WordPress API integration with hundreds of other services without requiring a single line of code from the user. Unlike plugins, it allows you to create multi-level scripts with conditions and iterators, automate text translation, and format images and HTML before uploading them to WordPress.

Ultimately, this solution is cheaper than using multiple plugins, which are likely to conflict with each other.

Benefits of Combining WordPress and AI Automation

The WordPress+Make+AI combination forms an environment where content requires less and less effort to create and provides more and more opportunities to profit from it.

Faster Content Production

The traditional article creation cycle begins with research, followed by writing an outline, then a draft, after which specialists begin editing, and finally, layout. AI, however, can reduce this cycle time by 80%. It instantly builds a structure based on keywords, while Make automatically creates posts in WordPress, populating all required fields. This allows marketing teams to instantly respond to trends, even being able to publish news and analysis minutes after a hyped event.

Improved Quality Control

AI automation makes it possible to eliminate human error in all aspects of quality. This covers maintaining a specific tone of voice, which is made possible by relevant prompts in the Make script, which ensure that the text always matches the specified style.

Such texts also meet the most stringent SEO standards – the automated system can independently check for keywords in titles and produce alt texts for images and meta tags.

Ultimately, each publication will have the same high-quality formatting, lists, quotes, and other attributes that search engines love.

Reduced Manual Tasks for Teams

No-code automation with Make frees content managers from administrative chores by selecting and compressing stock images, as well as creating unique visuals through tools like Midjourney. It can also handle sending publication notifications to social media and messaging channels. And, most interestingly, Make can optimize old texts and incorporate anchors to them into new ones to implement cross-linking.

Setting Up Your First Automated Workflow

Creating your first script in Make essentially involves mapping out your regular marketing tasks into a clear algorithm and linking it to your WordPress database.

Required Tools and Accounts

To implement a process automation cycle, you'll need a WordPress site with the Make Integration plugin installed, a Make account with the Core plan or higher (required for working with the API), an AI API Key (or any other key that provides access to the model you need), and a data source – usually Google Sheets/Notion, where your marketing team stores topics and briefs for future articles.

The Integration Process

Here's what the WordPress integration process looks like.

Configuring access in WordPress

Open the Users->Profile tab in your WordPress site's admin panel – there you'll need to obtain an Application Password, which will ensure Make's secure connection to the site via the REST API (an admin password isn’t required).

Creating a trigger in Make

Select a module (for example, Google Sheets – Watch Rows). In this case, your script will run every time you add a new row with the topic of the upcoming article to the table.

Writing text content 

Add the artificial intelligence ​​module. Now you need to create a prompt, passing data from Google Sheets – essentially, you just need to “instruct” the AI ​​in the role it will assume (for example, “Imagine you're an expert in IT copywriting”). At this point, you'll already have the article body in HTML format.

Preparing media content

Now, you have to use the module to generate/search for images. As a result, you'll receive an image URL, which will automatically be passed to the WordPress module for uploading the image to the site's library.

Publishing in WordPress

Finally, it's time to add the WordPress->Create a Post module. It's important to correctly map the fields: Title from Google Sheets, Content from the artificial intelligence response, Featured Media from the image ID, and Status (it should be either Draft to allow human review of the content before publishing it on the site, or Publish to enable complete autonomy).

Testing and Debugging Automations

Before running the script, you'll need to:

• Try running it manually in Make to track the data flow through each node.
• Ensure that the artificial intelligence ​​correctly closes HTML tags, otherwise the WordPress post layout may falter.
• Set up filters so that the script stops if your AI module's API returns an empty response or a rate limit.
• Check the History tab in Make – it will display the input and output JSON data for each step, allowing you to understand the cause of any errors that may occur.

Use Cases

Make enables going beyond simple scenarios.

Automatic Blog Drafting

Automatic drafting allows you to reduce the time needed for writing articles. For example, you can implement a scenario in which Make monitors an incoming channel (e.g., a Google Drive folder), and as soon as a short thesis or topic appears there, a chain of modules is launched.

Also, instead of a single request for writing an article, Make can build a whole series of requests, starting with writing an outline, as well as intros and the sections themselves, and ending with obtaining the HTML code, which is uploaded to the WordPress admin panel. Thanks to this, your editor only has to proofread the article.

Content Optimization

The AI+Make combination can take on the responsibilities of an SEO analyst and proofreader with a thorough understanding of WordPress. For example, the script can accept a list of keywords/LSI and check the finished text for their presence and naturalness. If the keyword density is low, the AI ​​will rephrase the text to integrate the missing ones.

Furthermore, based on the text content, the AI ​​module can also produce SEO titles, meta descriptions, excerpts, and alt tags (along with images in the required format and size).

Scheduled Publishing

Instead of publishing everything at once, you can have Make check the current WordPress post queue and schedule new articles for optimal publishing times. Furthermore, once a post's status in WordPress changes to Published, you can also implement automated distribution of article links and summaries via social media/instant messaging/email (such as a weekly digest – for this, you'll need Mailchimp/Brevo, too). And the coolest thing is that artificial intelligence can rewrite the same post text for different audiences, such as a short one for X and a more professional one for LinkedIn.

Best Practices for Reliable Automation

Now, let's find out how to ensure that the aforementioned combination works without interruptions when updating the engine or changing API limits.

Structuring Scenarios Efficiently

It's important to structure your scripts in Make properly from the start. Specifically, instead of one comprehensive script involving 20+ modules, it's much better to build several shorter scripts linked via Webhooks. For example, one script could write text, another could select images, a third could share links on social media, and so on.

Also, don't forget to set up filters between modules. This way, if the artificial intelligence ​​suddenly returns an empty response or invalid JSON, the script will stop before an empty post is simply created in WordPress. And yes, be sure to implement variables for frequently repeated data (usually this is a category ID or the required tone of voice) – this will make it easier to change them as needed instead of reconfiguring each module individually.

Error Control

Your script may run into problems from outside factors, like crashing (with the model you're using) or server outages. Therefore, you need a plan for how you'll handle such issues with your scripts. 

An example would be creating the special branches (Break/Resume/Ignore) for use within the Make software that allows the task to execute even when facing an error. Additionally, it is important to implement a retry process in the script such that if the task encounters an error, it will retry after a certain period of time.

Maintaining Data Privacy

To ensure proper security, never use your primary WordPress admin password for integration – instead, come up with separate app passwords with limited scopes. It's also essential to store your AI’s API keys only within the secure Credentials store (in Make), avoiding writing them in plaintext in script comments.

Conclusion

As you can see, integrating WordPress with artificial intelligence via Make can transform a nearly empty website into an automated system capable of delivering value to its audience in just a few hours. Are you interested in gaining this competitive advantage? If so, we'll implement any Make scenarios you need! You can also check out these case studies to see our expertise in this field:

• 1800DTC story: 500+ tools, one perfect platform
• The Starters: automated ranking & payment system