Why I Built LolaCore
by Fran Barbero
I ran an online store for ten years. Wellness products. Built it from scratch, grew it, made real money from it. Selling was never the problem. The problem was that every small change I wanted to make in my own store cost me half a morning.
You know how it goes. You want to launch a product and you end up clicking through six screens just to get it published. You want to understand why sales dropped and you end up with twelve tabs open. You update a plugin and pray it doesn’t break your checkout. And the worst part: the context of why you did something disappeared the moment you closed your session. Three weeks later you couldn’t remember why you had deactivated that plugin, so you turned it back on, and the same thing broke again.
That was just my side. My wife, Lola, handled customer support. Same endless hours, but on the other side of the counter: answering tickets, chasing down issues, keeping track of what she’d promised each customer and why. We were both running on the same treadmill, each on a different screen, neither seeing what the other was doing.
It wasn’t a bad plugin or a broken theme. It was WordPress. The bigger your store gets, the more of your time it eats. We didn’t have a store. We had a store that had us.
We quit. Then I came back with one condition.
COVID hit and we were both burned out. It was the push I needed to shut everything down. I didn’t close because of the product or the market. I closed because I was exhausted from managing the thing. Years of jumping between screens, keeping configurations in my head, losing the thread from one session to the next.
I took some time to think. And when the fog cleared, only one question was left: if I went back to WordPress, how would I do it differently?
I spent a good chunk of my savings learning AI from the inside out. Working directly with the APIs, building prototypes that broke, throwing away entire frameworks and starting over. There’s no other way to actually understand this stuff.
And all of that taught me something I didn’t expect: the AI tools that exist today can do impressive things, but they don’t remember anything. Every time you start a new conversation, you’re back to zero. For a store that’s useless, because the value is in the accumulated context: which plugins caused problems, which changes worked, which decisions you made and why.
What I wanted was AI inside WordPress. Not connected from an external server. Inside, with real access to the site’s data, executing real actions and remembering the context from one session to the next.
For a long time that was technically impossible without external libraries that made everything unstable and fragile. Then the first betas of WordPress 7.0 arrived with native AI built into the core. The technology finally matched what I had in my head.
That’s when LolaCore was born. And yes, she’s named after my wife.
What Lola is for you
I didn’t build this for developers or for people who enjoy tinkering with admin panels. I built it for the person we were ten years ago: someone with a real business who just wanted their store to work without it eating them alive.
Lola is the assistant that would have saved us those ten years. She lives inside your wp-admin, reads your actual store, and executes what you ask her to. She doesn’t explain how to do it so you can do it yourself: she does it with you, shows you exactly what she’s going to touch, and waits for your confirmation before changing anything.
And she remembers. She remembers what you changed last month and why you changed it, the way someone would if they’d been running your store with you from day one. The more conversations you have, the better she knows your business. That memory is the difference between a tool you use and someone you rely on.
That’s why LolaCore doesn’t stop at technical management. It also connects with your customer support and marketing tools, because I know firsthand that the burnout doesn’t come from the admin panel alone. It comes from both sides of the business at the same time, and nothing out there connects them for you.
Every store I work with today, I run it this way. The LolaCore website itself is built and maintained with LolaCore. If something breaks, I’m the first to know.
If any of this sounds familiar, Lola is on the WordPress.org repository. Install her for free and let her get to know your store.